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Cake day: January 21st, 2025

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  • Understandable

    I use us rice because I live here and in terms of global warming unless there is a shortage and I have no other option it makes the most sense to use California rice

    That said Japanese rice is more aromatic and has lower arsenic content so in a perfect world I would use that. However, I do not want to both contribute to the emissions of shipping rice across the globe when there is rice that is good enough plus I don’t want to contribute to taking Japanese rice away from Japan. It appears that a big contributor to the rice shortage is again capitalistic scumbaggery - both in terms of middlemen scalping with shortages occurring and the export market valuing Japanese rice as “premium”. I don’t want to contribute to that just like I won’t buy a marked up concert ticket or game console.


  • Tell that to yoshinoya, who has been mixing California rice into their rice for the past year with some locations using entirely American rice, or Matsuya, who have switched to American rice at many locations due to cost. Lawson is also starting to prototype bentos with rice blends. Even if the consumer takes a nationalist approach the invisible hand of capitalism will reject that for profit

    And with that there’s data to suggest the consumer doesn’t reject imported rice. Aeon sold the 80/20 blend with US rice and that proved popular enough that they are now selling 4kg bags of 100% california rice due to consumer demand. The 80/20 bags were 10% cheaper, the 100% is likely far more

    It is a dangerous game. This is how walmart destroyed American small business. Everyone has ideals and principles until a massive vendor with huge advantage shows up and undercuts everyone in town by 10-30%. Doesn’t matter if the product is inferior. People don’t have money


  • Agree, and using the rice situation as leverage is shitty tbh. It’s a crisis and while Japan is a developed nation with a relatively good standard of living for the most part it’s also one with extremely stagnant wages and economic growth, fairly significant wealth inequality, etc.

    many Japanese are struggling to get by more than Americans. Though it’s hard to directly compare. The average salary in Japan in far lower than in America (~30k vs ~39k) and wages for equivalent positions are much lower (like a computer programmer who gets paid $80k for an American company might get $50-60k from a Japanese company), but the cost of living is much lower in many ways, rent costs are substantially lower (even a Tokyo apartment is like $500usd/month unless you want something crazy extravagant), robust public transit network making car ownership truly optional, healthcare system that is not ideal but has much more managed costs than the us, etc

    That’s probably in part why sanseitō (think japanese maga: anti immigration (in a country that barely allows it), super nationalist (in a country that’s already crazy nationalist), anti vaccination, etc) is seriously picking up steam and just picked up several seats in the upper house, going from 1 seat to 14 at the expense of the LDP and communist party who lost seats. They ran on rhetoric similar to trump, a “silent invasion” of immigrants is “taking over Japan”. It captured their youth, who are frustrated by a lack of meaningful jobs and the reality of an economy that has been stagnant for many decades at this point (arguably caused by boomer policy and refusal to break from tradition) but instead of looking inward at what could’ve been done wrong domestically they are looking for a boogeyman to easily shift blame to. Sound familiar?

    The right wing shift is not limited to America unfortunately. AfD, sanseitō, national rally, Lega, Orban and bolsonaro, etc. many of these are picking up quite a bit of steam



  • the big turning point I remember was a combo of popups and interstitial ads

    Popups we all know and hate as they still exist and are disgusting. They were obviously gross and ate up ram and stole focus and shit

    But the interstitial ads were also gross. You’d click a link and then get redirected to an ad for 10 seconds and then redirected to content. Or a forum where the first reply was replaced with an ad that was formatted to look like a post

    Like adblocking was a niche thing prior to the advertising industry being absolute scumbags. The original idea that allowing advertising to support free services like forums and such wasn’t horrible, put a banner ad up, maybe a referral link, etc. but that was never enough for the insidious ad industry. Like every other domain they’ve touched (television, news, nature, stores, cities, clothing, games, sports, literally everything a human being interacts with).

    The hardline people that blocked banner ads way back when and loudly complained allowing advertising in any capacity on the internet would ruin everything were correct. We all groaned because no one wanted to donate to cover the hosting bills (which often turned out to be grossly inflated on larger sites by greedy site operators looking to make bank off their community) but we should have listened





  • They sometimes do make good on their threats and the wealth concentrated in the northeast is absurd enough to make a significant difference at times

    David Tepper (hedge fund manager, net worth 11.4 billion, extreme income of $700 million per year) left New Jersey in 2016 over tax rates for Florida.

    His move cost the state $140 million in tax revenue. It wasn’t enough to destroy the state obviously, but it was a noticeable hit to revenues. It also gave media great PR against taxing the wealthy

    https://www.schiffsovereign.com/tax/the-state-of-new-jersey-just-signed-its-own-death-warrant-23939/ headline is literally “New Jersey just signed its own death warrant”

    https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2016/04/06/billionaire-to-save-hundreds-of-millions-from-florida-move.html “billionaire to save hundreds of millions from Florida move”

    Etc. of course in our propagandized society very few/no media outlets focus on him paying his fair share (or the ethics of his extreme wealth in the first place). They all fellate him for being such a savvy businessman and skipping out on his civic duty is an extension of that. Fuck public roads and schools, this guy needs a net worth of 11.48 billion instead of 11.42.

    He eventually relocated back to NJ in 2020 fwiw. He claims the move wasn’t necessarily about taxes and tbf he never publicly said it was. It is potentially possible he just had a family issue or something and the media ran with to propagandize the situation. he remains a registered voter in Florida, whatever that means

    Imo he came back bc he realized the northeast is great. It’s nice to visit the rest of the country but if you live in the rest of the country I’m sorry to say this but your pizza is terrible


  • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoNews@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    I’m not claiming to know everything nor am I claiming the the “snark” (terrible word) against the fox lady was justified.

    From what I saw of the accusations it was all hearsay, basically a bunch of out of context text screenshots from random people who I had no context for. Maybe they were meaningful, or maybe they had an agenda against her, I don’t know. What I do know is that a collection of easily faked evidence coming from a reddit hate sub that is not exactly damning evidence. Plus I don’t mean to sound callous but it frankly doesn’t really matter at this point. She is gone, even if it 100% true the issue is over.

    From what I saw of the reddit guy (note, this is confusing if you read because many people will purposely misgender him) getting trashed he basically posted a list of said “evidence” to bring it to light because he is sympathetic to animals and maybe a bit too into internet drama. From what I’ve seen there is no evidence he did anything other than this, have a huge online footprint that made him extremely easy to be doxxed, and be trans.

    So essentially you have a fox lady who may or may not have run an animal rescue very poorly and regardless of whether this was true probably got shit on a lot because she was popular online and did things like onlyfans. Then she committed suicide and some people are co-opting that tragedy because they found one target who is mildly associated with the backlash against the fox lady and happens to be trans which means they can potentially bully a trans person into suicide.

    If you have the resilience to do so I recommend reading the soyjack thread. Those people are disgusting and their intentions are clear. They use hate speech constantly with the standard slurs you’d expect for transgender people, mockingly using neopronouns, talking about him “roping” and “41%ing”, etc. this is not hidden away on tor or conjecture. This is happening to a teenager on the clearnet right now. It is not good for your mental health but it is important to see how this unfolds to learn how they twist the narrative. They are posting as him on reddit and bluesky right now and laughing in the thread about how they are trolling him.


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    1 month ago

    I don’t know how I feel about this

    I was interested in this beyond the headline and read about it for 20 minutes or so. I have never heard of anyone involved in this

    From what I read this person you cited claims to have compiled some (somewhat dubious but lengthy) information that the deceased was at least neglectful of the many animals they were raising and then posted it. They claimed that was all they did

    Reddit had a snark subreddit but it’s impossible to see if said user was very active on the sub bc it’s obviously private now

    That said soyjack.party is dogpiling on the user you’ve mentioned. They’ve doxed him, they are creating pseudo bluesky accounts under his real name to slander him and make people think he is goading people, contacting workplace and parents, etc. it seems motivated partially because some of their users loved the fox lady but a number of users also seem to think the fox lady was “a degenerate” and the reddit users claims were valid, but happily join in simply because the reddit user is trans

    https://www.soyjak.st/raid/thread/194610.html#195569 (a great deal of hate speech here fyi)

    This whole thing stinks and appears to be co-opted by very hateful people who intend to cause someone else to commit suicide, basically


  • There’s a huge degree of separation between “violent music/games has a spurious link to violent behavior” and shitty AIs that are good enough to fill the void of someone who is lonely but not good enough to manage risk

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/30/tech/teen-suicide-character-ai-lawsuit

    “within months of starting to use the platform, Setzer became “noticeably withdrawn, spent more and more time alone in his bedroom, and began suffering from low self-esteem. He even quit the Junior Varsity basketball team at school,”

    “In a later message, Setzer told the bot he “wouldn’t want to die a painful death.”

    The bot responded: “Don’t talk that way. That’s not a good reason not to go through with it,” before going on to say, “You can’t do that!”

    Garcia said she believes the exchange shows the technology’s shortcomings.

    “There were no suicide pop-up boxes that said, ‘If you need help, please call the suicide crisis hotline.’ None of that,” she said. “I don’t understand how a product could allow that, where a bot is not only continuing a conversation about self-harm but also prompting it and kind of directing it.”

    The lawsuit claims that “seconds” before Setzer’s death, he exchanged a final set of messages from the bot. “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” the bot said, according to a screenshot included in the complaint.

    “What if I told you I could come home right now?” Setzer responded.

    “Please do, my sweet king,” the bot responded.

    Garcia said police first discovered those messages on her son’s phone, which was lying on the floor of the bathroom where he died.”

    So we have a bot that is marketed for chatting, a teenager desperate for socialization that forms a relationship that is inherently parasocial because the other side is an LLM that literally can’t have opinions, it just can appear to, and then we have a terrible mismanagement of suicidal ideation.

    The AI discouraged ideation, which is good, but only when it was stated in very explicit terms. What’s appalling is that it gave no crisis resources or escalation to moderation (because like most big tech shit they probably refuse to pay for anywhere near appropriate moderation teams). Then what is inexcusable is that when ideation is discussed with slightly coded language “come home” the AI misconstrues it.

    This results in a training opportunity for the language model to learn that in this context with previously exhibited ideation “go home” may mean more severe ideation and danger (if character.AI bothered to update that these conversations resulted in a death). The only drawback of getting that data of course is a few dead teenagers. Gotta break a few eggs to get an omelette

    This barely begins to touch on the nature of AI chatbots inherently being parasocial relationships, which is bad for mental health. This is of course not limited to AI, being obsessed with a streamer or whatever is similar, but the AI can be much more intense because it will actually engage with you and is always available.




  • there’s a deeper discussion to be had about schizophrenia and right wing rhetoric in America

    This guy was maybe schizophrenic. Maybe a lot of the other right wing people that go to extreme violence to. Not all of course.

    It is important to preface this by saying schizophrenia does not make you violent. It actually makes you more likely to be the victim of violence, statistically.

    But delusional thinking processes, grandiosity, and religious or political hallucinations are schizophrenia symptoms. Again, these on their own don’t create violence. But delusional thinking processes can and often are shaped but cultural contexts and social narratives.

    So dominant political themes - good vs evil, governmental control and surveillance, authoritarian power structures with strong hierarchy, become amplified. Qanon, racial purity, savior complex, etc.

    Where this becomes extremely irresponsible is that it’s then very easy for someone who has this line of thought to then enter a place, many places even, where their delusional thought is not only challenged but encouraged. “You are correct, trump will save us, the democrats are going to kill everyone, you are being watched”.

    It doesn’t help that government corruption lends credence to validate these delusions in some ways. While you’re not being watched 24/7 there likely is some kind of info on you in a database if you live in America. Whether it’s a social credit score or simply identification (facial recognition, demographics, etc), is unclear, but its increasingly clear this is the case (and more worrying the data is likely held by 3rd party contractors like palantir and amazon)

    So then a mass shooting happens and people go thoughts and prayers (except not really anymore) or they say we need better mental health supports (except again not really anymore, we’ve kind of abandoned the song and dance). The improved mental health supports thing is true but that can’t counteract groups that actively seek out people like this. Lonely, isolated, angry, and unstable. They then amplify that persons bullshit by feeding them conspiracy bullshit and every once and a while they pop off

    This could happen in a leftist space, the process is the same, but they appear to do a better job of policing themselves or supporting each other when someone is getting too far gone (at least based on the statistics of political violence in the USA).




  • I am an outpatient therapist who specializes in queer clients and I have had many clients utilize the Trevor project and translifeline over the years. They often don’t call crisis supports because they do support mental health issues outside of ideation

    That said no situation is perfect but in many locations they don’t even call the cops anymore because many states fund mobile crisis response units that have therapists respond instead of police.

    But frankly this is the nature of crisis response. I worked in crisis response for years before shifting to outpatient. There is both a legal liability and moral obligation to do something if someone is truly a danger to themselves or others. Suicidal ideation is overwhelming a transient state, eg if we keep you safe during the worst of it you will eventually consider it a very good thing that you did not commit suicide. This is not conjecture, this is evidence based.

    I will admit that there are bad hospitals and police response can be quite poor or even deadly. At the same time it is also an issue that is heightened in terms of awareness. Thousands of people per day are processed into inpatient per day on involuntary holds, cops shooting them or serious abuse happen fairly rarely. Obviously any incidence is completely unacceptable and we need to continue to highlight issues and strive for reforms, but to paint an involuntary hold as an inevitable abusive or even fatal encounter is seriously misleading and potentially dissuades people from pursuing support that may be desperately needed in crisis.

    I do understand your response. We need do decouple the overwhelming majority of crisis mental health response from police (though response to situations with firearms adds complexity and currently mobile crisis will not respond to these at least around me), fund more mobile crisis response programs nationwide, fund more interim partial support programs that exist between inpatient and outpatient (community supports/iop/php/new modalities altogether), overhaul therapist training and supervision, etc. but in the meantime we have the system we have and we have to work within the constraints of that framework while we continue to push and advocate for change