4dpuzzle @ tesseract @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I'm not an antivaxxer and certainly won't recommend going unvaccinated against such preventable diseases. But IMO, it's wrong to just brush off antivaxxers as stupid. There are two reasons for this. The first is that vaccination rates are dropping. That would mean that wise people are turning stupid. No - there has to be a different explanation, which we will get into later. The second reason is that we need everyone (except those who can't for medical reasons) onboard for vaccinations to work. Herd immunity is an important thing in vaccination.

Antivax sentiments, like any conspiracy theory, comes from a distrust in authority - be that the government or the bigpharma. One reason could be religious beliefs - religion always has something to mislead people. But another reason could be that these authorities are genuinely untrustworthy. In the US for example, you could be forgiven for thinking that the big pharma is out to make money from your ailments - sometimes getting you sick in the first place. The nexus between big pharma, hospitals and medical insurance companies are genuinely out to squeeze people. Big pharma gets rich out of other people's misery and the government just doesn't do enough to stop it.

In such cases, a healthy skepticism of big pharma and government is actually warranted. But there's no clear definition of what's healthy. And people often stray into the unhealthy territory, ending up with antivax and other conspiracy theories. Antivax is just a symptom of public and private institutions losing the trust of ordinary people. And while the doctors are often on the people's side, they're also part of the system. People's trust in them depends on their personal experience.

Sure! Take your own sweet time! We have plenty of it!

Somebody should just blast a hole on one of these ships the next time they decide to be a douche.

I guess greed and the lack of empathy aren't monopolies of billionaires.

It does. Imagine people with Asthma or COPD. Their deaths are not going to be attributed to pollution.

This isn't a wild fire. This is intentionally done by farmers to prepare their land for the next crop. The farmers know that the smoke is choking and killing people in Delhi. But they don't care because the winds carry the smoke away from them. There is a ban imposed by the courts against this. And they still don't care.

Is it just me who has difficulty trying to get to the crux of the matter? It felt like the articles spends too many words before reaching it.

Aside from that, I get the feeling that the headline is a bit clickbaity. The article doesn't give me the impression that anything new about the accretion disk and the jets were found. Rather, the scientists were able to partially validate their model against observations for the first time.

Am I reading this right, or did I miss something?

If it make you feel better, they could do it all with one closed loop and just use the ground as the sink.

I don't how that should make me feel any better 😀 . But I don't know if ground is a good enough sink for that.

They could then power it entirely off solar panels and Iron air or sodium batteries.

I don't think they're going to consider renewables for cooling alone when the entire operation needs enormous amounts of power that cannot be satisfied by renewables.

They’d cool their servers with the blood of children if it saved them money.

Amen to that! Like I said - perverse incentives.

can only assume you exclusively consume your entertainment on subway platforms

After Google killed all the competition with ad-free unpaid service for so long. Market manipulation with bait and switch.

but I like to support creators and live a comfortable life

Like I said - you're self righteous. You have no clue how much the creators and web as a whole lost due to the greed and treachery of this horrible company.

I’m not worth your top-shelf stuff, trust me. Save it for your English teacher.

You are not worth anything. So keep patting yourself on the back.

Please check again who started it. This is TERRIBLE moderation. I'm out.

But it doesn't have to be drinking water. Nuclear power plants, for example, often use 3 cooling circuits. The first two are closed loops, in order to avoid the release of radioactive nuclides. The coolant is condensed (using heat exchangers with the next circuit) and recirculated. The last circuit is often just river water or similar that's thrown out after use. Even the evaporated water isn't an issue, since it will fall back as rain somewhere. The atmosphere has a limited capacity to hold water vapor.

My real concern with AI isn't water at all. It's the energy usage. Water (not drinking water) is renewable. The bulk of the electric power supply is not. Perhaps someday, there will be technology to do the training with much less power. But today it's unsustainable. But the big players will keep doing it, since they make money off of it. The incentives are just as perverse as with the crypto mining industry. And just like crypto, AI is headed in a way where a few rich players have all the edge to become even richer, at the expense of regular folks.

There was an instance where Google used a GPL software (GNU units?) in their backend and didn't release the modifications because they were technically not distributing it. So yes. It supports your suggestion of using AGPL where its purpose is not immediately apparent. It's a good thing that people are starting to accept copyleft licenses after the anti-copyleft tirade promoted by the industry.

You know something went seriously wrong when people start rooting for Internet Explorer. Can we go back and reset?

That's where Google succeeded. They bloated up the web standards so much that developing any of the alternatives to the required level is extremely hard. I doubt that even Google can create an alternative to chrome from scratch.

At this point, the only way for any of these to succeed is for the vast majority of people to actively avoid chrome.

Exactly! In fact, that was the original free software MO. The whole maintainership shenanigans became a thing after companies started exploiting it for free labor.

GPL code can be used in proprietary products as long as it is not distributed outside. There are a lot of such use cases.

The main driving force behind use of proprietary software in educational institutions are the software companies themselves. They have an incentive in it. When the students graduate and join the workforce, their employers are more likely to choose the software that these new workers already know. So it's like an investment for software companies to get their software into the curriculum. They spend considerable money and effort into it. Regular people stand no chance in pushing for free software - mainly because most of them don't even care.

You sound like you use Brave.

You assumed wrong.

But if someone offers me an entertainment service at a price, I pay, or don’t use it.

Oh boy! Another one with the comprehension skills of a mole rat! Where did I say don't pay the artist? What I don't like is the pimp middleman in between.

You’re not some noble pirate, you’re just a cheap ass who wants to consume other people’s hard work for free.

Says the shill who parrots the words of an abusive and corrupt corporation. Go look at the mirror and call them cheap ass. You are just a self-righteous idiot who helps monopolies gain control over ordinary people, including the artists you supposedly support.

For everyone who feels righteous by paying YouTube for content, here are some things to consider:

1. A part of your payment goes to Google - who is involved in unethical and often illegal subversion of privacy and user rights on the internet by corruption of the very foundations of the web.
2. They're coming up with their 'content is not free' argument after they've killed off all their competitors. They're in a position to demand because they played a bait-and-switch and succeeded in it.

I'm not against paid services, and especially not against paying the content creators. But when you pay a crook for their services, you bear responsibility for their actions.

Congratulations on doing your part in helping a filthy spyware company ruin the web for everyone with their corruption of browsers and the web standards.