Authoritarians gonna authoritarian
I don't mean to make much out of little, especially when there are real-world enemies that are endangering us all that we could be focusing on. But it is interesting to me how little regard most of the Lemmy communists have, for anyone's right to exist in their space who expresses any kind of dissent or disagreement, and how unapologetic they are about wielding power without regard for anyone except their own faction.
My mental stability or lack thereof has nothing to do with you offering up made-up nonsense to try to prove your points
Yeah. And, also, it is clear when you look at votes that they make organized efforts to "brigade" threads sometimes, all come in and vote to influence the totals, which is something that they constantly accuse others of doing whenever their unpopular views get noticed and dogpiled on.
Yeah. Maybe.
lemmy.ml and friends have a really weird habit that I still haven't completely figured out. They will swear something that isn't factually true, and then if asked to justify it, they'll switch to something the vibes of which more or less line up with the claim, but the facts of which have nothing to do with it.
Here, watch, I'll prove it: Who are the two people itt who were hard-core Palestinian genocide deniers? What did they say that was denying the genocide?
I can guarantee that the statement they made will not be denying the genocide. Absolutely 100% guarantee. Instead, it will be "well they said Hamas shouldn't have raped a bunch of people and that's basically the same thing" or something along those lines. But, the shoot-from-the-hip confident assertion of "hardcore genocide deniers" will turn out to be poppycock. I think it is sort of self-selecting that only people who are comfortable with that kind of shifty vibe-y MAGA-adjacent logic stick around on lemmy.ml, because it is so endemic there that you can't really tolerate the place unless you are fully on board with it.
Prove me wrong. Who are the genocide deniers and when did they deny the genocide? Like I say, in my view there is a 100% chance that it turns out that what they said will turn out to be something different than "there is no genocide in Palestine" but you will make the effort to pretend that it's all the same and so who cares. But who knows, maybe I'm just running my mouth and they are here in all their Zionist glory, in the room with us right now.
So when did you see the lemmy.world downvotes with your own eyes? Here or there?
Lol I'm just messing with you, honestly. I don't think there is all that much productive exchange to be had here.
How did you come to conclusion that the downvotes were probably .world brigaders?
I actually rephrased my statement and made it in the exact way that I did because of the Lord of the Rings. The movies are excellent, easily good enough to be masterpieces by Hollywood standards, but they are still a pale imitation of the original.
.ml has a persistent myth that it's all lemmy.world that is "against them" and dislikes the Russian government. It's part of their attempt to pretend they are the majority. By implication, every other Lemmy instance is neutral, apparently, except "the liberal instances" (which turns out to be basically all of them).
I'm sure the downvotes are from off-instance brigaders, if you want to call it that. I have no idea why they would be centralized to lemmy.world, and I doubt they are.
I gib 0
100% are from .ml, Hexbear, or Lemmygrad.
I got curious about one Hexbear user, and looked at their profile, and I learned that no one can name any specific human rights abuses China has ever done, and also nobody "here" talks about Israel's human rights abuses.
Clearly
I think lemmy.ml defederated from them.
Every other site more or less doesn't care. Your Lemmy votes are not private. But, lemmy.ml as always cares deeply about controlling the narrative, and talking about who is voting and how and how often particular .ml users feature in the voting patterns, disrupts their ability to pretend that they're standing up for normalcy and a handful of isolated "liberal" instances are the weird ones who love censorship.
Nice try Steve Bannon
I like UPS because the workers have a union, they take care of their drivers, and it seems like USPS is having some problems lately, which makes sense because the people in charge of it are actively trying to destroy it along with everything else.
So, I tried out UPS recently. It costs a little more but whatever.
I tried to ship a package to Canada. In addition to the tariffs, which are fun, UPS tacked on a "customs brokerage fee" which they attempted to charge to the recipient. Basically, as long as that person is paying tax and tariffs and God knows what else, we might as well collect $17.95 from them at the same time, because why not.
The person receiving the package told the UPS driver more or less "Get fucked, I'm not paying that. I'm not the one shipping the package, getting it to me is your problem not mine." I can sympathize. He said that he's had experience with doing that before, and the delivery company caved and he eventually got the package anyway. IDK what that's about, it sounds unlikely, but that's what he said.
Anyway, I talked with him, and eventually he agreed to pay this bullshit. I have spent half the morning at this point on the phone with UPS trying to get them to attempt redelivery of the package.
Actually, before that, when I was trying to sort everything out, I had some fun conversations where they explained this "customs brokerage fee" to me. I asked the guy several times if any other carrier charges this fee, and several times he responded to the question with long explanations without answering it, simply pretending that I had asked some other question. Because, as I now know, the answer is "no." It's just some random bullshit that UPS and only UPS does to international shipments. I think it's just an opportunity to snatch money from people while they're distracted and don't know what's going on, and don't have a lot of other options. If they presented to me this fee they were collecting when I was choosing to ship the package, I could say "fuck that I don't want that" and choose some other shipper.
Anyway, now that we've sorted out what's going on, I've been on the phone with UPS trying to get them to attempt redelivery so we can finally put this issue behind us and I can avoid UPS in the future for international shipments. The phone people just can't get their act together. Every person I talk to is surprised that I have an international shipment, and tells me I should have called worldwide shipping. I ask them for the phone number, and they give me the phone number I called. I point this out and they react with confusion and skepticism.
The first guy that I managed to get through this whole process with said that they can't find the package, took my email address (which took him four attempts to replicate even when I spelled it out very slowly), and said they would send me an email. The email I received was inviting me to set up a claim for a lost package. That's clearly not right, so I called back.
The second woman asked about transferring me to worldwide shipping, since I know now to ask about that first. I said fine but pointed out that I had called the exact same number she was giving me. She became very confused by this, and then launched into trying to help me anyway (?). She eventually told me back a bunch of information about the package that I had just told her, seemed to be reading to herself from some information she was looking up, and then told me to have the shipper contact UPS and create a MyChoice account. I asked her if she could just mark it to attempt redelivery, since I was already on the phone with her and she was UPS. In keeping with how the UPS people generally behave on the phone, I had to ask her this several times before she was willing to answer the question instead of just starting to talk about random stuff in a sympathetic tone of voice. It turned out that the answer was, no, she can't help me. I pointed out that UPS people had lied to me a few different times about how things would work, so I was a little skeptical. I realize this probably isn't a productive line of conversation for me to go down.
Anyway, she successfully attempted to pass me off to someone else as quickly as possible, so now I'm on hold. While listening to the music on speaker, I decided to make another attempt at setting up a ups.com account for myself. It didn't work the first time because it only works on Chrome, apparently, and browsing with Chrome is becoming a painful and insecure way to traverse the internet.
Anyway. Success! Now it wants me to set up my account.
I cannot possibly emphasize enough how little I want basic benefits like tracking notifications. I have the tracking number, I will check if I want to know what's going on with my package.
Wait! The person has answered the phone. I've now been on the phone, just for this call, for 34 minutes, just to reach the initial person who is apparently able to help me with this fairly simple issue. He is at least concise and seems to be able to understand the issue and what I want ("redeliver package pls") with a minimum of extraneous bizarro-world conversations where he repeats lots of details about my shipment back to me. He even knew the tracking number and asked me if he was looking at the right shipment, without me having to read it to him slowly and him fucking up taking it down multiple times as some other people I spoke to did. I feel like maybe that's just entertainment for them, if they're having a slow day, to make simpleton errors in the tracking number and see if they can get the customer wound up a little bit.
Update: After an extended hold, during which I got nowhere with the web site, he got back on the phone and reported that he had solved my issue, and they're planning to reattempt the delivery tomorrow.
I also am entertained to learn that this interaction was the only one that was followed up by a phone survey inviting me to indicate my level of satisfaction. I took the survey. I suspect that this segment of the operation somehow actually does care about their phone support people functioning at anything above "surly toddler" level, and so is following up about it, and that's why this man was competent. I suspect the rest of the operation mostly cares about saving money, not about anything competent happening to any person's package, and so that's the result they're getting.
I hit the button requesting to leave a voice comment at the end of the survey, but something fucked up in their system, and I wasn't able to. Oh well.
Don't use UPS for international shipments. Maybe not for other shipments.
The frame.work desktop with the AI capabilities has sold out into where they are now taking orders in what is clearly the "we'll take your money but don't hold your breath" batch. The difference is it has 128GB of VRAM and it costs $2,000. In other words it seems like a sensible thing to buy if you actually want be able to do AI stuff, instead of whatever unwanted nonsensical trinkets these other people are trying to shoehorn into their shoddy products.