301–310 of 377 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before LLMs, Wikipedia was the greatest source of misinformation in all of human history. It is at best good for satiating an idle curiosity with some plausible-sounding fun facts to amuse oneself with without care for whether they're really true or not, but so many people rely on it for so much more, and I have little doubt it causes more harm than good. Real encyclopedias with professional standards exist.
[flagged]
As a strong supporter of unions, that's the end of my donations. I've probably donated fewer than a dozen times, but definitely more than five or six. I felt reasonably good about it and went on with my day, no hesitation about supporting them. That's done. Fwiw, unions often have support pages where you can donate or buy merch to support. One of my favorite tshirts advocates for a union that was trying to form at a…
Curious why you support unions in general? It’s kind of like saying “I support governments” or “I support companies”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One can support both billionaires and unions. Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the USA while roughly 2/3rds of their workforce is unionized
Not to mention the heaps of economic research showing that there are quite a lot of benefits to the existence of billionaires.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's pretty cool and worthy endeavor. Having public domain pictures of cultural events seems like a worthy cause IMO.
Genuinely curious - why is photographing FIFA World Cup important? It is a very wildly watched event, extremely popular. Literally every for-profit media is going to cover it. Wouldn’t that money be spent on lesser known, lesser popular events? Or even projects like photographing the effects of climate change etc - the events that for-profit media is unlikely to cover?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a good analogy though. Unions aren't a clear public good. > The way those arguments are made is similarly ignorant of history, is the simple point. Yes and that point is rejected by me.
The comparison is the unambiguous gains for society union labour organisation achieved through industrial history, which was a clear public good, and what is lost if there are no longer unions to defend those gains. Stuff can go backwards and currently in the USA absolutely is going backwards , at a federal, state and commercial level. Unions, even in their flawed American form, are a force pushing back on that. You…
It's a loose comparison. I think vaccines are a much more clear public good.
> Stuff can go backwards and currently in the USA absolutely is going backwards, at a federal, state and commercial level. Unions, even in their flawed American form, are a force pushing back on that.
Ok... https://apnews.com/article/trump-chavezderemer-labor-secreta...
> You still need them. In just the same way that you still need continued vaccination to protect the gains made by vaccination.
I'm not sure we need them. I don't need one. But I do need vaccines and society at large to be vaccinated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects According to [0], they intend to spend $18m on community projects total, out of their total $240m FY26-27 budget[1]. $330k of that go to the WikiPortraits project[2]. Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects). I would hardly call that deceptive. [0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Regions#Wikimed…
> Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects) That's a bit of a stretch. I couldn't find any up to date information, but for 2024-2025 WMF wrote: "Across the Product & Tech department, we plan on allocating an estimated 50% of our resources to Wiki Experiences, 30% to Signals and Services, 5% to Future Audiences, and the remaining 15% to Product and Engineering Servi…
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wiki...
Some people here think Wikimedia Foundation's mission is to keep Wikipedia up. That's a subset of their mission. I attribute nearly all of the blame to WMF, because their donation ads are quite deceptive. The actual, public mission of Wikimedia Foundation: > The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comparison is the unambiguous gains for society union labour organisation achieved through industrial history, which was a clear public good, and what is lost if there are no longer unions to defend those gains. Stuff can go backwards and currently in the USA absolutely is going backwards , at a federal, state and commercial level. Unions, even in their flawed American form, are a force pushing back on that. You…
> The comparison is the unambiguous gains for society union labour organisation achieved through industrial history, which was a clear public good, and what is lost if there are no longer unions to defend those gains. It's a loose comparison. I think vaccines are a much more clear public good. > Stuff can go backwards and currently in the USA absolutely is going backwards, at a federal, state and commercial level. Un…
In short the picture there is not what you suggest. Unions have notable concerns about the current administration, and about trends in state governments which are going backwards.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/may/01/us-surge-efforts...
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-workers-rights-wa...
https://cwa-union.org/trumps-anti-worker-record
https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/12/twists-and-turns-t...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/19/how-unions-p...
https://betterinaunion.org/project-2025
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/excl...
I understand why factory workers or store clerks might want a union but I'd never understand why tech workers should. I guess except the game developers but the most realistic threat vector for them is the studio shutting down, so a union wouldn't really help.