Pronouns: They/Them

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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Coming from someone who worked tech support for some time: There are lots of people with no grasp of basic computing concepts working office jobs in which they sit at a computer all day. Some even highly educated and specialized. lawyers, managers, marketing consultants, insurance salespeople… young and old. They can use Word, and Outlook, and Chrome, and phone apps, but the concept of a file or folder, or utilizing files and folders to organize information, are alien to some. Doesn’t help that some (especially mobile) OS’s do a lot to obscure that layer from people, and people can often get by with rigid workflows or by calling tech support a lot. Not judging them. Well at least the ones who were nice to me. I don’t know how to change my oil. I mean none of the people I’m thinking of did either. But I don’t know how to do whatever lawyer managers do all day(meetings?). I realize there is some self selection in who calls tech support every day, so having worked tech support might have skewed my perception of the average office worker.




  • Risks of medical intervention always should be weighed against risks of nonintervention. If there is a significant probability a child is trans, delaying puberty may be the least intrusive option. There is a chance of negative effects, like with all medical interventions, but if they are most likely trans forcing them to undergo puberty is much more likely to have long term negative effects (including suicidality). Why is this specific medical decision equivalent to kids having sex? Do you view other procedures, like deciding to have braces, the same way? What about much riskier treatments with a muddled short/long term prognosis, like some heart surgeries?







  • The system rewards ownership, and owners sometimes are forced to distribute some value back to the creators of value to get that reward. Sometimes owners are forced to or benefit from sharing some ownership (like in the case of IP on YouTube).

    It’s not unique to software, though the potential to infinitely copy software makes the relationship starker. For example owning a parcel of land is similar to owning a peice of IP, in that the creation/purchase potentially happens once, and rent can be extracted over time from everyone who utilizes it. The number of renters you can fit on a peice of software is theoretically infinite, but in practice limited by the number of potential customers, the availability of their attention, and your distribution Infrastructure, while the number of renters you can fit on a parcel of land is limited by its size and the structures on it.

    Note that most owners did not personally create and do not personally develop what they own. Most software is not owned by programmers (who often make good money, but nowhere near the rent that is extracted from that software), and most homes are not owned by builders (who sometimes can’t afford the homes they build). It’s ownership which is primarily rewarded, and which spawns most further ownership.


  • Gravity (phenomenon) is neither a theory nor law, in a similar way that a cat is different from a picture of a cat or a dictionary entry describing the word cat or our collective understand of what a cat is. At the same time, gravity is also BOTH a theory and a set of laws in the same sense that you could point to a picture of a cat and say “that’s a cat right there”, and no one would correct you. The distinction seems silly, but it is important. Theory, law, etc are structures/lenses through which we understand and predict things. A sort of formalized collective metacognition is the basis of science, and this is why we have these terms and distinctions. And theories and laws are fundementally different things in a way that’s may be best expanded by critically reading the resources provided by the other commenter.



  • I think the meme is fairly clearly making fun of American conservative/fascist discourse. Like the whole watering down of any semblance of a working definition of CRT when referenced by right wing pundits and moral panic board meeting parents, where right wing people call every call to be somewhat decent human beings “CRT” or “wokism”, and then have no actual working meaning for those words except as something that seems left wing and makes them uncomfortable.





  • Wereduck@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlNot Happening
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    2 years ago

    Why not call someone what they want to be called? It ain’t new. Just like it’s polite to ask someone “can I call you x” or “do you prefer x or y” when you start to call someone a nickname or more personal name, someone can ask to be called x, and it’s polite to do so. Names are arbitrary things, but at the same time often deeply meaningful to people.