tburkhol @ tburkhol @lemmy.world

Posts

1

Comments

606

Joined

2 yr. ago

Does he thin[k] drug manufacturer/dealer all come from mexico/canada/china?

Yes. That's the racism.

Less than a third of eligible voters voted for him, so it tracks. Close to half the country not voting suggests they understand tariffs, but either just fine paying 20% extra for everything or don't believe he'll actually do the things he's been most vocal about doing.

A key part of federating, at least notionally, is ease of migration. The local pub locks their customers because there's no alternative. Twitter locks their users because their "followers" aren't on the new platform.

The fediverse facilitates migration, all the way down to redirecting from the previous account. Doesn't look like there's a way to automatically update followers' following, and there probably shouldn't be, but follower count (including all of the inactive and bot accounts) is one of the tools commercial social media use to scare people into staying.

Exactly. I'm just here to say that regulation isn't a solution to corporate malfeasance - at best it is a patch until the corp lawyers figure out where the loopholes are or how to accomplish the malfeasance in a different way.

Sensors. Especially sensors in your living space where fans or other noise from the proper server would be distracting, or in a tight space - inside your HVAC, for example - where a proper server wouldn't fit.

Media front-end. Most of those SBCs are more than enough to run a kodi or jellyfin frontend, fanless for minimum distraction.

Robot. Low power requirement so it could be mobile; but there are lots of stationary possibilities. GPIO libraries are great for running servos and there's tons of libraries to facilitate.

For small businesses, a president taking power can immediately affect business. Small business owners make decisions based on their expectations of future, colored by their emotional state, so if they believe that a Republican President will be good for business, then they're more likely to order new machinery, hire an extra person, etc. In an ecosystem of small businesses, that optimism feeds on itself.

Happens in big business, too. S&P500 gained 3+% the day after election, which (if you don't believe the daily stock market is just gambling) presumably means that 'the market' expects 3% more growth out of all those companies, just by Trump's win being formalized. Stock price up makes it easier for companies to raise capital to expand, buy out competitors, etc

Neither of those things is "the economy," but they can feel like it, if you're close enough.

Who was that demon-sperm doctor? Close runner-up.

I can see that. If you just want to hang out in a space, then VR Skyrim definitely has some cool places to hang, but how long are you really going to spend in that Skyrim tavern?

When OP asks whether VR is a long-term option, that's what I think. My favorite 2D games I have 500+ hours, probably a half dozen of them; I can still go back to those, some 10+ year old, and sink another 50+ hours. The only VR game I have more than 50 hours is the mini-golf game that's glorified chat.

For me, VR as an experience has been really amazing. It's a level of immersion that's just indescribably better than anything 2D, but each of those experiences has had limited staying power, which I think is because the physical demands of VR constrain my playtime and focus. I can left-mouse-button all day, but my back gets sore if I stand for three hours. So I can handle beat saber because I treat it like a gym session, but the idea of VR walking 7000 steps to Skyrim's Throat of the World...just no.

It's not going to replace flat screen gaming. It's hard to be in VR for hours, especially when you have to manage battery life, but I've had a headset for a year or two now, and it's still amazing where it's good. I'm better with smooth moving, but I still prefer teleporting, for headache/dizziness.

Tried Skyrim, couldn't make it stick - VR just isn't right for massive open worlds. Halflife Alyx is amazing - it's the right scale for VR, the attention to manipulatable objects is amazing, and some of the puzzles just couldn't be done in 2D. Blade & Sorcery is good, too.

Games I keep going back to are Beat Saber, because I'm old and need something to make me stand up and move, and Mini-golf, which is mostly a focus for hanging out with remote friends.

RFK's version of the conspiracy is that vaccines are a scam inflicted by private pharma. Given his druthers, he would probably outlaw not just vaccines, but all corporation-produced medicine.

Money doesn't win the election, it's more of an entrance fee, and campaign financing is more complicated than just 'the campaign.' You have to account for PACs, party, and all the free messaging from sympathetic media outlets. Bernie pinned his hopes on going viral on social media, and mostly demonstrated that it's not a viable strategy, at least at the Presidential level. Might work OK for smaller races, like AOC, in a geographically small, relatively young district, but not nationally. Most people actively avoid political messaging, which is a fundamental problem if you plan to rely on organic distribution of a political message through social media. Especially social media controlled by billionaires that might be hostile to messages like 'billionaires bad, unions good.'

The reality of American political process is that it takes at least a billion dollars to run a Presidential campaign. (Thanks, SCOTUS) That kind of money doesn't come from unions, social activists, or proletariat donors. It comes from corporations and billionaires, and those people don't like revolution.

Until someone can demonstrate that you can get more votes with progressive, worker-friendly policy proposals than with a well funded propaganda machine, the DNC is going to keep chasing the less conservative billionaires. And no third party will even be relevant.

There's a lot more than Fox out there echoing the narrative that times are hard, inflation is killing you, and there aren't enough homes to go around. Wapo and NYT would happily recount Trump's claims that it's because immigrants are taking all the houses and jobs while Biden policies are making everything expensive. Doesn't matter if they follow up with long-winded explanations that his claims aren't true, because most people stop listening when they hear there's someone to blame.

Fun fact: in the boiling frog experiment, the frogs were 'pithed.' Jam a stick in their skull and scramble their brain.

Frog spinal cords have a lot of reflexes. They'll use one leg to wipe a painful stimulus off the other. They'll jump. But they accommodate pretty quickly and won't get excited enough to jump out of slowly warming water. Gotta have a brain for that.

Recounted here: https://archive.org/details/studiesfrombiol00martgoog/page/398/mode/2up

Original ref: Goltz, F. 1869. Beiträge zur Lehre von den Functionen der Nervencentren des Frosches. Berlin, 1869, p. 127, etc Which is actually online: https://ia801200.us.archive.org/15/items/b22344937/b22344937.pdf

Dems definitely lack a coherent, interesting economic message. Any new proposal - medicare for all, UBI - immediately gets sucked into a quagmire of details. Turning to Republicans for the votes they need to win in general elections has been such a consistently losing strategy that I have no idea why they keep doing it.

Meanwhile Republicans keep running on "You feel poor and it's Their fault," continues to resonate, for varying definitions of "Them," as long as GOP is out-of-power. It's simple. It feels good. It completely absolves them of needing any policy more complicated than "Get rid of Them." It's a winning strategy as much as the Dems have a losing strategy.

Look how tight the labor market got when COVID took a million people out of the workforce. Trump's talking about deporting 10 million workers and customers. You will absolutely see it, although it may be hard to connect the dots.

RAID is more likely to fail than a single disk. You have the chance of single-disk failure, multiplied by the number of disks, plus the chance of controller failure.

RAID 1 and RAID 5 protect against that by sharing data across multiple disks, so you can re-create a failed drive, but failure of the controller may be unrecoverable, depending on availability of new, exact-same controller. With failure of 1 disk in RAID 1, you should be able to use the array 'degraded,' as long as your controller still works. Depending on how the controller works, that disk may or may not be recognizable to another system without the controller.

RAID 1 disks are not just 2 copies of normal disks. Example: I use software RAID 1, and if I take one of the drives to another system, that system recognizes it as a RAID disk and creates a single-disk, degraded RAID array with it. I can mount the array, but if I try to mount the single disk directly, I get filesystem errors.

Treasuries are nice because they're convenient and low buy-in, but their yields are crap, sometimes a little above inflation, sometimes below. TIPS are a decent way to hedge the inflation risk, but (IMO) it's still really for people who are more worried about losing their savings than living off it. (i.e.: if you have, say, $1e8, you can live pretty comfortably off $1e6, even $1e5 in a lean year, so your rate of return doesn't really matter)

For me, personally, the limited bond exposure I have is all corporate and mostly junk, bought through my broker in the secondary market, with maturity 10-20 years out. Until fairly recently, junk bonds were the only way to get yields above 4%, and that's kind of my mental benchmark for gaining relative to inflation. One downside of corporate bonds is they generally have a $10k minimum.

That drop was when the Fed was raising interest rates to stall inflation. Interest rates up, bond values down. But the drop in VTINX was only 20% over all of 2022, where OP is showing 50% in maybe the first quarter.

Incidentally, the sensitivity to interest rates is why I don't like bond funds. If you buy actual bonds, you get the face value back at maturity, where bond fund are forced to mark them all to current market prices to calculate NAV. IMO, this negates the main "safe" factor in holding bonds.

You can't melt through snow or ice by spinning your tires.