Kovukono

  • 79 Posts
  • 277 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • KovukonotoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 days ago

    I know you’re looking for people currently living there, but I left not long after Trump got elected the first time (coincidence, not cause), and I feel like it’s helped me be a bit more objective about it.

    I’ve seen my dad go from a die-hard conservative who makes a couple edgy jokes to someone who isn’t even trying to hide his support for Trump. At best, he says that Trump’s statements are overblown, at worst he supports them wholeheartedly. It didn’t improve under Biden’s term, and his behavior was one of the big reasons I feared a Trump victory in 2024. He felt no need to hide what he had before (that is, if he had it then. It could have grown over time as well). There was no reform coming for him, just deeper entrenchment.

    On the other hand, my sister and Mom represent some of another segment of the US. Neither one follows politics because they’re just busy. When they do have time to relax, the last thing they want to do is catch up on things they’ve missed. Unless my sister has something blasted across her social media feeds, she doesn’t know about it. My mom just doesn’t really watch anything at all, mostly because she’s dealing with her own stuff.

    I got to see the US change drastically when Trump got elected, with issues that affected literally everyone, and it turned out that part of my family ignored it, and the part that did know about it supported it. I know my immediate family isn’t a representative sample of the entire US (hell, they’re not even representative of my entire family), but seeing is believing. I never would have thought that people could be like this, but if this can happen to people I know, it’s not that hard to see it happening to others.

    So, yeah. Even assuming Trump peacefully leaves power in 2029 (I’ve got no hopes of removal from impeachment), that’s four years of destroying good will, soft power, government services, and legal protections, and this is happening just after we had a president who, at best, could stabilize the country a bit before building back some of what was torn down in the four years prior. This time, the administration is moving faster and with more purpose in some of these areas, too. Assuming it takes twice the amount of time to completely rebuild all that the Trump administrations have removed, that’s still 20 years down the road to be at par with where we were 8 years ago. Foreign countries don’t trust the US to not elect a lunatic. It can be a normal country, some day, but not until I’m old, and not without a lot of internal changes I don’t see happening yet.





  • If you enjoy games like Outer Wilds or Return of the Obra Dinn, where you basically can only play it through once to figure out the secrets, it feels like this is going to be something you’d love. The downside is the roguelite element can be really punishing and make you feel like you’ve wasted a day, especially if you’ve found the secrets in those rooms. The good news is that there’s been at least a couple times where I found out items were puzzles days after I saw them, so it might not entirely be a waste.







  • Since Legault took power in 2018, I’ve come to remember him for:

    • Thinking the been on face coverings and religious symbols hasn’t gone far enough
    • Blaming nurses, not employers, for patients’ issues rising from the nurses’ strike
    • Bill 96, which has let them require all businesses have French signage (replaced at their own cost), prohibition of already-existing English government resources, and limits the number of students in English speaking schools
    • Limiting funding to English-speaking universities in Montreal
    • Limiting immigration in an attempt to make sure that a limited amount of non-French speakers move in
    • Forming a committee literally named “The Committee of Sages” in order to determine protections and rights for trans people, which also has no trans people, or any LGBTQ+ people
    • Advocating for removal of an anti-Palestinian protest camped out on a university’s grounds

    And now for fucking with strike protections. When the one good thing I can think to say is “He didn’t fuck up the COVID response,” that’s a pretty bad track record.






  • KovukonotoBuy Canadian@lemmy.caCanadian toothpaste?
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    2 months ago

    All this info was gotten off their Wikipedia page:

    Sensodyne is a brand of toothpaste that was first sold by Block Drug, a Brooklyn, New York-based company established in 1907 by pharmacist Alexander Block.[1]

    In 2000, Block Drug was purchased by Smith Kline Beecham P.L.C.,[11] which became GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK).[12]

    Sensodyne became a part of Haleon, a British multinational consumer healthcare corporation, in July 2022, following the establishment of Haleon as a separate entity through a corporate spin-off from GSK.[14]


  • KovukonotoBuy Canadian@lemmy.caCanadian toothpaste?
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    2 months ago

    While it was originally an American brand, Sensodyne’s parent company got bought by a British company in 2000, then spun off into another British company through corporate restructuring in 2022. It’s not Canadian, but it’s at least not American-owned.






  • Ignoring whether or not AI is able to deliver the same quality as humans, it boils down to that capitalism views human beings as a unit of work. So many of those units of work are necessary to achieve a product. AI is supposed to cost less than humans to produce the same amount of work.

    Humans, however, aren’t just a simple measurement of what they can put out. Your worth isn’t tied to your productivity, or the amount of capital you have. Those factors might affect your total worth, but capitalism would have you believe that these are the only metrics that matter. Creative activity has been a staple of humanity throughout history, and it’s now a job where you can produce something that has some semblance of soul attached to it.

    So when it comes to replacing artists with AI, there’s the offense that companies are trying to stifle what artists can get work by replacing them with versions that are mimicry, at best. I’ve seen fantastic works of AI art, but every single instance of it used by companies is replacing a creative human job for the sake of saving costs.

    But AI doesn’t do a good job at most things. It has a terrible record of answering questions accurately, self-driving technology isn’t yet to the point where it’s been deemed safe, and we don’t have robots at the point where they can replace a human doing something as simple as stocking shelves. But what it can do, really well, is imitate art, whether it’s drawing, or vocal performances, or to an extent physical performances. People are worried about artists because those are the jobs affected right now. But the minute those other jobs are able to be automated away in a cost-effective manner, you’ll see people pissed about that, too.