Notices by 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦 (zdl@mastodon.online), page 2

@dansup @pixelfed I've been using Pixelfed since I heard of it at least a year ago (maybe more?). I've loved it.

@sinituulia Car culture in North America is truly next-level shit. Just look at the screaming hissy fits you get from people who misunderstand "fifteen minute cities".

@clacke I'm too old for that. 🤣

@musicman @clacke Yeah. The kids are alright. They have been since https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afam2nIae4o and probably thousands of years before that.

@grant_h @mastodonmigration @kamalaharrisforpresidentnews I'm not sure anybody, anywhere has ever had a free democratic election at the level of national (or even provincial) politics.

Political parties undermine and invert democracy. Their systems for generating candidates (e.g. "conventions" in Canada) are explicitly there to make sure that the general public has little to no say in who will "represent" them.

AFAIC if you have one or more political parties you lack democracy.

@rakoo @ben I live not too far from Dujiangyan¹, a hydro-engineering project that's over 2200 years old *AND STILL IN USE TODAY*. (How many of our "great" technological achievements made this century will be able to say the same thing?)

Since the whole story of how it was conceived, how it was built, and how it was used is well-recorded it's really easy for me to remember that ancient peoples were no dumber than we are, and indeed possibly a bit smarter.

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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujiangyan

@cy @DamiaB What a profoundly thick-witted take.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/0116-a-new-look-at-venus-with-akatsuki

No. She took the raw data from the cameras and turned them into data visualizations. Hence her name being *LAST* in a chain of attributions and her claim to be the author of the photo in question, not the lens assembly and CCD that captured the original raw data.

@dansup@pixelfed.social @dansup@mastodon.social The alt text on the post https://pixelfed.social/p/zhang.dianli/699843661291068434?fs=1 doesn't seem to be showing to me for some reason. I'm using Firefox if that helps. A friend I asked to check can see it using Chromium, however.

Do you have any advice?

@zeh @wendyg @catileptic @jens Again, that sounds to me like a social disorder unrelated to cash or lack thereof.

Fix your society.

@jens @catileptic The crime rate *was* fixed.

Since nobody carries cash and most businesses (begrudgingly) have a small amount of cash, robberies, pick-pocketing, etc. have basically vanished as an entire category of crime.

(Other crimes are also on their way out, but for far more troublesome reasons.)

That being said, your parallel doesn't really work. You want to keep cash because your society is broken. The crime rate dropping wasn't the goal of going cashless, it was a side effect.

@jens @catileptic I have had cash stolen from me.

In Germany.

I'm not sure when it was: might have been picked while I was outdoors, might have been stolen from my hotel room while I was out at the pool. But it was stolen. It's happened to me here too. Indeed small property crime is commonplace in most places I've ever lived in or visited; I've been fortunate enough to have it happen only a small handful of times in my life.

So this is a real problem, directly experienced.

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@jens @catileptic Something very strange happened in the slightly over a decade of me not using cash, though: nobody has stolen money from me at any point. Hell, I'm not even at risk from the kind of weird ways people have stolen from credit cards (double-imprints, say) or bank cards (apparently some way of capturing the PIN when paying?; I lack technical knowledge of how that works).

It seems that going cashless has solved a problem that has been around since I was a teen.

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@jens @catileptic I started moving away from cash in about 2010. I went, for all meaningful purposes, 100% cashless by about 2013. (So much so that my 2016 visit to Canada had me really upset at the huge amount of money I suddenly had to carry around.) I am entirely un-eager to go back to cash.

Every advantage cited for cash is put in the category of "hypothetical bullshit" AFAIC, but the risk of theft and loss is something that is all-too-real with multiple real-world occurences.

@jens @catileptic That sounds like a problem with how finance is handled in your country, then, not cash vs. cashless.

You're blaming a lack of cash for what is really a fucked-up system that stabs you in the neck. Fix the system. Don't force everyone to carry their purchasing power with them where it can be easily stolen or lost.

@jens @catileptic And I'm saying fix the financial system so that cashless is accessible to all instead of forcing, for example, every small business to have two separate systems for paying (one of which puts them at increased risk for criminal action), and other such matters.

The problems you're talking about aren't related to cash or the lack thereof. They're social organization issues that forcing cash on top of is at best a band-aid solution.

@catileptic I haven't used cash in ages. I don't miss it. I don't want to return to it.

When I travel this summer, the single thing I'm *least* looking forward to is having to carry pocket loads of easily-stolen paper to pay for things, but *shrug*, that's the price of going to backwaters like North America.

@pixelfed Wikipedia's rules for "notability" are ludicrous. A project like Pixelfed will be deemed by some self-important twit as "not notable" while there's 15,000 pages of information on a background character in a video game…

Technically you can appeal this, but thatt involves a bureaucratic war with people who can cite every obscure Wikipedia rule from memory. You basically need to find one of those who's on your side to win.

@FrostPoem @penprompts

"Explain it me again?"

"I'm supposed to guard the Portal, and when it opens, I'm to prevent whatever comes through from leaving the Foyer, right?"

"Yes. Nothing past this room."

"And I'm to sacrifice anything up to my own life?"

"Right."

"Well, I just didn't jump to that final option. I negotiated with it and … it was hungry. So I gave it my hot tuna & cheese sandwich."

"And…"

"It turned around and called off the invasion."

"The world was saved by a TUNA M…!?"

#Truth

@inthehands Truth be told, I find that most strongly technical people are moral toddlers. Very little I've seen while working in tech companies (in marketing) convinces me otherwise.

Are there moral techies? Of course. It's just they're the unicorns. Most are amoral. Some are flat-out vile.