aalvare2

joined 2 years ago
[–] aalvare2 15 points 1 month ago

Relevant link for those interested in what OP is talking about.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-microreactor-experiments-watch-starting-2026

I’m not yet convinced this technology is the future or anything, but it does look pretty promising. We’ll know better when DOME testing begins in 2026.

[–] aalvare2 1 points 1 month ago

100% agree, when I see something I disagree with on its face I try to default to “I probably don’t get something they’re saying, given that it’s only a couple sentences of written word, and a different person’s brain who wrote them”.

It always makes for more useful conversation than defaulting to “ha what a dumbass”

[–] aalvare2 2 points 1 month ago

I think downvoters are just expressing disagreement with your opinion. Personally I don’t hate git but I wouldn’t call myself a “fanboy” either - I just don’t think “distributed” has to be mutually exclusive from “decentralized”, which is a term not rigorously defined in this context anyway.

But thanks for informing me about patch theory, that’s something I’ll probably make a small hobby out of studying.

[–] aalvare2 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Isn't decentralized itself since it's not a platform

I think I see your definition of “decentralized” a little better now, if you only want to apply it to platforms.

I think your definition may be too strict, and that “decentralized” and “distributed don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but eh, that’s just my take.

[–] aalvare2 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

What version control software in particular do you find better than git?

Your point about users often managing git projects via centralization is taken and valid. I was just pointing out that you don’t have to use git that way - different clones can separately develop their own features - so the earlier claim someone made that “git isn’t decentralized” is still wrong, imo.

[–] aalvare2 28 points 1 month ago (10 children)

Git itself isn't decentralized is about people copying it and sometimes mirroring it.

Not sure what you mean. My understanding is that git itself is decentralized insofar as each clone can develop its own history without ever needing to push to the origin, but that what OP is referring to is actually the “distributed” nature of git, where i.e. it’s easy to copy the entire history of an instance.

[–] aalvare2 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Ah, that’s fair. That’s a pretty key difference between us, and I’m fine agreeing to disagree.

Thanks for the spirited discussion.

[–] aalvare2 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I don’t really know what you’re getting at, but if all you’re saying is “wow, this dude doesn’t hate capitalism”, then…sure? I consider myself a social democrat.

Kind of a weird thing to fixate on. Especially after proclaiming you were done responding.

[–] aalvare2 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I'm not engaging with this anymore, you've obviously not understood my perspectives here (intentionally or not).

You’re free to choose not to engage any further. But I’d wager to say you haven’t understood my perspective either. At least I’ve tried to make sense of what you’ve said so far, and provide citations to enforce my perspective. I get the sense that you think you have an insight into unions and working class people that I could never fathom, or something like that. Hopefully I’m wrong.

I'm speaking to a very specific material conditions that a particular subset of the electorate is experiencing and liberal policies fail to address, and you've dismissed them yet again.

Okay…so you believe that liberal policies can’t address the problems of certain people? That seems bizarre, given what you said a few replies up:

The more socialized benefits available to small town workers, the less pressure there will be to remain employed in a dying industry. That includes childcare, healthcare, housing, food; basically everything they're afraid to campaign on because republicans will accuse them of being radical socialists.

I figured your main beliefs were in that quote, and that a lot of what you’ve said thus far was just an effort to empathize with conservative-minded workers. Guess you’re a more befuddling guy than I thought.

It's extremely calloused to ignore the economic hardships experienced by these workers when the industry that supports them and their community is broken into pieces and replaced by another, and I don't think you're in the right place to see or acknowledge those.

Buddy, I’m just some guy on the internet, same as you. At the end of the day we don’t really know a thing about each other. At least I’m not assuming you “fail to see” this or “aren’t in the right place to see” that.

Maybe that's just a function of where we are in the election cycle. A part of the way capitalism works is by holding the means of survival hostage to coerce labor to protect it, and when democrats turn a blind eye to the trap those people are stuck in it solidifies reactionary political perspectives.

Man, I get it, you hate capitalism. That’s okay. IMO economic systems don’t really matter nearly as much as the rules and regulations above those systems. That’s okay, too.

I don't give a shit what O'Brian's personal politics are or what Teamsters endorsement or platforming at the RNC means to the democratic campaign. He represents a segment of the population that is experiencing conditions not addressed by current or proposed democratic policies, and he's using his platform to put pressure on both parties to address them by dangling Teamster's influence, and I think that's a fine (good, even) strategy.

I don’t care what it means “to the democratic campaign”, either. I just care that he might help Trump win, because IMO that’s bad for his constituents. Trump doesn’t care about workers, teamsters included, and Harris is the successor to the guy who you can’t deny at least cared enough to give them the largest pension bailout in US history. To me, that’s what’s most practical to care about.

[–] aalvare2 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

On top of that, the House feels like it really ought to be fixed. The number of representatives has been fixed for almost 100 years, yet the country’s population has more than tripled.

I don’t think legislators of the time expected the population to get so big.

[–] aalvare2 0 points 2 months ago (6 children)

To address your first 3 paragraphs…you’re acting like all I care about is O’Brien’s non endorsement. I guess I’ll spell out the thing I’ve said in every single comment on this thread: Not endorsing democrats = fine. Not endorsing democrats + speaking at the RNC and NOT directly calling them out on their bs = fucking stupid. You keep treating the non-endorsement like it’s in a vacuum. And you can disagree with my math, but if you continue to pretend that this isn’t what I’m saying, then you’re just straw-manning me.

Rust belt unions are less concerned with expanding union protections than they are concerned with their industry going bankrupt. A coal mining union isn't concerned with having better legal protection for going on strike, they're concerned that the entire coal industry is getting replaced elsewhere by renewables and wont have anyone to negotiate with.

Yes, it’s understandable that workers feel like they won’t survive if their industry dies…but in the specific case of coal, the solution isn’t to bolster that industry. Much of the solution is to create new jobs in growing industries that coal workers could transfer into, and to set guarantees that those new jobs aren’t exploitative. Democrats have fought, with real action, to do both the former, and the latter (I won’t source the latter again, read any of my pro-union sources).

I already said that the PRO act is an excellent bill, and that dems should be campaigning on it,

Yes, and not only do they campaign on it - they consistently vote in favor of it. But go on.

but that's simply not why they're losing union support in the rust belt. Millions of americans are afraid that they're going to loose their livelihoods to changing economic priorities, and democrats are allergic to taking any action that addresses that fundamental apprehension because they're terrified of being called socialist.

Yes, I get their fear. And that’s why the liberal solution to those fears is making it easier to switch jobs and to provide better childcare, healthcare, housing, food, unemployment, all on top of pro-worker reform…all LEFT-LEANING policies that the modern GOP will NEVER ENDORSE.

It sounds like you’re just trying to explain what many workers see as the solution. They think the tried-and-true solution is to bolster their industries, instead of all the stuff I just listed. But that’s a conservative solution to the problem.

It sounds like you want the democrats to have liberal policies in general, which is what I want too. But what, in your head, does O’Brien want? If he wants conservative industry-first policies, then AOC isn’t punching left at the guy, end of story. And if he actually wants liberal, boosting-quality-of-life-policies (the kinds of policies I want and you seem to want), then he’s an idiot or a coward, or both, for not getting mad at the modern GOP for spinning all of that negatively as socialism.

Because the democrats haven't proposed anything that actually addresses their concerns, and they're frustrated that the things democrats have proposed are targeted in other places of the economy and callously ignores their material interests. They're convinced that democrats will never solve their problems - but the GOP is promising to preserve their industries by passing tarrifs, removing environmental protections, stopping the growth of renewables and tech that threaten to put them out of business....And those are simple, believable solutions to their problems. You and I understand that those are problematic in a million different ways, but from their perspective everyone else seems to be fucking over everyone else to get their bag, so why not them? Democrats simply don't have a response to that, especially when they're insistent on stopping short of breaking with neoliberal economic policy.

You’re not addressing the subtlety that while they feel democrats aren’t proposing good solutions, and while you seem to feel democrats aren’t proposing good solutions…your solutions and their solutions are different. You’ve said you want more of the kinds of solutions they’d call “radical socialism”. (I want those solutions too, but imo Democrats are already working on it, they just have an uphill battle against conservatives.) (And sure, many conservative workers probably just don’t realize that they’d love those solutions, too, but in the meantime they’re duped into supporting the GOP and their worse, pro-some-industries, anti-other-industries solution.) Are you under the impression that the reason O’Brien isn’t capitulating to democrats is they’re not embracing those solutions? Do you think that when O’Brien cozies to the GOP, that he’s secretly trying to get the GOP on board with those solutions? When there’s negative evidence of that?

I'm exhausted by having this same conversion over-and-over again. Moderate democrats have this way of middling their way out of grasping the underlying issues voters are experiencing and instead try to bandaid over huge gaping wounds, then cry bloody murder when voters don't act as grateful as they think they should. Liberals are never going to understand why they're losing support if they aren't able to even conceptualize the concerns of the working class in small-town economies.

If you’re trying to say that pro-worker policy is the bandaid, and widespread policies that provide better childcare, healthcare, housing, food, and unemployment are your solution, then I don’t disagree, other than that pro-worker policy isn’t as much a band-aid at it is part of that solution. But if that’s O’Brien’s solution, then he’s a bad leader for helping the republicans who reject that solution. If that’s not O’Brien’s solution…then attacking his leadership isn’t “punching left”.

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