Microsoft’s new Xbox Mastercard includes points you can redeem on games
I was really critical of Microsoft's announcement of their plans for financing the Xbox Series S/X. Financing a video game console. Like what the fuck? And here we are, at the next logical step.
For those looking, the video is about Rajneeshpuram. But you can also find a well-done Netflix documentary on it.
One of my favorite Down The Rabbit Hole videos. Too bad it's not on Youtube anymore...
I think that's an image caching bug.
You're right, I didn't think of that, but that's another great example of how much contempt Musk has for his employees, and how he can ensure their loyalty: "do what I say, or I will have you deported."
"Millions, Billions, Trillions?" "Doesn't matter the answer's the same."
Hanlon's Margin of Error
It's actually fairly simple. If a user notices a post in their feed from an account they don't follow, they can simply click or tap on the three dot icon located in the upper right-hand corner of the specific post. This will open a drop-down menu.
However, if the post is an ad, this menu provides additional options. ... "Not interested in this ad," ... "Report ad" ... "Why this ad?"
You bet your ass that they are going to get rid of those options.
The bug is the feature. Firing 90% of the company doesn't just save you a ton of money, and doesn't just trim the fat or rot of a company. It removes any dissidents and skeptics who don't have total, unwavering, boot-licking loyalty. Even Musk fanboys were likely forced out just for questioning whether it was a good idea to fire 90% of them. The slightest hint of independent critical thinking is snuffed out by force, or leaves the company voluntarily when they see the writing on the wall, or they are merely unable to leave.
What else could that maneuver possibly produce except a small army of sycophants?
And then once you have those sycophants, it doesn't matter whether you make good or bad decisions, you will never ever be challenged on them. You don't have to worry about how your orders become reality or if you break any laws along the way, your gang of losers will make it happen and won't ask for a penny of overtime pay.
Hanlon's Razor is dead, at least as applied to Musk, because the malice and stupidity are one and the same.
EDIT: Consideration for H1B
You never got the criticism because it was not actual criticism, it was a malicious meme generated and amplified by the alt right to smear Biden.
I'm literally going to start at the Know Your Meme page and look up the people in the Spread section:
On February 17th, 2015, Redditor gaylordfocker uploaded a photograph of Biden whispering into the ear of Stephanie Carter
https://old.reddit.com/user/gaylordfocker/ (troll)
On February 18th, Redditor Bossman1086 posted a gif of the moment to /r/gifs.
https://old.reddit.com/user/Bossman1086/?sort=controversial (libertarian)
On November 22nd, 2017, YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson uploaded a video titled "Creepy Uncle Joe,"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PaulJosephWatson (the entire Wikipedia intro)
Regardless, it was never addressed adequately in the US.
A problem created by Trump.
(1) we’re totally behind on vaccination because (2) the issue was so politicized
Both problems created by Trump.
what’s still going on at the border
A problem created by Trump and continued by Texas's state government.
human rights being challenged EVERYWHERE
There are more conservatives EVERYWHERE than there are President Bidens ANYWHERE.
and his climate policy
Won't disagree here, he could do a lot more here.
A lot of your complaints are problems created by conservatives and criminals, that Biden hasn't been able to fix. He's not a progressive superhero and he was never going to be. He's a janitor, and I don't see any productivity in getting mad at the guy holding a mop. Yeah, I would have loved Bernie or Warren too, but with the double whammy of first past the post voting and billionaire conservative power-brokers, Biden was always going to be better than the alternative.
I feel bad OP, you're gonna be eating downvotes all day for an article you apparently didn't write. But I gotta ask, why even post it if you knew the author was insane?
I mean, Wheaton is an idiot. A vile idiot. So vile that he should have fit right in with the rest of the leftist troll mob on Mastodon.
Detached from reality.
Like most tree hugging liberal hippies, Wheaton is sufficiently vile, that he attacks his own mother and father, in public, which is something that in decent cultures, like Japan, you would NEVER do.
Hahahahaha oh man wow. This right wing weeaboo just made my night.
Nah, we're talking a timescale of minutes here, a few hours at best. New feature, no conflicts, ready to merge. Fetch, rebase, push. Out of date almost immediately. Fetch new commit, rebase, push. Minutes later, out of date again.
See what I learned is, you can't outpace the sole project owner and principal developer, no matter how many other contributors the project has. Especially if he gets paid to work on the project full time. How do you compete with someone who has direct push access, commits every half hour, doesn't check PR's, and mandates rebases for fast-forward-only merges?
So my takeaway was, you don't. They're just not that into the feature, why should I be? Leave the branch exactly the way it is until someone asks for it to be made ready. They get 3 chances. If they don't merge it after asking for it 3 times, I tell them to checkout the branch themselves and take over. If I get code review feedback 3 times, I ask for peer programming. If they can't schedule it or don't want to, tell em check out the branch themselves and take over.
If they've got better things to do with their time, then you bet your sweet bippy I got better things to do with mine.
Unfortunately I don't think your experience is unique. I've seen several open source projects suffer from cliquey, protectionist behavior. I've been on a project where I was told by the primary developer to rebase my PR branch onto origin/main or it won't get looked at. By the time I've done that, that same developer's already pushed a commit directly to origin/main, and I'm no longer up-to-date.
4/4 As God as my witness, I promise this is the last one. I just want to provide the links I used to formulate this... if we want to be generous we can all it a screed. I don't mind.
https://fxb.harvard.edu/2015/11/12/a-brief-history-of-national-id-cards/
https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/iq/204657-national-id-functions-worldwide/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listofnationalidentitycardpoliciesbycountry
https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/26/3384416/social-security-numbers-national-ID-identity-theft-nstic
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/voting-rights-national-id-card/619772/
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/sovereign-citizens-movement
Oh god... I didn't even get to talk about how I got sovereign citizen vibes from the EFF article, but I don't have the energy left to elaborate or edit it in... it just reads like libertarian concern mongering, that's all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitydocument
EDIT: aaaand there it is: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/31/23853618/x-privacy-policy-update-biometrics-job-history
3/? So here's my biggest beef with the EFF article. In school I was taught the most convincing arguments are made with synthesis - you have to both support your thesis and interrogate your antithesis. You may notice I haven't done that myself... guilty as charged.
I see the EFF has a lot of one-sided arguments for why you should oppose national ID systems... in fact they just tell you outright to oppose them. But I'm not easily convinced by a series of negative arguments with nearly zero analysis of the purported benefits of national ID's. This is the closest I think the article has:
After 9/11, many governments began collecting, storing and using biometrics identifiers in national IDs. Authorities justified these initiatives by arguing that biometric identification and authentication helps secure borders, verify employment and immigration, prosecute criminals, and combat identity fraud and terrorism.
...Maybe I'm just a certain kind of jaded or I'm just part of the wrong demographic, but whenever I see 9/11 being invoked, it's like a magic spell. It's such a universally terrible event that we can put it next to anything and taint it by association. "After 9/11, many video games began to feature 3D photo-realistic graphics." It's correlative, not causative. What else happened around 2000, 2001? Home computers became widely accessible? Google redefined the search engine? Yes, 9/11 is contextually important to the United States because it catapulted the PATRIOT Act through the legal process like a hot knife through butter. But was it also the catapult for "many other governments?" Or was computing power and data collection becoming more accessible, facilitating the collection of more information to increase the accuracy or security of preexisting national ID systems?
In fact the entire article reads as if it was written only for an American audience, and specifically a FUD-driven American audience. In the sidebar are short paragraphs talking (again, only negatively) about national ID systems in Argentina, France, India, and Kenya. Why is there no mention of Estonia, or Malaysia?
I'll admit this is personal, but I am not easily convinced by arguments that only focus on stopping something from happening, especially after it has already happened. And EFF's American-centric arguments ignore the fact that de-facto ID's are a problem elsewhere in the world. "Ireland's Public Services Card is not considered a national identity card by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection (DEASP), but many say it is in fact becoming that, and without public debate or even a legislative foundation." It's a form of American exceptionalism, as if we have nothing to learn and nothing to gain from seeing how other countries operate and determining if/how we could apply their systems, or improve on their systems, at home.
Yes, the article presents a lot of problems with a National ID system. So... let's solve some of them? "Administration of ID programs are often outsourced to unaccountable companies." Social Security isn't, so maybe we can create a public bureau to issue and administrate a freely available national ID. "Historically, national ID systems have been used to discriminate against people on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and political views." Alright, let's write and enforce laws that prohibit discrimination based on protected classes.
If we abdicate our ability to investigate and analyze complex problems, we don't make the problem go away. We just invite less scrupulous actors to attempt to solve that problem and exploit a lot of people along the way. We don't have a national ID system? The credit bureaus will co-opt the SSN. We don't have a virtual public square? Elon Musk will take Twitter and twist it into his image. Every problem we ignore, the ones where we eschew imperfect solutions in pursuit of ideological purity, is an opportunity to a grifter. If you don't trust the government to make a national ID... do you trust the free market more?
What's the cost of a national ID system? Privacy. Some freedoms. The government gets to collect more data about you. Build models of where you've been, what you bought, who you associate with.
What's the cost of not having a national ID system? A private interest can do all those same things, For profit.
2/? Hey, real quick. You know how on old SSN cards it says "For Social Security and Tax Purposes - Not For Identification." That was added in 1946 but removed in 1972. And uh... I definitely couldn't get my current job without providing my SSN, I couldn't open my bank accounts without it, and I couldn't receive retirement benefits without it. So...
If a national ID is required for employment, you could be fired and your employer fined if you fail to present your papers. People without ID cards can be denied the right to purchase property, open a bank account or receive government benefits.
...We're already there. Yes even the purchase property bit, because you get your credit checked for the mortgage loan. "... landlords, cable companies, cell phone providers, or even credit reporting agencies, which all habitually request SSNs simply because a number is more precise than a name. lt;lt; emphasis mine.) And our 9-digit, unencrypted social security number is not even that precise or secure!
Once biometric data is captured, it frequently flows between governmental and private sector users. ... Private sector security threat models assume that at any one time, one per cent of company employees are willing to sell or trade confidential information for personal gain.
We've already had the Equifax breach with SSN's. That wasn't a devious or disgruntled employee looking to make a quick buck, that was the entire organization choosing to skimp on security to save money. And no, I don't believe the CEO of Equifax when he says this was all to blame on one person. A failure that big is never the result of one individual, but a result of the entire institution full of people who failed to recognize and remedy the problem. So I'm in agreement with @Nowyn, we should be judicious about who can access your ID and set some consequences for them if they abuse or misuse that access. (I think it would help if we had cryptographically secure ID's, but that's an extra layer I don't want to jump into, I've ranted enough already.)
We already sacrifice freedom for security all the time. We already sacrifice privacy for identity all the time, from dating profiles to driver's licenses. We already have a national ID system, it's called Social Security, and it sucks. We're already there, so where do we go from here?
Alright, I'm going to be critical of this entire article, but in particular the paragraph you quoted, "Why You Should Oppose National ID Regimes." I have a lot of facets I want to tackle and no particular order in which to tackle them. There's no TL;DR... sorry, not sorry, but still kinda sorry. 1/?
Right up front, my philosophy is this: we sacrifice freedom for security all the time. It's not even an open question, the answer in reality is we do. Why are we only allowed to drive on one side of the street, ought I to be able to drive on the whole street, or whichever side I please? Well, we all agreed to limit ourselves to one side of the street to ensure we don't crash into each other. We stop at red lights. Why? A simple color cannot stop me from reaching my intended destination! Well we stop so we can let other people go first, and then we wait our turn. Why do we wait in lines? Why do we have customs, and rules, and laws? Why do we limit and restrict ourselves? Because we want to add some security to our lives, or at the very least remove one worry from our basket of worries. The restrictions we self-impose are all outweighed costs that we pay to derive some benefits. So this is the frame of mind with which I'm approaching this article.
First, most of this article talks about biometrics collection. Now my knee-jerk reaction is yeah, creepy! Why should anyone know my "fingerprints, iris, face and palm prints, gait, voice, and DNA?" But despite the article talking about biometrics for the majority of its length, it's not really about biometrics is it? It's about National ID's, and biometrics are just one method to create a National ID. We use other personal information to identify ourselves all the time. You have a Hinge or Bumble profile? What's on it? Your name, your gender, your face. When we get our driver's licenses, what's on it? Our names. Our height. Our eye color. Our birthdates. When you open a bank account, what do they ask for? Your Social Security Number...
https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-xbox-series-s-x-monthly-payment-plans-141958507.html
Ignore Engadget's braindead conclusion.