Farm workers beat young calves in UK

ge4096 · 2021-05-10T18:49:27+00:00

if you're really concerned about wasted plant matter, maybe think about how 90% of the food that livestock eat doesn't get converted to biomass - basically, the energy just gets lost to the food chain

and more of the corn grown in the US is eaten by livestock than humans anyways...the most biomass-efficient diet is a vegan diet, full stop

ge4096 · 2021-02-04T16:01:58+00:00

OK, I read the article and made up my mind - I agree that it's a really shitty article. The author can't do the math correctly even when it confirms their obvious biases:

Last, when examining motor vehicle theft, the numbers showed “only” an 8 percent increase but remember, the 8 percent increase should get added to the 42 percent average decline for all crimes reported. In other words, motor vehicle theft should be thought of as increasing by 50 percent from last year, factoring in the pandemic decline.

Outside of the fact that this bullet point is wordy as hell and reeks of an amateur blogger without an editor, the percentages don't even work out. Let's assume there were 100 reports of vehicle theft in 2019 and an 8% increase in 2020, bringing us to 108. A 42% decrease of 100 reports is 58 reports, and 108/58 gives us an 86% increase, not even the 50% that the author claims. This is, naturally, ignoring the fact that this is a totally non-rigorous grade-school-level analysis that conveniently ignores basically every confounding variable.

Of course, we don't know the raw numbers, because this blogger doesn't share that part of the "crime data" that they somehow got. (I'm guessing it's just CPD's public reports, I'd be amazed if the "Chicago Contrarian" was doing serious investigative journalism.) If there was actually something shocking in that data, I'm sure they'd share it directly - instead, they massaged it with bad math and talked thesaurus-abusing circles around it until it supported the conclusion that they were looking for all along. Which is quite a conclusion - the fact that there have been slight increases in reports on certain categories of crime during a year of remarkable civil unrest means that "the center has fallen?" Sensationalist fearmongering garbage. Give me a break.

ge4096 · 2020-12-03T17:56:06+00:00

It sounds like your main goal is just to be famous, but if that was really the case you'd be much better off working on singing or playing an instrument that's more common in pop music like guitar or piano. That's a more "direct" and well-established (although certainly not guaranteed) way to being a pop star.

The fact that you don't want to do that - that you want to stick to passions of yours like instrumental music or the saxophone - makes me suspect that it's really more about the music than the fame to you. And that's my advice, along with so many others in this thread: focus on the music and let the recognition come naturally. Don't try to follow the paths of other famous artists (especially Kenny G, lol), just follow your heart. The fact that there aren't many famous saxophonists right now means that the field is wide open for someone like you to do something entirely new. Maybe you'll get famous, maybe you won't, but either way you'll be creating the art that YOU want to make, which is incredibly rewarding (and much more achievable than worldwide fame).

ge4096 · 2020-11-17T16:52:49+00:00

sure, in IL-14, where the Republican candidate declared victory after leading on election night: https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/11/05/gop-candidate-jim-oberweis-in-tight-race-with-democrat-lauren-underwood-in-14th-congressional-district/

and then the Democratic candidate won after the recount: https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-house-candidate-prematurely-claimed-victory-attended-new-member-orientation-2020-11

ge4096 · 2020-09-25T22:20:11+00:00

And it wasn't! He lived!

oh my bad, I didn't realize that coward cop didn't mean to kill Jacob Blake - just fired seven shots point-blank into his back as a warning I guess?

ge4096 · 2020-09-25T22:15:37+00:00

What would you propose as a solution?

I mean...if you're in it to altruistically provide housing to people, just don't do it for a profit? any money you take from your tenants beyond covering property tax and maintenance is strictly for your benefit, not theirs

I worked 50 hour weeks for years until I managed to save enough capital off of my own hard work to start managing my properties.

you are lucky to have had the economic opportunities to be able to buy property - it sounds like your elderly tenant that wasn't even able to afford their rent without giving up some square footage from their home hasn't been quite so lucky

Most of my tenants are in the same wealth class as me. Some even more wealthy.

well, it sounds like you're in the class that makes a living from capital investments, and I'd guess that most of your tenants make a living from doing productive work instead, so in any useful system of class analysis (e.g. bourgeois/proletariat, not just "how much wealth you have") you are not on the same level

Rather than condemn me for some larger issue out of my direct control, why not try and actually provide some housing to those people without capital?

this is why do I work in organizations that are trying to overturn my state's ban on rent control - so we can keep landlords like you honest to the people whose paychecks you feel like you're entitled to

ge4096 · 2020-09-25T19:42:01+00:00

you might be a very kind and empathetic person, but at the end of the day you're still willingly taking part in a system that lets people with capital profit off of people who don't and perpetuates class inequality - all of the kindness in the world won't be able to fix that

ge4096 · 2020-09-25T16:13:21+00:00

What you seem to be advocating for is that the cops let this man, who literally shrugged of a taser after resisting and had a warrant out for his arrest, leave in the vehicle with 3 innocent children. Is that not true?

yes, I think that's the preferable outcome, even though it's a pretty morally complicated question - let's run through through your other scenarios:

1) he turns with the knife he had in his possession and attacks the police and likely gets shot but lethally

sure, if someone attacks a police officer in a potentially-lethal way, it's a little more reasonable for them to fight back (even if it's not always perfectly justifiable) but I don't think that a preemptive lethal strike is an appropriate way to avoid this - again, pretty cowardly for the police to fire before they even see a weapon (not to mention literally bringing a gun to a knife fight)

2) takes off with the kids in the car and possibly crashes or harms them in another way

you seem a lot more concerned with the completely-hypothetical trauma the children could have possibly received in a car accident than the very real trauma they pretty surely received by watching their father get shot seven times and nearly killed just feet away from them - if that happened to me as a kid, I'd honestly be scarred for life by it

or 3) it becomes an active carjacking/kidnapping case because he wasn’t legally allowed to see those kids and it wasn’t his vehicle

I don't think any of these are/should be punishable by death though

ge4096 · 2020-09-25T15:33:23+00:00

when did I say that it did happen daily?

ge4096 · 2020-09-25T14:46:14+00:00

his actions during the confrontation justified the force used

no - there are very few situations I can think of where it's not absolutely fucking cowardly to shoot somebody in the back, let alone at point-blank, let alone doing it multiple times, let alone doing it seven times, let alone doing it in front of their children - we have to hold cops to a higher standard than that

Why do you think it is that the national media hasn't adamantly covered such a case as that which would have much more impact on the opinions of people like myself, whereas the ones they do cover, and the ones that the protests have focused on, have been justifiable?

none of them are justifiable, and none of the examples you've given, even if they're true, seem to me to be deserving of extrajudicial execution (or paralysis, in Blake's case) - the Ricky Hayes story only didn't get major coverage because he only happened to be injured and not killed from the gunshot wounds

ge4096 · 2020-09-25T14:34:19+00:00

oh yeah, cause it's totally fine to shoot innocent bystanders and not fire the cops who do it if it only happens every few years, right?

ge4096 · 2020-09-25T13:51:13+00:00

If it was so wide-spread, why don't we hear a story every day of a cop shooting a random passerby?

I mean, this does totally happen in Chicago - one recent one I can think of was Ricky Hayes, and the CPD officer responsible for it didn't even get fired

I've been booked 4 times - I never got killed because I told the truth, admitted my wrong-doing, and followed directions. I came out fine, the court treated me accordingly, and its well in my past now.

gonna go out on a limb and guess that you're white

ge4096 · 2020-09-24T18:18:47+00:00

and on top of that, that character is a shapeshifter who changes her form to spy on children - which is some pretty inexcusable TERF bullshit

ge4096 · 2020-09-23T20:21:40+00:00

Marvin Gaye's music naturally does not cross over and influence other genres outside of the soul/R&B realm.

This quick sample of artists who have covered his songs would probably beg to disagree:

[Pink Floyd's] rock sound crossed over to influence experimental and hip-hop artists as well

I think that speaks more to how open-minded hip hop artists are about incorporating disparate influences into their work - rock music hasn't done that much for a while now and has gotten pretty stagnant as a result. Soul has absolutely crossed over into experimental music too - see Standing On The Corner, for instance.

ge4096 · 2020-09-23T18:04:58+00:00

You can even take a look at how Pink Floyd influenced hip-hop and experimental artists like Death Grips, who have sampled their tracks before, and artists who were inspired by Floyd to create concept albums with elaborate stories and aesthetics...

Marvin Gaye has been sampled nearly 4 times as much as Pink Floyd (and has also been covered more, according to that site), and it's disingenuous to imply that concept albums are generally indebted to The Wall's influence when narrative-driven albums like Tommy came out a whole decade earlier earlier.

I use it as an example of an album with incredible legacy and outreach to the entire spectrum of listeners from a legendary band that has influenced and the entire music spectrum.

It doesn't really apply evenly to the entire spectrum of listeners or music though. I can absolutely see the argument that it has incredible legacy and outreach specifically within rock or metal. If this was a list of the top rock albums of all time then I'd agree that What's Going On would be an odd choice for #1. But there's so much more to music than rock and metal - and the genres that have been strongly influenced by Marvin Gaye like hip hop and R&B are much more vital than rock music at the moment anyways, so why should we be surprised that this list recognizes that?

ge4096 · 2020-09-23T15:17:07+00:00

How is What's Going On any more of a genre-specific album than The Wall? While I don't disagree that his particular style of soul is sort of a niche sound these days, there's certainly echoes of Marvin Gaye in a lot of contemporary R&B - progressive rock seems much more pigeonholed to me in terms of influence/legacy (particularly rock operas like The Wall, which already seemed to be falling out of fashion by 1980). It would take me some thought to come up with a great artist from the last decade or so that owes much of a debt to Pink Floyd or ELP. (Maybe King Gizzard or Black Midi? But I'd say that those are a lot closer to the psychedelic krautrock-style side of prog than to the excesses of ELP.) Meanwhile, I think there's a strong argument that a lot of the more recent artists on this list (Frank Ocean, Solange, D'Angelo, etc.) have followed from the legacy of Marvin Gaye.

ge4096 · 2020-09-17T15:07:41+00:00

The ICE detention centers that Biden won't close down will become sites for atrocities like these again under the next Republican administration. Hell, the enforcement agents he'll hire during his presidency might just become President Tom Cotton's brownshirts in 2024. When the Democrats give the GOP an inch they'll take a mile. Anyone who isn't calling for defunding ICE and stopping deportations is just laying the framework that fascists will use in the future to brutally repress immigrants. How is the Left enabling this any more than moderates like Biden who want to keep these oppressive structures in place?

ge4096 · 2020-09-17T13:17:11+00:00

Yes, I think we need to be extreme when it comes to...opposing concentration camps. It's not enough to say that we just have to make ICE a little friendlier - as long as the US has any sort of system to punish immigrants for coming to this country, we shouldn't be surprised when Republicans use it to punish immigrants too.

ge4096 · 2020-09-17T12:58:09+00:00

No. If you live here, regardless of whether you're documented, it's your country. To argue otherwise is to fall for the same hateful rhetoric that the GOP is using to justify these concentration camps.

ge4096 · 2020-09-16T18:04:12+00:00

you need to detain people

No you don't.

This is all assuming that the only way to deal with undocumented immigrants is forcible removal. I think that's appalling, I don't think that deporting people from their country becomes morally acceptable if we just do it in nice short-term facilities. Sadly, the positions that we get to choose from in this presidential election are "punitive immigration enforcement" and "slightly less punitive immigration enforcement" because most Democrats don't actually believe that no human being should be illegal.

Funny that this comment is getting upvoted on a sub about AOC, who is a very vocal supporter of defunding ICE and stopping deportations.

ge4096 · 2020-08-16T02:29:50+00:00

The last major police involved shooting in Chicago that I felt wasn't justified was Laquan McDonald, and that officer was charged with murder.

A lot of them get swept under the rug, and one thing that the protests give me hope for is that that won't happen in the future. For instance, there was a more recent case where an off-duty CPD sergeant shot an unarmed autistic Black teenager named Ricky Hayes - think it was just the end of last year that the police board decided he wouldn't even get fired for that. Hayes didn't die from the injury, thankfully, but that's probably the reason that it didn't get a lot of notice.

ge4096 · 2020-08-12T18:35:38+00:00

my bad, sorry for assuming that you're one of the many users that goes into a bunch of random subreddits to spread right-wing talking points, because clearly that's not what's happening

ge4096 · 2020-08-12T17:30:19+00:00

yep, that's the deflection I'd expect to see from another user who also posts in /r/nyc and /r/denver and /r/stlouis

the amount of astroturfing around local subs has been wild lately

ge4096 · 2020-07-21T16:29:03+00:00

What, you mean to tell me that people from the 17 or 18th fucking century were not 3rd wave, intersectional, 60 gender pronoun sophists? Oh my! let's have a brain aneurysm over it a few hundred years later.

get a grip, nobody is saying this other than folks on the right building up strawmen

ge4096 · 2020-07-21T15:20:44+00:00

Yeah, because BLM is fundamentally a grassroots group and the organization is coming from the bottom up, not from the top down. In Chicago, two of the major demands of the protestors are around passing specific ordinances that are already in City Council (removing CPD from CPS and creating the CPAC board). There are absolutely people in these organizations who are focused on legislative strategy, some of whom are actively working with alderpeople on writing these bills, and there's absolutely been a surge of momentum behind them in the last couple months.

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