No, it wasn’t like that. Remember that while computer technology was fairly mainstream, it wasn’t nearly as engrained into our lives as today. So people were talking about a worst-case scenario that involved technological things: potential power outages, administrations maybe shutting down, some public transportation maybe shutting down, … To me, it felt like people were getting ready for being potentially majorly inconvenienced, but that they weren’t at all freaking out.

I do remember the first few days of January 2000 felt like a good fun joke. “All that for this!”

I’ve been telling people that the notion that the ER lets poor people die in the US is false; instead, they make you wish you did.

Mint uses an OAuth token (I think through Plaid). This is not the same thing as sharing a username/password, and is authorized by your bank, since they provide the OAuth flow; otherwise OAuth wouldn’t work in the first place.

Right, and in my case to be clear, it was all businesses headquartered in the US, doing business in Europe, and getting compliant with Europe’s GDPR. I have no idea if it was any different if the businesses were headquartered in Europe (guessing no), but I thought I’d confirm that was the situation.

Yeah, there were different interpretations there from different counsels. It went from “well, they put it there and we don’t store it anywhere else, so nobody is preventing them from removing it, we don’t need to do anything”, with some “oh this field is actually durably stored somewhere else (such as an olap db or something), so either we need to scrub it there too when someone changes a value, or we can just add a ‘don’t share personal information in this field’ little label on the form”; to doing that kind of stuff on all fields.

Overall, the feeling was that we needed to do best effort depending on how likely it would be for a field to durably contain personal info, for it to smell a judge’s smell test that it was done in good faith, as is often the case in legal matters.

Reposting what I posted here a while ago.

Companies abiding by the GDPR are not required to delete your account or content at all, only Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Lemmy instances are unlikely to ask for info such as real name, phone number, postal address, etc; the only PII I can think of is the email that some (not all) instances request. Since it’s not a required field on all instances, I’m going to guess that the value of this field does not travel to other instances.

Therefore, if you invoked the GDPR to request your PII to be deleted, all that would need to happen is for the admin of your instance to overwrite the email field of your account with something random, and it would all be in compliance. Or they could also choose the delete your account, if they prefer.

Source: I’m a software engineer who was tasked at some point with aligning multi-billion-dollar businesses to the GDPR, who had hundreds of millions of dollars in liability if they did it wrong and therefore took it very seriously. I am not a lawyer or a compliance officer, but we took our directions from them directly and across several companies, that’s what they all told us.

Nitpicking: I’d rephrase “playing an instrument” to “playing a first instrument”. I struggled as heck to learn the guitar as a young adult, while kids in my music class were having a much easier time; but once I got it after a while, all instruments I learned after that, even in my 40s, were a ton easier.

I mean, I guess that depends. History is littered with countries that got destroyed because they got suddenly wealthy, like what happened to Nauru; but also of countries that thrived and are still thriving on a well-protected, sustainably obtained natural resource. I’d be more worried if the situation was more sudden and taking people with their pants down, but it’s been a very slow burn over decades.

And to consider another looming environmental catastrophe: the currently rising water scarcity can’t scare you too much if you live next to one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.

I mean, I have, but now that you mention it, I’ve only met people who claimed they were from Wyoming. Who knows what they might have been hiding…

To what end? Just shit and giggles or is there a goal to it?

Even if it’s the wrong decision in your case to trust your gut, I worry that if you don’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what it would be like if you did.

I don’t hate it, but every time now that I get linked to a Reddit post, I look at the comments, and every time I get a little more shocked at the amount of low-value, hateful comments over there compared to here.

In other words, I don’t hate it, but I feel like it hates me.

My wife has been telling me for years that research was still ongoing about aspartame being potentially carcinogenic, so I should be careful with my at most one diet soda a day. When the news first came up that the WHO was about to classify it as such, I was like “oh shit, it’s happening?”

And then the details came a few days later, and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. 😆

Maybe it extended it, maybe not, my understanding is it’s hard to say.

One thing for sure: slavery lived on quite a lot more than 20 years. The abolition of the Atlantic trade was later voted to be in effect on Jan 1st 1808, the very day that it was constitutionally possible to abolish it; but that didn’t free the existing slaves quite yet. 50+ years went by to attempt to resolve the issue diplomatically, which eventually failed and gave way to 4 years of Civil War. So, that’s almost 80 years total.

But on the other hand, my understanding is no one really knew clearly what the King had in mind to do about slavery, and it was not in his interest to be too clear about it and risk to alienate either side, before actually taking action. Maybe he was planning to quickly abolish slavery indeed; or maybe just to limit it, or maybe to tax it. The Southern states were very worried they he may abolish, but I’m not sure it’s well known what his actual plan was. So, maybe he would have stopped slavery earlier; or maybe he would have regulated it the way he wanted to and then let it happen, and slavery could very well still be active to this day. No idea.

Me too!

When my wife offered it to me for my birthday, I hadn’t seen a real one in my life. I already had been playing the guitar and the ukulele (on top of other non-string instruments) for a while, and I said: “I hope it’s not yet another tuning to learn chords from scratch on, a friend tried to teach me the cello’s tuning once and I found it so needlessly confusing”.

Oops… 😂

But it’s all good, I got over it. 🙂

I have a less impressive, but similar story to yours. I’d say it’s fine to work hard and do work that’s not your job, but the key is to follow through by demanding the proper acknowledgement and gratification for it. Like, doing it for free a couple of times to be nice is fine, but after that, the value you bring with this has to be properly acknowledged and compensated.

If you’ve been working hard and helping out, and an employer doesn’t gratify you to that value, the proper response is not to give up and pin it on hard work being the problem. That employer is being the problem. Try to change that if you can at all.

I don’t know enough to know the answer to this question, honestly. I know some stuff about the cultural state of slavery at the time of the founding of the US, and how much it already was on thin ice at the time; and that it’s actually very likely that it would have been ended or at least severely restricted by the King of England earlier if the US hadn’t actually won independence (or at least so thought the Southern states). But I don’t realize what was going on elsewhere in the world too, in a way that it would have been abolished there, or not.

What I know: the reason for slavery in the South specifically is that those colonies were funded with much more of a “get rich quick” mentality. Sustainability wasn’t initially the goal, the goal was finding tons of gold and bringing it back to Europe. When the tons of gold didn’t materialize, people had to drastically cut costs to keep those colonies going on other resources; and that’s how, before slavery, indentured servitude was introduced. It initially was a temporary and voluntary state: you’d sign yourself into indentured servitude for a plantation for X years, as a way to pay for your trip to the new world, at the end of which you were free to build the life you want there. Eventually, the plantation owners wondered what it would be like if they didn’t have to set all those people free at the end of the agreement, and obviously it was quite financially successful for them. Eventually, the slave trade and abductions, and all the related horrors, got set up to feed that system.

Anyway, fast forward to the Revolutionary War, and the English crown is showing signs of wanting to regulate that madness. Maybe not abolishing right away, but at least putting serious limits to what people can do. The war starts in the North, with most Southern states not being very interested to join, but what sets the keg on fire was, after the war started, when the King proclaimed that any slave who would escape to join the war effort on the redcoat side would thereby be free. That sent Southerners the message that slavery was on its last leg if the colonies remained English, and is what convinced a number of Southern states to join the rebellion after all.

Eventually, independence is won, but in the 1780s, the King violates the peace treaty of Paris by placing an embargo on America, in order to squeeze them out of money and force them all to join the English empire back (which obviously didn’t quite work!). At the time, the South has most of the remaining funds after a very difficult decade, and little debt (I wonder why!), but if the North goes back to being English, they see the writing on the wall that the South would also eventually be conquered into the English empire again, and therefore slavery would probably end. As a result, the Southern states demand a clause in the US Constitution that forbids the future new US Congress to abolish the Atlantic slave trade (and therefore slavery) at all for 20 years (until 1808). So with that, they have a choice between being sure to keep slavery for at least 20 years, or going back to being English and having it abolished or severely restricted basically any time. That was a key motivator for the Southern states, which tended to be against centralization of government, to still agree to ratify the Constitution.

So to hit it on the nail again: they knew so well that slavery was on its last leg regardless of what they’d do, that they agreed to a very temporary 20-year break to still be sure to stretch it for that time, even if it meant agreeing for the very long-term to something they massively didn’t like the idea of: a federal government. The rest is history.

Anyway, that’s just the US, and even with that knowledge, I don’t know when emancipation here would have occurred if different events had happened; and even less so the rest of the world, of course.

Same, but even when I type one-handed, I also bounce back and forth at each word. Swiping gets short words wrong more often, but more rarely long words.

So for instance, for “I am on vacation”, the only word I’d swipe when one-handed is “vacation”. If I swiped “am”, I’d probably have a 50-50 chance of getting “an”; which may or may not self-correct later, depending on what else it got wrong.

Sure; but it still bothers me that the US is part of it and yet is often associated with freedom by American nationalists. The same way I’m annoyed that France (my native country, I’m a naturalized American) boasts itself the “pays des droits de l’homme” (“the country of human rights”), despite freedom of speech and of religion having gigantic asterisks, even though they feel like such basic human rights to me. It’s just like, if your national identity happens to not be the greatest at something, maybe don’t boast about being the best at it!

But anyway, this leads me to wonder… I feel like US slavery is discussed and depicted in arts a lot more often, and I genuinely wonder why that is. What do you think? Is it just that American culture chooses to address it head on when a lot of others don’t, or do you think there’s more to it?