Aceticon @ Aceticon @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Ah, interesting.

Which country is it, if you don't mind me asking?

That kind of mixed purpose building is pretty standard in Europe (I actually can't think of a country I lived in or visited here that doesn't do it for most appartment buildings,, expecially in areas with more foot traffic) so probably the author of the cartoon didn't even think about that side of things at all.

I suspect appartment buildings with shops on the ground floor qualifies as one of those "it's so common that nobody thinks about it" kind of things over here.

That example being in France, there are plenty of coffee shops serving good quality coffee much cheaper than Startbucks.

In countries like that it's generally only the tourists from countries with no such traditions that end up in Starbucks since the locals just frequent the coffee shops which are generally much cheaper and generally have better coffee.

I live in a country that nowadays gets swamped with tourists - Portugal - especially in my hometown of Lisbon and lots of such large international brand shops pretty much only get frequented by tourists, plus there's a certain styling of establishment that's done to appeal to tourists - roughly, those establishments which look like the kind of thing you would find in the Departure Hall of a large Airport anywhere in the World, are aimed at tourists.

All that to say that in the context of a French Cartoon a Startbucks probably represents very well that kind of cookie-cutter same-style-everywhere-in-the-World establishment that's actually worse and more expensive than the local version and exists to cater to tourists.

It depends on the quality of regulation in your country.

When the regulation isn't properly done or enforced, for example when living above a restaurant you get things like excessive smells (they're supposed to have their own chimney all the way to the top of the building) and higher fire risks (they're supposed to have specific fire safety facilities above and beyond what a normal habitational unit would have).

Around were I am - in Portugal - living above a restaurant being a good thing or not very much depends on the municipality were you're living since some are quite corrupt or just plain incompetent and Justice around these parts is a slow, innefective and unreliable joke.

PS: Mind you, shops on the ground floor of appartment buildings around here are pretty standard, it's just that specifical example of yours of a restaurant might not be such a great thing to live above when the regulations that are supposed to protect everybody else aren't sufficient or aren't enforced. Most other kinds of shop don't really have that problem.

Because when a significant proportion of the housing market gets turned into business spaces (which is what AirBnBs are), it reduces supply in the housing market, pushing house prices up.

This benefits politicians in several ways:

• Most national politicians are at the wealth level were they have enough savings, excess income or simply receive "housing subsidies" as part of their work (for example, parliamentarieans when they're from a city other than where the parliament is located) that they are also "realestate investors" alongside their day-job as politiciasn, in which case higher house prices directly make their properties worth more hence make them richer.
• Realestate inflation is generally not counted in the Official Inflation indexes in most of the West. It is however counted in the Real GDP numbers (via a mechanism called Inputted Rent). Give the way Official GDP (which is the Nominal one, i.e. after inflation has been removed) is calculated, housing inflation by feeding into Real GDP but not into the inflation index used to calculate Nominal GDP from it, directly pushes up the Official GDP numbers, so for government politicias housing inflation is a wonderful way to create fake GDP Growth (fake because house prices going up by mere price inflation isn't really actual wealth - i.e. the "Product" in GDP - being created) which they then parade all over the Press as being the result of their great work in government.
• It makes their very wealthy and very thankful friends even more wealthy and they'll be very thankful to those politicians. Lot's of thankfulness available from the Owner class for people who pass measures to make their Assets worth even more, from being welcome to the most luxurious events all the way to millionaire payouts in the Speech Giving Circuit, Non-Executive Board memberships and gold-plated "Consultancy" gigs.

Server-side checks cost processing power and memory hence they need to spend more on servers.

Client side kernel-level anti-cheat only ever consumes resources and cause problems to the actual gamers, not directly to Rockstart's bottom line (and if it makes the game comms slightly slower on the client side it might even reduce server resource consumption).

If Rockstar's management theory is that gamers will endure just about any level of shit and keep on giving them money (a posture which, so far, has proven correct for just about every large game maker doing that kind of shit) then they will logically conclude that their bottom line won't even suffer indirectly from making life harder for their existing clients whilst it will most definitelly suffer if they have more server costs due to implementing server side checks for cheating.

I played WoW right when it came out, on a PvP server.

There was already a subset of the crowd just like there back then - some people rushed game progression to have higher levels as soon as possible only to then hang out in beginner areas and "pwn" significantly lower level players.

That's around the time when the term "griefer" was coined.

In these things the real difference is how the servers are structured rather than the human beings: if the architecture is designed so that there is some way to filter players (smaller servers with moderation or some kind of kick voting system that bans repeat offenders), griefers end up in their own griefer instances griefing each other and the rest can actually play the game, otherwise you get a deeply beginner (or people with less time, such as working adults) unfriendly environment.

As somebody else pointed out environments were people run their own servers tend create those conditions at least for some cases (basically if there's some kind of moderation) whilst massive world centralized server environments tend to give free right to people whose pleasure in a multiplayer games derives mostly from making it unpleasent for others (in game-making, griefing is actually recognized as one of the 4 core types of enjoyment - along with achiving, exploring and socializing - people can derived from multiplayer games)

Actually, if you want to take what I said seriously, cooling liquids just have a high termal capacity and decent or high termal conductivity as well as being at the liquid stage at the temperature range they're supposed to work in: a cooling liquid by itself it does not cool anything, it just absorbs heat from the environment on one side of the circuit, carries that heat somewhere else and releases it to the environment there and after that it circulates back to absorb some more heat and so on - the name "cooling liquid" is somewhat deceitful since those liquids work by transporting heat from a hot side to a cold side rather than making things cooler by their mere presence.

There are plenty of combustible fluids which fit the criteria and could be used as liquid coolants. Whether it would be wise to use a combustible liquid (worse, one which would burn at a high enough temperature to melt, or at least to soften, steel) for cooling computers is an entirelly different matter altogether.

The idea of a cooling liquid that's combustible is actually the "it's absolutelly possible" part of my post and not the "stupid" part.

That's not how AIs are trained.

In a session they're responding to what you wrote before because they have a long buffer of context for your session, but that's just temporary and doesn't get fed back to into anything permanent.

By a curious turn of life, I have enough technical expertise in the right areas to be able to design the software and most of the hardware turn a lot of my home smart like that in a safe way were I'm fully in control of it all (no 3rd party involved) ... and I can't be arsed, for very much those reasons.

I mean at one point when I was playing around with microcontrollers I was looking for ideas of things to do with some neat microcontrollers which are cheap and have built-in WiFi support and I just couldn't find anything worth the trouble, for pretty much the kind of reasons you list.

Sure, lots of things can be done which are "cool ideas", just not stuff were the whole "remote controlled from my tablet" actually significantly reduces the effort in doing something without introducing new problems (i.e. it would be a whole lot of work to get my apartment door to automatically open when my face is detected outside and then the thing has a non-zero rate of failure even I I train the AI really well, so when it fails I would be stuck outside hence I would still need to carry a key around, so in the end it's really just less hassle not do it and to keep opening the door with my key), plus often the problem is that once you add "remote control" to a device's design you just make it consume a lot more power, so now it has to run from mains power rather than run from some batteries that will last for a year or so.

The maximum home automation I ended up doing it is automated plant watering and that stuff has been designed without remote access exactly because it can run from 3xAAA batteries for a year even though it actually has to power a water pump which when it's running does consume a fair bit of power (but it only runs when the soil on the vase is not humid enough, which is so seldom it averages out to very little power). Sure, it would be "cool" to read the humidity sensor from my tablet and activate watering remotely, but that doesn't actually achieve the point of of automated plant watering - making sure my plants don't die of thirst because I forgot to water them - whilst overall making the design worse because now it needs a lot more power and I don't have a design anymore where I can just replace the batteries once a year or so.

In more civilized countries, we keep a sledgehammer read to bash the printer with, rather than a gun.

I strongly suspect MBF is an actual Intelligence operation of the US Government.

It makes all sense that to control the information that people access in this day and age of people being able to read news from just about anywhere using the Internet and when there is widespread awareness of Fake News and similar opinion making mechanisms, for a state to set up and fund an intelligence op disguised as a "well intentioned group" to act as an "independent" (always without the transparency, clear processes and supervision to guarantee said independence) gatekeeper to all that information and tell people which information sources can be trusted and which cannot.

With such a scheme you can even get infiltrated agents in popular social media (such as moderators in high traffic places where anybody can be a moderator) to leverage that "well intentioned group's" image of "independence" to get both soft (advice bot) and hard information control mechanics in place (post rejection) determined solely by that single gatekeeper's decisions.

It doesn't even take a conspiracy, just a handful of individuals and some careful talk and image management to sway well intentioned people who aren't exactly trained in data analysis or counter-propaganda to "use these nice and honest people to protect our readers from fake news" - people seriously understimate just how much influence a person who is paid to spend all day gaining influence in open groups, who has done it long enough to be experienced at it, who has zero ethics or honesty and who has access to the level of resources a nation state can provide, can gain and then leverage.

By an amazing coincidence it's pretty much the same for people attending work meetings.

Nature is truly incredible.

As a general rule Romance (I.e. those derived from Latin) languages don't use the letters K, Y and W, so a common word such as the 2nd singular person of the present tense of the Italian verb for "understanding" is not going to start with a "k".

I'm not Italian and I definitely misspell Italian words when writing them, but that " k" in your attempt was the bit that felt really, painfully wrong to me.

At least back when I lived in the UK the Greenparty were the only national party which was Leftwing, though I believe nations other than England did had more mainstream left of center parties.

I was actually a member of the Greenparty until I left the UK following Brexit and at least the people in my local are were trully well intentioned people though quite naive (IMHO). Then again in the UK I worked for almost a decade in Finance - which was pretty much Sociopath-Central - so maybe it was me being significantly more cynical and skeptical than average rather than them being more naive.

They try really hard to make the difference de facto as small as possible whilst being loudly theatrical about how "different they are" to make it seem as big as possible.

It's why for example in the US you get loud outrage about some stupid teenagers posting a photo were they spell the N-word, but nowhere the same outrage about kids in poor inner city neighbourhoods not having anywhere the same chances in life as the rest because schools there are shit or having significantly lower life expectation because for poor people food is shit, houses are shit, healthcare is shit, even the mattresses they sleep on are shit - all of which are things which disproportionatelly impact minorities and are the mechanisms via which racism shapes lives and causes suffering 24/7.

Again and again make clown shows of morons being morons (and there are always morons) so as to avoid addressing the actual ways in which people are oppressed because those are all about money and one can't negativelly impact the wealth and what the priviledges it buys, and if there's one thing where both the Fascists and the Marginally-Less-Fascist are exactly the same is making sure the wealthy remain wealthy and can derive maximum priviledges of it, with zero concern for all those who must suffer for it to be so, minority members or otherwise.

Zero surprise in seeing the hard Neoliberals of New Labour siding with ethno-Fascists and silencing criticism of it even from their own party members.

For those who didn't follow it, some years ago the Labour membership elected an actual Leftie to lead the Party - Jeremy Corbyn - overthrowing decades of total control of the party by the New Labour faction (who are hard Neoliberals, not Leftwing, and whose policies were at one point deemed by none other that Margaret Thatcher as "my greatest achievement") and what followed was a massive slander campaign, mainly using accusations of anti-semitism anchored on statements from Israeli linked Jewish organisations, even at one point with New Labour faction politicians relentlessly keeping on the slander campaign during an election causing Labour to lose it, something they then claimed as being because Corbyn was "unelectable", until they finally managed to bring down Corbyn and restore power to the New Labour faction who promptly went on a purge of the Labour part of any overltly Leftwing members.

Fast-forward to present times and the Neoliberals who now control the Labour party have a huge debt to the Zionists, hence their support of their Genocide (and the recent "we're blocking some arm sales" announcement only "blocked" 20 out of 300 kinds, and was clearly just the the usual theatre so typical in UK politics)

Exactly.

You commonly get plastic protectors like that with UK plugs which have squarish metal pins with hard corners - example - but I don't remember ever seeing any such things coming with EU plugs, of which there are two two types but both with all pins having round tips - example.

This is consistent with the explanation that those plastic covers are to protect everything else from the plug pins, hence why they come on plugs whose pins have tips with hard corners that more easilly perforate or shred things but not on those with tips which are rounded.

In the specific example of this post, two of the pins are have hard corners and although the other does not, the plastic protector covers all 3 probably because it's just a more stable fit (and it looks better) if it slots in all 3 than in only the more dangerous 2 even if it's not doing much for the round pin.

The more under pressure they are, the sooner they lose it...

The main political difference between Neoliberalism and Fascism is the order at the very top of the power pyramid:

• Neoliberalism puts Money above the State and since in Democracy the State is what is controlled by democratically elected leaders, that means Money above Democracy.
• Fascism puts the State above Money, only it's not a democratically elected State.

For both the rest of the pyramid - I.e.citizens - are only there to produce wealth for the top.

Whilst it's much more obvious to people that Fascism wants to control them because the Fascist State cannot allow itself to be controlled by the populous via elected leaders, Neoliberalism keeps the vote as a sort of meaningless ritual were people elect "leaders" (and generally the "choices" offered are carefully selected) for an entity which is not the one that actually controls things so de facto the vote controls little or nothing and all the Neoliberals have to worryabout is to stop any politicians who would actually try to undo the Neoliberalist structure (which is why you see things like transnational Trade Treaties which require countries to practice elements of Neoliberalism, sometimes even including element such as "arbitrage" courts explicitly placed above all sovereign power including the highest courts of a land).