I don’t even understand what the theory is. Plastic is plastic. What does it matter if it’s attached to the bottle?

Well, that’s always been the case with Skid Row, though it might be debatable which came first – the homeless encampments or the aid agencies. And for that matter, there were Hoovervilles in the Great Depression. In any city in America, there are transients milling around the shelters, which is why there’s so much NIMBYism over developing new shelters.

But what’s going on in California probably has more to do with the fact that LA and San Francisco tend to be very tolerant of the homeless encampments and provide generous aid, thus inducing demand. The homeless population is soaring across America for various reasons, but California is a desirable place to be homeless: better aid, better climate, softer police, etc.

Maybe California’s big cities really are more humane and generous, but at this point it’s to the detriment of livability in those places.

It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.

An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.

I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.

Maybe you don’t care, but the OSI definition does.

In fairness, they didn’t release anything open at all.

That still does touch on the problem. The RCS group was formed in 2007. Let that sink in.

I think if you try to have regulators come up with standards for things like airdrop or location sharing, it’s going to be a bad time.

RCS you can just regulate as a telecom feature. It’s contained. It doesn’t touch things like finance (which vary by country).

I honestly get it. Apple has been excruciatingly stubborn to adopt RCS.

I think in the past this was excusable because RCS has been such a moving target. First it was the carriers disagreeing about how to implement, and dragging their feet, then Google got tired of waiting for carriers and sort of bypassed them. But even then RCS is messy when it’s part carrier, part Google, etc. Even Google Fi doesn’t support RCS if you want its text-from-computer function working! Then came e2e encryption, which has been haphazard.

At this point though, it is starting to solidify. Apple should implement it, and if Apple drags their feet, regulators should intervene. Don’t rule out that happening in the EU, either.

You must be lost.

Well, no, because that sentence doesn’t make any sense. There’s no such thing as a “PPP adjusted GDP,” PPP is just a way of measuring GDP. I’m suggesting that if you want to use PPP to measure GDP, by all means, use PPP. PPP merely corrects for currency imbalances.

In other words, if you don’t like nominal GDP (valid), by all means, use PPP. Both PPP and nominal GDP are measures of GDP though.

SO: China spends between 1.7% of its total economic output directly on its military. The US spends closer to 3.5%.

If the US spent what China does, as a percentage of GDP, that would be just shy of $400bn. A lot of money, for sure, but we’re closing on a $2.0 trillion budget deficit.

I think you need to learn the concept of purchasing power.

By all means, use PPP.

My point was that GDP is not a useful metric, and I even gave you a concrete example of why.

Use PPP if you prefer.

You’re the one who compared US spending to China’s in absolute dollars.

The reality is that US spends more on military than the next 10 countries combined.

Unless we’re going to start paying soldiers $1,000/yr (roughly what China does), that’s going to be the reality.

For context, overall manufacturing output of US is only around $1.9 trillion.

And New York City’s manufacturing output is almost nothing. Manufacturing isn’t GDP.

One distortion of excessive national debt can be inflation. Good thing that’s not a conce—oh wait.

Not really

Is that site still around?

A lot of coffee/donut/pastry shops offer “service discounts” to cops, firefighters, and paramedics. It really took off after 9/11.

I actually think that you’re hitting on something that would be a good idea, but probably a redesign of Lemmy (or something new entirely).

Communities should work more like hashtags. If you “subscribe” to politics or technology or whatever, you should be able to get posts from across the fediverse with that label, instead of just what’s on your local instance. Then, you should be able to subscribe to moderation decisions like you can on Bluesky.

Combine those two things and you’ve made something powerful.

It’s not Apollo. But so far it’s not bad either. 😍

I’m tempted to say it’s better, but, unfortunately, in many ways it’s not.

What Reddit had, most of the time, was semi-canonical communities. There was /r/python, /r/linux, /r/privacy, etc. The diaspora of Lemmy is a shadow of all of that. Surely, there are a dozen or so (at least) /c/python communities on Lemmy, but is there a single one that’s anywhere near as active as the Reddit one? No. Not so far, at least.

And unfortunately, I can say as an instance admin, the lemmy moderation tools are just flat bad. We had to turn off open registration and enable email verification, not because we would otherwise need it, but the Lemmy moderation tools are 100% reactive and only operate on a 1-by-1 basis. If a spambot signs up 100 fake accounts, I have to go and individually ban each and every one of them. There’s no shift+select, ban.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to be here, and Lemmy’s great, and there’s far less toxicity (so far). All I’m saying is, (1) there’s work to do, (2) don’t gloat.

Paying less attention to political drama and social media is probably solid advice for anyone alive. I’m already wondering how to balance my kid’s inevitable desire to fit in with the fact that sites like Instagram and TikTok are just toxic for anyone’s wellbeing.

I definitely feel you on outside hobbies. When I was single and living in Colorado, I enjoyed long hikes (often alone), especially in the snowy winter when it would be so still and quiet. I loved it.

These days my hobby (if you call it that) is travel, but travel with a 3 year old is not exactly low-stress. 🤣