MrVilliam @ MrVilliam @lemmy.world

Posts

7

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666

Joined

2 yr. ago

This time, Biden is the incumbent. He would act immediately if they decide to try another insurrection. The only time I've ever seen police use less lethal weapons on a crowd properly was on January 6, 2021. Every other time, including current college protests, these weapons are being aimed directly at people in the crowd. These weapons can and do fucking kill people or maim them when aimed directly at them, which is why you aren't supposed to fucking do that!

January 6, 2025 will not be as interesting, thankfully. Lord I hope this comment doesn't age like milk...

Not just Thor, but Chris Hemsworth as Thor. My immediate assumption was that this was one of those foreign knockoff products that blatantly uses unlicensed shit to sell garbage.

How many warnings before it's okay to jail him? I want a number. Not from you because I know you're just spitting facts, but I just want somebody to draw a fucking line in the sand now so we can jail him when he crosses it. Because this is what, 12 counts of contempt he's been fined for? 13? How many times does the average person get fined for this before getting jailed?

Merchan is going way too fucking easy on the orange shit stain.

Can't I please have my drivers license back so I can keep working while I fight these vehicular manslaughter charges?

Same energy. Fuck him.

Because we're shoulders deep in late stage capitalism. It won't be long before we start seeing consumer scarcity. People are living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford much beyond basic needs. There are only so many hours in a day that people can work, so that's not stretching much further. We're rapidly approaching the breaking point. In a world with finite resources, a system seeking infinite growth will eventually collapse.

I mostly agree, except that I'm here because I left reddit. I can't speak for anybody else, but you can see my history here and compare it to my history there. It's been almost a year now and I'm not going back.

I'd like to think that enough people will get pissed off enough to make real change happen, but people think they have too much to lose and don't see how much they have to gain. In general, I mean. Windows doesn't really fucking matter lol. Netflix doesn't really fucking matter. The realistic course of action is to just vote with our wallets and hope that discourages overly shitty practices from these companies.

Hey!

Aw who am I kidding, I know my country's bloodstained history despite my public education. I wish I could say it was in our past and that we're better now, but we're literally funding this exact genocide. 🫠

I don't disagree with your point, but I think that the most important variable is how receptive the average person is to change. It takes a lot of discomfort for most people to want to make a significant change. Most people probably won't even recognize that Windows sucks because it's what they're familiar with and they probably attribute general tech improvements and new software with the OS because they don't know any better. So they see it as better in a lot of ways and only worse in a couple of ways. They probably also generally think that the only alternative is an overpriced Apple product. It wasn't until YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers that most people were even aware of the existence of ad blockers lmao. So I'm sure your average Windows user thinks that Linux means programming gobbledygook in cmd.exe and they would rather scroll Facebook. People are dumb and uninterested in the discomfort of learning things. Even if what they're learning is that there's not much discomfort because there's not much new to learn. You have to trick them by sneaking vegetables into their food. "You have a Samsung phone. That runs Android. Android is Linux. See, you're already using it." It's a fucking shock to me that Windows phones never took off.

But maybe the most important factor to Microsoft is the business world. It's obviously not unanimous, but a shitload of companies rely on the Office suite. Switching to something different overnight might be easy for some workers, but I'd assume a massive disruption in productivity until everybody got acclimated. There would probably need to be some kind of canned training thing to help workers with the transition, which would cost more money. In general, companies would run a cost-benefit analysis and ultimately decide that it really doesn't make much business sense to make that change when things are fine as is. Because in reality, Windows is fine. It's not bad enough for a business to burden a rocky quarter just because of some ads and a little jank.

The bad news for Microsoft however is that privacy and security could be getting called into question. Some businesses here and there might get worried about that, but it's the big Department of Defense fish that will drop them overnight because it's a matter of national security. In the same way that government devices banned tiktok years before considering a nationwide ban, government devices would not hesitate to dump Microsoft. Their greed could be their downfall. They're okay so long as the government and their big contractors keep running Windows.

This was my general takeaway. My laptop is showing it's 9ish year old age considerably. I picked up a used Steam Deck and I actually love everything about it except that it's really not powerful enough to replace my laptop. I'm interested in building a desktop, and SteamOS taught me that modern Linux is not super complicated, and now I know that it's not a huge pain in the ass to troubleshoot because the community isn't nearly as toxic as I was expecting. So unless I learn of an even better distro for general use, gaming, streaming, audio recording, and video editing, all for somebody who is experienced with Windows and not much else, I'm leaning towards Nobara.

The only real hurdle I have is that it's hard to justify dumping like $1200-1500 on a computer when I already have a PS5, Steam Deck, and gaming laptop. I really don't need it.

You're definitely right. Facebook got super shitty and most people didn't leave. Netflix got super shitty and most people didn't leave. YouTube got super shitty and most people didn't leave. Amazon's shitty video service got even more shitty, but Fallout was about to come out, so most people didn't leave and I bet they actually got more subscribers (but idc enough to look it up). It seems like most people have accepted that things just get shitty over time. Or maybe they're just not noticing the shitty changes? Idk. It's hard to look at our projected trajectory as a species and be left with much hope. There's good in this world, but it seems like none of it is coming from companies.

Source for profitability of nuclear over time

Idk much about that in particular but I can speculate based on what I know about the power industry and business in general. I think larger modular clusters (10-30) would be more common just because of the infrastructure needed. Sure, we might see instances of 1-3 units here and there, but I imagine that if a company is already going to the trouble of buying a plot of land and building a switchyard, getting water access and RO-EDI tech for it, cooling water of whatever type, n+1 redundancy on all equipment, radioactive waste management including on-site storage of spent fuel, etc while also welcoming the NRC and FERC and whoever else to scrutinize, it makes the most sense to have several units making money power. Like anything else, upping the scale makes the cost per instance go down. Nuclear in the US has a fuckload of red tape and permitting and oversight that cost a lot of money to stay on top of. There could be good applications for small clusters like closer to urban, more densely populated areas where land is expensive and the power needs are the immediate vicinity. Or in developing areas that don't have much power demand, at least not yet. There's no good reason why a small cluster couldn't replace the remaining coal plants. It's also completely feasible to throw some up at military bases or large university campuses for training and their own power needs. Big power will want to squeeze as many into as small of a space with as little maintenance requirement as they can get away with because everything they do is in the name of maximizing profits for shareholders. But for nationalized power like in France, it kinda doesn't make sense to build anything else right now.

Maybe the best part of SMR tech as I understand it is that somebody could get the land and permits and infrastructure set up for the end goal but just build a small percentage of the reactors at first, and then scale up later. This is cheaper to start, faster to build, and is a perfect proof of concept strategy to get investors excited at funding the bulk of the project.

How is this world news? Idc who this celebrity I'll never meet prefers to fuck.

I'll be a source. I worked at Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in MD for over 10 years. Because of the trend of shutting down nuclear, I shifted over to operating a combined cycle power plant. Calvert with 2 units did about 1800MW combined, base loaded 24/7 except for outages, and those were staggered so that when one went down for maintenance and refueling, the other unit was still throwing 900MW to the grid. My current plant has 2 gas engine turbines and 1 STG, and on a good day when we're fully up 2x1 with ducts in, we can hit about 800MW when it's called for. Balls to the wall in perfect conditions on a plant that's not even ten years old, we can't do half of what Calvert was doing and they've been operating since the 70s.

Imagine what modern nuclear tech could do. We should've been a step ahead of everybody with this.

I would. ROI takes longer, but they're super fucking profitable as soon as they turn a profit at all. They're generally base loaded 24/7 except for about 3-4 weeks per year for refueling outage. I'm 35, so assume 10 years to build and another 10 years before it starts profiting. I'm retired at 55. Sounds pretty good to me.

Edit: source in response to reply asking for it so they will find it :)

He's already ignored your requests to be more professional. You've already made it clear that his behavior is making you uncomfortable. I'm sure there's a code of conduct or similar somewhere that he agreed to that would prohibit this bullshit. Fuck him. Whatever happens to him is on him at this point.

Corporations are people, last I heard. Sounds like board members and executives should split prison time between them based on percentage of culpability.

And the one thing they want is to maximize profits. It's not that they want rivers and lakes to be polluted, it's that not polluting rivers and lakes costs more money than polluting rivers and lakes. And if the fines aren't higher than the difference, then they'll just keep doing it and pay their subscription fee.

Agreed. But conservatives have learned over the past 10-20 years that they can more or less just do whatever they want without consequence because 1/3 of the people will fight to the death for whatever they do or say, 1/3 is completely unaware and uninterested in politics and current events, and the final 1/3 is people like us who want consequences but we're too busy to do anything ourselves because survival is hard enough these days. There are a hundred things worthy of outrage and organized demonstration too, so which cause do we dedicate our summer to trying to fix? The right has an easier time because they just say "things used to be better" and then have one event where people complain about change. Pretty much everybody can identify with being pissed off that something used to be better until they changed it, and for some reason that's strong enough to get some pretty average people to sit at the table with Nazis. There's much more nuance and thoughtfulness on the left, so it's much harder to get unity.

Because conservatives can grow and maintain a reliable base to keep them in power, they feel no need to even pretend to be decent most of the time. They can just fervently choose their own selfish goals over what the Constitution or other rules and laws demand. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that we're rapidly approaching the era of post-democracy America. Some would say we've been there for decades already, but I think we're in for some dictatorial, executions-in-the-streets type of shit if Biden loses. So conservatives in power who like trump or even suspect that he may win or get into power otherwise have to weigh doing the right thing which could hurt their party and draw targets on their backs vs low/no consequence siding with trump.

"If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”—David Frum