megane-kun

!Conclave2025@lemm.ee for an instance-agnostic link.

It was okay. Nothing much but relaxing after Palm Sunday services.

I wonder if answering “I don’t know, I haven’t checked” would count as:

• “Why is this bastard even trying to apply for a job when they can’t even count the number of toilets in their house?”
• “Probably trying to dodge the question, not good.”
• “Homeless motherfucker? REJECTED!”

I remember coming across a study that has a fairly different conclusion. Of course, not having any caloric intake is a sure-fire way to lose weight, poverty limits people to cheap and calorie-rich (but not nutritionally rich) foods.

Not the article I remember reading, but here’s a writeup by the WHO about poverty and obesity: https://www.who.int/europe/news-room/23-05-2024-the-inequality-epidemic--low-income-teens-face-higher-risks-of-obesity--inactivity-and-poor-diet

Dr Martin Weber, Team Lead for Quality of Care and Programme Manager of Child and Adolescent Health at WHO/Europe, said, “The affordability and accessibility of healthy food options are often limited for families with lower incomes, leading to a higher reliance on processed and sugary foods, which can have detrimental effects on adolescent health.”

In my part of the world, poverty food has for the past few decades been instant noodles, on rice. Carbs on carbs. In my worst days, I managed to get by with just crushed junk food (think, the cheapest doritos-like chips I can afford) on rice (one serving for 0.10 USD).

Those among them lacking in morals would make bank (or influence, whatever is afforded to them) justifying that government’s actions according to US constitutional law.

I’ve never thought the poop knife will come back to relevance in this manner. Never!

• Publish prematurely in an attempt to take advantage of the momentum.
• Notice that there are grammatical, spelling, and typographical mistakes.
• Edit, attempt to explain the edits, while also introducing more mistakes.

Rinse and repeat.

It’s okay if there are patch notes, right? Right??

incredible defense → non-credible defense → ncd

For those people like me thinking “WTF is a worry stone?”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worry_stone

Worry stones are smooth, polished gemstones, usually in the shape of an oval with a thumb-sized indentation, used for relaxation or anxiety relief.

Something one would fidget with when worried, I suppose.

The way it was presented (not just in OP’s article, but also in news reports earlier) made me think it’s intentional and is some form of a very novel protest.

Glad I was wrong, I guess?

That last paragraph of yours just made things click for me.

I’ve been wondering what kind of government will potentially do this. While it’s a pretty good idea in general, I don’t think any government will be able to shoulder the costs while earning the ire of the companies (media companies, etc.).

I mean, yeah, I also dislike having to restrict access, but I’ve just accepted it as a fact that such an institution must face. The decision on those restrictions would fall on the library/archives institution, so long as they are not running afoul of laws. So, I guess in the US, it’d be on the Library of Congress or in the case of the UK, the British Library.

Of course, it doesn’t do a thing to address your concerns, which as far as I am concerned, is very valid. And this is why I think piracy should exist, to keep such institutions honest. Sure, the national library here won’t allow me to research xyz, but other sources exists.

In a more philosophical POV, such institutions existing along with other entities (pirates, or what have you) allows for a check, and provides future historians a means of verifying information.

To be clear, I also fundamentally disagree on the concept of restricting access to information. And I think a lot of librarians and archivists agree with both of us. But for such an institution with such a service to exist, restricting access might be an evil they’re forced to accept.

I guess, to be honest, I don’t think such an institution will be allowed to exist, even with such restrictions in place.

EDIT: Typos and minor changes.

This would have been the job of the national archives and/or the national library.

Where I live, the government has a law stipulating that one copy every published material has to be submitted to the national library. I suppose a similar law exists for a lot of other countries, and extending this law to non-print media (like movies and TV shows) shouldn’t be controversial.

Regarding material deemed harmful and/or illegal, I think it should still be collected, but access would be restricted. If need be, access could be restricted to “premises-only” like what is done in a lot of university libraries.

Having this online library of material doesn’t have to mean that pirates have to be stamped out. I think this works best with the pirates keeping the government-sponsored media library honest.

However, what I think would be more plausible is an offline library of all the media that country has produced, with limited off-premises access afforded to researchers and others. That much, I think, would be allowed by the real powers that be.

Thanks! I am currently listening to the news while doing something else and I might have missed the crowd estimates.

I was talking to my mom about this earlier. I pointed out that each local church chapter is incentivized (even if central church authorities have not said anything, in private or in public) to bring as many people as they can as a show of “good church stewardship” or whatever.

I fully expected them to fill up the venue, even expecting some spill over, and the coverage on that church’s TV network has emphasized the size of the crowds.

That said, I wonder what’s the peak crowd numbers have been. I fully expect it to have peaked around 4pm earlier.

Edit: typos, spelling and other minor mistakes.

Ah, what I was referring to as a pitch for a benevolent dictator overlord is the part after the ellipsis in my paraphrase:

Predatory governance is a thing because politicians are more interested in their political survival. Even if political survival hinges on them doing their jobs, they will do their absolute minimum for them to ‘do more’ when reelected. Therefore, if we give our politicians infinite power and infinite time to sort out the mess we’re in, without having to think of their political prospects, then maybe, just maybe, someone can take us out of this mess.

The implication that someone could use this fact as a pitch is what I was pointing out.

There’s other ways we can get out of this mess, but my mind inevitably wandered off to possible examples we can use, which led me to the question in the last sentence.

My thinking is that we need to lift up our people out of poverty, out of needing to rely on the government aid programs, out of needing to rely on politicians for their sudden big expenses (pa-ospital, pa-libing, etc). Basically, if people are in a good enough situation, then maybe we won’t be prey to this predatory government we have. But maybe I’ve got things the wrong way around: without a predatory government, people can be in a good condition… Or maybe we’re stuck in a vicious spiral.

Anyways, I haven’t really looked at the instagram reel closely, and maybe I should. But it’s Instagram, so I am not at all comfortable with it. There’s also a link given in the post: https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/files/wcfia/files/898_jr_predatory.pdf but even without reading it, I’m leaning towards “yes, we have a predatory government,” but my question would be “how can we get rid of it and install a government that functions for the good of the people, and not for the good of its people?”

Edit:

I’ve managed to watch the entire reel (it resets whenever I try to alt-tab away from it, or even moving tabs to a different window, but it’s a me problem). I am not sure if I got everything it meant to say though.

Another edit:

I’ve scanned the paper, mostly focusing on the discussion of the results and the takeaways from the model. I think I’ve been wrong: the predatory government model, as the paper puts it, is limited to autocracies and dictatorships. The Marcos Sr. regime was also given as an example. Moreover, the paper’s final sentence goes like this:

Predatory states seem to only arise in non-democracies and it seems likely that the types of institutional transitions that occur with democratization inhibit in the use of such socially undesirable strategies as the ones I have modelled.

Of course, there’s another discussion on whether or not the Philippines is a democracy, and in what sense.

Let me see if I’ve got it correctly. Predatory governance is a thing because politicians are more interested in their political survival. Even if political survival hinges on them doing their jobs, they will do the absolute minimum in order for them to “do more” when reelected…

Did I get that correctly?

This sounds like a pitch for a “benevolent dictator overlord”. “Give me infinite power and infinite time and I can fix the country!”

But that’s the path a lot of our neighboring states went through. Minus the benevolent part.

And I’ve been thinking. Was there any country that kept their democracy, didn’t exploit another one, and yet developed their economy enough to get from the “third world” to the “first world”?

I guess we’re free to make those? Not that I have anything though.

Maybe some kind of a DAE (does anyone else…) or “Ask a Pinoy” kind of post? (The latter has to come from a non-Pinoy though.)

Normally those kinds of posts are low quality and are discouraged, but idk…

There was a similar thread from a year ago, I thought it was from you. But nope. It wasn’t you.

If I am recalling things correctly, someone suggested putting the Barbie movie poster as the community banner as a joke. The community liked it, and it was never revisited again.

I suppose like one other commenter here wondered: “Is it because reddit, like the poster, is outdated?”

EDIT:

I tried looking for the post where I thought it happened, found a (now dead) link to what I think is the post, but also this screencap:

Oh, ofc, this post from last year with the same question (where I got the above goodies): https://lemmy.world/post/1252169