When you know which xkcd it is before you click it…

I think it fits because it isn’t an actual question meant to be answered.

Until you accidentally delete the taskbar panel.

CAD is obviously something that got much better with better computers, but apart from such heavily PC focussed jobs, I’m not sure this holds true.

Digital systems waste a ton of worker’s time as well, and we now have much, much more bureocracy than before.

In many cases, computers are great at helping you fix problems and accomplish tasks you didn’t have without computers.

It certainly doesn’t have the weird and hard-to-understand web of random rules that r/showerthoughts has.

Germany used to be a collection of tribes and depending on which of these tribes the countries around them had contact with that’s the name that stuck in that language.

• Germans call themselves Deutsche (from diutisc meaning “the people” in Old German)
• In French they are called Allemagne after the Alamanni tribe
• In Italian it’s Germania, same as the English Germany, from the ancient latin Germania with unknown origins
• In Finnish it’s Saksa, after the Saxon tribes
• Most slavic countries use some variant of Niemcy, which means “speechless”, because slavic and germanic languages have hardly anything in common and are thus unintelligible to each other.

What’s dishonest or fraudulent about a capitalist doing capitalist things?

If you think there’s some honest, genuine and honorable capitalists out there, you must be really credulous.

Pretty much, with the difference that corruption can only happen if it takes something off it’s path, so to say.

If the path itself is bad, being bad is not corruption.

If steel rusts, it’s being corrupted. Rust itself cannot be corrupted, because it is what it is.

And yes, I very much think that capitalism sucks.

To be corrupt, you need to have another purpose than personal enrichment that you are corrupting in favour of personal enrichment.

The whole goal of capitalism is personal enrichment. There is no other purpose that could be corrupted.

It’s like saying that you make water wet or that you burn a fire.

Read it again, slowly, without anger, and I’m sure you will be able to understand it.

This. In the golden age of record sales (pretty much the time before tape recoders became a thing), there were also thousands of musicians for each one that could actually live off their art.

Since people love making art even when they don’t make money off it, there’s always been an oversupply of artists.

Same with all other kinds of entertainment. For each football superstar there’s millions of kids who will never earn a cent for playing football. Same with painters, musicians and any other form of art.

Is Mozart’s music culture?

He was doing his stuff almost 100% for profit and was seen as a sell-out by a lot of the musicians at his time. He wrote his songs in German instead of Latin because he wanted to make essentially pop songs that were sung by kids on the street, and the musical establishment derided him for it, because they didn’t think what he was making was actually art.

This is very much it. If there’s people doing it for free, that pushes the resale value down a lot.

The concept of a “corrupt industry” doesn’t really make sense.

Corruption only works in non-profit/political/governmental contexts. It’s when you have a job that requires you to value some specific higher goal more than your own personal benefit.

The whole purpose and the higher goal of an industry, same as capitalism in general is personal benefit. A capitalist cannot be corrupt. Or to put it differently: The thing that would make e.g. a public servant corrupt is the modus operandi of capitalism.

Edit, since a lot of people don’t seem to get it:

Corruption means that you have some higher purpose that is corrupted in favour of personal gain.

Capitalism has no higher purpose than personal gain. A capitalist prioritizing personal gain is not corrupt, he is a capitalist.

Saying a capitalist is corrupt is like trying to make water wetter or trying to burn a fire.

What we call corruption for a public servant is ideal behavior for a capitalist.

Chemotherapy is bad for the person receiving chemo, it’s just even worse for the cancer. Yes, it cures people, but nobody in their right mind would use chemo on a healty person and claim that it wasn’t bad for that person.

If you have ever seen someone going through chemo, it’s really rough on them, and it’s only done in the hope of getting rid of the cancer and being able to stop using chemo.

But the analogy doesn’t make sense for the discussion on hand, because what propaganda bots do is polarizing, creating distrust, dividing society and cause people to do stupid things due to being angry.

Propaganda bots do that by posting extreme statements on all sides of the political spectrum. They post both pro-russia and anti-russia stuff, pro-capitalism and anti-capitalism, pro-trans and anti-trans, and so on.

So making bots to post anti-russia stuff is doing half their work.

An anti-russia bot would not be chemotherapy, it would be injecting cancer cells into the patient.

Maybe one could make a bot that posts moderate views and content advocating for reconcilliation or something like that.

Patriotism is nationalism for people who say “I’m not a racist, but”.

Wait for a few more years and you’ll see what patriots do to a country once they have taken over everything and been in power for a few years.

I am from Austria. I know what patriots do.

Patriots are the same shit as real nazis, only they are too cowardly to admit it and they “didn’t know what really happened” until the charade finally collapses.

Over here we have another term for patriots: Mitläufer.

That’s pure projection. I don’t love my country and it would be stupid to have romantic feelings toward a made-up thing that doesn’t exist.

I live here because it’s a good place to live. If the country goes to shit, I move on.

Do you feel patriotic love towards the supermarket you shop at? Or do you go there because it’s currently the place where you get the best deal? Do you love your petrol station? Do you love the highway or train you use to get to work?

Maybe it’s the american weirdness that you guys don’t value love so that you mistake thinking that somethig is ok is automatically deep love or something weird.

Patriotism has exactly on purpose: to keep idiots in line and stop them from thinking.

Tbh, I have to disagree here.

Even in its best form, patriotism is about being proud of things you did nothing to contribute to and about tribalism and exclusion of others (namely people from places where you don’t live).

In my city we have great public transport, great public healthcare, strong worker protection laws, a large public housing sector that keeps rents low, good free education, pretty old buildings, lots of nice parks and many other great things that I like.

I did nothing to contribute to these things except of voting every few years. It’s not my achievement that these things exist, so pride would be misplaced.

I also know that all it takes for these things to vanish is the wrong people getting elected once or twice, and if that were to happen, the city could quickly be turned from a great place to live to a terrible place. It has happened before, specifically between 1933 and 1945, but also from 1809 to 1848 and 1914 to 1923.

Being patriotic would elevating my city and/or country to something more than it is: from a place to live to a place to worship or something like that, and it would mean I would have to support things that cannot be reasonably supported.

It’s totally ok to like the good things you have. It’s also totally ok to get behind good causes and further them. But it’s weird to “love” a place and bind yourself to it even if it goes bad.

Mandatory minimum sentences exist outside of the US as well, and they are usually not a great idea.

For example, in Germany they introduced mandatory minimum sentences for possession and distribution of child pornography. Politicians were warned that it will have unintended side-effects, but the warnings weren’t heeded.

A bit later a (female) teacher noticed that kids in her class were passing around a sex video of one of her underage students and her ex boyfriend, that the ex leaked as revenge. She had one of the students send her a copy of the video as evidence, took that to the mother of the girl, handed it to her, so that the mother of the girl could go to the police with it.

In the process of the whole investigation, it was noticed that the teacher had that copy in her possession for a short time and passed it on to the mother, thus distributing child pornography. The judge was very apologetic and said the ruling was unfair and a shame, but his hands were tied, the law demanded without any possible leeway from him that she would have to spend time in prison, without chance for early release. She was also registered in the sex offender registry and barred from working as a teacher in the future. All for trying to help that girl.

Mining hardware is shortlived. These things get outdated real fast and need to be replaced frequently. So what they do is when a mining rig is up for replacement, they just swap it out for an AI rig.

The real asset for mining is the infrastructure: rack space, access to cheap electricity, data centers. All of that is very useful for AI as well.