• 11 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlOn prison abolition
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    20 hours ago

    I don’t think it’s possible to abolish prisons for all crimes. But why does a thief or a drug dealer (or worse, just a drug user) need to be in prison? What about the nature of their crimes necessitates imprisonment as a reasonable method of corrections?

    If the point is stopping people from reoffending, prisons don’t do that. Like objectively. Recidivism in the US is super high, and going to prison predicts increases in the severity of crimes people commit.

    So, what reduces recidivism? Eliminating the factors that drove them to crime in the first place. So, you monitor them closely - house arrest, assigned social/case workers, etc. Like a more robust parole system for nonviolent offenders. With enough surveillance, you can reduce the likelihood of reoffence by making the chances of getting caught much higher. This enhanced monitoring would be temporary.

    For violent offenders and more serious criminals, maybe prisons are still necessary. But they don’t have to be dehumanizing and can provide necessary health/psychiatric, educational, social, and job skills training.

    You could make the corrections system more effective by making society easier for criminals to reintegrate into. If you’re a felon and you can’t find work because you’re a felon - how are you going to afford to live within the confines of the law? Step 1) jobs programs for felons with a path to eliminating non-violent offenses from your record as it relates to work with exceptions as necessary. Step 2) improve the education system to prevent people from turning to crime and to help give former criminals relevant job skills to earn an honest living. Step 3) provide healthcare to people - having access to healthcare for mental and addiction-related conditions is super important to reduce crime.

    Basically - prison abolition isn’t about just letting rapists and murderers go free with no consequences. Instead, people in favor of prison abolition are typically in favor of reducing the societal pressures to commit crimes and preventing reoffense.


  • We kind of did create israel in utah. But for people who thought Jesus came over to America with the pilgrims and that they have magic underwear that will shield them from harm rather than for the people who thought that their God told them to cut part of their kids’ penises off, they couldn’t eat shellfish, and used to commit genocides on the reg but has inexplicably stopped for the last couple thousand years or so.



  • Many people have auras before and during migraines. These can be visual (seeing colors or black spots or colors/lights look brighter or dimmer), sensory (sensitivity to light/sound), speech-related (difficulty speaking or understanding speech), motor (impairment to movement), and brainstem (vertigo, tinnitus, ataxia, decreased consciousness, etc).

    I get sensory, speech related, motor, and possibly some brainstem aura symptoms. You kind of just learn to recognize when a migraine is coming on and not a regular headache.





  • Wow, this is super interesting. I don’t know if these sequels would have been successful (premise seems removed from the realism that made the published books so great), but if anyone could pull it off, it’s Butler.

    It’d have been a sad but potentially interesting critique of power to show Olamina become a darker character, as was suggested. Idk how I feel about the next book jumping to Earthseed having fulfilled its mission (in part) - seems like there’d need to be a transitional book with them making all the preparations under potentially new leadership first.







  • First you have to ask what gender is. Gender is a set of behaviors expected of people of a given sex.

    Then, you have to ask what it means to belong to a given gender. You don’t have to, and can’t, meet all the behavioral expectations of a given gender. Those expected behaviors change over time. People of all sexes have interests that cross gendered lines because gender is not perfectly correlated to specific behaviors - instead it is a broad notion of behaviors that are considered to correlate with a given sex.

    Additionally, there exist people who are not really male or female due to genetic differences. But, society typically treats them as the gender typically assigned to the sex they most resemble. So, since they do not have the “correct” sex and may not participate in the “correct” behaviors to belong to a given gender, their assigned gender is arbitrarily determined.

    Those 3 things establish that gender is: not biological, not behaviorally determined, and somewhat arbitrary.

    Since gender isn’t biological, woman =/= female person

    Since gender isn’t behaviorally determined, woman =/= someone who engages in typically feminine behaviors

    Since gender is at least partially arbitrary, woman =/= a factual category that can be determined by material features of a person

    If women don’t have to be female or engage in typically feminine activities and can’t be defined by physical or genetic characteristics, then what is left? Someone who identifies as a woman - who wants to be treated as a woman by others.

    “But that’s circular!!!” It actually isn’t. “Woman” as a category confers societal roles and expected behaviors onto a person, “woman” as a person just means someone who belongs to the category “Woman”. The only determining factor is being a member of the category. It’d be like asking “what is a boy scout?”, getting “a member of the boy scouts” as an answer, and then being upset that there isn’t some fundamental universal law being appealed to when classifying people as boy scouts.



  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mltoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldNo thanks. I'm good.
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    3 months ago

    I’ve seen many more coffee folks who have opinions ranging from “it doesn’t taste different than the local coffee” to “it tastes downright bad”. James Hoffmann has a good video on it: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pkbuFwHnJQY

    Primary thing seems to be the quality of the coffee cherries the civet eats. So if it’s just force-fed coffee cherries, it’ll be no better than normal coffee. If it gets to choose on it’s own, naturally, then it may pick better coffee cherries and the coffee may be better - but not because of the digestive process, most likely.



  • I mean… maybe in this case? I feel like profile/picture based matchmaking is something an ML model could be pretty good at in theory. Match people based on physical preferences and attractiveness (get head scans and frontal & profile full body shots), basic demographic/location/financial info, fill out a questionnaire with hobbies, political views, sexual preferences, etc.

    Do that for groups of satisfied pre-existing couples first to train the model on, then continue training the model on the successful matches from the app. Have it spit out X number of matches that have the highest ratings for all users, limit it to X matches per time period to limit “swiping” behaviors, then let users talk/date and provide feedback to the app about what they did/didn’t like.

    Obviously, it would need major privacy protections given how sensitive the info is, but that’d be a way better system than Tinder and the like. Like a super powered robo matchmaker serving up the highest probability matches.