merc

Just rotate the paw marks 90 degrees and they suddenly look a lot more like capital 'E's. That's a lazy designer.

There's a lot of selection bias here. The drone footage is footage where the drone found an enemy. The footage where the drone missed an enemy because of camouflage / stealth is never seen.

But, maybe it's true that due to drones and satellites, it will be harder and harder to keep from being hidden. So, instead of being hidden, the focus might turn to being unrecognizable as an enemy soldier, something that the pattern-recognition systems can't identify. So, effectively dazzle camouflage but for soldiers, like in Blade Runner.

I wonder what kinds of fruits were commonly eaten in Britain in Roman / Pre-Roman times. I don't think of British agriculture as being very fruit-focused.

Also, it's interesting how these descriptions sound a lot like the natives of the Americas when the European powers arrived in the 1400s/1500s, even down to family arrangements not being variations on a nuclear family.

Plus, the US effectively has no public broadcaster, so all news is for-profit news owned by massive corporations. Some news sources (like the Washington Post) are literally owned directly by the oligarchs. That means that what appears on the news is largely the stuff that's designed to keep people watching -- stuff that's sensational, talking heads arguing about things in a way that gets the viewer angry, etc. Public broadcasters in other English speaking countries (ABC, BBC, CBC, and the like) often tackle important but somewhat boring news items because they take their duty seriously. That just doesn't happen in the US. In addition, because news is billionaire or corp-owned, stuff that might threaten corporations or billionaires (or often stuff that might displease advertisers) simply never makes the news.

In addition, most Americans get nearly 100% of their news/entertainment from American sources, so they never see coverage of American issues from outside the US. They have no perspective on how things could be different. They might have heard a vague rumour that in Europe people don't pay directly for healthcare, but they don't really understand what that system is like, or what it might mean for their lives. That's why it so easy to lie to them about how awful socialized medicine is, for example.

I can guarantee that more than 95% of Americans have no clue what the GDPR is, even though nearly 100% have encountered the GDPR-required cookie banner multiple times. They probably find it annoying but have no idea why it exists, or why it's an unfortunate side effect of a very good law.

The other major problem is that due to money in politics and gerrymandering, it's virtually impossible for Americans to influence their government. If you live in Arkansas and are a non-Republican or in Massachusetts and are a non-Democrat your vote effectively doesn't matter, especially in the presidential campaigns, but also in just day-to-day races. In many cases, the only vote that matters is the primary, because whoever wins the Republican / Democratic primary is essentially guaranteed to win the election. Primaries are even less democratic than regular elections.

Importantly, there are only 2 political parties that matter, and both of them like this system. It is so much easier to raise money when there's only 1 other option. It's so much easier to retain power when there's only one other option.

So, you can't get Americans to put pressure on their governments because they don't know that things could be different, and because they know that it's hopeless to try to get the government to enact any policy that doesn't benefit the wealthy donors.

Good point.

Yeah, that's probably true for some farmers. Life was terrible, but life in the city was even worse.

the Industrial Revolution ground such people up and oiled the machinery of progress with their blood (literally so for his maternal grandfather).

Literally? I wouldn't think blood would make for good oil for machinery, I'd have thought it was too sticky. And, since it's water based it will evaporate quickly at high temperatures, so it's not really suitable for most machines where temperatures can easily exceed 100C.

Nah, private equity doesn't care about profits every year forever. They want to squeeze the remaining juice out of something then throw it away. Something that's sustainably generating profits year after year is a pipe dream compared to what private equity does.

For them, it would be something like have the farm sell its land to an affiliated entity, so the farmer now owes rent on the land in addition to the other expenses. Take the money from selling the land and invest in farming a crop that's completely unsustainable but profitable in the very short term. Say something that needs so much water that the water table quickly drops and the wells no longer work after a few years, or something requiring massive amounts of expensive fertilizer. While that's going on, fire all the farm workers who do any kind of maintenance or planning work. It doesn't matter if the pumps stop getting maintenance, if the tractors are never serviced, if bills are paid on time. It doesn't even matter if mold starts creeping in or vermin start moving in, as long as it doesn't happen immediately. Arrange for the farm to pay the PE owners a management consulting fee that's so high that after paying rent and 100% essential costs, there's absolutely no money left. Eventually, when the farm collapses, declare bankruptcy and let all the creditors fight over the remains.

From the picture, she looks old enough to be his mother. He looks like he's barely started shaving, and she looks like she's desperately trying to appear under 40.

I'm not a farmer, I'm not a baker, I'm just a bread eater, but even I knew that 1kg was way too much wheat for a single loaf of bread. Turns out, yup. 1kg makes 2 loaves.

How does that change things? Well it means a loaf of bread contains 12.5p of flour, not 25p. So, instead of a loaf from a grocery store being about 5x as much as the price of the flour it contains, it's 10x as much.

Having said that, This isn't just a "capitalism" thing. There are many steps between the farmer selling raw wheat and a loaf of bread appearing on a store shelf. Many of them are unchanged since ancient times. I'm sure baker in the Middle Ages charged enough for his loaves of bread that he'd make a reasonable profit and that was centuries before capitalism was a thing.

In the modern world there are different facilities for every step. There's transportation which costs something at multiple stages. There's winnowing and milling the flour. There's buying and shipping the other ingredients. There's mixing the dough. There's baking the dough. There's packaging (and possibly slicing) the bread. And finally, there's the grocery store. To be useful, a grocery store basically has to be in a built-up area, which means high real-estate and related costs. It also needs to make enough margin to pay people to stock the shelves and cashiers to sell the loaves. The only truly modern part from all that that didn't exist in the Middle Ages is sales and marketing. Paying to send out emails or a flyer or whatever to advertise their items. My guess is that most of those steps operate on razor thin margins and make up for it by doing huge quantities.

Now, it's true that the system has flaws and inefficiencies. One glaring example is the lack of competition at many stages in many countries. In Canada, there are so few grocery store chains that the existing ones were able to literally fix the price of bread. So, of course when that happens both customers and farmers get squeezed.

I wonder if there ever was a "golden age of farming" when farming was a comfortable lifestyle. It seems to me that it has always been a very difficult career. If anything, it's probably at its best now under "capitalism". That isn't to say it's an easy job now, just that as difficult and stressful as it is now, it was even worse in the past.

It would be interesting though, just as an intellectual exercise, to imagine a perfectly fair world to figure out what the perfectly fair ratio is between the price of wheat and the price of a loaf of bread on the store shelf. If everybody were paid the exact same rate for their labour, and there were no excess profits generated that went to owners / landlords, how much of the final price of a loaf of bread on a store shelf should come from the raw ingredients of wheat, water, yeast, oil? How much goes to the baker? How much to the delivery drivers? How much to the shelf stockers and cashiers? Imagine it's a wood-fired oven, how much of the price of a loaf of bread goes to a lumberjack, even though their involvement in the whole process is really indirect?

I think one reason I really like Lemmy / Mastodon is that they remind me of the days when people ran their own IRC servers, and/or Jabber servers and when that was a normal and standard way to communicate.

Easy doesn't matter as much for me, since I've been using Linux for more than a quarter century, but stable is important. And, something that makes it easy to deal with the video card drivers sounds very nice.

I assume that if it's Linux that a system that is optimized for playing games could still be used as a web server, or to develop software. But, seeing as how my gaming machine is mostly used for gaming / web stuff, it would be nice to choose a distro with that as the focus.

What distro do you recommend if it's a machine mostly used for gaming?