@hex@kolektiva.social2025-11-06 12:34:05
I had 12 weeks of parental leave for each of my children. (Six of those were paid by my company, and 6 by Washington State. In the US, this might come across as bragging but functional countries will be shocked at how little it is.) My partner fed them, because we had the privilege of being able to breast feed, so I took care of diapers, tummy time, and what other things I could.
I learned about elimination communication (EC). We used cloth diapers, for ecological reasons but also because they can help with potty training later. With EC, it was relatively easy. I actually only had to change dirty diapers a few times. I was available, so I could pay attention to our babies. I could learn their body language. Both of them rarely cried because we knew what they needed before they had to cry about it.
When I was forced back to work, the EC thing fell off. We continued to use cloth diapers for a while with our oldest, but it became too hard with our youngest. We had to switch to disposable diapers because of the overhead.
There have been so many wasteful things we've done because we don't have space to do the right thing. Having kids is both isolating and overwhelming. To maintain sanity, you just have to take short cuts when you don't have time or help.
Before kids, we used to really enjoy cooking together. We would start from basic ingredients and work our way up. We made pad thai, squishing tamarind paste from pods by hand. Even after having kids, my oldest and I would collect acorns from the tree down the street and crack them together. The other day we all cracked acorns we had collected for the first time since moving over here (and I made some Dotori-muk. We've also started making bread together again.
Kids really love making and processing food. There's a sensory element to it, which, if you don't have kids, is actually a really big thing kids need. But there's also a social element to making food together. They just behave better when we do things like that. It's almost like there's some kind of evolutionary incentive for kids to *want* to help. Go figure.
I've really been wanting to make seitan as we try to reduce how much meat we eat in our house. Even that meat consumption is partially about convenience. It's relatively cheap and easy to throw a bag of chicken wings in air fryer, or some ground beef in with pearl couscous in the instant pot, and just have low effort food home made food. My partner is vegan. I used to eat mostly vegan at home and only eat meat on occasion, usually eating out. But it just takes more mental energy to cook without meat. It's an easy protein, and our kids are picky.
These threads, and a few others, all connect back to a single thing. When we can slow down, we can be more careful and thoughtful. We can be mindful. We can make decisions that are better for the environment, that account for climate change. When we are under pressure, when we are tired and overworked, it's just harder or impossible to be careful and mindful... and that's exactly the point.
At a time when the survival of our species depends on our ability to slow down and be mindful, we are more stressed and overwhelmed than ever. Because, if we had a chance to slow down and think, if we could make good choices, we would make choices that would destroy the industries at the core of the global order. To slow down, as we did at the beginning of COVID, is catastrophic for "the economy." Of course it is.
When an industry runs out of room to expand by driving efficiency, it must increase demand. If demand is already fulfilled, it must create waste. The more pressure there is on the population, the worse decisions people make, the more they waste. Waste is the point. We are in an existential conflict. If we do not destroy this system, if we cannot simply slow down and think, we will be destroyed by it.
I think about the microplastics from those diapers, the methane from them rotting (not captured in the municipal biogas digester, but released directly into the environment), the little plastic containers of everything, all the opportunity costs of the carelessness inflicted on us to survive, and I wonder, "is any of this really worth my time in the office? Did I really produce so much more value doing my work than when destroyed in order to allow me to work?" Of course not, because the invisible hand, in it's infinite wisdom, has shuffled away that cost. The cost of our family thrashing is borne by society, we are a burden on everyone, while the value of my labor is internalized to the company.
How much of your "carbon footprint" should belong to your employer? There can be no capitalist solution to the climate crisis because capitalism is the crisis.
#ClimateCrisis
@arXiv_csCR_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-10-09 08:59:51
BATTLE for Bitcoin: Capital-Efficient Optimistic Bridges with Large Committees
Sergio Demian Lerner, Ariel Futoransky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06468 https://
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-10-03 16:59:41
Brutal similes
Using #AI is an ethical choice.
I know that there cases when an #LLM could make my job easier. Which doesn't mean I'll use one. Just like I won't be buying cheap junk gadgets that could help me with some random stuff a bunch of times before they'll end up on a trash pile.
Yes, sometimes I am curious what an LLM could come up with. But then, there are people who are curious how many donuts they can eat before throwing up. A waste of good donuts.
What world would you rather live in? One where you put a little more effort in your job? Or one where LLM helps with with your job, but you can't enjoy your free time anymore because the capitalists are using LLMs to turn every single aspect of your life into a nightmare, and eventually your employer just makes you do more and more until you're thrown out? But at least you will get a monthly trial of a statistical "friend" to "talk" about your trouble to.
Yeah, you can claim that training models does the most harm, and that's already happened, so not using them doesn't change much, and all the energy spent on it would be wasted. Or use the traditional "others" fallacy — others will use it anyway, others will fuel the vicious circle, so why renounce convenience. It's like when you learn that your dinner is human meat, and you decide to eat it anyway, because not eating it won't bring that human back to life, and if it's wasted, then their death will be for naught.
#AntiCapitalism
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-10-03 07:16:35
What are you going to do when the regime falls? After calling all your friends, after the great memes, after the parties, what are you going to do to make sure it never happens again? What world should we create?
Taxing billionaires is great and all, but we could build systems where billionaires are impossible. Is hoarding wealth and using it to control people even something we should consider part of a functional and humane system? Any system where one group of people doesn't have rights means that anyone can be stripped of their rights, like has happened with all the US citizens who've been illegally detained and deported by ICE. Does the concept of "rights" that must be defended with violence, that can be stripped away by people who can exercise more violence, even make sense? Or should the bedrock of a functional system be the obligations that we have to each other and to society, that cannot be severed or taken from us, that tell us we *must* defend regardless of whether systemic oppression will impact us or not?
Americans have been so restricted by the limitations of the two party system, only able to choose between options acceptable to different sections of the capitalist class. Would we even be able to imagine what we could do if those restrictions went away?
The fall of the Berlin wall was a surprise. The fall of Assad was faster than anyone expected. One day the government of Nepal was an unrepentant oligarchy, the next it was on fire. Everything can change in an instant, faster than anyone expects. No one can predict revolutionary change. Will you be ready if the opportunity presents itself?
The US cannot be fixed. The economic system is a ponzi scheme that has been patched again and again, but has finally run out of options. Racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism are baked into the system at every level. Trump gutted the system of soft power that held the US economy together, now there is only a slow decline. Even after he's gone, the damage is done. Once we let go of how to fix something that cannot be fixed, we can start to imagine something that cannot be achieved within the current system.
This is a time of opportunity. Do not burrow so deep in terror that you miss your chance to dream.
#USPol
@arXiv_mathCO_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-09-05 09:46:51
All Ordinals are Cop-Robber Ordinals
Jorge Cruz Chapital, Tom\'a\v{s} Fl\'idr, Maria-Romina Ivan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04270 https://arxiv.org…
@karlauerbach@sfba.social2025-08-26 21:18:47
I fully believe that El Naranja will be creating firing squads (actually, death squads) after he imposes, which he will, martial law on DC, LA, Chicago, NYC, etc.
Yeah, it will be unconstitutional and unlawful as all hell, but we now know that El Naranja cares nothing about that stuff.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articl…
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-10-02 19:43:19
"""
[…] Paradoxically, the more a population grew, the more precious it became, as it offered a supply of cheap labour, and by lowering costs allowed a greater expansion of production and trade. In this infinitely open labour market, the ‘fundamental price’, which for Turgot meant a subsistence level for workers, and the price determined by supply and demand ended up as the same thing. A country was all the more commercially competitive for having at its disposal the virtual wealth that a large population represented.
Confinement was therefore a clumsy error, and an economic one at that: there was no sense in trying to suppress poverty by taking it out of the economic circuit and providing for a poor population by charitable means. To do that was merely to hide poverty, and suppress an important section of the population, which was always a given wealth. Rather than helping the poor escape their provisionally indigent situation, charity condemned them to it, and dangerously so, by putting a brake on the labour market in a period of crisis. What was required was to palliate the high cost of products with cheaper labour, and to make up for their scarcity by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy was to reinsert the population in the circuit of production, being sure to place labour in areas where manpower was most scarce. The use of paupers, vagabonds, exiles and émigrés of any description was one of the secrets of wealth in the competition between nations. […]
Confinement was to be criticised because of the effects it had on the labour market, but also because like all other traditional forms of charity, it constituted a dangerous form of finance. As had been the case in the Middle Ages, the classical era had constantly attempted to look after the needs of the poor by a system of foundations. This implied that a section of the land capital and revenues were out of circulation. In a definitive manner too, as the concern was to avoid the commercialisation of assistance to the poor, so judicial measures had been taken to ensure that this wealth never went back into circulation. But as time passed, their usefulness diminished: the economic situation changed, and so did the nature of poverty.
«Society does not always have the same needs. The nature and distribution of property, the divisions between the different orders of the people, opinions, customs, the occupations of the majority of the population, the climate itself, diseases and all the other accidents of human life are in constant change. New needs come into being, and old ones disappear.» [Turgot, Encyclopédie]
The definitive character of a foundation was in contradiction with the variable and changing nature of the accidental needs to which it was designed to respond. The wealth that it immobilised was never put back into circulation, but more wealth was to be created as new needs appeared. The result was that the proportion of funds and revenues removed from circulation constantly increased, while that of production fell in consequence. The only possible result was increased poverty, and a need for more foundations. The process could continue indefinitely, and the fear was that one day ‘the ever increasing number of foundations might absorb all private funds and all private property’. When closely examined, classical forms of assistance were a cause of poverty, bringing a progressive immobilisation that was like the slow death of productive wealth:
«If all the men who have ever lived had been given a tomb, sooner or later some of those sterile monuments would have been dug up in order to find land to cultivate, and it would have become necessary to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.» [Turgot, Lettre Š Trudaine sur le Limousin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)
@raiders@darktundra.xyz2025-10-04 17:32:46
Buccaneers Receive Strong Message on Raiders’ Jakobi Meyers https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/jakobi-meyers-trade-target-buccaneers/?adt_ei=[email]