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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2022

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  • Absolutely, the fact that every time you interact with a person it could be on the worst day of their lives, but for you it’s just Tuesday is a massive contributor to mental health issues. Being unable to talk about it makes things much worse, and while the ethos like ‘killology’ and similar might cops less traumatized by their jobs it is definitely for the worse.

    The amount of othering I hear from cops who talk about the people they interact with in their jobs… Well let’s just say I’ve never heard a cop talk about their job and go “boy am I glad that person is on the force”, and it definitely seems like at least partly a coping mechanism.


  • I think there are a few reasons, firstly while conservatives put many issues within society under a mental health umbrella, they simultaneously make no efforts to fix this problem and in fact actively make it worse since poor housing access, wealth inequality, healthcare access, food access etc are all major factors for pretty much all mental health issues. There are only a few explanations I can come up with for this:

    1. ‘mental health’ is a smokescreen; it’s an umbrella so vague and monumental an issue that it gets put in the “I can’t affect this problem, so there is no point in worrying” basket.

    2. People with mental health issues are so othered to them that their solution to people with mental health issues is “a cop with a gun”.

    As for cop’s mental health, that’s a bit easier:

    • I can’t speak for other countries, but where I’m from if a cop gets diagnosed with pretty much any acronym they risk getting their gun taken off them which directly restricts the jobs they can take and their career advancement. Where I’m from won’t even take on a recruit if they’ve been diagnosed with something. This means cops are terrified of taking any work provided therapy.

    • pretty much all police orgs have a really bad machismo problem, which is one thing that keeps men from seeking mental healthcare in general.

    • police tend not to require much formal education to start training and tend to pay better than other jobs with the same starting requirement (moral hazard pay), this can lead to the ‘golden handcuffs’ situation of not wanting to jeopardize this career because you’ll have to start at the bottom for a career which pays worse.

    • it’s very common for society to see police as ‘essential workers’, which puts it under the umbrella of “we can make your work conditions terrible”; things like shift-work with really unpredictable hours tends to isolate people from their friends and family, making mental health worse and makes them more reliant on their job for their support network.

    Reforming the police a tolerable institution seems impossible to me, but a decent start would be disarming them and making sure they are not the people who respond to mental health calls. Problem is that this requires a large part of the population to accept that you can’t simply shoot your problems, even if you hire a goon in blue to do it.

    Regarding the US and their gun ownership: yeah, disarming cops is a lot more complicated and probably involves training them about de-escalation and the peelians. It also requires setting up some aptitude requirements, since basics like “time, distance & cover” are regularly forgone in favour of “warrior cop”, and currently there is a very strong pipeline from “that kid who tortures animals” to “corporal”.







  • I was a “ironically” racist as a young teen, it took me till my early adulthood to realise that being ironically racist is just being racist, and the edgy “humour” that is made at others expense isn’t funny or clever, and is incompatible with the kind, empathetic person I wanted to be.

    Cringing at my teen self pushes me further into deprogramming myself from that shit, but I’m encouraged by the adage “if you don’t look at yourself from a decade ago and cringe, you wasted that decade”.






  • Cost to manufacture is not more than wages, but cost to purchase a good is always more than the total cost of labour needed to produce it, so long as profit exists.

    The money isn’t free so much as redistributed from taxation elsewhere, think of it as the same as subsidising industry except only to the workers of that industry (instead giving it to owners and expecting the savings to trickle downwards). You could also consider it an income tax rebate with more fine-grained control of who gets it.

    It doesn’t seem particularly ground-breaking of a concept; I see the value in investing money into necessary but unprofitable industry though my concern is that if you subsidise wages of a business with a profit incentive, management may lower wages to compensate.


  • That’s… Always true though?

    Money backed by precious metals is the same fabric with numbers on it, and sure the idea is that you can always exchange it but if the government/bank refuses an exchange what are you gonna do? The exchange guarantee is backed by the state as much as the value guarantee is for fiat.

    Say you buy literal gold and use it for transactions, it’s value as a currency is still based on the trust that people will accept it in exchange; gold is not intrinsically valuable to an everyday person the way for example water is, so it’s value comes down to how much you expect to be able to exchange it for later, which is just taking currency faith the long way around, and in addition you need to consider purity concerns and the like.

    When you use crypto, you at minimum trust that it won’t be forked, and probably need to trust that the exchange mediator won’t rug pull. You also to some extent trust that the currency will be about as valuable tomorrow as it is today.

    Expecting your currency to have a “real backing” based on a physical property is just ignoring the basic fact that all exchanges of goods revolve around a debt relationship between at least two parties, which always requires some level of trust.

    When people trust a currency held by a state, it’s not just based on whether the state keeps its word, but also based on the fact that the state will use it’s monopoly on violence to maintain the integrity (large fines/prison for currency fraud) and value (requiring taxes to be paid in the currency) of that currency, which is a guarantee no other medium of exchange can have.



  • It really depends on what you’re most comfortable with; when you go for such a custom option most of the design decisions are about personal preferences.

    I suggest you draw out some layouts on a piece of paper, adjust them until you feel happy and then plan out how you want the keymap to look. When you’re happy, look for a layout that fits what you want or build your own on KiCAD.

    I bought a kyria from Splitkb, and I’ve been very happy with the design. If I needed another keyboard, it would probably be a very similar layout, but have slightly fewer keys, be low-profile and no oleds.


  • My parents treated my device access something they had to keep a keen eye on. They were good at manually making sure I wasn’t sitting around having my brain rot, but their spying on what I was doing into my teens left me with some trust issues.

    They briefly tried to use technological solutions to control my access and monitor me, but all that served was to make me very good at circumventing them. Outsourcing parenting to a computer program doesn’t work, and kids notice when you try.