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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 12th, 2024

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  • Ngl, the more this happens the more servicers are confused about what they should be collecting and from whom, and that’s actually a win for the borrowers (not as much of a win as this shit going through but still).

    For example, due to the slew of challenges, I’m still on $0 repayment through October and don’t even have to certify income for that. And who knows if they will actually move forward with resuming charges for it; this is the second time it’s been delayed for me.

    I hope the system does get thrown into complete chaos if it doesn’t all get forgiven or at least restructured. That would be better than people having to pay for worthless and/or overpriced degrees, and not being able to do shit with their lives.



  • I never said it wasn’t low. It’s low, but 14 million people is still a lot of actual people, people just like you, under a different circumstance.

    14 million people looking for work means there are a lot of potential scabs, because our social safety nets are fucking laughable. They don’t even exist for a lot of people, such as those with no work history yet (can’t get unemployment if you’ve never been employed, for example, and if you only have a couple years employment history, unemployment in a lot of places doesn’t cover shit).

    Having been one of the underemployed, you often take what you can get because you don’t have the luxury of finding the “right job”.

    Or you and your family become homeless.

    Those are basically the options these days and I’m not willing to say that’s not the case just because unemployment (which does not include underemployment, nor those who left the job market) is low by some economists standards, because it absolutely is for millions of people.

    So sure, many of those people might be looking for “the right job”, but in the interim, they find and take “the right now” job. And that might be scabby.


  • All good friend; we do agree and it really sucks that it’s so difficult to get people to support their own best interest if it costs them in a tangible way (even if the benefits are exponentially more impactful).

    This is an education thing and we are fighting a lot of anti-union propaganda, here and everywhere. We see people lose their jobs over joining.

    Who can blame them not wanting to sign up?

    Union leaders need to fight fire with -water-. They need an unyielding stream of information to fight the fanned flames of disinformation and anti-union propaganda going out to perspective members, and that’s… unfortunately just not generally practical.

    I don’t really have a solution, I’m sorry, but I am absolutely behind yours and every other union. I will support you all with every breath in my body, for whatever that’s worth.



  • I’m really sorry to hear that. Genuinely. We all need better.

    I am a firm believer in unions and collective action, despite never having the opportunity to be part of a union myself. And like they don’t have a lot of power here… they got most of it removed by law years and years ago.

    But it doesn’t stop us trying at least, I suppose. And the general vibe is to support the unions. I’m sure there are tons of scabs here, but… they aren’t winning social favor being scabs at least.

    Even if they are largely toothless, it’s better to be toothless together; A pack of starving wolves with one tooth each is enough to do a lot of damage if they attack together often enough.

    The real problem is getting them to be part of the pack. I mean each wolf is toothless anyway, so getting them to join the pack is super important for their survival too.


  • You certainly aren’t wrong, but… at least in my area (and this is with state-level laws that fucking decimated union power), unions are relatively well respected by the population at large, because most of us have some experience with them (big trades area), and they are growing, rather than shrinking, despite having their legs cut off at the knee.

    Despite being a super conservative and heavily gerrymandered area, our major trade unions (pipefitters, construction, metalworkers, electricians, etc.) never went away, much as the state (for the past 15 or so years) would have liked otherwise. And it’s making a big resurgence; there are tons of manufacturing plants near me and a lot of them are part of or bound by the unions (not just their workplace, but like regional unions)

    I hope the trend continues! We need more collective action in our society. We need unions for non-tradespeople, and we don’t have any of those… but at least the trade unions are unshakeable, and that’s a good gateway for the rest of us.





  • BubbleMonkey@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzProgress happens with every death
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    3 months ago

    I mean… No offense or anything but I really don’t care if I mis-spell a brand name. It’s super unimportant in the grand scheme of things. It’s… all just stupid marketing anyway, and if they cared, they would have used a smarter spelling.

    What I am concerned about is calling oneself stupid and a nazi (of any sort at this point) while actually being neither. Even as a hyperbolic thing, it’s something I greatly dislike.

    Please be kinder to yourself. It’s ok to be pedantic, but just say that instead :)

    I also have things that make me unreasonably annoyed. It’s ok to have those things :)





  • BubbleMonkey@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzProgress happens with every death
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    3 months ago

    This is basically the reason we have artificial sweeteners, too.

    Some dude was trying to make/do something, and labs were sort of “lol everything is safe” back then so he like… had a sandwich… and noticed it was sweet… so he just sort of tasted all the stuff he was working with and found aspartame. (I believe it was aspartame)

    I believe the same is true for fabreeze, the underlying chemical mechanism was an accidental discovery because the researcher’s wife noticed he didn’t smell of cigarettes. It never caught on tho because it, naturally, has no smell, and you become blind to smells you are constantly exposed to, so until they added perfumes (fabreeze as we know it today), even tho it worked, nobody cared to use it. I wish I could actually find it unscented… the scented shit stinks and gives me headaches.


  • I find this wholly unsurprising.

    All ai projects should be forced to show the entirety of their training data. I don’t give a flying fuck if they want to call it proprietary, they don’t own most of the data in the first place. Even if they bought it, it doesn’t belong to them, just like we don’t own digital movies we buy.

    And if even a single piece of that training data doesn’t have proper licensing for that specific use for that specific model, or they are ever found to have withheld any of the data, the model as a whole should be immediately scrapped, along with everything even tangentially derived from it, and the company should be fined fully double whatever amount of money that model generated or one years revenue for the company as a whole, whichever is more (no I don’t care if this leads to bankruptcy, should have thought about that before you stole data), and like use if for affordable housing programs or public schools or something, whatever.

    They can try again with clean data, also subject to review. One time. Second time they do the same shady shit, permanently banned from the entire sector.

    But regardless, we need to stop rewarding them for this behavior. And we need the consequences to actually hurt or we can expect it to get worse, not better.