Canada is a bit of a mess too, although different. We never really use miles, but we do use feet and inches and pounds pretty regularly. The construction industry is a real mess in particular because so many things are measured in either imperial or metric units

I can’t see it anymore for some reason - it doesn’t mean anything really but I remember the first character being 毛 which is hair haha

Being able to read Chinese characters, I had a really hard time seeing your name as you intended it…

Or they just can’t leave for one reason or another – moving is tough

There are absolutely very important reasons to still vote for Biden, but you can’t rely on millions of people to all do the right thing just because it’s logical. The person who’s running for office ultimately has the responsibility to ensure people want to vote for them. It’s just not really useful to blame millions of people when you know that there are statistically for sure going to be disaffected people out of those who need to be motivated. It doesn’t even matter whether most voters who would vote for Biden turn out to vote for him - they almost certainly will - because this fight is at the margins, and to win, you have to capture the irresponsible and unreliable people too.

I always wonder how this works. Do we have free will, or does everything we do follow God’s plan? If it’s the former, then God is clearly either not all-powerful or not entirely benevolent, since there are many ways we make things worse for our fellow humans and other life on this planet. If it’s the latter, then God is directly responsible for everything bad that happens as well as the good, nothing else really matters.

Hamas doesn't exist in a vacuum though. Most people don't just wake up one day and think "hmm, terrorism sounds good to me today!" There's always going to be a minority of people who end up having extremist views and committing violence, but a functioning state is able to keep those people under control. The fact that Netanyahu has no motivation to make the situation better is directly what causes this situation where people help Hamas out of desperation. They can't wait for Israelis to get their act together and elect someone who is strongly motivated to make life better for Palestineans, they see that they have to live on the other side of a wall where only they have to deal with that level of poverty and violence on a regular basis and it's unfair. If you put yourself in their shoes you'd get it too. That's not a justification at all, it's just empathy for their situation.

I can also empathize with Israelis who want revenge. People in Israel expect safety and don't think of their country as a war-zone. It's easy to think of the problem as entirely one-sided when you don't have to deal with it, but it's just not the case.

So which is it, are they being allowed freedom of movement into Israel to work with identification, or you don't want them in because they're terrorists who threaten to kill civilians?

All I've seen is that some people were allowed in and out, but it isn't exactly a porous border, identification requirements are strict, getting the necessary approval and documentation is difficult in a place without a functioning state. And you can't just make rules and distance yourself from the consequences of them just because people are unable to meet the requirements of those rules, you have to actually look at what the effect is.

Israel’s strikes are the most targeted fucking strikes you’ve ever seen a military do, and they actively warn the people in those buildings with everything from roof knocking to a phone call.

That doesn't even make sense. If the point is to destroy Hamas assets and people, there's no sense in tipping them off about it. So either they're doing that and destroying people's homes for no reason, or they're not actually doing that.

It's not actually possible to take out military targets like that in civilian neighborhoods with air strikes in a "clean" way. Obviously the only reason they don't go in on the ground with IDF soldiers if they actually have legitimate targets instead is because the lives of Palestinean civilians are less important than the lives of Israeli soldiers, and they know that air strikes don't lead to any casualties on their side.

The idea that the atomic bombs directly caused the surrender of Japan is contested, actually. It's more likely that they created an urgency in what was already looking like a losing battle. The difference in that situation is that Japan wasn't fighting a war of resistance at any cost against the US, they were fighting as part of an alliance on one front of a world war. In that case it is very real that troops lose morale, civilian casualties become too great, and loss of military assets make victory look unlikely, and then surrender looks attractive by comparison. But I think in the case of popularly supported resistance to colonizers, that threshold is quite high - people feel quite strongly about revenge and are convinced of the justice of their cause in that situation, so the brutality of their colonizers isn't likely to do anything other than strengthen their resolve.

Frankly, I actually think the atomic bombing and firebombing campaigns would be considered war crimes if they happened today. It's really weird that people justify it so much by how horrible the Japanese state was at the time - tons of innocent civilians, including lots of children, died horribly, and it was 100% anticipated, and in the case of the atomic bombing, they did it twice, knowing that. You can't justify your own actions by the crimes of your enemy.

I actually did stop engaging as much after eliminating Reddit. Lemmy is nice sometimes, but I'm nowhere near as active. I probably post a few more YouTube comments, that's about it.

I can understand that but at the same time, it can also counteract a lot of localized perverse incentives. The majority of people might want more housing, but then at the same time there's a significant part of the voting population (especially at a municipal level) that doesn't want it in their community because of unfounded fears of higher density, so everybody wants it somewhere else and it doesn't get done. Well, if you go up a level of government, it's going to get done everywhere fairly, and people finally realize that it won't be a problem.

What do you think about the argument that it keeps costs down when things are generally getting more expensive? In effect, you might actually still be benefiting from lower prices without ever knowing it.

I don't know that I always buy this, but I can see the logic of it and I think it may be true sometimes, especially if things are competitive enough that being able to keep your prices down is more beneficial to business than putting the savings straight into profits.

Otherwise I think probably rather than customers seeing direct benefits from lower prices, an attempt to capture more of the excess profits of automation with taxation is needed.

Well, I didn't mean to say Labour is far-right or anything, just that they're sliding in the direction of the right.

I mean those are pretty major things, especially if you're part of one of the affected minorities. If I were trans I wouldn't really want to work with a coworker who insists on misgendering me and makes a fuss out of me using the right bathroom.

If it doesn't come up, it doesn't come up. People can agree to disagree, also. But there are also cases where the disagreement is so fundamental that it makes it pretty hard to respect someone or even want to be in the same room as them.

I do but only with people I've actually made friends with who I'm pretty sure will either agree with me or at least respect my point of view. I'll share mildly political articles in discussion groups for those specific things at work sometimes, but those are places where people have specifically opted in to hearing about them and are interested in the topics.

Well, Labour is legitimately sliding right, and it's become somewhat common among the so-called "left" in the UK to make a scapegoat out of trans people - it really wouldn't surprise me that an older, liberal woman in the UK would have some right-wing things to say.

Well, extrajudicial would imply not legal. What you're really pointing to is that when white supremacists are involved, somehow the government suddenly cares about due process and civil rights.

The only place I've ever seen this in Canada is at some private liquor stores. They have a tip prompt. I guess in theory someone could help you to decide what you want and make recommendations, but in practice how much does that happen and how much is it really worth? I think it feels like just shaming your customers for not paying your own employees' wages, tbh.

If you're actually in Tokyo - tbh this isn't anything new most other places, I've been using self-checkouts for like 15 years, and I don't really see much of a reason to have someone do a job that isn't really necessary and just makes me feel awkward, standing there while someone basically does a robot job. But honestly in Japan it makes a ton of sense to try to introduce self checkouts. Part-time staff are incredibly overworked, there's much fewer part-time workers available compared to demand, and most people who have worked a part-time job in Japan can attest that it's incredibly easy to find a job that doesn't pay very much and isn't very fulfilling. It's quite a different situation from full-time jobs, which are incredibly hard to find and still overwork you doing meaningless work.

Is it just that as a paying customer, you don't feel that you should any of your own effort to that service? Because if so, that's practically impossible, and maybe not even desirable. The best kind of working environment is one in which workers, customers, and employers all empathize with each other and do their best to make things easier. And as an example of something that customers are sometimes expected to do, there are a lot of cheap self-service restaurants in Japan like soba shops and such where you bring the tray to your table on your own and then clean up after yourself and bring it back to the tray return area. This isn't common in all parts of the world, and someone who isn't used to it might protest and say that they're paying the wages of the people who work there, so why should they have to serve themselves? But it's just part of the system there and it cuts down on the workload - you would be rude to not respect that.

If you think businesses are just pocketing the difference and it's leading to greater profits, the only real way to address that is to either encourage greater competition and for example break up monopolies, or implement price controls. But it doesn't make sense to employ people to do something when labour can be used more efficiently on something else.