My family took care of a small herd of dairy goats when I was growing up. They could definitely make their displeasure known if you tried to make them do something they didn’t want to (especially when they were very nearly your own weight). Milking time? Most days they were perfectly happy to jump up on the stand for us to relieve their udders for them, sometimes even before we’d gotten everything set up.

I am careful where I get my milk from because the big dairy institutions are rather problematic. And I agree that the broad disempowerment and incarceration inherent in farming is an issue on its own. But saying that milk is always, unequivocally, unwanted theft (and respectively that farms provide an unqualified worse life) is just the other side of the same human-exceptionalism coin – you’re removing their agency to say “yes”.

re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml
cc: @Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip

The no-censorship crowd is funny. “I wanted to block everyone whose admins block someone, in order to find the people whose admins don’t block anyone, so I could talk to the few people I hadn’t blocked because they don’t block people.”

(And that’s ignoring the traditional entitlement in that people somewhere else deciding not to listen to you somehow means you’re censored locally.)

Hypocracy – and conspiracy-level rambling – aside, there’s actually an interesting kernel of commentary here on how we talk about joining and administering Fedi. On the one hand, we say that newcomers shouldn’t worry about which instance to start out on, because every one connects to every other, but on the other we celebrate how the instanced architecture allows admins control over which other instances to connect to. And then you have the deeper issue of the vast majority of the software assuming DNS, so even if admins do want to connect to Tor instances, they can’t feasably do so without a fair bit of host-system tweaking. Yeah, those mixed messages are just the emergent result of which layer of abstraction we’re talking about in any given conversation, but it would be nice if we could find language that doesn’t take literally the opposite tack on each successive layer.

And that’s just the raw money spent. I can’t imagine China is using that investment less efficiently than the US. As the article says:

When you further consider that a significant portion of U.S. research, up until this point, has been invested in projects designed to produce academic publications and not technological advances, the picture is even more bleak.

re: @yogthos@lemmy.ml

I was homeschooled for most of my pre-high-school years, but other than that this captures so much of young me. I’d bring home a stack of books two feet tall from the library every other week, and not infrequently would read them up in the branches of one of our trees. Math workbooks always got finished early because I liked math (still do), but I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the old novels my mother would suggest were to bolster my otherwise… minimal approach to history.

Meanwhile I developed absolutely no fear of correcting people twice my height and nearly three times my age because I knew our farm and how to care for the animals, and why wouldn’t they love them just as much if only they learned how to work with the goat, say, rather than fighting to get it to obey.

Thanks for the solid laugh! (Also, xe/xem, and another thanks both of you for reminding me to add those to the profile metadata.)

Thanks for fielding that! Yeah, the perspective’s quite deceptive. There’s actually about an inch and a half of air between them.

EDIT: That was meant to be a reply to @FilthyShrooms@lemmy.world Still trying to get a handle on responding to Lemmy threads from this (very much non-Lemmy) server.

CC: @targetx@programming.dev

I do want to take a deeper look at what’s going on eventually, yeah. It’s one of the fans built into the case, though, rather than something I added during the build, so I’m going to have to see how easily I can remove it in the first place. I love the space and the wire management this case allows, but its parts are more tightly attached (if apparently not tightly enough in this case) than others I’ve worked with in the past.