Lewis Carol noted that a clock that doesn’t work at all is right twice a day whereas a clock that loses a minute a day is right every 1.97 years, and by this calculation the broken clock is the better value.
I’m pretty sure Carol was being facetious. There’s more value obviously in a mechanical thing that works — even if not well — then one that doesn’t. The joke is in the notion that we judge clocks based on how well they tell time, which is not a good metric once they deviate significantly from that standard.
Image shows a tweet with the header “and people STILL try to convince me Linux and Windows are better when the DATA clearly shows otherwise. SMH” with an image attached showing the following:...
Which only adds bas relief to the point. Linus has no personal or commercial motivation to get people to get the hot new trendy thing. Linux isn’t motivated by built-in obsolescence the way Windows and iOS are.
In fact, their higher iteration indicators are a symptom of a disadvantage of the operating system, not an advantage.
I think this was related to their plan before, in the case that got decided (specifically that Reddit didn’t have to reveal the IP addies of its clients), but that’s always been a problem especially if an ip address leads to a router or is dynamic at the ISP, then there’s no certainty it can be identified with a single person.
This is how the whole twelve-strikes program was formed where big name ISPs would (hypothetically) give demerits and eventually throttle or disconnect ISP addies that were identified as engaging in infringing activity. The problem is, clients stopped wanting to pay their bills when quality deteriorated, so it’s not consistently enforced. In fact, companies that are not Comcast or Xfinity are motivated not to do anything beyond threats.
ETA: Similarly, it’s actually to the benefit of social media websites to preserve the privacy of their clients, since incidents in which they cooperate with law enforcement reduces engagement. Google used to have a robust legal resistance to giving away personal data. It was deteriorated through enshittification, but now Google has lost enough reputation that it’s looking for ways to preserve privacy, like the new effort to constrain personal map data to devices, so Google is unable to respond to location dragnet warrants. They’re still in trouble for search-term warrants.
(Note the map thing is not yet rolled out, so don’t use Google maps when burying your bodies.)
I’ve been on Reddit for over a decade. But I’m done with that site and want to do something else. What do normal people look at on their phones? Is it all social media? Streaming?
Unhealthy? Maybe, but you’d need some good science to indicate so. (More than anecdotal examples) We have a lot of people who will make a moral panic over anything they don’t like, and we’ve grown skeptical.
Our government is not interested in curbing the common need to cope. I submit that scrolling is safer than alcohol, tobacco and white supremacy activist meetings, or any frisbee park in Los Angeles.
Were going to cope somehow, and so it’s a matter of harm caused on contrast to other means that are accepted and expected by society.
Considering the same government asserted tabletop RPGs, rock and roll, and video games are dangerous, I question the veracity of the source.
It’s headed in that direction, but we’re not quite there yet.
There are two ways to fight the autocratic takeover. One is opportunistic: The US is immense and has a lot of interlocking and often conflicting systems in place, which makes for a lot of chaotic complexity. So the way that dinosaur clones were able to breed, escape Isla Nublar and survive despite a lysine addiction (all contrived to contain them) we need to find opportunities to impede their takeover or creatively disobey.
The other is in creating local mutual aid organizations. Make sure that your marginalized and outcast locals are getting fed, keeping warm and otherwise having needs met, and the police will find it harder to push them out. Whatever you can do to allow strikes and protests to last longer will tax the goons of the plutocrats, and tax them until either they retreat and rally elsewhere or ratchet up the violence so that it becomes too atrocious for the neoliberal public to ignore.
These days, Godwin’s law of Nazi analogies is something of a liability, as a lot of people are quick to assume (sometimes in bad faith) that a comparison to actual nazis is hyperbolic. I’ve taken to applied Godwinism, that is getting very specific in my comparisons.
That brings us to the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of the German Reich that was run by Reinhard Heydrich. The Behind the Bastards podcast two-parter on Heydrich gets deep into the starting of the SD. One of the things it highlights is that in the investigation and persecution of Jews, it was only supposed to go after known felons, but it went after anyone it could plausibly nail. It was an open secret within its own ranks, but by the time anyone on the outside wanted to check Heydrich’s methods, he’d have enough dirt on them to keep them mum.
Cut to NSA and PRISM, which is the massive internet surveillance program that monitors traffic between Americans and foreigners. Yes, it’s only supposed to be counterterrorism (Islamist terror, specifically) but from the beginning, it ruled-in any internet packet that crossed the US borders, even when the sender and recipient were both in the US. And since the mid 2010s, NSA has been allowing the mission to extend to all law enforcement, including letting local precincts know about large amounts of liquid assets in transit to be intercepted and confiscated. Some searches of the blog website Techdirt should yield you dozens of examples of incidents that made it to courts, to civil rights watch organizations and investigative reporters. The FISC was always a joke, known even by the FBI as a rubber stamp court.
Incidentally, ICE also engages in the same kind of ignoring (or reinterpreting) mission parameters. Ordered to only arrest and deport undocumented persons who’ve committed violent felonies, they go after everyone they can, including locking brown American citizens in a room with no phone and no resources and order them to prove they’re a citizen. People deported, often shores alien to the deportees are quickly swept up into human trafficking rackets with which ICE closely operates.
So no, it’s not as bad as we imagine. It’s far worse.
You been listening to Behind the Bastards four-parter on Clarence Thomas too? As Miles Gray observes, a lot of people with terrible opinions were able to move civil rights efforts forward into actual policy. (Thomas wasn’t one of those, but he dabbled in with black nationalism and misogyny in his early career.
Reviews of Dobbs revealed that principle is dead in SCOTUS, that the Federalist Society judges are more interested in autocratic despotism to please their plutocratic masters.
Every lost of life traced back to an ideological court ruling further delegitimizes the courts in the eyes of the public. This is not just a matter isolated to women denied medical care, though the loss of abortion rights raised a lot more awareness, than the civil rights that have been getting carved and stripped since the PATRIOT act in 2001. In the 2020s the forth- and fifth-amendment protections we once took for granted are conspicuously absent whenever we have to engage law enforcement.
The question is, what happens next? We’re not going to go quietly into Gilead. It’s never appropriate to consider violence until the hour it is. Is it a matter of deciding which incident is our Mahsa Amini? Do we organize sabotage teams and consider targets before that hour?
Peaceful protests are already treated by law enforcement as riots, and tend to be ineffective in moving policy forward. We, the public, are already regarded as terrorists, as enemies of state. While I don’t have answers, I am curious at what point to we acknowledge peaceful engagement with the establishment has been neutered and exhausted.
With the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 we already know they’re not waiting for the public to strike first.
While I completely agree with you based on the data, DRM is absolutely sold to publishers on the pretense that it combats piracy, at least with keeping paying customers from engaging with media in ways the publishers don’t like (such as lending content or selling that content used in a secondary market).
And yes, the more draconian their restrictions, the more they drive people to resources that provide cracked or DRM-free content. That said, Sony is notorious for going to extreme lengths to severely limit use of their content outside narrow consumption, often with obligatory ad-viewing, driving people to either piracy, or avoiding Sony content at all.
At one point, I might have been interested in playing Horizon Zero Dawn and went from buying it, to getting a refund to thinking about pirating it to eventually deciding I cannot be bothered. But then I steer clear of most AAA game companies, now.
Here in the US there is always going to be messaging telling women they need to be underweight. Having had a friend who died while anoexic and underweight (I can’t be sure of the causal relationship but I’m sure malnutrition was a factor) the danger of body dysmorphia is, to me, very real.
I’d say someone’s negotiation with their own body is up to themselves and their doctor, but even primary care providers in the US are freaky about weight. Are you a fat lycanthrope with cancer? Statistically your doctor is most likely to fixate on your extra girth.
Just curious as I’ve never been on the other side of the counter, how does this sort of thing tend to work at restaurants? Fast food and fast-casual places are where I’ve heard customers say things “pile as much lettuce on there as you’re allowed to” - is there ever a limit your supervisor instructed you for things...
The answer is yes. Before the 1990s, there were was a lot of casual business. My San Francisco residence was rented to my flatmate entirely on a verbal contract (which created problems in the aughts, when utility companies were modernizing their service). This kind of casual business works well when everyone is friendly or acting in good faith, but it leaves fewer protections from fraud.
In rural parts of the US, there were regions in which there was little enough cash flow that barter was routine. And then farms often would have enough extra produce they would look for neighbors to give food to, rather than dumping it.
I’d say we’d have organized crime to thank for the necessity of making transactions a lot more secure and a lot less anonymous, but that’s really only the justification. It’s law enforcement that has turned to the same rackets that were the purview of mobsters. Not only are grocers no longer able to give away one-day expired food to homeless and impoverished folk, but kids risk legal trouble just by running a lemonade stand on a hot day.
For reasons I may not disclose freely on the internet. I am going to celebrate new years eve this year by myself. Does anyone know of ways to solitarily celebrate new years eve?...
Ever since the 2020 lockdown professional help has been impacted, with few openings available.
This sucks especially for those of us with more chronic issues (I was showing signs at seven years old) because finding a patient-therapist fit is a process. A lot of patients need specific care, and the professional sector is not as… well… professional enough to treat without letting their own opinions get in the way. So it sucks to discover your psychiatrist is anti-gay when you are as gay as an opera in Paris.
There’s also the matter that US insurance only covers short term mental health care at best, like ten sessions when it takes at least a few years (so 200 sessions) to affect significant change, or get enough symptom management skills to not feel like making a public mess every goddamn day.
So, while it’d be super keen if all of us truly gone fishing types were able to get comprehensive care with a psychiatrist who cares and a psychotherapist who actually gets us and isn’t trying to surrepititiously push Southern Baptism Jesus on her patients, this is far, far, far from a realistic goal for anyone in the near future, unless they have rich benefactors.
And the problem with rich benefactors is they are easily swayed to toss their gay-as-love-letters-in-the-1890s relative into an illegal conversion therapy work camp.
I think Merry Christmas is a harken to antiquated dialect, much like other religious phrases. Thou shalt not kill or Thy will be done or extra Ecclesiam nulla salus
I think I might cancel. I’m not watching ads and I’m not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don’t know if I’d end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though…...
Ancient wisdom often sounds like common sense now that it is commomly taught. What is some ancient wisdom that we no longer teach because it was wrong?
This question inspired by this post..
Some of y'all need to see this and drop the superiority complex... (lemmy.world)
Image shows a tweet with the header “and people STILL try to convince me Linux and Windows are better when the DATA clearly shows otherwise. SMH” with an image attached showing the following:...
Film studios demand IP addresses of people who discussed piracy on Reddit (arstechnica.com)
What do normal people look at on their phones?
I’ve been on Reddit for over a decade. But I’m done with that site and want to do something else. What do normal people look at on their phones? Is it all social media? Streaming?
we persist. (mander.xyz)
One of the Most Controversial US Spy Programs Just Got Quietly Renewed (www.motherjones.com)
Congress blew a rare bipartisan chance to protect Americans’ calls and texts.
What caused the downfall of the Black Panthers group?
Interested in the history and the social programs they created like free breakfast.
Do grown-ass lions and other big cats enjoy standard cat-treats?
[Not cats as treats, cats are - treatz friends...
Far-Right Judges Are Coming for Lifesaving Abortions (theintercept.com)
What's the best music streaming service?
I am looking to move on from spotify, what music streaming service pays the artists the best while still having a large library.
What's it called when a title has "or" in it followed by a different title?
Examples:...
Looks like DRM prevented to watch movies in many theaters yesterday (www.theverge.com)
From the article:...
How to respond to gf saying "I'm fat"
She gained some weight but she is not fat at all!
Current and Former (Fast) Food Service Workers - How do you handle requests like “All the fries you can give me”?
Just curious as I’ve never been on the other side of the counter, how does this sort of thing tend to work at restaurants? Fast food and fast-casual places are where I’ve heard customers say things “pile as much lettuce on there as you’re allowed to” - is there ever a limit your supervisor instructed you for things...
I am to celebrate new years eve alone. How can I celebrate solo?
For reasons I may not disclose freely on the internet. I am going to celebrate new years eve this year by myself. Does anyone know of ways to solitarily celebrate new years eve?...
Does anyone else feel like every year is like the movie 'Groundhog Day'? Same holidays, same birthdays, same work week, etc
Why does America say 'merry christmas'?
while it seems everyone else says ‘happy christmas’...
Prime is adding ads to their streaming service
I think I might cancel. I’m not watching ads and I’m not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don’t know if I’d end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though…...