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chiliedogg

@chiliedogg@lemmy.world

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chiliedogg ,

Heck - even the letter is just a sans sarif Swastika.

chiliedogg ,

My one true MMO addiction in my younger days was City of Heroes, where I was an Empathy Defender (healer/buffer). I played pure support and never attacked enemies at all, because my attacks weren't strong enough to be impactful, and enemies would aggro me and kill me off in 1 hit.

When people asked why I didn't contribute to damage, I explained that staying alive and helping the other 7 people on my team to do 20% more damage and stay in the fight was a much bigger contribution than adding another percent or 2 to damage before I got 1-shot and the team wiped.

chiliedogg ,

Also black powder guns or ANY gun made before 1898.

chiliedogg ,

A breaker panel can be a kill switch in a server farm hosting the Ai.

chiliedogg ,

I've had way too many Windows updates fuck my shit up, so I wait as long as possible to update so they have a chance to fix what they broke by the time it gets rolled out to my machine.

chiliedogg ,

In this case, they absolutely did. They had a CDL in place specifically to comply with copyright law, and they willfully and intentionally disabled it.

The publishers also had arrangements with local libraries to expand their ebook selections. Most libraries have ebook and audiobook deals worked out with the publishers, and those were expanded during the lockdowns. Many of the partner libraries preferred those systems to the CDL because they served their citizens directly. A small town in Nebraska didn't have to worry about having a wait list of 3000 people ahead of the local citizen whose taxes had actually bought the license the Internet Archive wanted to borrow.

The Internet Archive held a press conference right before the ruling comparing the National Emergency Library to winter-library lands, but that's simply not accurate. The CDL they had in place before and after was inter-library loaning. The CDL was like setting up printing presses in the library and copying books for free and handing them out to anyone.

Under the existing CDL, they could have verified that partner libraries had stopped lending their phycical copies of the books and made more copies of the ebooks available for checkout instead of just making it unlimited and they'd have legally been fine, but they did not, and the publishers had every right to sue.

The publishes also waited until June to file suit: well-after most places had been re-opened for weeks.

IA does important work, but they absolutely broke the law here, and since they did it by intentionally removing the systems designed to ensure legitimate archival status and fair-use of copywritten works, they have pretty much zero defense. It wasn't a mistake or an oversight. And after reopening they kept doing it for weeks until they were sued and were able to magically restore the legal system the same day the lawsuit was filed.

chiliedogg ,

Their counter-argument isn't a legal argument. They're saying they did it because they think the publishers aren't being fair.

And they're talking mostly about format-conversion, which isn't the problem here.

You can absolutely make format conversions to digital for archival purposes. What you cannot do is them make a bunch of copies and give them away for free simultaneous use. That is not fair use. That's 100% piracy.

The CDL was built specifically to ensure that only one digital copy was on loan for each owned copy of the material because the IA absolutely knew that was the law.

chiliedogg ,

The biggest changes have been the social acceptance of homosexuality.

Looking at the question of people's perception on homosexual relationships in the GSS between 1973 and 2022, the percentage of Americana who view homosexual relationships as being "Not wrong at all" went from 10% to 61%. And for the first 20 years of that period, it pretty much stayed around 10%.

The question of homosexual sex itself has only been included 5 times on the GSS. The earliest in 1991 and the most-recent in 2018. In 1991 is was 11% and in 2018 was 55%.

In 1973, 1/3rd of people believed a gay person shouldn't even be allowed to speak in public.

The somewhat scarier number is reagrdining homosexual books in public libraries, simply because there's a slight uptick in banning them between 2020 and 2022, and while more-recent GSS numbers aren't out, we have been seeing lots of book-bans in the news...

Other fun stuff from the GSS:

40% of white reponsants were in favor of a law banning interracial marriage in the 70s, and - more interestingly - up until they stopped asking the question in 2002 more democrats supported laws prohibiting interracial marriage than Republicans.

Support for abortion "for any reason" didn't cross the 50% threshold until the Trump Presidency, and it's pretty much entirely a trend on the Democratic side. The Dem and Rep voters weren't that far apart until very recently.

chiliedogg ,

A lot of people don't consider the future even when writing helpful posts. I'm as guilty as anyone.

If you link the correct answer, the person finding your post in 6 years better hope the link is still good. That's the legitimate reason scholarly papers needs to cite specific book editions and journal page numbers instead of using hyperlinks in a bibliography.

If a copy of the book or journal can ba tracked down, the citation will still work.

It's also why online-only published journals are still often formatted like a book with static pages instead of websites. If you find a journal article that's important, you'll likely still be able to find an achived copy in PDF somewhere even if the journal stops publishing or they change domains or whatever.

chiliedogg ,

And now when you card expires, they just change the expiration date on your existing number a few times until it works to keep the subscription going, and that's somehow legal.

chiliedogg ,

All to take away jobs and break the internet.

chiliedogg ,

I usualy love it, but for some reason Firefox fails to retrieve web pages about 75% of the time when on the internet connection at my parent's house, and I don't know why.

It acts like a DNS failure, but the DNS settings are the same in Firefox, Chrome, and the router.

Meanwhile Chrome and Edge work great.

chiliedogg ,

Steam's strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.

chiliedogg ,

"We don't know how it works but released it anyway" is a perfectly good reason to be sued when you release a product that causes harm.

chiliedogg ,

When Chrome launched Firefox was in pretty rough shape, and Google wasn't what they are today.

Lots of us switched to Chrome then because it simply ran better.

chiliedogg ,

I personally carry my MX Master. Not as many buttons, but the adaptive free-scrolling and the side-scrollling wheel make it a productivity lifesaver.

chiliedogg ,

She needs to apply for a jobs at these companies that use the software in order to generate damages she can sue over.

chiliedogg ,

With the trillions they steal from the rest of us we should be able to fund the project fairly easily.

chiliedogg ,

The billionaires don't have to be intact on their flight.

chiliedogg ,

The home-user PC market has been hit HARD by smartphones and tablets. Suburban families no longer have a desktop in a home office plus a laptop for each member of the family. They may have a laptop, and it's probably a Mac.

This decision is too make people buy new devices or upgrade to an OS that has a lot more tracking built in.

Microsoft is pressing AI and other data-scraping tech hard, but they're necessarily going to have to have enterprise and government licenses that allow admins to block those features for legal and security reasons.

So they desperately need new home users they can data-mine.

chiliedogg ,

It also partially explains the Western feeling to Star Wars. Lots of Kurisawa films were made into Westerns.

Seven Samurai became the Magnificent Seven (and Bug's Life!). Yojimbo and Sanjuro became A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More.

chiliedogg ,

Throughout history, most people have lived within an hour of work.

The biggest difficulty is retrofitting cities that have developed in the last century. Places that have been around for centuries were developed with walking in mind. Places that were developed around the automobile and climate contril are very difficult to convert.

The world has both quadrupled in population and urbanized over the past century as the car became the primary mode of transit in much of the world.

The only thing that makes transitioning even possible is that the landlord class would love to return to feudaliam.

chiliedogg ,

Your examples are cities that are hundreds of years old and we're absolutely initially designed around walking.

chiliedogg ,

Okay. Great. Downtown is now walkable.

How do people get downtown?

The thing about auto-centric design is that it covers transportation from end to end. Other methods require a much more complicated network of fist and last-mile solutions that aren't easily adapted.

"Just use park and rides" doesn't solve the problem. It just moves the traffic to the transit stations. And now it's more expensive and slower than the existing system.

Houston put in a light rail system that costs 1% of every dollar spent in the city, costs a ton to ride, adds 45 minutes to a trip downtown, and drastically increases the odds of your car getting broken into at the park-and-ride. So yeah - there's pushback against expanding it.

chiliedogg ,

There's also inherrent difficulty when the city is so spread out (The Grand Parkway outer loop has a 60-mile diameter, compared to Paris's 15), and walking outside is a health hazard 3-4 months out of the year.

chiliedogg ,

What's a concrete, real way to fix these cities that doesn't require millions of people to give up their homes to move into more-expensive apartments they don't own, addresses the fact that being outside for more than a few minutes simply isn't safe for a significant portion of the population for almost half the year, and doesn't significantly add to commute times?

chiliedogg ,

People can't travel 30 miles from their home to the office entirely using public transit. Walkable cities and light rail are Last-mile. Heck - throw in high-speed for the majority of the transit and you still have a huge first-mile problem, which is by far the hardest to solve.

The reasons modern cities are designed around cars is because cars are flexible. Add a street for a new row of houses and every single one of those points is connected to every end point in a single step. No new scheduling, routing, or transit lines required. Problem solved with a little asphalt.

It's an easy solution, and backing out of it is very, very difficult because it must be replaced with a complicated, expensive solution that's less-convenient for most users.

I'm not anti-transit at all, but people around here seem to believe that a city can be fixed with the power of wishes and fairy dust just because another city that covers 1/10th the area and was developed hundreds of years before auto-centric decelopment ago managed to do it.

chiliedogg ,

Do you think we don't have offices, schools, and C-stores in the suburbs?

We also have sidewalks, bike lanes, walkable shopping districts, etc, but in Texas they don't get used because it's 110° for months at a time and you don't want to have to take a shower every time you change locations.

But the problem is those C-stores and small offices don't bring the jobs required to support the suburbs. Most people have to work in the city, so they have to commute, and getting from their house to the office is what creates traffic.

chiliedogg ,

Absolutely. I work in the planning department of a municipality that's a tiny enclave for the super-wealthy. The average new home here is over 10 times the price of the regional average. I recently issued a permit for a 5,000 square-foot guest house with a tennis pavillion on the roof.

Our residents don't want neighbors. They don't want a sense of cummunity. They want their special enclave with a police force that exists to keep out the homeless people from the major city that surrounds us.

I don't live here of course. I have to drive 90 minutes every morning because my annual salary won't cover a week's mortgage for some of these houses.

chiliedogg , (edited )

I also use mine when starting a fire. Way easier than using a pot lid for stoking.

chiliedogg ,

Back when I used a Weber charcoal grill I'd bust out the blow dryer.

chiliedogg ,

It's almost like they have a financial incentive to pull this shit.

In 2000/2001 this same shit was being done in California, leading to rolling blackouts and record-high energy prices. One company was buying all the plants and shutting them down for "maintenance" specifically to increase energy prices.

There were going to be congressional hearings over it in early 2022, but that company was Enron, and at the end of 2001 they collapsed due to other bullshit they were pulling.

chiliedogg ,

1st day availability on Gamepass for all AAA games simply isn't a sustainable strategy. They can't give away multiple games with a 9-figure budget along with everything else for the price of the sub.

chiliedogg ,

Of course people tend to get better with experience. But the retail worker who gets trained in 2 days can be reasonably good at the job within a few weeks and an expert in a few months.

Compare that to the years of training required prior to the first day on the job for an engineer or a doctor, who also get better with experience.

chiliedogg ,

People on here love to shit on Houston's massive expansion of I-10 as a failure.

It worked great for years, but the population continued to grow. Having 5 fewer lanes on each side would just make things worse or increase sprawl by pushing people further out to thin the traffic. They ain't gonna mass-adopt bicycles in a city where the heat index is 115° + for months at a time

chiliedogg , (edited )

What creates demand on I-10 in Houston is population growth. People haven't swapped from taking the bus to using a car. Houston leads the country in population growth. You add a couple million people to a me triplex and the infrastructure needs upgrading.

And trying to make people swap to a car by making traffic shitty works in some areas, but major cities that were largely developed after the invention of the car are almost impossible to retrofit for public transit. It's even worse in hot climates where the city was largely developed after air conditioning. My commute in a different Texas metroplex has gone from 45 minutes to 2 hours because of traffic, but between housing costs in the city and the lack of infrastructure to build transit I still drive every day and can't consider anything else.

Houston spends bonkers money on its light rail that nobody uses between May and October because last-mile transit is a problem in a city where you'll sweat through your clothes waiting 10 minutes at a bus stop. The office would smell like a gym if people used it.

I work in municipal development, and it's a rite of passage for planners to come in from out of state all excited to kill parking standards and shut down roads to make downtown pedestrian-only. Then they spend their first summer here and realize that when you have months of uninterrupted 100°+ days that you can't just wish away the necessity of door to door transportation.

chiliedogg ,

Interestingly though, on average, gay and lesbian married couples both make more money than heterosexual married couples.

chiliedogg ,

We can and have improved things massively. What we cannot do is fix everything at one time. The most we can realistically hope for is marginal improvement. Demanding perfection or nothing results in us sliding backwards.

But look at 60 years ago. Racial discrimination wasn't only legal, but state-mandated in much of the country. Interracial marriage was illegal. Being homosexual was illegal. A woman could be fired for not sleeping with her boss or for becoming pregnant. Businesses couldn't operate on Sundays because it competed with church. Firearms could be purchased by anyone without a background check at any store. Politicians openly ran on the platform that the white race was superior. Poor kids and minorities were drafted and forced to fight in useless wars while rich people could get college deferments.

We're so, so much better today than we were then. I don't want to rant forever, so let's focus on one issue and go even more recent:

30 years ago the general public was so homophobic that a Democratic President signed a law banning openly gay people from serving in the military. Clinton then followed it up by signing the Defense of Marriage Act barring federal recognition of same-sex marriage and allowing states to refuse to recognize marriages granted by another state - even though no states allowed it at the time.

20 years ago gay marriage was still illegal in all 50 states (next Friday is actually the 20th anniversary of gay marriage in Massachusetts!). It wasn't until 2012 that the first states legalized gay marriage through popular votes.

It's been less than 10 years since gay marriage was legalized nationwide.

In 2010 the majority of the country was opposed to gay marriage. Today nearly 80 percent supports it. That's remarkable.

We've improved so much very, very quickly. It's just hard to see when there's so much more work to be done.

But it took work to make the progress we have. If we'd given up and simply chosen not to vote we'd have empowered those who fought change.

Please vote.

chiliedogg ,

The FCC really started pushing for net neutrality in the Bush administration.

In 2005, the Madison River Telephone company (now Lumen/CenturyLink) blocked Vonage from using its networks and the FCC stepped in to stop them. They then established 4 principles of an Open Internet:

Consumers deserve access to the lawful Internet content of their choice.

Consumers should be allowed to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement

Consumers should be able to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.

Consumers deserve to choose their network providers, application and service providers, and content providers of choice.

In 2009, they overtly added the principle of non-discrimination, and in 2010 they made the principles official with the Open Internet Order.

Comcast sued and got the order thrown out, so they started the prices of reclassifying broadband, and the fight reached fever pitch in 2014 when it looked like the FCC was finally going to win for us.

But between 2012 and 2016, the ISPs changed their tactics. They stated colluding with the major tech and streaming services pitching net neutrality as a good thing for the established businesses that could pay the ransom or engage in partnerships. A good example was T-Mobile exempting Netflix from their 2gig data limit on cellular plans. T-Mobile was able to advertise the partnership as a good thing instead of an assault on users and the open internet.

Then the Trump administration took over and took a huge steaming dump on the FCC along with everything else, and the Biden administration just spent the better part of 4 years just trying to seat a commissioner to reinstate open internet.

I'm not optimistic we'll have it for long.

chiliedogg ,

I was talking to someone the other day who was really bent out of shape over an extremely unpleasant customer. The kind of interaction that sticks with you for years.

I told my perspective on people. We tend to remember remarkable things - stuff that really stands out from the normal. The news media does the same thing. Normal, everyday stuff isn't "newsworthy."

So when an asshole customer stands out that much, it's because it's such a rare experience. People are mostly good, so the goodness doesn't stand out.

chiliedogg ,

The shitty thing right now is grid connection is required by pretty much any building code, and the utilities are getting wise to solar. They're moving a lot of the fees from power use to connection and line maintenance. My family was looking at solar, but since 2/3 of their power bill is just to be connected to the grid it wouldn't save enough to make economic sense.

chiliedogg ,

"Negligent Discharge."

It's used in the firearms community instead of anything with the word "accident" because there's almost never a reason for a gun to fire unintentionally that doesn't involve a serious fuckup by the user.

Any ND that results in death or injury should also be treated as a felony. There are 4 basic rules to firearm safety that should be followed at all times. Any one of them should prevent injury, so you have to fuck up all 4 at once to hurt someone.

  1. Treat every gun as if it were loaded at all times.
  2. Keep your finger away from the trigger until ready to fire.
  3. Do not let the gun point at anything you're not willing to kill or destroy
  4. Know your target and what's beyond your target.

The only true accidents I know of regarding a gun being fired unintentionally involve faulty weapons firing on their own (more likely to win the lottery), but even then they shouldn't hurt anyone because it should be pointed in a safe direction.

chiliedogg ,

It could always be used to level a foundation.

chiliedogg ,

Notice how he waited until the major American vehicle manufacturers decided to move to the Tesla charging standard for future models.

Killing the charging network kills the EV market.

And on an entirely unrelated note, the Saudis financed the Twitter buyout...

chiliedogg ,

When it was hemorrhaging money?

We're in a weird time where all the tech companies are being told at once that they need to start being profitable, and at the same time the EU is cracking down on lots of the shady shit they've been using to control the bleeding to this point.

The internet has spent the last 20 years developing an economic model that's quickly becoming unsustainable, and none of the big web companies seem to have been prepared.

chiliedogg ,

Write-offs are entirely misunderstood by people. Writing off losses doesn't magically make loss profitable.

I'll use myself as an example. I teach underwater photography at a university as a side gig. Last year I made about $3,000 teaching the class, and I also spent about $1,000 on underwater camera gear for the class. Because of that I get to reduce my taxable income by $1,000, so it's as if I made $2,000.

At my tax bracket a write-off reduces my income taxes by 22% of the expense. So on a thousand-dollar purchase I'm still losing nearly 800 bucks.

chiliedogg ,

Of course it's better than not having the write-off. But it's not like it's free.

Business expenses aren't profit so they aren't taxed because it's money you didn't actually make.

Since most businesses operate on a small margin, removing tax deductions would make tax burdens higher than profits.

And it's not like that camera lens isn't being taxed. I'm buying it from a company that pays taxes on its profits and payroll and whose employees pay taxes, and on top of that I'm paying sales tax (to a different entity of course).

chiliedogg ,

They aren't attempting to solve a problem. The political right wants to buy TikTok to control a space used by millions of young voters.

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