Software engineer working on very high scale systems, and dad.

Born and raised 🇫🇷, now resident and naturalized citizen 🇺🇸.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Maybe it extended it, maybe not, my understanding is it’s hard to say.

    One thing for sure: slavery lived on quite a lot more than 20 years. The abolition of the Atlantic trade was later voted to be in effect on Jan 1st 1808, the very day that it was constitutionally possible to abolish it; but that didn’t free the existing slaves quite yet. 50+ years went by to attempt to resolve the issue diplomatically, which eventually failed and gave way to 4 years of Civil War. So, that’s almost 80 years total.

    But on the other hand, my understanding is no one really knew clearly what the King had in mind to do about slavery, and it was not in his interest to be too clear about it and risk to alienate either side, before actually taking action. Maybe he was planning to quickly abolish slavery indeed; or maybe just to limit it, or maybe to tax it. The Southern states were very worried they he may abolish, but I’m not sure it’s well known what his actual plan was. So, maybe he would have stopped slavery earlier; or maybe he would have regulated it the way he wanted to and then let it happen, and slavery could very well still be active to this day. No idea.


  • I have a less impressive, but similar story to yours. I’d say it’s fine to work hard and do work that’s not your job, but the key is to follow through by demanding the proper acknowledgement and gratification for it. Like, doing it for free a couple of times to be nice is fine, but after that, the value you bring with this has to be properly acknowledged and compensated.

    If you’ve been working hard and helping out, and an employer doesn’t gratify you to that value, the proper response is not to give up and pin it on hard work being the problem. That employer is being the problem. Try to change that if you can at all.


  • I don’t know enough to know the answer to this question, honestly. I know some stuff about the cultural state of slavery at the time of the founding of the US, and how much it already was on thin ice at the time; and that it’s actually very likely that it would have been ended or at least severely restricted by the King of England earlier if the US hadn’t actually won independence (or at least so thought the Southern states). But I don’t realize what was going on elsewhere in the world too, in a way that it would have been abolished there, or not.

    What I know: the reason for slavery in the South specifically is that those colonies were funded with much more of a “get rich quick” mentality. Sustainability wasn’t initially the goal, the goal was finding tons of gold and bringing it back to Europe. When the tons of gold didn’t materialize, people had to drastically cut costs to keep those colonies going on other resources; and that’s how, before slavery, indentured servitude was introduced. It initially was a temporary and voluntary state: you’d sign yourself into indentured servitude for a plantation for X years, as a way to pay for your trip to the new world, at the end of which you were free to build the life you want there. Eventually, the plantation owners wondered what it would be like if they didn’t have to set all those people free at the end of the agreement, and obviously it was quite financially successful for them. Eventually, the slave trade and abductions, and all the related horrors, got set up to feed that system.

    Anyway, fast forward to the Revolutionary War, and the English crown is showing signs of wanting to regulate that madness. Maybe not abolishing right away, but at least putting serious limits to what people can do. The war starts in the North, with most Southern states not being very interested to join, but what sets the keg on fire was, after the war started, when the King proclaimed that any slave who would escape to join the war effort on the redcoat side would thereby be free. That sent Southerners the message that slavery was on its last leg if the colonies remained English, and is what convinced a number of Southern states to join the rebellion after all.

    Eventually, independence is won, but in the 1780s, the King violates the peace treaty of Paris by placing an embargo on America, in order to squeeze them out of money and force them all to join the English empire back (which obviously didn’t quite work!). At the time, the South has most of the remaining funds after a very difficult decade, and little debt (I wonder why!), but if the North goes back to being English, they see the writing on the wall that the South would also eventually be conquered into the English empire again, and therefore slavery would probably end. As a result, the Southern states demand a clause in the US Constitution that forbids the future new US Congress to abolish the Atlantic slave trade (and therefore slavery) at all for 20 years (until 1808). So with that, they have a choice between being sure to keep slavery for at least 20 years, or going back to being English and having it abolished or severely restricted basically any time. That was a key motivator for the Southern states, which tended to be against centralization of government, to still agree to ratify the Constitution.

    So to hit it on the nail again: they knew so well that slavery was on its last leg regardless of what they’d do, that they agreed to a very temporary 20-year break to still be sure to stretch it for that time, even if it meant agreeing for the very long-term to something they massively didn’t like the idea of: a federal government. The rest is history.

    Anyway, that’s just the US, and even with that knowledge, I don’t know when emancipation here would have occurred if different events had happened; and even less so the rest of the world, of course.


  • Sure; but it still bothers me that the US is part of it and yet is often associated with freedom by American nationalists. The same way I’m annoyed that France (my native country, I’m a naturalized American) boasts itself the “pays des droits de l’homme” (“the country of human rights”), despite freedom of speech and of religion having gigantic asterisks, even though they feel like such basic human rights to me. It’s just like, if your national identity happens to not be the greatest at something, maybe don’t boast about being the best at it!

    But anyway, this leads me to wonder… I feel like US slavery is discussed and depicted in arts a lot more often, and I genuinely wonder why that is. What do you think? Is it just that American culture chooses to address it head on when a lot of others don’t, or do you think there’s more to it?





  • So, they’re spiking on it, which isn’t particularly surprising at this stage. In fact they have to since they’re a public company, they can’t make announcements that they’re spending R&D on something, and not spend it, that would be SEC fraud. I’m still not buying that it’s in their interest enough that they would actually put it out there. This feels like such a heavy engineering lift, for little upside besides the compelling differentiation story to tell.

    Also, based on their communications so far, they mean to federate with Mastodon, but they don’t care much about Lemmy. Which makes sense, their shareholders have massively heard of Mastodon, but not Lemmy. Even if they release something, I bet it will be federation with some specific Mastodon servers that they know will treat them well.

    Maybe I’m wrong, that’s completely possible. If they start federating with Lemmy.world, I’m squarely in the “then we should defederate now” camp. But at this point this feels like so much hot air and speculation, that I’m not even sure why it’s being talked about so much.




  • Hm, my understanding from Lemmy.world’s post was “guys, we’re years away from it if it ever happens, maybe we should chill until we learn more?”

    My personal bet is that Threads will never actually implement ActivityPub anyway. The announcement of it sounds great for shareholders to see a differentiation with Twitter on the short term, but making it really has so many uncontrollable scale hurdles that I’d bet it will be given up before it’s real.

    But whether my guess is correct or not, Lemmy.world admin’s point is factually correct: right now, this whole thing is just a lot of hot air.

    (Also, I’m intrigued, I think you might be the only person, when moving instance out of disagreement with an admin, to join one where the admins are known to be Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea. With the point of Lemmy to have very diverse viewpoints, obviously that’s all your choice and you should be where you think you should be, but of all instances out there to join to seek alignment with admins, I wouldn’t have thought Lemmy.ml would be one people would turn to a lot, since it’s been controversial exactly for that, and there are many many others. Heh, you do you.)




  • I remember the movie really ramping up towards unconventional things, and then ending in disappointingly conventional ways. “And then the son with whom they got separated to a near-certain death is alive after all, and they find each other and get reunited.”

    Also, as has been discussed to death at the time, the absolute lack of build-up towards the resolution, which leaves it with a taste of “wait, so why exactly did I watch what happens to this bunch of randos?”

    I have nothing against people who liked it, but the final act felt like such a let-down compared to the beginning and middle of it, that I can’t really remember it positively.