I believe it is what Americans call what might be called an Owners Corporation / Body Corporate / Apartment Owners Association / Management Company in other parts of the English-speaking world.

Generally speaking optometrists measure the core measurements of how your vision is and make the prescription.

However, to make glasses as well as the prescription they need the interpupillary distance (IPD); how far apart the pupils in the centre of the eyes are.

The IPD rarely changes much / at all in adults (so saving for certain conditions, once you know it you could keep using that value), and measuring it is not that hard if you have another person to do it (read how to do it properly on the Internet).

I don’t know the law in Canada around what they have to disclose. I believe Canada has privacy legislation that says that people have access to private information about them held by companies in at least some cases, so that might be something to look into, and then request all the information they hold on you if you ever need the information again.

No

On economic policy I am quite far left - I support a low Gini coefficient, achieved through a mixed economy, but with state provided options (with no ‘think of the businesses’ pricing strategy) for the essentials and state owned options for natural monopolies / utilities / media.

But on social policy, I support social liberties and democracy. I believe the government should intervene, with force if needed, to protect the rights of others from interference by others (including rights to bodily safety and autonomy, not to be discriminated against, the right to a clean and healthy environment, and the right not to be exploited or misled by profiteers) and to redistribute wealth from those with a surplus to those in need / to fund the legitimate functions of the state. Outside of that, people should have social and political liberties.

I consider being a ‘tankie’ to require both the leftist aspect (✅) and the authoritarian aspect (❌), so I don’t meet the definition.

I’m looking into it using data from my instance to check it isn’t an abuse issue.

What I know so far:

1. It is a lemmy.world user.
2. That user has downvoted 548 comments, and upvoted 18. Downvoted 557 posts and upvoted 25.
3. Timing: the downvoting has been going on for some time, it isn’t a new thing. 71 downvoted comments since 2024-06-01T00:00:00Z, 212 since the start of May (out of 548).
4. The user has two comments ever, and no posts. One comment, on a thread about the actions of a right-wing American politician, said “Click bait lemmy for sure”. This could imply the downvotes are legitimate and coming from having an impossibly high standard for what is considered quality here, or perhaps they are related to political grudges. I’m going to look further for patterns in the downvotes. I think a bot could have done far more downvotes - so it could just be a human.

The government just has to print for the money, and use it for that

Printing money means taxing those that have cash or assets valued directly in the units of the currency being measured. Those who mostly hold other assets (say, for example, the means of production, or land / buildings, or indirect equivalents of those, such as stock) are unaffected. This makes printing money a tax that disproportionately affects the poor.

What the government really needs to do is tax the rich. Many top one percenters of income fight that, and unfortunately despite the democratic principle of one person, one vote, in practice the one percenters find ways to capture the government in many countries (through their lobbying access, control of the media, exploitation of weaknesses of the electoral system such as non-proportional voting and gerrymandering).

instead of bailing out the capitalists over and over.

Bailing out large enterprises that are valuable to the public is fine, as long as the shareholders don’t get rewarded for investing in a mismanaged but ‘too big to fail’ business (i.e. they lose most of their investment), and the end result is that the public own it, and put in competent management who act in the public interest. Over time, the public could pay forward previous generations investments, and eventually the public would own a huge suite of public services.

My grandparents had a lot of antiques, some probably which they inherited. My grandfather was particular proud of his clockwork wind-up clock (which was an antique even back then). I disassembled it to find out how it worked, but couldn’t figure out how to reassemble it (and my granddad couldn’t either).

In the early 2000s, I bought a book for someone from amazon.com. I’d had good experiences with Amazon a few years earlier in the late 90s when it worked like a normal store - you pay Amazon and they send you the book you ordered. Little did I know that Amazon had since become a ‘marketplace’ where they let any old scammer list, take your money, and not send anything. After a couple of months with no book arriving, luckily I was able to charge back and get the money back from the bank.

I think doing a good analysis of strategy here will depend on a lot of factors.

Firstly, before coming up with a strategy, it is good to have a clear idea of your goals / the strategic problem you are trying to solve. I see or could infer a few possible ones: you want to work in an environment where you don’t feel bullied, you want to ensure others aren’t bullied, you want to see bullies punished, to maintain positives in the company and want to enjoy those without the negatives of being bullied, or perhaps that you believe in the goals of the company or have some stake in it, and want it to succeed. Different goals might lead you to a different course of action.

Next, you would want to diagnose what’s really going on. Are there just a few bullies, in a company mostly full of professional people, or are the bullies the majority? Are senior leaders in on the bullying, or is it only lower level employees? Why do you think the bullies were hired in the first place - is it because bullying is considered okay in the company, or is it not considered okay but they slipped through? Why do you think the bullying hasn’t been addressed already? Is it because senior managers don’t know? Are the bullies friends / relatives of senior leadership? Are the bullies high performers that the company really would want to keep around, or do they get barely get anything done? Also, are the bullies even aware they are being bullies? Are they unaware they are being insensitive, and likely to change if made aware, or are they actively being malicious and well aware of the impact?

Next, consider the direction you want to take, and analyse the likely impact on your goals. You could find another job - how easy that is would depend what the job market looks like for your role, and how good the terms of your current job are. It wouldn’t achieve goals around making it better for others. You could try talking to the bullies if you think that they might just be unaware of the impact of their behaviour and that they might change. If that doesn’t work, you could try talking to a manager / HR member, perhaps either to arrange mediation, or for them to take action. You could also just try ignoring the bullying if it isn’t having much impact.

To choose from the many possible directions, it might help to think from the perspective of the company shareholders, senior leadership, and HR department. What would you do in their shoes if you learned of the bullying? If it is the majority of the company doing the bullying, then something like replacing all the bullying staff is going to be an instant non-starter. The best possible would be to slowly roll out training, policies, and new hiring practices to try to improve the culture over time. If it is a few people who, it now turns out, are the reason for high staff turnover and lower profits, then they might be quite happy to take action. Although probably not if the bullies are the senior leaders.

There are a few different types of blockchain, differing by how they stop you just making up your own alternative chain and saying that is the real history:

• Proof of Work - prove you wasted lots of energy to add to the chain, making it prohibitively expensive to make your fake alternative chain - but also causing lots of emissions / wasting lots of energy.
• Proof of Stake - adding to the chain requires participation of the people with the most total coins in the cryptocurrency already. Essentially ‘one dollar, one vote’, and ‘the rich get richer’ brought to crypo.
• Proof of Humanity / Proof of Personhood / Proof of Identity - adding to the chain requires the participation of the most people. Attempts to bring “One person, one vote”, and Universal Basic Income to crypto. There are various attempts - some require submission of photos and videos, and have an adjudication scheme built in to detect duplicates (which might fall to AI-generated faces relatively soon). Others (see Worldcoin) require a trusted central party to produce hardware which scans faces and verifies they are real and unique (and have already had data leaks from participants involved in verification). The other option is to trust governments / other existing infrastructure to verify identities (which is probably the most sensible option if you are trying to genuinely just disrupt banking, but many crypto people hate because they also have a cyberpunk fantasy of accelerating crypto-anarchy, and actually want crypto to be used for tax evasion and without the cooperation of governments).

So there are alternatives to environmental impact, but there is currently no perfect crypto. Stack that on top of the number of scammers out there riding the crypto buzz, and it is certainly not that hard to see the reasons behind the hate.

Programming is the most automated career in history. Functions / subroutines allow one to just reference the function instead of repeating it. Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler in 1951; compilers, assemblers, and linkers automate creating machine code. Macros, higher level languages, garbage collectors, type checkers, linters, editors, IDEs, debuggers, code generators, build systems, CI systems, test suite runners, deployment and orchestration tools etc… all automate programming and programming-adjacent tasks, and this has been going on for at least 70 years.

Programming today would be very different if we still had to wire up ROM or something like that, and even if the entire world population worked as programmers without any automation, we still wouldn’t achieve as much as we do with the current programmer population + automation. So it is fair to say automation is widely used in software engineering, and greatly decreases the market for programmers relative to what it would take to achieve the same thing without automation. Programming is also far easier than if there was no automation.

However, there are more programmers than ever. It is because programming is getting easier, and automation decreases the cost of doing things and makes new things feasible. The world’s demand for software functionality constantly grows.

Now, LLMs are driving the next wave of automation to the world’s most automated profession. However, progress is still slow - without building massive very energy expensive models, outputs often need a lot of manual human-in-the-loop work; they are great as a typing assist to predict the next few tokens, and sometimes to spit out a common function that you might otherwise have been able to get from a library. They can often answer questions about code, quickly find things, and help you find the name of a function you know exists but can’t remember the exact name for. And they can do simple tasks that involve translating from well-specified natural language into code. But in practice, trying to use them for big complicated tasks is currently often slower than just doing it without LLM assistance.

LLMs might improve, but probably not so fast that it is a step change; it will be a continuation of the same trends that have been going for 70+ years. Programming will get easier, there will be more programmers (even if they aren’t called that) using tools including LLMs, and software will continue to get more advanced, as demand for more advanced features increases.