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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • Eugenics is a system of controlling reproduction. Many eugenesists may have believed that being a member of a certain race or having certain congenital diseases made one inferior (and thus unworthy of the right to reproduce), but the basic principle some people should reproduce and some people shouldn’t.

    Like why do you think people are against eugenics? Because they’re afraid we might accidentally bring an end to genetic diseases? That there might be too many blonde people? That they care deeply about people who don’t exist yet’s rights to be some particular way?

    So yeah, when you propose a rule controlling reproduction…


  • If you want to have a system which determines which people will or won’t make terrible families, only permitting the former to reproduce, you want a system of social control. If children were delivered randomly by storks it would be something else. Aviation regulations? Avian regulations? Something like that I guess.

    Not all social control is bad. Society and its institutions often limit what people can do. But of late we’ve mostly determined that restricting reproduction should be used sparingly, not defaultly, and I tend to agree.



  • If there’s a place that you just can’t stomach to shop because of how they treat their employees then I highly recommend you do not shop there. I was avoiding Walmart before avoiding Walmart was cool.

    However…

    Boycotts only really work when organized, towards an end goal. What was Walmart doing before, what is it doing now, what do we want it to do, and who’s coordinating? That’s how you change corporate policy through boycott.

    If certain DEI policies are important enough to you to boycott when a company removes them then that’s fine. I guess it’s also worth asking what it is about any given program that makes it good enough for not, which companies should or shouldn’t have it, why, and all that.


  • I’m not sure if the exact details, but based on what you’re saying, that’s a union busting technique. You strike for recognition of the union and to bring the company back to the table to negotiate the contract. If a company is raising wages in response to a strike that’s generally an attempt by the company to show that they will “take care of you” without the union contract. Anything the company does to “help” in response to worker action other than adding it as a concession in the contract is an attempt to avoid having a concession in the contract.




  • Yeah I’m okay with the basic navigation options. The primary point is that man pages do look like they had written by someone who does not do technical writing. Whether that’s someone coming from a law background, programming, or whatever.

    It’s not written for an end user who wants to know how to use the tools they have available. It will tell you what a command “does”, sometimes, but it doesn’t explain itself. It presumes a certain amount of pre-existing knowledge, or familiarity with the syntax of man writers.

    For another example, the man for ls repeatedly lists options referencing “implied” entries without ever explaining what “implied” means in this context. It presupposes that the reader knows what that term means. I know what an implication is in an English class, and the antonym for “implied” is “explicit”, but in a man page? No clue. Not like there’s reference to or examples of “explicit” entries to contrast with “implied” entries. You just have to know what it means in context, or figure it out some other way.


  • I don’t think you get what I mean.

    I don’t mean that man itself isn’t functional, I mean the way most man pages are written isn’t clear enough to communicate how to use the programs they refer to.

    I’d include the man page for man in that, and I’d encourage anyone else to look at it from the eyes of someone who can follow written instructions and ask “How does this manual/help file compare to others I have read?”.

    So, for example, in the examples, it says:

    man -a intro Display, in succession, all of the available intro manual pages contained within the manual. It is possible to quit between successive displays or skip any of them.

    Those two lines are the only place within man’s man page (at least the one you get from man man) that use the string “intro”. What is an intro in this context? Guess you got to run it to find out.

    What is -a for? About 200+ lines down there is a two sentence explanation.

    The first sentence tells you how man normally behaves, saying: “By default, man will exit after displaying the most suitable manual page it finds.” This sentence is unclear (“When does man exit after displaying the most suitable manual page it finds? When I run man ls I see the manual for ls on my screen until I press ‘q’ to ‘quit’ out of it.”) and not immediately connected to the purpose of the flag/option.

    The second sentence says: “Using this option forces man to display all the manual pages with names that match the search criteria.” This is a lot clearer, and my only complaint about it can be that it’s not the first sentence in the explanation.









  • Hypocrisy, politicization, hellfire, and lack of community I guess.

    If religion is supposed to be the opium of the masses, it should at least leave me feeling better after church. The rising ideology was naive and attracted narcissists, and there was less and less space to hold on to the original beliefs. It started looking less like a refuge from the world and more of the world. It wasn’t perfect before but there was more flexibility and grace at least.