No idea about tools although I hope you find something.

Two related suggestions that will change your life:

1. Grunt Fund if you are making decisions about equity
2. Have people estimate the total time for a task, rigidly enforce that every man-hour spent on a project has to be allocated to one of those tasks (including the elusive but vital “oh shit we forgot” task), keep track of the coefficient between the two. It’ll be different for different people sometimes. When estimating a project, have people come up with estimates and then multiply by the coefficient. Be transparent with everyone about this system. It’ll revolutionize your project management life once people get used to it. I tried to find a blog post which explains more detail, but honestly, it’s not complicated, and Google is too shit now to find it.

Even if you accept the scriptures as credible

I do not. They include some direct contradictions between different sections about factual events, never mind even the spiritual inconsistencies, which are massive. If you study the history and where things got translated into other things, you can actually see where some of the mistakes got introduced and why, and how particular people introduced particular self-serving parts into “canon” at different points for particular reasons. So no, definitely not credible.

I’m just saying that, when I read the story of Jesus’s life specifically, the way he’s described sounds exactly like how a real holy man would behave and how I think society as a whole (very much including the church) would react to him: With mistrust, hostility, and eventually with assassination. It’s very different from both the Mike Johnson supply side Jesus version and the Sunday school version that is common in American religious upbringing. In fact they are so different that those three are all simply mutually unrelated to each other. American Christians are just telling the story they’re trying to tell, making the point they’re trying to make, just like you apparently are here.

I’m not taking a position about whether any of it is true and I don’t plan to. I have no idea what argument you’re trying to start, but I want no part of it.

What?

Jesus didn’t tell the guy to give Jesus anything. He said, go give it all away, then come back when you have nothing to give me, then we can get to work.

If you read the bible, Jesus was very much like what I would have expected a for-real holy man to be. He was also constantly at war with the Mike Johnsons of his day, with periodic physical violence from both sides.

I wanted to make sure I sat down and really replied to you before because I generally like your takes and respect you as a person, and a quick reply from my phone would be impossible as a medium for replying to your thoughtful and well stated argument.

Yeah, all good. I mean maybe I am wrong, we can talk about it.

My issue with Substack isn’t that there’s Nazis on there, it’s that Substack’s owners made sure they were there, and made sure they got a cut of the revenue sharing scheme.

Okay so this is actually one of the issues that made me start to say that this is deliberate disinformation, not just people saying some stuff I don’t agree with. The thing is: I don’t think this is actually true. I saw a big article that made this claim, I dug into the details, and it turned out to be one of those “Ship of Theseus” things where, the people they invited were not the Nazis, just some random people with MAGA-type ideas, and they hadn’t expressed those MAGA-type ideas until long after Substack’s dealings with them had been and gone (pre-2017 Matt Taibbi I think was one). Basically, Substack in this aspect did nothing wrong at all. But people wrapped it up like they had sought out Richard Spenser and invited him to the platform and made sure to give him some money to get things started, which is false, and it was weird that people were trying so hard to say that that had happened. What they did was took millions of dollars from VCs and then gave it to good journalists.

Who are you talking about when you say the Substack owners made sure there were Nazis? I want to dig into this a little bit more and where you heard that from.

There’s a whole separate issue of them allowing for real neo-Nazis. I’m probably in the vast minority, but I actually think that was fine. It’s the same like I think Hasan Piker can say whatever the fuck he wants, it’s the same like I think nutomic can have transphobic views if he wants. I think it is fine.

Like I say, I’m probably the minority there.

considered it important to Substack’s future that those Nazis be present and paid.

The question I find myself asking is what views do they hold, what do they tolerate, and how long until they find a new way to promote those views or allow someone to co-opt their waveforms to broadcast their message to us.

Just to be clear: Are you saying that they’re in any way promoting or in favor of Nazis? Or just that they allow them on the platform and that’s the huge problem?

I’ve seen the first thing, and I think that’s what you’re saying, but if you are saying the second thing it’s a different conversation.

I guess ultimately, what I’m driving at, is that it is my view that Substack, like Medium, is a captured outlet. It can only ever show you a distorted version of the truth that serves its holders of power, who are ultimately aligned with the techbroligarchs that are strangling all of us.

I don’t think any of this is true. I haven’t seen any indication at all that they’re distorting anything about the blogs that are hosted there, and the very nature of them (as far as I’m aware) makes it pretty difficult for them to start rigging the algorithm to promote one instead of another, or anything like that.

I do think it’s a problem that Substack is a centralized platform. That I will 100% agree with you on. The point being that regardless of whether the current owners are up to anything, there’s the strong likelihood in the future that it will succumb to the inevitable like so many before it.

I think Ghost is probably a much better model, to be honest. On the other hand, because Substack is centralized, they were able to subsidize good journalism to get the ball rolling, and I think that was a really good thing. And, of course, it’s absolutely impossible to keep Nazis off of Ghost either. Actually, even the purge of Nazis that Substack eventually did, would be impossible on Ghost, because its decentralized nature means they would be there to stay if they chose Ghost. It’s more or less impossible to stop, generally speaking. (Which is part of why I agree with Substack’s original stance on it.)

Does this make sense?

The equation “Substack = Nazis” is textbook political misinformation: A thing with a technical grain of truth, entirely missing the point and then dishonestly presented, for the purpose of splintering and confusing the left and getting them to attack each other. I suspect it is deliberately promoted by enemies, because while it has a technical little fig-leaf of truthfulness, it bears so little resemblance to anything real or relevant and is a convenient way to shit on one of the chief leftist platforms for thought and journalism, and leftists love nothing more than a contest of “I am so pure that I hate this thing that everyone else likes because it’s actually evil and I’m super clever and informed so I can see that and you can’t and I’m the first one.”

I guess it is possible that people came up with this all on their own as a purity-test (actually I do think that the original campaign which persuaded Substack to get rid of most of the Nazis, was that), and it’s just a general leftist self-own because of that tendency. I do feel like it’s pretty likely that it has started coming in in some way from outside though. When this argument is presented in print form, it often has so many hallmarks of propaganda or slanty dishonest framings associated with it that it’s hard for me to think that it is entirely self-created organic purity testing gone awry.

Here was my conversation about the details of the underlying Substack Nazi issue the last time it came up. I don’t have a lot to add to it: https://ponder.cat/post/1721638/1949850

Hey, look, I found some.

But to address your request for more information on that admittedly poorly chosen example: that was at the start at the Russian invasion, so I don’t have the source readily available. It might have been Jacobin or a YT geopolitical analyst based in Europe.

Not what I asked. I asked you for general reliable sources about the world, since your international friends are in touch with them and all read them and they’re 100% up to speed on things that idiot Americans are not aware of. I want to know these sources, not this specific claim, but just in general. Surely you want to help me not be a blithering idiot in my news consumption anymore?

IDK, maybe your answer is “YouTube and Jacobin.” I do watch YouTube and I’m familiar with Jacobin.

I come to Lemmy for conversations that are fun, funny, thought-provoking, and helpful. So, on that note, I’m out. Enjoy your day.

Seems to me like you come to Lemmy to snidely insinuate weird pro-Russian points of view, and then become super-friendly and say it was all a big misunderstanding, brother, when someone calls you on it, and then say it wasn’t important and flee into the darkness when asked for details. I stand behind my rudeness to you, it seems like it was well-earned. You’re welcome to defend “US manipulating geopolitics with UA and RU so as to bring the EU to heel,” if you want to, but since you don’t want to, have a wonderful evening.

even I said “WAT,” i.e. my disbelief regarding conclusions at which some people outside the US arrived.

That’s not what you said. You said that it was, more or less, a universal consensus outside the US that the US had manipulated events in Ukraine to weaken the EU, because they couldn’t stand having the EU around because it was a real democracy. So much so that you’re a “blithering idiot” “out of the loop” “depth and breadth of ignorance” and so on because you don’t see it that way because you consume US media, whereas the whole rest of the world knows that that’s going on. Right?

That assertion (that it’s universally believed outside the US, not even touching on whether it is true) is absolutely wrong. And then, you said “WAT” about your own reaction to it, but also seemed to take it very seriously, comparing it favorably to your own ideas which you were very negative about.

Would you care to elaborate on how I called commenters here misinformed?

You said “us,” as in “it becomes very difficult for us to be anything other than idiots”.

I feel like you are digging for an argument that doesn’t exist.

If you would like more clarification or elaboration, rather than making assumptions, I’m happy to discuss.

Okay, sure. Maybe that’s fair. So tell me: What are these reliable sources that your more wise and knowledgeable international friends read, what’s some of what they tell you about geopolitics and the war in Ukraine? Specifically as pertains to “US manipulating geopolitics with UA and RU so as to bring the EU to heel.” Since you’ve identified the idea that that is not happening as the “blithering idiot” viewpoint by contrast, maybe you can help me out of my idiocy by helping and elaborating.

Edit: Rephrasing

Let’s set aside the veracity of the US manipulating geopolitics in the UA/RU war

Let’s not. That’s the exact point at which you departed from accuracy into fantasy-land, and what I was taking note of.

Can we all agree that the US has a long history of fuckery when it comes to stomping out anything it doesn’t like or isn’t in line with corporate interests?

Yes, 100%.

Even if the independent journalist were absolutely presenting the truth, it’s still feels like tinfoil hat shit because of how severely we’re inculcated by “trustworthy” news sources in the US.

I like to think I’m a teeny bit media- and news-savvy, but damn… most days I really feel like a blithering idiot.

This is an impressive type of sophisticated negging whereby you criticize yourself as a way to implicitly criticize the reader, and tell them they’re an idiot.

Most of Lemmy and most of the content on Lemmy isn’t from the US as far as I’m aware. This whole media blackout you’re talking about is a very real thing for most US people, but it simply won’t apply on Lemmy or the sources that are usually prevalent on Lemmy. For example I host some news sources on rss.ponder.cat; four out of the top five of the popular ones are non-US sources.

If you are telling the truth about your self-assessment, I would really urge you to re-examine that leap you took from “most US readers are misinformed” to “most of the people in these comments are misinformed” and definitely the one you took to “US is skillfully manipulating the Ukraine situation, and definitely not fucking it up because they don’t care about much of the issues involved all that much, except insofar as their friends can sell tons of weapons to all parties involved.”

Talking with my longtime acquaintances and friends in CA, DE, VN, and JP, the conversations invariably become “Did you hear about [current event causal factors]? This is super obvious, and here is [their reliable news sources].” Well, shit.

Tru dat

For example, the one that really blew me away was the US manipulating geopolitics with UA and RU so as to bring the EU to heel.

Lolwut

Never change, lemmy.world. Your opinions are always a magical adventure.

Fight for… what? My fellow Americans?

Yes. Some of them don’t have the option. It’s either be here safe, or have ICE kick in their door and fuck them up. Some of them just want to do science. Some of them are wanting to turn the resources of the richest country in history to solving big problems like climate change. There are important things and people happening in the US that are worth defending. At least try.

The Trump people, you can fight to educate better and rescue from the economic circumstances that primed them up to line up behind fascism. Not for their sake, fuck 'em. But for the sake of everyone else who will be a victim once their confusion and violence becomes law.

the Great Depression + the Gilded Age + the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand + the Civil War + segregation + Asian-American internment camps, but instead of happening over the course of a hundred years, we’re packing it all in to Thursday.

You forgot that on top of all that, the people on top have in their possession an integrated surveillance state superweapon the likes of which has never really been seen before.

How effective they’ll be able to make it, in service of destroying anyone who opposes them politically, remains to be seen, but people who’ve managed to build pale imitations of it have in the past been able to accomplish terrifying things, and they got this version all for free and all complete, someone else having built it for them.

I definitely wasn’t saying it will be a straightforward struggle or a fun time.

People were getting born into slavery, live their whole lives working in the fields not knowing how to read, and there was a massive political and paramilitary fight over whether that was going to continue and how and where, which presaged the explicit military fight the whole country had about it.

Then we had the civil war.

Then we had the labor movement, people getting born basically into slavery again, and having paramilitary battles to fight for their right to simply live and exist and have some kind of voice in how their daily life was organized, and have some life outside of their slavery existence, instead of living on corporate fiefdoms obeying the owner of their company like a king.

Then we had segregation, poll taxes and voter literacy tests, police brutality, water cannons and tear gas and police dogs and lynching. When people talked about making lynching illegal it was a huge debate. Without lynching, what would we even do? To keep order?

Somehow, from that, we made it to today. People today can expect that they can vote, they can have newspapers or web sites that say whatever they want, they can be free of police public or private just coming around and fucking up their shit because they irritated someone powerful. (That last one is debatable in the modern day, but for 99.9% of people I would say that most of what I just said is still true.) But none of that happened because “constitution” or because “America.”

It happened because people fought and died to make it happen. Maybe it’s useful that there was a piece of paper somewhere that was giving them something to hope for when they wanted to give up, give an end goal in mind and remind them why it was important. They had something to talk about to other people about why they were doing it. But “the country” didn’t do shit to help them in that fight. They just had to go and do it.

Fuck that, man. Stay and fight.

Have a passport (definitely apply for one today if you do not), have a plan, if shit really goes sideways then it’s every person for themselves and their family. But as hard as it might seem if you’ve grown up in a time of stability, we’ve been through way worse than this bullshit in this country, and we’ve usually come out of it stronger and wiser.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Are you saying I was being silly?

You might be onto something

Okay, so way back when, Google needed a way to install and administer 500 new instances of whatever web service they had going on without it being a nightmare. So they made a little tool to make it easier to spin up random new stuff easily and scriptably.

So then the whole rest of the world said “Hey Google’s doing that and they’re super smart, we should do that too.” So they did. They made Docker, and for some reason that involved Y Combinator giving someone millions of dollars for reasons I don’t really understand.

So anyway, once Docker existed, nobody except Google and maybe like 50 other tech companies actually needed to do anything that it was useful for (and 48 out of those 50 are too addled by layoffs and nepotism to actually use Borg / K8s/ Docker (don’t worry they’re all the the same thing) for its intended purpose.) They just use it so their tech leads can have conversations at conferences and lunches where they make it out like anyone who’s not using Docker must be an idiot, which is the primary purpose for technology as far as they’re concerned.

But anyway in the meantime a bunch of FOSS software authors said “Hey this is pretty convenient, if I put a setup script inside a Dockerfile I can literally put whatever crazy bullshit I want into it, like 20 times more than even the most certifiably insane person would ever put up with in a list of setup instructions, and also I can pull in 50 gigs of dependencies if I want to of which 2,421 have critical security vulnerabilities and no one will see because they’ll just hit the button and make it go.”

And so now everyone uses Docker and it’s a pain in the ass to make any edits to the configuration or setup and it’s all in this weird virtualized box, and the “from scratch” instructions are usually out of date.

The end

As is often the case, the behavior they are telling you you MUST not do, and they will NOT stand for and you definitely will suffer for it, is what they’re afraid of.

At some point the public opinion will hit critical mass at the street and individual level. Maybe (and maybe not). There is a reason they always want to get out of the area as soon as possible, and have stopped wearing identifiable uniforms.

I have no idea whether a group of ICE agents getting mobbed by an angry crowd that outnumbers them 20-to-1 will be a good thing or a bad thing, if things do reach a point where that happens. I legitimately don’t know. It’s definitely better than no one doing anything until they’ve escalated to filling up all these detention centers they’ve been building with people who mentioned “protest” on Facebook. Also, certainly, them threatening retaliation against people who are showing signs in that direction is a real and dangerous threat.

I’m just saying there is a reason they are calling out judges and bystanders as the threat that they MUST shut down. It’s because it is by far the most easy and reliable undoing to their power. It means a lot more than the Supreme Court, honestly, at the end of the day.

“We didn’t mean to send you that stupid letter, it was so so stupid, you should have known it was stupid when we sent it to you.”

• “That sounds like a you problem”
• “So if we’d agreed you would have said never mind don’t worry about it forget all that?”
• “Apology accepted. Contact us if you need anything else”

I know it’s only vaguely related, since they’re not US-funded, but at some point I think it would be hilarious (in a particularly poignant way) if the Lemmy developers’ funding got cut off by the process of the explicitly rabid governments they are fans of finally succeeding at destabilizing the friendly Western countries where they live to the point that NLNet wasn’t funded anymore. As I understand it, NLNet is already facing some headwinds because the friendly liberal elements in EU politics are getting replaced by the same kind of “fuck everyone just give money to rich people and also anyone who disagrees with me dies” elements that Russia likes to give money and social-media-shilling campaigns to support.

Surely Russia and China will jump to the front and fund basic infrastructure work for the good of everyone, if that happened. They could count on it happening, instead of having to get jobs.

Surely.

I want to ask about how strongly Russia’s economy is doing, and how they are rising and NATO is falling apart and the EU is going to all crumble and freeze in the dark with no fossil fuels while Russia stands strong, and how that all ties in with this whole theory, but I have lost interest.

I wish you luck with your geopolitical theories. Y’all are weird.