There can be enclaves or castes without mass immigration. In fact, a bunch of suburban and rural communities feel like enclaves where no outsiders can feel welcome.

Critics of mass immigration or open borders have a point- in a world with global travel and trade, a country cannot work without controlling who can come in and who can work.

Critics of anti immigration politicians also have a point- blaming social problems on immigrants, fueling hate for people whose skin has a different tone, and inhumanely denying aid and shelter from refugees are not going to help anyone.

The world is changing and it’s difficult to cope. I don’t think that the enclaves of immigrants are the main reason of those challenges. It’s the loneliness epidemic due to social media use, the affordability crisis due to unchecked corporate greed with political corruption, and the collapse of perspectives for meaningful and lucrative careers due to AI and the corporate takeover of everything. Those changes are faster and more profound than a bunch of immigrants moving in next door, please look beyond them.

I also took a 180 on marriage but not when I met my wife.

When my (now) wife and I started dating, we both were anti marriage. Several years later, we considered marriage for certain benefits that the legal status would have had for us, and because our relationship was solid and we were already committed to it on the long term, we decided to go ahead with it.

I actually started to like the thought of it as soon as we started planning the wedding. We didn’t want to spend much on it (after all, we didn’t really believe in marriage), so we DIYd the whole thing, it was a nice bonding experience with each other and with friends who helped.

It really started to make me feel different about my relationship after a couple years. It does feel different to think “I have a girlfriend” vs ”I’m married. I’m someone’s husband.”

There was a certain warmth to it. We both liked being married and calling each other husband and wife. This warmth or security worked quietly in the background for years to further strengthen our relationship. And I do think it helped too at low points and conflicts to remind us that we want to fix our problems, not walk away from them (the latter sometimes seems easier on the short term when one is exhausted or desperate, it’s not a bad thing to add some friction to that process).

So while marriage on the surface is just words, rituals, and legal status; in experience I found that it’s also commitment, belonging and warmth.

Next time I will tell about how we both agreed we never want kids until one day…

I’ll check it out!

Sorry for the pedantry: zero sum means it creates winners and losers, because you can only give someone more by taking it away from someone else. “Not a zero sum” means you can create winners only, because you can generate value to give someone without taking it away from anyone else. Economy is never zero sum: a bad economy is bad for most, and a good economy is good for most. Cronies exploit poor people in both good and bad economic circumstances.

There is a lot of inequality that plays into this.
If you think about 90s Goldman Sachs style of 80-100 hours weeks, no weekends, no holidays culture that dictated “work ethic” expectations in American white collar jobs, to the post covid hybrid work and “quiet quitting” culture: I think the typical white collar worker works way fewer hours than 20-30 years ago, even though contracts said 40 hours the whole time. Anecdotally, a cushy office job at individual contributor level can be apparently kept while working maybe 1-2 hours a day. I know those are not typical, but it’s way more common than it used to. And my perception is that taking weekends and holidays off became normalized, and nobody is virtue signaling anymore that they worked the whole weekend, even if they did. People take their vacations.

Now that doesn’t mean the hours of hourly workers, healthcare workers, construction workers, service and restaurant industry workers, etc, are getting shorter, but as I said, that is more a social equality problem than anything about the economy or inflation rate specifically.

You can’t look at the inflation rate in isolation and decide if that’s good for you or not.

If inflation is 0.0001% and you are laid off and there are no jobs and the stores have empty shelves not that you have any money to buy anything, that’s a bad economy.

If inflation is 3% but there are plenty of jobs and you get a 5% raise every year, that’s a good economy.

The right way to look at how expensive things are is to normalize prices to other things that also change with time, for example wages and expectations.

A car may be more expensive now than in 1960, but the car is faster, safer, more comfortable, and more people have one now.

Same with many improvements- an iPhone today is more expensive than a Nokia 3210 was in 2000, but it has more features and more people have one.

It is against human nature to stay where we are and just use improvements to reduce the amount of work we need to do. We want to have more. That may be a bad thing for sustainability, but we typically expect our governments to support that kind of progress, hence the dual mandate of the central bank to maintain economic growth with a high level of employment and a low level of inflation.

I struggle to understand your question. What are you trying to get at? Maybe try rephrasing it. In the current form, you’re basically asking: are people making a minimum wage able to buy fancy dinners? To which the answer is no, but like why would you think so?

You start with “the part that gripes me when they travel “ suggests you are complaining about Amercans traveling to cheaper countries finding the prices cheap? Note that Americans who travel abroad are not the average American and typically are not living on minimum wages.

Your link doesn’t exactly support your point.

Studies show that the Green Revolution contributed to widespread eradication of poverty, averted hunger for millions, raised incomes, limited the increase of greenhouse gas emissions, reduced land use for agriculture, and contributed to declines in infant mortality.

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Quote from the post:

Now turn this into an actual game - quadruple the size of the playable area, introduce fun game mechanics, add a plot that isn’t too cliche, some twists, a magic system, make it really good

To be fair, the post is about the models’ capabilities, but, that doesn’t prevent people from publishing “games” “made” like this.

Are you asking how the popularity of lemmy and piefed combined changes over time, or how the 2 compare vs each other? I see that responses assume the first… and I don’t know the answer to the second.

To me it feels like about the same over time. There is some life in the bigger generic communities but most specialized communities I subscribed to remain dead.

I agree those are strong contributions, I didn’t know about this because I don’t really follow rocket stuff but I’m interested in cars.

For the sake of it: would you mind listing the top 3 high level engineering decisions he made that are particularly original and turned out to be game changing in a positive way? Maybe I just haven’t heard of them.

Edit: comment was meant for the comment one level up, fat fingers.

He did say enterprise and server though. Those don’t have all the bullshit pre installed.
You see, this is the hive mind - seeing the keyword and commenting what is usually commented and upvoted about the topic, without reading what you’re commenting on.

On topic, I would not touch residential Windows, but I do use Windows server at work, it has no bloat, and is as fast as any modern mainstream desktop environment (I do use Windows, Mac and Linux daily, so I think I have a good base for making that comparison).

Like, autonomous vehicles should rely solely on visible light cameras? That went famously well indeed. What a smart man.
Or that we should dig tunnels to drive cars in? Yes, we now see he was right all along. Or that the US government could save trillions of dollars by using tech instead of people for running things? One of the most successful ideas of Trump 2.0. And the list goes on. Tesla made a decent electric car, on par with other electric cars, just falling behind on self driving (fsd is not self driving, according to Tesla). Space X built some good rockets that can do what NASA can; just killed NASA in the process by siphoning away the federal budget. Starlink is good satellite internet. Exploiting an orbital space that nobody was brazen enough to just claim and take without any public approval. Got to give him the credit. He is good at taking away things and claiming for himself that nobody else dreamed of taking.

There is no such thing as transparency into large language models. It’s a billion numbers that don’t mean jack shit to anyone, human or machine. In other words: it’s Chinese to us.