jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz

Posts

20

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537

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm just saying that one thing most politicians do not want to be seen to do is get rid of any jobs. This is why it's hard to get traction with it - it'll hurt them politically directly(people think nationalized health care is worse or bad), it'll hurt their campaigns (cause contributions), and it'll hurt them on "the economy" because they "killed lots of good jobs".

It's interesting to me to meet someone wholly anti jail. I think our "justice system" is anything but, and at least that's partially because we have a completely muddled idea about what we're even trying to accomplish - mostly because of all these different opinions.

It seems pretty clear that our jails are "technically" just this side of cruel and unusual punishment as defined by our courts. But it's all about punishment. Of course this assumes that retribution is a useful goal, and as you point out - it probably isn't.

It's also dubious that there's any deterrence effect from jail sentences. Lots of people believe there is, but the studies I've seen don't bear that out.

It's also pretty clear that jail is expensive and just as likely to make criminals worse rather than better, so from a societal perspective, there's a really good reason to re-think our justice system.

However, given our current system is about punishment and making victims and society at large feel better because "those who fucked around found out" - I would still prefer to see this guy get his to remind people we do in fact have laws and might enforce them.

I think it's because it'd end a lot of jobs and moneymaking opportunities. Imagine all those huge insurance companies just... not being needed the day nationalized healthcare happens. What about all those administrators who fill out the paper work in doctor's offices?

OTOH, it might also be what's needed to cool down the job market in the US.

It's also possible that the method of communication is just changing. I've found that often I have more trouble communicating in written form than conversationally, and I wonder if that's because of zoom and video essays, not to mention shorts / TickTok becoming more prevalent. I've also had my writing degrade just because I don't have a place or reason to exercise it as much. So what I'm writing is perhaps less comprehensible because it's more like a stream of consciousness.

Or more likely it's both - people don't do long form or even "hard" reading anymore, and so find more complex text incomprehensible.

Philosophically it's a horrible idea to me, being from the US. First, it's pretty against ideas of freedom and self determination. Secondly, and worse, is that conscripts often are basically an internal sabotage threat. Work to rule, no interest in anything but getting out, actively tend to hurt morale given their resentment, etc. Oh, and 1 year of training / 1 year of service is basically a little past basic training, so not really well trained for modern combat. See what Russia is getting with conscripts for instance. I suppose if you just want bodies to throw into a meat grinder it might work, but unless you have enough to take staggering losses to overwhelm better trained and higher morale troops - and you're willing to take those sorts of losses... the conscripts are just mostly a drain on resources IMO.

No mobile data access, or bad mobile plans?

Yea, this regular "surprise" that work computers are... IDK... owned by work and are configured as the owner requires... is so strange to me.

Yeah both insist on regulating medicine, but one wants abortion to be legal and bleach to not be medicine and the other disagrees on both points

But that's just a disagreement on the rules, not the overall system. My bugaboo is we often get the worst of both worlds with our regulation and sort of free market in medical stuff. Here's 2 examples:

1. I had a refill of a prescription, went to my normal pharmacy. I went to pick it up, pharmacy was closed. Tried again on the next day, found out it's just closed indefinitely. Ok, so I call the other one of the chain in town, same issue. Cannot talk to anyone about pharmacy, the answering system refuses. Ok, no problem, I call doctor, ask to send prescription to other chain in town. Then I call the other pharmacy - they can't fill it because the first chain that has closed their pharmacies in town has "taken the prescription fill". Ok, I call insurance company. No dice - the chain that won't talk on the phone or in person about prescriptions has to release the "fill" they HAVEN'T DONE. I ended up having to have a friend go to a location 45 miles away that was still open to pick up the prescription.

Now, if this wasn't so screwed up, I could have just ordered on Amazon, and whoever filled the prescription couldn't count it as filled against Insurance till they actually shipped or handed me the prescription - you know, like when I get my car repaired under insurance, or order a book!

2. I have a CPAP. There is a company that provides supplies that you need every 6 months or so. This company only exists because for some reason our government thinks regular people can't figure out a CPAP on their own (IDK if you can't tell if you're breathing or not, I don't think the government can help). And for some reason regular pharmacies and mail order ones cannot fill tubing and mask orders. Or well, they can, but not via insurance, so what is $17 to me via insurance is $150 retail. (This is also bullshit IMHO, and if we didn't have whatever regulation is going on here, similar tubing and the like - like elastomer respirators - it'd likely cost sub $30 retail). This company is so incompetent that if they weren't propped up by "you don't have a choice", they'd have been out of business years ago. Instead, we get to plead with them to figure out how to fill an order.

Yea. Though, TBH, given many things I've seen, I'm not really sure how bad it is to just ... eventually... not pay off the debts.(In the US) Like, yes, it'll hurt your credit - but even bankruptcy clears out in 7-10 years from what I understand. Just not paying off some credit cards?

So, if you're young enough, that might well not be a big deal, you can wait it out being poor just like you are now. If you're old enough, you probably don't care - one hopes you're not looking for a big loan at 80. And I also wonder - you know - on unsecured debt anyway - what is going to happen? I suppose if your total is high enough they might garnish your wages. But OTOH, many times it's just avoiding debt collectors, which usually is just not reading that mail, and not answering unknown phone numbers. You know - daily life in 2023.

I'm not going to suggest you default on your debts (unless it's in the context of dying without anything in your estate to go after), but I know of plenty of people who manage to go through life for decades basically paying very small amounts to keep foreclosure and tax auctions away, and otherwise just don't pay bills. The downside is they can't get loans, and don't have spare money - but it depends on where you are currently too - maybe that's just current life anyway.

I have trouble saying the Democrats are overall authoritarian around guns, at least in terms of what's getting proposed in the government as bills etc. Unless you count the current sort of rules around driving authoritarian in the states - because most of the proposed rules are similar to driving rules.

And both parties are functionally authoritarian around medicine - it's regulated to heck and back, often to the detriment of people, though I can't say if the balance is saving more than it's harming.

The problem IMHO is just that you need a different app for each cities cab companies. That's great if you were living in that city and regularly taking cabs. I don't know what the percentage is, but at least for me, I only take cabs when I'm travelling, otherwise I drive my own car. I like having one or two apps, and I don't have to find, sign up for, and configure an app for each city I go to.

Note - this is actually a bigger issue, not one that the cab companies can necessarily fix - but I think PayPal is doing the best here in having a "checkout with PayPal" on random websites and I don't have to do anything but log into paypal. I'm still surprised it seems like no one else is really doing it. I've very occasionally seen Pay on Amazon, but I don't recall if in those cases I still needed to create an account on the website etc unlike the newer offering from PayPal.

Where's American Express, Visa, Mastercard, Zelle, Venmo, Cashapp, etc or even another new offering that just makes it as easy as PayPal does to have your "Pay online / in the app" account that if you do it gives the seller the payment (without exposing your actual card number), and address if needed for shipping?

You don't even need 10k employees, I see it make sense with ~450 employees if you also have a decent IT team and funding. The issue is most companies can't see the need to keep things they own up to date - there's always a temptation to "just put it off a year" to make the budgets look better, till they hit near catastrophe with being 5+ years beyond reasonable. The cloud "forces" them to put in update, maintenance, employee overhead etc up front and forever. They just pay a premium for that service IMO.

I used to think it was kind of stupid, but then I realized - companies hire consultants at exorbitant rates to help them do things they don't have the in house skills for - so really - building that into the overall cost might still be a wash. The expensive part of Cloud IMO turns out to be needing training, consultants or new employees with different skills to manage it, which all charge more than traditional on prem because cloud is still the current ?fad?. And the unseen costs of screw ups by the cloud provider themselves losing data, being down, or having a security breach that affects you - and you're completely out of the picture with remediation or even knowing what might be a risk.

I still believe there's a huge markup though. Look at premium Usenet providers - they store something like 1200 days of the posts (minus DMCA takedowns) which I think run something like hundreds of petabytes of data. Yet they can provide the service, including transfer, for what has to be a niche market at rates around $10 a month. Presumably there's no "magic" or subsidies in what they're doing. Yet what they're doing is essentially what a big streaming service is doing.

Now you might say - well, yea, $10 a month - right around streaming prices. Sure, but you figure in the larger scale to spread the costs over. For Box etc, they're not even having the content costs that a Netflix would have (which I'll admit is a lot, and might well make up for the difference between just storage and transfer of Usenet) which makes them comparable in some sense.

Even if you say that well, Usenet gets multiple companies cooperating in their competition and storing the same data so they get some redundancy for "free", compare to backup providers like Backblaze at $7 a month for unlimited storage (unless you're on Linux, then f**k you, so I don't use them, but still). Or Jottacloud that runs around $100 a year for 5TB soft cap 10TB hard cap.

I still think there's a mix of a lot of markup, and people not actually looking much into competition - I know people who don't cross compare.

I tend to think this will play out as a tech demo if it happens. At least initially. Then we'll probably have the same split people have over all the other AI art - some people will love it for cheap content, others will feel it's completely "fake" (whatever they mean by that), and some will pay extra for "human made" stuff. Similar to furniture and other mass produced vs hand made ...

The part that's interesting to me is for characters more than actors - but as someone else said - the AI also needs to emulate their style and such for it to be a compelling "performance". That said, I believe it'll be possible if there's enough pre-existing content to train on. GPT already can create written content "in the style of" well enough to be amazing to most average people.

What's interesting is how much these will be used followed. I'm thinking to many of the franchises - like Star Trek - where they've re-cast the characters, but current writing is so... let's say different.... that it still doesn't' really feel like the character. I'm not attached to Shatner - I don't watch shows because he's in them. I do like his portrayal of Kirk in the TV show and movies. But there's the current Actors (like when Chris Pine did his movies) don't like to "do an impression". Pine can and a good one - there's a SNL skit where he actually does a Shatner impression, and it was very on for the character IMO.

Are the current actors right? IDK - we don't usually get any sort of A/B testing for the wide public. That said - given the fan backlash on the newer franchise productions - there's a viewership who presumably would like a full recreation. Ahhh, but the other critique would be - it's not just the current actors, heck, many are excellent - it's the writing. I'd argue that's (like I said above) easier to do with current AI - if the producers and studios let an AI do an actual "in the style of" script.

What's my point? Hmmm, I'm actually interested in more affordable creation of new content in franchises that I liked, to the extent it actually fits with the existing content. I think we need to separate the characters from the actors - much like animated characters have been.

If only they hadn't gone Creative Cloud, which sucks. Or Acrobat Reader past version 8 or something.

Presumably you would rent a special vehicle for the 2% of drives. Of course that's still inconvenient, and I don't know where the crossover for others is.

For an individual there are a lot of factors, and I don't know all of them because I have never owned an EV or even a Hybrid.

That said, if I could get rid of stopping at gas stations and oil changes, and have it cost less per mile, those are all plusses for me. But I still weigh it against the still much higher purchase price, and need for electrical work that would probably cost a lot, or 110v charging which would be slower than I'd like.

I also don't really want to have a "worse fit to me" next car just to get an EV. I think EVs keep getting closer, but I am still 50/50 if they'll be there when I'll need a new car in 5 years.

The Wounded Sky (IMO better across the galaxy instant drive story than Discovery) My Enemy, My Ally Doctors Orders The Invasion series Uhuras Song Black Fire The Romulan Way Yesterday's Son Time for Yesterday

There are apps that can make white noise while using 0 network really. If I was Spotify I'd write a library into the app that detected white noise and stopped streaming, and just turned on the local generator in their app.

Not to be an idiot - but where should people post this stuff? I mean, I do find it interesting occasionally, and like to see what other's think, not so much complaining that it was posted at all.