megane-kun

Their “unity” is a lie. Even among the supporters of the Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte tandem, it is viewed as nothing more than a marriage of convenience. But when it stopped being convenient, it’s back to the usual mudslinging.

I’d also be wary of Duterte’s promises with regards to China.

In the 2016 election, one of his campaign promises involved going by jet ski onto the disputed islands to personally protect them, a promise he later dismissed as just an empty promise and mocked those who bought into it as stupid. His promise of pushing a claim cited in the OP article might as well be one of those empty promises made to increase their dynasty’s chances of winning the elections. Their actions show where their priorities and loyalties lie. What was promised to be a “protect our islands” stance, turned out to be an “embrace China” stance.

Marcos Jr. isn’t in the clear either, with the Marcos dynasty trying to whitewash and erase from history their wrongdoing.

Moreover, his 20 PhP (~0.33 USD) per kilogram of rice promise is just as ridiculous as Duterte’s Jet ski promise. As with Duterte’s jetski, Marcos delivered a ~600 PhP (~10 USD) per kilogram of onions reality instead and later on, dropping to ~20 PhP / kg (~0.33 USD / kg) as local onion farmers had their harvests.

Of note here is the fact that the Marcos Jr. held the post of Secretary of Agriculture at the same time as him being President until November 2023. Meanwhile, the price of (well-milled) rice is around 60 PhP (~1 USD) per kilogram—thrice what was promised. For context, the average daily wage is around 620 PhP (~10.33 USD).

Not that Duterte had the best handling of the economy, it was however, overshadowed by his bombastic statements and pro-China stance.

I personally would have enjoyed watching their (word) war of the dynasties if it were not for the healthy chance that one of them would win (because any politician opposed to both practically obliterated and rendered irrelevant).

NOTE:

All currency conversions were made assuming 1USD = 60PhP

If you have such a problem with too many people existing, do something about it. IDK.

Both can be true, that we’re experiencing record low birth rates globally and that the global population is still increasing at the moment.

How?

1. While birth rates in many countries have fallen below replacement rate, it’s still not zero, which means people are still having babies.
2. Due to advances in health science, the death rate has fallen.

These two factors, especially decades earlier, mean that population hasn’t yet fallen. However:

3. Non-existent humans will not produce babies.
4. The older the population is on the average, the higher the death rate will be.

This means that if I don’t produce offspring, my non-existent offspring will not produce babies. The less babies are produced, the older the population would be, and the higher the death rate will be. If current trends continue, the death rate will overtake the birth rate, and the population will shrink.

Outside of a worldwide disaster that kills off people of child-bearing age, population will still rise before it levels off and then fall off as more and more people find less and less appealing to raise children. This is just a consequence of us humans not dying immediately after childbirth, and us humans as a whole making offspring at a certain age (say, 20 years old). These two factors explain the lag between childbirth figures and population growth.

Target is one creature the caster can touch (can be self). The target can make a wisdom saving throw against the caster’s spell save DC. If successful, the spell ends without having any effect on the target. Otherwise (or if the target chose not to make the wisdom saving throw), the target will immediately taste some really well-made lemonade gin mojito that will linger for as long as the spell is in effect.

For every turn the target takes after this, the target will have to make a constitution saving throw against the caster’s spell save DC. A successful constitution saving throw will restore one first level spell slot. A natural 20 will increase the spell slot level this spell will restore. A failure will end the spell. A critical failure will cause the target to deplete all of their spell slots and the spell ends. Every turn increases the save DC‌ by one.

Thanks for the explanation.

It reminds me of the concept of depreciation in accounting, in which you’re accounting for the “loss of value” of a piece of machinery as time goes on. I guess it fits how the capitalists view people (labor) as yet another kind of machine. I dunno how it fits with what you’re trying to explain here, but it somehow clicks for me. So that the factory owner can keep buying machinery, they must allocate some of their funds not just for the upkeep of the equipment, but also save up for the cost of buying a new one.

Admittedly, I’m not very well-versed with neither accounting nor the theories put on display here, but we learn something new every day, right?

(PS:‌ I’m still working through the pamphlet you’ve linked. I might have gotten a lot of things wrong, and in that case, I apologize.)

I was like “(companies) paying parents to have children” belongs to a caricature of capitalism, but here we are. (My bad, it’s companies paying parents to have children, and not some bigger entity, like the government. I already edited the previous sentence for clarity.)

If you don’t mind me asking though, what “marxist theory in action” do you see in this article?

“If I can’t have you, no one will.” – China, apparently.

And as usual, no one will do something decisive about it because China is a huge bully and is using its reputation as the world’s factory and its economic heft to intimidate anyone who thinks of doing anything about it.

Yep. Plus how it’s rendered depends on which frontend you’re using. I’m using Alexandrite, and I swear, the way it shows the name of the community makes you think that the tagline or whatever it is is indeed part of the community name (it’s not). So, yeah, it’s not really your fault, as far as I see it.

Of course, however, learning how Lemmy works is pretty helpful in situations like this, but we all kinda learn it as we go.

Hahahaha~! Well, glad to have helped you then!

It’s kinda screwy anyways, I would have also thought it’s part of the URL myself had I not checked the community on its home instance before.

That’s not the one you’re looking for, huh? Best of luck! I hope someone remembers what community that one is.

I think you’re referring to !tenforward@lemmy.world

In Alexandrite, it’s shown like this:

I expected someone to make this joke, but this still made me chuckle. Thanks for the laugh!

Sure, sure. Whatever you say.

I suppose that the vitriol surrounding this topic is tied to the innate biological pressures towards procreation. Life is supposed to the ultimate good. People like us who have doubted this assertion are not only fighting against long-held societal norms, but also biological instincts. It also doesn’t help that having a child (or not) is one of the most impactful personal decisions one can ever make. Having a child not only affects your life, your partner, but most especially, the child themself! It’s something that will permanently change one’s life, and those around them for better or for worse.

I’m not even against people who choose to have children (the so-called “breeders” in antinatalist communities). If their lives are enriched by having children and forming a family, more power to them! Even more so if they can provide the child with what they would need to thrive, or at least survive in this world.

Perhaps this trend of growing sentiment towards childfree lifestyles is yet one of those bio-sociological mechanisms driving us to having more quality children instead of just having more children. Children that would be able to live better, more fulfilling lives than I can ever hope for, and can thrive in the shitty world we’ve left for them.

I tried to give you an overview of how someone might be sympathetic to their views, but I should have known that you’re not receptive to such.

And yeah, if you give me money for the expenses needed for that all-curing therapy, sure, why not? However, you might need that for yourself.

This one, right?‌ https://micro-editor.github.io/

Reading about it, it’s to Kate what is Nano is to… hm… Notepad? 😅 Just looking at the screenshots, I could easily confuse it with something like VSCode.

I’m not exactly antinatalist, but I’m somewhat sympathetic to their position. The way I see it is this: humanity’s effect on nature is on the average, harmful.

We’ve been very successful as a species, but at the cost of a lot of others that weren’t able to cope with our success. Perhaps some species which are useful to us—sometimes just by being cute, have learned to live with us, or have learned to live despite us, have managed to thrive. But for one species that gained our protection, how many others have disappeared with no one caring?

If that’s not bad enough, I don’t think that the average individual human being is thriving. We’ve destroyed a lot only to build depressing cubicles for us to rot in.

I don’t think it’s worth it.

Having a child means condemning them into an ever worsening world. And I don’t think I’ll be able to properly equip my child to even have a smidge of a chance of being “well-off”, healthy or even happy.

However, our innate instincts, as well as societal and other pressures pushes people to have children even when it’s not going to end well for the children as well as their parents. Antinatalism is a counterbalance to this pressure.

I’m probably one of those weirdos who use VSCode, Kate, Nano, and sometimes KWrite all in their different niches.

I do most of my programming work in VSCode, but most of my shell scripting in Kate. When I edit configuration files, I’m usually using the command line and thus use Nano (sorry, I’m too stupid to use either Emacs nor Vim, let alone Vi). When I’m just looking at text files (or doing a quick edit) via my file manager, I use KWrite. With the exception of VSCode, they’re all provided in my installation by default.

Having said that, trying out different editors will enable you to pick the editor that better fits your requirements. Kate is too powerful for what I use it for, but since it’s already there, the additional features are nice to have. I actually had to explore a bit before I‌ settled on VSCode for my programming work, and while there’s probably one that better fits my needs, my workflow has already adapted to working with what I currently have.

Isn’t that making the problem worse though? If you have a tool that resolves your problem for you, wouldn’t that make you dependent on it, and thus, be even more helpless when moving to another ecosystem (like, yeah, Arch)?

Arch is built for a particular kind of Linux user though, btw. It’s probably the worst choice for a “not a computer person” move into, issues of dependency hell aside.

Having learned how to use computers via MS-DOS, then growing to mostly use Windows machines, and then moving to daily-drive Linux in the past handful of years, I think the problem is more about context. If I see an error message, it’s not that I don’t read them. ‌Rather, if I lack the context to understand what it is trying to tell me—and more importantly, what I‌ can do to resolve the problem I’m having, I’m out of luck and I’d have to ignore it.

It was when I switched to using Linux that I’ve picked up the habit of searching the error message online, and then browsing the various pages (mostly Stackoverflow, sometimes Arch Linux wiki pages) which might or might not lead me to the context behind the error message. If I get lucky, I could find a clue to resolving my problem on top of understanding what the error message is about. Other times, I end up being even more confused and give up.

And then there’s the monstrosity that is the logs. I’m pretty much illiterate when it comes to them, and reading them might as well be reading arcane records of eldritch daemons keeping my machine working (in a way, they indeed are). Copy-pasting some snippets from them into an online search is a crapshoot. I may find something that fits my context, but a lot of times, it’s for a different problem. It might not even be for my OS/distro/package/version.