sailingbythelee @ sailingbythelee @lemmy.world

Posts

9

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684

Joined

2 yr. ago

I used to trust HCPs, but I know many of them now and have heard them shit-talk and judge their patients for mental health issues and drug use (among other things). I would NEVER, EVER tell a doctor or nurse about any form of drug or alcohol use now, or any kind of anger issues that could possibly be interpreted as aggressive. Especially not in a hospital where everything gets recorded in an electronic chart and may be used against you in the future. Fuck that.

Definitely. The first couple seasons of BSG are almost as good as Babylon 5. Though neither of those is quite as good as Firefly.

That's what I have, but she likes the slim new hotness, and really prioritizes battery life. She isn't worried about Linux performance, though, because she doesn't use it, lol.

Oprah? Did AI get so advanced that it invented a time machine and sent us back to the 1980s? Next you'll be telling me that Phil Donahue is back.

I think you are misunderstanding the nature of the conflict. The war is between Iran and Israel. Gaza is just one tiny battlefield in the larger war. Iran and its proxies don't want to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Cui bono? Iran and its proxies, that's who. Kamala Harris knows this. She isn't stupid and she is well-advised by experts. You and your fellow protesters aren't helping at all, you are just making her job of defeating Trump harder. Wake up, my friend.

Hezbollah and Hamas are Iranian proxies that have wrecked Lebanon and Gaza respectively. Hamas's murderous attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 was all about creating chaos, provoking Israel, and undermining the Abraham Accords. It wasn't about solving the problems of the Palestinian people, it was done to further Iran's "Axis of Resistance" goals. In that sense, Hamas's October 7 operation was very similar in nature and purpose to Bin Laden's 9/11 plan, and Israel is responding much the same as the US did back in the early 2000s against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Iran and Hamas started the current clash with the purpose of provoking Israel into a drastic response in Gaza. Gazan civilians are caught in the middle, but if you think it's Israel's fault, you are falling exactly in line with what Iran and their proxies intended.

The Russians, for all their faults, have a well-developed sense of realpolitik, and they have a term for people like you and your fellow protesters: useful idiots. I prefer the term "naive but well-intentioned", but there is quite a lot of overlap in this case. That "naive but well-intentioned" outlook is fine, even laudable, most of the time, but it is quite unhelpful at this moment when the competition between Harris and Trump is so close.

The Middle East is strategically important, so the West can't just ignore it. But it doesn't make sense to get emotionally involved in what happens there. The protests against Israel do not make sense to me given the wider context in the region.

I know it isn't a popular position right now, but I believe the Israelis are correct in their assessment that Hamas needs to be thoroughly crushed. True, it is only a short-term remedy because Iran will simply fund another generation of jihadis, but it may give Israel another decade or two of relative peace. Hamas only wants one thing and that is to destroy Israel. Hezbollah is similar and also needs to be crushed and Lebanon liberated, but that is a more difficult job that'll have to wait. Both Hezbollah and Hamas are so thoroughly entrenched in their ideology and, more importantly, in a black market economy, that they will never become legitimate state actors.

So, how does the situation with Iran and their proxies get resolved? Peace processes have been tried for decades only to be scuttled by extremists. The West has sanctioned the hell out of Iran and yet they are still able to supply their proxies with tens of thousands of rockets. Protesters say that Israel needs to give the Palestinians their own state and then the hostilities will end. Yes, that's a nice goal, but I don't believe for a second that Iran will stop fomenting violence against Israel no matter how many concessions the Israelis make to the Palestinians. Does anyone, in their heart of hearts, truly believe that Iran will ever stop funding terrorism against Israel and the West as long as the Ayatollahs are in charge? Will any amount of justice for Palslestine appease the Ayatollahs? I don't think so.

I hate to say it because war is the worst way to solve conflicts, but I suspect that the Middle East will remain a violent stalemate until the Ayatollahs are removed from power.

Interesting. I've got a fast internet connection and a server running 24/7 with Transmission and 9 TB of hard drive space. I run it behind Gluetun/NordVPN to avoid those copyright strikes. My setup has been extremely successful so far. I only delete torrents once they hit a ratio of 1.5 at the moment, though I could extend that if necessary. I don't use cryptocurrency, though, and don't intend to start. I assume my setup would be somewhat valuable to a private tracker. Do you have any recommendations?

Edit: oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I, too, only use bittorrent to share Linux ISOs and other non-copyright material. Definitely. Piracy is bad.

I thought I read that private trackers are hard to sign up to. Or that you have to prove yourself somehow and people get stressed about maintaining their ratio. Is that true? If so, that doesn't sound fun.

I don't live in America either, but I went on a cruise once and there were many Americans, including a black American couple who were very obviously urban. By which I mean, the wife wore high heels and a tight jeweled mini-skirt on a sea-kayaking excursion...clearly signalling that she hadn't spent much time outside of a city.

Anyway, I was shocked when they spoke exactly like The Jeffersons, with all the exaggerated whooping, non-stop vernacular, and stage-like mannerisms. It was so over-the-top that I honestly thought they were play acting, but after chatting with them for a while I realized that was just how they were. They were very nice people and clearly having a great time.

Yes, the article makes the point that Signal needs to compete for talent with the rest of Silicon Valley. I get that. And we've all heard about the nearly unfathomable amounts of money that tech companies throw around. When you break it down to individual salaries, though, and see that even normal people in normal jobs are making a million dollars a year between salary and stock... well, I think it really exposes the spectacular wealth inequality that we have allowed to fester. I mean, sure, shelter costs may be high in Silicon Valley, but the cost of other goods remain about the same. A $50,000 truck that an average person in Nebraska might have to save for years to afford is barely a rounding error for folks making a million a year. I'm no economist, but it does seem like there are consequences for this kind of ever-growing wealth inequality.

It is also absurd on its face for a multi-millionaire developer to place a "Donate Now" button in an app and talk about being a non-profit to tug at the heart strings of people who make one-tenth of what the developers are making. It's feels like Scrooge asking Tiny Tim for a donation.

Anyway, I don't blame the developers for this absurd situation, and I do appreciate Signal, and Meredith is clearly a cool person who is fighting the good fight against big tech surveillance. But every once in a while an article like this reminds me how deeply fucked up the world is. It seems we are approaching pre-French Revolution levels of economic disparity, and maybe it helps explain why so many working class people are pissed off.

This is a very rude question, but on this subject of being lean, I looked up your 990 and you pay yourself less than some of your engineers.

Yes, and our goal is to pay people as close to Silicon Valley’s salaries as possible, so we can recruit very senior people, knowing that we don’t have equity to offer them. We pay engineers very well. [Leans in performatively toward the phone recording the interview.] If anyone’s looking for a job, we pay very, very well.

So, I googled their tax filing out of curiosity. It's true that Meredith pays herself much less than her engineers, which is great. What I was rather shocked to see is that they pay their software developers enormous salaries. They're listing developers making over $400,000 per year, with their VP making over $660,000 per year. Now, I'm all for the value-creators making more money than the CEO. I just had no idea that software developers make that kind of coin. I was thinking of donating to Signal, but I'm kind of weirded out by those astronomical salaries.

To be fair, it's because US politics at the moment is a train-wreck in progress and its hard to look away. Or, more accurately, the US news portrays US politics as a train-wreck in progress, with civil war and right-wing dictatorship just over the horizon. Both political parties and the whole media establishment are literally spending billions of dollars to attract eyeballs, so the drama of US presidential politics is off-the-scale and the whole world is watching, not just Canada.

Canadian politics at the moment is a snooze-fest by comparison. However, when crazy US-style drama does go down in Canada, like when our COVID trucker convoy noisily occupied Ottawa for a few weeks, we were glued to that instead.

For Americans, you can think of Canada as being like Minnesota. Sure, we get a dramatic event every once in a while, but mostly it's boringly reasonable, center-left, earnest, and low-drama.

I've got a 2015 T540p with integrated graphics. It's fine for low-spec gaming. I only run Linux-native games and haven't managed to get any Windows games running in compatibility mode yet. Here are the games that have "just worked" for me so far.

Dwarf Fortress

Cataclysm: Dark Day Ahead

Darkest Dungeon

Baldur's Gate 1 and 2

Caves of Qud

Unity of Command

Stardew Valley

Planescape: Torment

Shovel Knight

If that's the kind of retro gaming that floats your boat, an old Thinkpad is just fine.

I've had this game on my wishlist for years. Maybe time to take another look.

Hold up there, cowboy. Hawaiian pizza is Canadian cuisine, not American.

When I'm in bed, my cat will walk up to the side of the bed and meow. I reach down to stroke her and she walks away. Then she comes back and meows again. So I reach down to try to pick her up. Walks away again. Okay, so she wants me to follow her, right? Maybe she's hungry, wants to go outside? So I get up. But then she doesn't go anywhere except the foot of the bed. Then she let's me pick her up and put her on the bed. But then she quickly walks to the end of the bed and acts like she's going to jump down. Then I have to make a big production of making a spot for her, patting the bed and speaking soothingly. Then she lies down. This little game happens every night. She has me trained.

Years ago, I was hanging out with a manager of finance and asking a few basic questions about finance. After a little while, i guess she got tired of the conversation because she handed me her old finance textbook.

Anyway, I was mostly interested in the foundational ideas of finance, not the details, so I went away and started reading the introduction. It turns out that the introduction was very short, no more than two pages. It was extremely well-written, simple, and to the point.

The foundational idea of modern finance, according to this standard textbook, is very simple and highly reductionist: the one and only goal of finance is to maximize shareholder value, and share prices are the ultimate way that goal is measured. I've never seen a whole discipline reduced to such stark and prosaic terms with absolutely no attempt to articulate ethics or justify it in relation to some wider public good.

This is so true. My own daughters, who I raised from birth, and who I tried to inculcate with good sense...yes, even they....they tolerate ads. I know, I know. It is hard to believe. But I have personally witnessed them watching Youtube ads with apparent interest. That was a hard day.

Trudeau is our Biden. He's an old news incumbent and he's got to go if we want any chance of beating snide Skippy. Trudeau cannot possibly have missed the way Biden bowed out and made way for new blood, and how that has energized the left and moved the needle with swing voters.

The same thing could happen with the NDP, if Singh would bow out. Of course, if they both pull a Biden, it might split the vote even worse. So, I guess we'd better hope that the NDP ditches Singh, but that Trudeau, unable to bear the thought of living in an empty house without Sophie and the kids, desperately clings to power like a madman.