Starting with only autopaid non-flexible spending is a good bet, and there are credit cars that will de facto get you an ~3% discount on those categories just for using them.
Remember, all cash rewards / points systems exist to make you spend more money, though. Like the cards, they’re designed to increase your spending. So it’s the same advice – only think hard about it for fixed costs.
Also if the shareholders vote for policy X, the company cannot work against policy X or ignore policy X.
If your shareholders all get together and vote for some policy or program that will DEFINITELY hurt the stock value… well, the company still has to do it because it obeys the shareholders. And it has to try and do it the best possible way – malicious compliance/bad faith can also potentially get you in trouble.
But since the majority shareholders in, frankly, most meaningful public companies are the likes of hedge funds, then the majority of votes are always going to be to do the thing that boosts share value. This inhuman corporate concepts simply cannot care about anything other than more dollars. On the rare occasion where they may try, it gets labeled as ESG wokism and they get threatened legally by conservative governors (at least in the US).
The real problem with shareholder capitalism may be the terrible influence of hedge funds and professional investors rather than the fundamental principle of the investor-based system. But the hedge fund and professional investor is also a kind of natural consequence of these systems.
It dates back to the Soviets sending in the tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution and later Prague Revolution, though I think most people using it today are intending to invoke Tienanmen Square imagery, which is still totally on-the-nose.
By definition, fediverse mods only have power over their own instances, so their power grows with their own userbase and shrinks any time another user/instance refuses to do business with them. Admins have vanishingly little power except where admins are ALSO mods of major instances.
And if you still want all the same content with even less lemmy touch, kbin (or kbin-based instances) are an option – the one I use for that very reason. Interoperability HUGELY hardens a platform against toxic personalities. Plus ernest seems to be very fucking low-key and chill.
Darning socks is easy and super relaxing. Only takes maybe 20 minutes to fix a typical sock hole. I’ll Do it while watching TV. I’d rather repair it than consume more imported crap pointlessly.
Did planets form because of electromagnetism?
For myriad reasons, the answer to this is an emphatic yes.
Gravity may attract particles towards each other, but the force that actually causes them to interact with each other is almost entirely electromagnetism. The collisions of grains of cosmic dust are caused by electromagnetic fields interacting with each other. As is the gradual loss of kinetic energy – the friction – that allows some amount of potential energy to get converted to heat, allowing the particles to slow down and, as you described it, clump.
Absent electromagnetism, the actual particle nuclei would need to directly hit each other to cause an interaction via the nuclear forces, which is VERY improbable in the vastness of space. Improbable doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen, but in this case it does mean the universe is way too big and young. Without electromagnetic interactions, particles just form orbits. Which again, that’s what a “dark matter halo” is. It’s all the dark matter stuff orbitting around a galaxy’s center of mass because it doesn’t get easily trapped in the center. It’s all the dark matter in a gravitational system constantly whizzing back and forth across the center of mass since there’s no electromagnetic force to rob them of the potential or kinetic energy and stop them from heading back out.
And, conveniently, these halos are just what our observations seem to indicate dark matter is doing in a typical galaxy. The observations and theory align well
I’d also bet that a huge portion of those offices rely on at least some kind of proprietary software that doesn’t play nice/officially support Linux. MS Office, for example, or Autodesk’s stuff. When I saw what a headache it would be to get these working on Linux, I just shrugged and decided I’d keep my dual boot available for when I inevitably have need.
You’re turning up the cost dial for every additional workaround or adjustment you ask of people. Just to save what is fundamentally seen as $50-200 up front cost on a system for a new Windows 11 Pro license.
We observe patterns of behavior – orbits, movement, gravitational lensing – that are exactly what we would see if, for example, there were great clouds of matter or other galaxies in those places. But we don’t see the hydrogen gas. We see non-uniform distributions of dark matter mass that imply there is not simply some consistent calculation error, but rather that there is dark matter that is not uniformly distributed. Again, read up on the Bullet Cluster because it shows a VERY clear example of what I am talking about, where the regular, electromagnetically-interacting matter behaves one way but the apparent shadow of dark matter behaves in a different way that is consistent with lack of electromagnetic interactions.
We’ve also discovered things like ultradiffiuse galaxies – likely remnants from ancient collisions – that have apparently been stripped of their dark matter. MOND cannot explain these observations because these galaxies essentially behave in a Newtonian manner that would be impossible in a MOND framework.
if it has mass, why does it not just clump together?
Why does stuff clump together? For all non-dark matter, the answer is electromagnetism. Outside of the extreme cases of neutron stars and black holes, where gravity overwhelms and defeats electromagnetism and the nuclear forces theoretically take over to create degeneracy pressure, electromagnetism is the reason things clump. Absent electromagnetism, what would cause clumping? Essentially nothing, stuff would whizz straight through other stuff and go into orbits. Potentially HUGE orbits, which is why there’s so many theories around dark matter “halos”. Maybe if there were DIRECT collisions of theoretical DM particles, that might cause an energy-releasing event – this is one of the things current dark matter detectors are looking for and may yet find within the upcoming years.
are there any theoretical works on what kind of particle this could be, matching the pattern?
Yep, and more than a handful Many that make specific predictions we can test for and so are testing for. For example, you could look at axions, which are a theoretical particle predicted by an entirely different theory that may be a good fit for the dark matter particle.
The observations of systems like the Bullet Cluster imply that dark matter is actual material – baryonic matter. Stuff that exists in specific locations and has mass. Modifying the math of the physical laws does not explain these observations without absolutely going into contortions where dark matter explains them quite elegantly.
The Bullet Cluster, among several other systems, are very strong evidence that dark matter is actual baryonic matter that does not experience significant (or any) electromagnetic interactions. What we see when we look at these kinds of systems is that there is all evidence of STUFF there, but we cannot see the stuff. It’s not an indication of a poorly-performing math model missing a function term.
It would be like if we saw ripples in the water like we know exist around a rock. But we don’t see a rock. Sure, MAYBE we just fundamentally need to rewrite our basic rules of fluid mechanics to be able to create these exact ripples. But the more probable explanation is that there’s a rock we can’t see, and falsifying that theory will require just HEAPS of evidence.
The evidence we have suggests overwhelmingly that there is actual stuff that has mass that we simply do not have the tools to observe. Which isn’t all that surprising given that we are only JUST starting to build instruments to observe cosmological phenomena using stuff other than photons of light.
Cosmic Inflation is a good one to read up on if you never have. Because the slow acceleration we observe right now in the expansion is actually vastly inadequate to explain what we see now, so the big bang theory currently involves spacetime itself having to go through a few phase changes that are hard to wrap your head around.
All of physics is a “math model”. One we attempt to falsify. And when a scientist does prove some part of the model wrong, the community leaps up in celebration and gets to working on the fix or the next.
Dark matter started as exactly a catchall designed to make the model work properly. We started with a very good model, but when observing extreme phenomenon (in this case the orbits of stars of entire galaxies), the model didn’t fit. So either there was something we couldn’t see to explain the difference (“dark” matter), or else the model was wrong and needed modification.
There’s also multiple competing theories for what that dark matter is, exactly. Everything from countless tiny primordial black holes to bizarre, lightyear-sized standing waves in a quantum field. But the best-fitting theories that make the most sense and contradict the fewest observations & models seem to prefer there be some kind of actual particle that interacts just fine with gravity, but very poorly or not at all with electromagnetism. And since we rely on electromagnetism for nearly all of our particle physics experiments that makes whatever this particle is VERY elusive.
Worth observing that once, a huge amount of energy produced by stars was an example of a dark energy. Until we figured out how to detect neutrinos. Then it wasn’t dark anymore.
In short, you’re exactly right. It’s a catch-all to make the math model work properly. And that’s not actually a problem.
Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). It’s been the dissenting voice in the modern Great Debate about dark matter.
On one side are the dark matter scientists who think there’s a vast category of phenomenon out there FAR beyond our current science. That the universe is far larger and more complex than we currently know, and so we must dedicate ourselves to exploring the unexplored. The other side, the
On the other you have the MOND scientists, who hope they can prevent that horizon from flying away from them by tweaking the math on some physical laws. It basically adds a term to our old physics equations to explain why low acceleration systems experience significantly different forces than the high-acceleration systems with which we are more familiar – though their explanations for WHY the math ought be tweaked I always found totally unsatisfactory – to make the current, easy-to-grock laws fit the observations.
With the big problem being that it doesn’t work. It explains some galactic motion, but not all. It sometimes fits wide binary star systems kind of OK, but more often doesn’t. It completely fails to explain the lensing and motion of huge galactic clusters. At this point, MOND has basically been falsified. Repeatedly, predictions it made have failed.
Dark matter theories – that is, the theories that say there are who new categories of stuff out there we don’t understand at all – still are the best explanation. That means we’re closer to the starting line of understanding the cosmos instead of the finish line many wanted us to be nearing. But I think there’s a razor in there somewhere, about trusting the scientist who understands the limits of our knowledge over the one who seems confident we nearly know everything.
In the US, organic-labeled products typically used way more pesticides than non-organic because organic growing is much more vulnerable to pests. They just need to be approved “organic” pesticides. It’s a meaningless label here.
I think you mean WASN’T threadiverse already a term.
Yes, it used to be. Soon, it won’t be.
There’s a reason you have organizations like the NLRB, meant to be the “first step” before a labor case goes to a more general trial – it lets a bunch of people who are actual subject matter experts (in the NLRB’s case, labor law experts) be the first pass at reviewing the legal claims before a general court that doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about gets involved. It lets you set the tone for the whole ensuing trial process, grounded in understanding and truth.
The average judge doesn’t know jack shit about ANYTHING other than the technicalities of the law. Most of them haven’t done a real day of work in their life. But being a judge gives you the confidence you need to think your understanding of the technicalities of the law can be applied to just about anything, even something you find utterly baffling outside of the trial.
We really lack a qualified commission or board to be the first pass for these big tech disputes. The FTC is asleep at the wheel. And the result is that our ongoing legal frameworks around these issues continue to be arbitrary, unpredictable court rulings based on random judges’ limited understandings and gut instincts. It’s a very bad situation.
In a similar vein, that’s why the fascists on the Supreme Court are trying so hard to undermine and delete Chevron deference. Because when you want to use the courts to just enforce your preferences and write your own laws, having to appeal to subject matter experts just gets in the way.
Not that you’re asking for an argument, but I do want you to know why I, and many like me, find this whole life-from-conception argument totally ethically unpersuasive. And it’s not the usual nonsense of “it’s just cells” because, as you well know, that’s an unimpressive and pointless debate. Whether a fetus is a human or not is fundamentally subjective. And so I’ll grant that it is, because I have total confidence in my pro-choice position even then.
The issue with the pro-life position is not that it asserts that abortion is bad. Frankly, I don’t give a crap if you or anyone else thinks it is bad. Again, that is subjective. A personal preference. The issue with the pro-life position is that it always seems to assert that abortion must be banned and even criminalized. That’s what pro-life is. It doesn’t mean “I think abortion is bad”, it means “I think abortion should not be allowed.”
My position isn’t that abortion is good. Mine is that the pregnant person has a right to choose. I think the moral calculus on when and whether it is good or bad is FAR too complicated to form a rule, and so we must leave it up to the biggest stakeholders to figure that out privately.
I think a lot of things are bad, but having a preference against something is different than justifying use of the state’s violence to prohibit it.
A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson, PDF - 1971. Hardly new, and I doubt you’ve never seen it, but ultimately it is still the line of argument that I do not think has been convincingly rebutted. This essay is still probably the most sound and straightforward work of philosophy that shows that banning abortion is impermissible in an ethical society, and it presumes life from the moment of conception just as you do.
My extreme summary of the point it is making: at the end of the day, you have two competing human rights. You have the right to autonomy of your own body against another’s right to life. Both are undeniably rights a person has – and highly related ones, at that. When these rights are in tension, we need to make a choice as to which is supreme. And the consequences of giving life supremacy over autonomy are disastrous compared to the consequences of giving autonomy supremacy over life.
Rather than empower the state to take any and all actions necessary to protect life, we instead must impose a limit on the power of the state – it may not violate someone’s ability to make choices about their own body functions, even if to protect the life of another.
I’d prefer to be in a world that has no abortions at all. Just as I’d prefer to be in a world without contagious disease. One way to get rid of all contagious disease is to systematically euthanize every sick person at their first sniffle. Problem solved! Such is an abortion ban.
We get rid of disease by investing in research and healthcare and doing our best to use it maximize efficacy with fair triage, vaccination programs, etc… We get rid of abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies from the get and by creating a world so supportive and safe for pregnant people that they do not want to terminate it.
The ONLY way to fix the wider world of messaging is mandatory adversarial interoperability.
No matter how clever your new standard is, it will not work.
Adversarial interoperability – even if it is gated to only be required of sufficiently large businesses/platforms – will be the end of all this bullshit once implemented. Messaging should be about the people and the messages, not the platforms.
All of those headings are single words.
Taste is subjective, but mine says either color the whole heading or don’t color it at all.