admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

Posts

0

Comments

795

Joined

2 yr. ago

I like to imagine there are starfleet scouts with bullshit merit pips.

Microsoft outdoes every other (paid) OS including Chrome, Android, iOS, and Mac in terms of their longterm support, as far as I am concerned.

But Win10 is still the end of the line for me, I suspect. All the MS Account stuff deeply integrated into 11 is a bridge too far.

(which is free, but also doesn't get properly supported on older devices)

It's 100% Google's fault.

The recipe sites that would feed you the recipe right at the top are downranked in search because you don't spend as long on them.

By design.

Bitcoin has pretty much no incentive to make the transactions efficient. The load is distributed to other people (their customers), and their biggest customers have a perverse incentive to want the transactions to be as inefficient as possible in order to discourage competition.

Vista et al have to pay for their own transactions, so keeping it light is simple cost savings and totally rational.

What business model? Why does a messaging app need to be a business? And again, how is someone who doesn't have service supposed to be receiving/sending messages? Makes no damn sense.

Basically all bittorrent programs include allowing a peer to act as a tracker directly.

And now here I am, nostalgic for the good old days of having one chat app that could connect you to everyone over XMPP/jabber.

Sure, but you also just... don't have to do that. None of that is necessary fore core functionality of a messaging service, IF you stipulate that both devices must be online at the same time to ping each other.

The only thing you need is some very basic addressing service so they can find each other, and there are entirely P2P solutions for this that already exist and work without issue. See: bittorrent.

The ONLY drawback of having no server, fundamentally, is that the two devices need synchronicity. If they both aren't online at once, messages won't get delivered. Which is not a big deal for a modern smartphone given that most of them are online close to all of the time.

The difference is that there's enough unused capacity on your personal device to handle all the traffic any typical user needs to handle in a day many times over, for simple messaging. Likely, that load is so little it won't even affect your battery life.

To be clear, what I said is Spotify should be sending them their annual several dollar checks. They shouldn't be allowed to just trim away that cost entirely because the artists are small and Spotify wants more profits.

And what you're saying is that they shouldn't get anything because it's "just a hobby".

Fuck you, seriously.

Which really illuminates how fucked it is that they aren't paying those people.

These tiny artists earning barely anything are evidently a major enough cost sector that it's worth Spotify just telling them to get fucked. Playing their content is evidently significantly important to Spotify, but not enough to justify an annual check that isn't even enough to buy a beer.

I think removing the stigma is the best pathway towards decriminalization.

It's the exact opposite way around. Early car users were plowing their way through crowded streets, which were designed for and primarily used by human beings. The streets also had their fair shares of carts, horses, trolleys, etc., but they were primarily for people walking around.

The fledgling auto industry was under SERIOUS fire for the HUGE number of people getting killed by reckless, inattentive, unsafe drivers. Serious risk of cars being fully banned from many cities. So they ran a giant PR campaign to flip the blame. The issue wasn't reckless drivers carelessly charging around crowded streets and killing people -- it was actually the peoples' fault for being in the streets (that had ALWAYS been theirs to be in previously and which were built for them by them).

Worked great. Streets rapidly became places people were not allowed to use -- only cars were permitted, and nearly rent-free. A total hostile takeover.

Honestly, this is a real discussion we do need to have.

So many municipalities have over-expanded things like their water systems beyond the point that communities can afford to maintain them using the tax revenue generated by those communities.

Is it really doing right by a place to saddle them with a massive, expensive system they cannot afford to maintain? The federal dollars are going to show up, replace the system with a state-of-the-art one of at least the same size if not bigger, and then what? 30, 40 years from now, who will be there to give them the critical fixes they will still need? And in the meantime, their community will need to devote even more of its revenues (tax dollars) to maintaining the water system -- but that means neglecting other things that ALSO need spending.

The shit happening in Jackson and Flint isn't MERELY idiot government incompetence. It's also a sign of urban decay affecting so many municipalities. And it's going to get worse before it gets better at the rate we're going as a society because we keep build build build-ing while pretending cities don't need to be productive or have balanced budgets. But they do. Cities aren't national governments. They can't print money. If they issue bonds, they need to pay those bondholders back using real money collected from taxes. If they don't have the money to do city things, they just stop being able to do city things. And it doesn't look like bankruptcy when they cease to be able to do city things -- it looks like potholes and busted, toxic water systems.

That's not to say we shouldn't get these systems fixed so they aren't poisoning people. Of course we can't be poisoning people. But the discussion needs to be more sensitive than just "spend the money fix the shit no matter what it costs." Every city needs to think very, very carefully about how they may fix their systems to make them more sustainable in the future. No matter what they do, it is going to be financially devastating on some time horizon, but cities need to stop buying more infrastructure than they can maintain on debt and just shrugging the problem off to the next generation because that's how we got to this problem in the first place.

side-note:

My proposed solution is to get the richer areas of the city/state to help pay for the poorer areas. Everybody has skin in the game as far as the benefits, so why not the costs?

Backwards from reality. The richest parts of town, with the new, state-of-the-art infrastructure and the vastly inferior and less productive land uses typically generate a lower or even negative ROI compared to the poorer parts of the city. The poor neighborhoods more often subsidize the rich ones. Look at e.g., the case studies made by Urban3, which Strong Towns and other urbanist organizations often write up. The older developments are funding the spending on new infrastructure even while their own infrastructure is so neglected it is poisoning people. And just throwing federal dollars on it is not going to force a change in behavior in the cities.

Personally, I'd like to see any fixes for these old water systems attached to e.g., adding land use taxes (that would affect large lot R1A single family homes FAR worse than traditional (poor) communities) or dis-incorporating unproductive (wealthy) suburban areas from the city to fend for themselves (since they can afford it, unlike the productive, poor neighborhoods).

One of several reasons we have so much reported "human trafficking" cases in the US is because our current laws make it so that any time more than one person is working in an organization involved in sex work, it can magically get redefined as human trafficking even if no workers were forced to be there doing the job.

There have been cases of two sex workers that were roommates being accused of trafficking each other because the material aid of being roommates qualified them as traffickers. Or drivers employed by a sex worker to literally escort them to and from clients/airports to take them to and from the airport being busted as pimps and traffickers.

And of course, the whole thing about interstate travel turning sex work into trafficking is loaded with its own horseshit. It's just a reality for a sex worker that the "new girl in town" gets more business, so there's a huge financial incentive for the worker to occasionally do some business travel.

On top of that, when a brothel or organization gets broken up, frequently all the sex workers are offered deals where they have to say they were trafficked and go after the businesses organizers, seen as the "bigger fish".

For one layer worse, now hotels are being super, super hostile to "human trafficking" but really all their "warning signs" and policies are just meant to stop sex workers. So sex workers are forced increasingly to ply their trade in unsafe locations like cars / client accommodations instead of fairly safe hotels. Meanwhile, the hotels themselves ACTUALLY benefit the REAL human trafficking threat that we should be trying to address -- immigrant wage slavery. Because the hotels frequently are the ones subcontracting things like cleaning to incredibly shady sub-minimum wage exploitative employers that are doing actual trafficking-related stuff. So many of the very things that are causing REAL trafficking are using trafficking to attack sex workers for no reason other than puritanical bigotry.

There's infinitely more to say here, but I just can't do the whole thing justice. Here's a really good podcast episode on the subject that is sensitive and clear about how much nonsense there is in the current, widespread "trafficking" moral panic and how much harm it does compared to the good it preaches.

We do not need to legalize it to get rid of the stigma. Spreading and calling out stories like this for the dreadful, inhumane, closeminded bullshit that they are is how we get rid of the stigma.

It does look like literally every new construction highway offramp commercial strip in the country, though.

Especially in places where cities/counties have adjacent jurisdictions. It's one of the subtle-until-pointed-out signs of the pervasive US urban decay caused by building out more (especially road) infrastructure than an authority can afford to maintain.

Read a bunch of Strong Towns materials and you become very not-fun in the passenger seat of a car.

The country is ABSOLUTELY broken.

Even now there are people who look at a close election between Biden and Trump and genuinely think "Well, I don't like Biden, so I won't vote / will throw my vote away instead of voting against Trump."

You have racists, morons, and fascists voting for Trump.

You have irrational moron progressives who will refuse to ever vote for anyone with a D no matter how bad the alternative and no matter how much good that democrat has provably done.

And you have dispirited progressives just trying to get their peers to show up to the polls and do the minimum possible effort. We're seriously fucked because of this.

Intuit and H&R Block are the reason we have this depraved, inhumane, anti-consumer tax system. They've created the laws that make it necessary to use tax prep software. They should not be rewarded for this by getting business for that very tax prep software. Everyone should say no to TurboTax.

irs.gov/freefile

There are always a bunch of perfectly good competitors to them listed. Use those competitors. For most people it's totally free.