Yeah, if you’re on probation or parole you’re not allowed to drink (or use marijuana, or any other illicit substance). The cops in PA will randomly raid bars looking for probationers and parolees. That shit was annoying for those of us that were trying to have a good time at Karaoke
Just because you don’t remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. You had to learn it at some point. You weren’t born with a lexicon of slang that revealed itself when it suddenly became modern/relevant lol
Don’t forget how casual the r word was. Every comedy of the 90s and 2000s called somebody that. It’s still too commonly used but nothing like it was back then.
We had a couple weeks calling people “F.A.G.s’ and “M.A.G.s” for 'female ass grabber” and “male ass grabber”. As in someone how grabd a females ass or or a male ass. I have no idea how the teachers were able to do anything about that with a straight face.
I think this is true, but I also grew up without Internet or social media so maybe things were more regional as opposed to this larger shared culture those things have enabled. So that may be part of it?
You have a point, but when I was a kid we at least made sure the slang came from black people first. I don’t think anything good can come from white kids out there making up words.
I’m gonna be the Debbie downer and mention that no-iron clothes have synthetics in them, the washing of which is a major contributor to the microplastics problem.
Lol who said anything about specific garments? We just wear our clothes wrinkled and no one cares. My linen shirts looked wrecked for an hour or so and then the wrinkles fall out, for instance.
Linen is supposed to be wrinkly, that’s why it’s so cool. It lets the breeze get between you and the fabric. Just hang it up wet, giving a few strategic tugs to smooth it out, especially the collar.
I have never even heard of “no iron clothes” until now, and I haven’t ironed any of my clothes except when I absolutely had to do it because I was in the Marines.
This one. One of the best motivators. Sense of satisfaction when you get it working and you feel unstoppable (until the next subtle changes happens anyway)
I don’t know how fast it works. According to their posts (I feel really creepy reading their history), their first round of chemo was started around Dec 23 2022. On Dec 30th they reported that their tumor has shrunken 1/3 since the first round. By Feb 3 of 2023 they had completed three rounds of treatment.
On April 15th they reported that tumor was no longer growing and thus the tumor was beaten.
16 months before this incident, they had another kind of cancer. So it is infuriating that their doctors didn’t run tests till it was almost too late. They state they are Germany, so maybe the doctors there are extra conservative with running test.
Earlier on Lemmy’s life, there was someone here telling people of how many fake reddit stories they had written to places like Am I The Asshole using numerous alts.
And how they were convinced of doing it because they were an editor, and they were used to seeing so much badly written anecdotes with no respect for narrative or proper focus on details of importance… Until Reddit hapenned and flipped that. It was a source of far too many interesting and well edited stories and something was off. They were certain that the average person with a story to tell was far less educated in English, far less capable of shorthanding detail, than what Reddit had to offer on average, and the answer was that people were just using it as a creative writing exercise platform. So, they used it that way too, since they wanted to bea fiction writer.
That’s an interesting theory they had, but I’m not sure their evidence necessarily followed.
The upvote/downvote mechanism and the Reddit alogithm mean that the stuff that you’re most likely to see is not necessarily “the average person with a story to tell”. Because if they’re a bad writer, people are more likely to downvote it. It’s a sort of sampling bias.
The best part is that Cox and Zucker didn’t give it the name Cox-Zucker machine themselves, because you’re not supposed to name things after yourself. A third person, Schwartz, caught the joke and gave it the name.
While the general message of this meme is true, almost none of the internet actually goes through satellites. There are huge cables all around the world connecting the whole thing. And while launching rockets and deploying satellites is really cool, I think ocean crossing cables are impressive all on their own. Imagine a cable not only long and strong enough to cross an ocean, but also resting on the ocean floor, exposed to the environment and expected to work for decades. And to think the first of these cables was deployed back in 1858.
Well Starlink is yet to turn a profit, so I’m not sure it has any place to actually exist. I think it’s mostly there to fill up the SpaceX launch schedule. Especially since the Starlink stuff de-orbits in like 3 years, so they have to keep on launching.
Starling satellites have motors, and regularly boost their altitude to help overcome atmospheric drag. That figure is from when the satellite either runs out of fuel, or shuts down.
Yes this helps with positioning and orbital decay. Almost every satellite has this, it isn’t special to Starlink stuff. I know Elon makes it sound like they’ve invented the wheel here, but much of what they do has been done in one way or another.
There are a couple of factors which impact the lifespan of these satellites:
Technological progression. As they refine the technology and techniques they need to update the satellites with the latest and greatest. This means of course removing the old satellite and replacing it with a new one. Especially in the early days (now) this is a huge factor in replacing their stuff.
Failure rates. This is mostly due to radiation, but may also be due to other factors. The network is only as good as its nodes, so failing nodes need to be replaced fast. Radiation hardening is expensive and usually adds weight. This is a trade off between launch costs, the number of satellites they can fit in a Falcon 9 and lifespan of the stuff. Things like solar storms can have a huge impact, as Starlink found out the hard way.
Fuel consumption. Exact positioning is important for Starlink and with their VLEO orbits drag is a big factor. The satellite have very cool engines that help them stay in place, but only a limited fuel supply. There is a safe minimum fuel as regulation requires them to de-orbit safely, which takes a lot of fuel. So just running it till it’s empty is a no go, they need a good safety margin. They also don’t want to start any kind of Kessler syndrome kind of deal, so old spots need to be cleared out before new stuff can go in.
There are other factors, but these are the big ones. Starlink say they are aiming for a total replacement every 5 years, but in practice it’s more like 3 years. This is mainly due to the first batches being more prototype like, getting nearer to a final design recently.
With the proposed 11.000 unit constellation and the 5 year replacement rate, they would need more than 1 Falcon 9 launch each week. The costs are literally astronomical and the revenue has been only a fraction of what Elon sold the investors. I would be surprised if the plug is pulled on the whole Starlink thing.
People seem to think Starlink is the first and only one to try this, but it has been tried for decades and almost all have failed. The only success is with companies targeting niches, where there is little to no competition and premium rates can be had. For example reporters in the field broadcasting from a van to a satellite to be live on TV was a big niche. So far Starlink hasn’t delivered on a lot of the promises made by Elon and is destined to fail unless something big changes.
I didn’t realize the sats had such a short lifespan, I thought it was closer to eight years.
Although, there are hundreds of millions of people around the world who are potential customers, and I’ve spoken to a few people who either are, or plan to be, a customer. I do think the market exists.
Hundreds of millions would be a lot. I think you overestimate the demand for something like Starlink a lot. People who can afford to pay and would consider paying for Starlink tend to live in well developed countries. These countries typically have internet connections which are better than wat Starlink offers. Statistically most people live in cities, which also typically have good internet. People who live in lesser developed countries and don’t live in cities tend to not be able to afford or willing to pay for Starlink. Usually there are other cheaper options available, even though they would offer less bandwidth than Starlink. So the total market would not be hundreds of millions.
Starlink also offers poor bandwidth and latencies compared to local solutions. People who just use things like Facebook would rather have a low latency and low bandwidth solution than a high inconsistent latency and high bandwidth solution. Starlink is getting better, but the latency, especially in regions with few base stations (which is their best use case) will be inherently poor compared to wired or local wireless solutions.
Starlink themselves thought they would have 20 million subscribers in 2022. In reality they managed just about 1.5 million. (It’s not clear how accurate these numbers are and if they include non paying customers) They could get more people on board if they lower pricing, but then they need more customers to get the same revenue. Since the costs of building and launching the satellites, managing them and maintaining the ground part of the system are fixed and high, they need to generate a lot of revenue to turn a profit.
There may be large parts of underdeveloped areas in the US for example where people have the need for high bandwidth internet and are able to afford it and local solutions are lacking. But you end up with only 50 potential customers for one area of which maybe 5-10 people actually sign up. As soon as you hit something like a town, local wired and wireless internet solutions will outcompete Starlink easily. In a poorer country there may be more people to be found in rural areas, but if you only make the equivalent of $5000 a year, you probably won’t spend more than $1000 for Starlink. For those people the budget they have for internet would be more like $50 a year max.
And remember even if Starlink starts to operate at a profit, they aren’t out of the woods yet. They have had huge upfront starting costs, much more than they expected. Those costs need to be covered before investers actually get anything.
All the while they are competing with local internet solutions which are being rolled out fast all around the world. Something like 5G is rapidly cutting into the need for something like Starlink. As soon as subscriber count starts dropping instead of rising, it’s all over.
i'm in the outskirts of bumfuck. there's areas here with maximum dsl speeds under 1 mbit/sec. which the telco naturally sells at a higher price than the 40-60 mbit dsl in other parts of town because it's the only wireline service available in those neighborhoods (cable's ridiculously-priced service is their only competitor otherwise, but they don't cover every part of town)
But the cables aren’t exactly running in a straight line I think, so I would need to do some math and research to figure out if the circumference actually matters. Someone get on this!
These screens aren’t usually touch-sensitive, no? I don’t usually fill up at Valero’s, but those buttons on the side are often used because the screens aren’t designed for touch. I’m in a cold climate though, so maybe they just don’t use them here…
You obviously haven’t been talking to servers that make $200 a night in cash tips they don’t pay taxes on. My fiancé works in marketing for a large winery, and some of the kids they would bring in to work the restaurant would be making tons of money from it. Those are the people who love it
You don’t talk to enough servers that aren’t 20 year old blonde chicks. And even then, there are slow nights where they bring home $50 in tips. It’s a predatory system for all involved except the owner class.
Or the people in the back of the house that bust their ass, are sometimes highly trained, and take home less than the person carrying food back and forth.
Okay? The point is that there are people who like the system, and those are the people I outlined. That’s the point of my comment as a reply to the comment above. No one here has said it’s not predatory.
You’ve never gotten into an argument with someone who says they tip their mechanic and doctor and thinks everybody should do the same?
There absolutely are people in the US who believe that everybody you interact with as a customer should be tipped because they believe all the propaganda from the likes of Readers Digest and Wall Street Journal. They believe everybody must be tipped because covid and “How are those jobs any different from being a server? It’s a SERVICE!” It’s beyond ridiculous. I worked in retail and food service (not tipped) for a long time and would have been embarrassed to have to resort to begging for tips.
Tip culture worship is real. I’ve run into plenty of people online and offline who think that tips should be mandatory everywhere, of all walks of life.
Waiting tables. Bartending. Hospitality, food delivery, beauty salons, rideshare driving. The service industry, as anyone who has worked in it knows all too well, is notorious for relying on tipping to undercut employee wages and deputize individual customers to determine how much money a worker should be able to take home. Amid increasing recognition of these injustices, a number of campaigns and new laws surfaced, pre-pandemic, to abolish or meaningfully reduce the practice of tipping.
But despite the best efforts of these campaigns, tipping remains the industry - and American society - standard. Indeed, the perverse logic of tipping has broadened into an ever-present ‘snitch economy’ - an ecosystem of tactics like mystery shoppers and Uber and Yelp rating systems designed to police the behavior of workers while outsourcing the costs of said supervision to customers and other workers.
In the process, our snitch economy pits those being surveilled against those doing the watching, and the judging. Through a ubiquitous public-facing network of rating and reviewing other people’s labor - and often the behavioral disposition they exhibit while working - people with otherwise very little power are elevated to temporary positions of authority over others, fostering a culture of surveillance rather than one of solidarity. The snitch economy serves the dual purpose of not only giving working people a false sense of power when they’re the ones being served, but also reducing millions of human interactions to opportunities for not only snap judgments, but subjective rewards and retribution.
I mean if they have read some of his stories, it should be pretty obvious he was pretty fucking racist. The cat thing is a fun meme but if anyone has read at least call of Cthulhu the work most people know about its pretty on the nose. Every human antagonist is either black or a foreigner and he is pretty blatant about it. Hell don't get me started on Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (or The White Ape), that one is just so funny with how bloody racist it is because the conclusion is so absurd, you can't take it serious.
His racism is honestly the most horrifying part of his work.
Like there’s some good stuff there, but it’s the extreme racism that really gives me the heebie jeebies that make me put the books down and take a breather.
He might have actually been the greatest coward of all time. Yeah, that cowardice meant he held a lot of shitty opinions about the world, but it was the exact kinda experience with endless fear that could create a new horror genre.
Lovecraft’s racism is very much a product of fear, not racial superiority. Dude was extraordinarily terrified of everything remotely foreign. It’s why “strange creatures that are vaguely human but completely incomprehensible” is the generic terror in his stories.
In that sense, I find the motivations for his racism far less terrible than the motivations a racial supremacist has.
Its a bit of both. He definitely believed in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race. There is no excuse for it, but there is a pitiable aspect to the part of Lovecrafts racism that is rooted in fear. Like Fucking chill Howard, its just a Welshman.
Nah, his racism is well documented. Though if we want to talk about the cat in particular, it’s not known if he named it himself, when it went missing he was only 14.
Not that it matters at this point, but I saw somewhere that he had remorse for his racism later in life. Is this true? I have never seen anything to show it but I haven’t saught it out either.
It’s kinda funny how some of my favorite board games are based upon the setting. I love that they are heavy with diversity. It makes me think of Stephen King’s writing book, he says a story is no longer yours once it’s out there.
I’m glad Lovecraft made what he did, and that it’s so free tooled today. I think one day the Wizarding World will be the same (I refuse to keep calling the whole thing Harry Potter).
Not that it matters at this point, but I saw somewhere that he had remorse for his racism later in life. Is this true?
Keep in mind he died at 46, and at best went from “extremely racist” to “very racist.” His political views change, and I have always had a bit of a chuckle on his original assumptions:
As a result of the Great Depression, Lovecraft reexamined his political views. Initially, he thought that affluent people would take on the characteristics of his ideal aristocracy and solve America’s problems. When this did not occur, he became a socialist.
Lovecraft’s racism is what I call “hilarious racism”, if you’ll pardon the term. I’ve only ever thought that in connection with HP. He was very much a product of his times, as we all are. Eugenics was all the rage, and you can pick that out in his works.
Lovecraft wasn’t merely racist against non-whites, he was racist against anyone who wasn’t of the “right stock”. He might snob you if you were a white man, living in Rhode Island, of English or German descent, but came from the wrong family tree. LOL, this guy rated humans like dog breeders rate bloodlines. OG Playa Hater’s Ball.
And speaking of his times, look at when he wrote. We were just discovering how incomprehensibly monstrous the solar system was, how big the Milky Way was, just then understanding that we lived in a galaxy. And we didn’t know there were others. FFS, Pluto wasn’t discovered until 1930.
Anyway, well worth reading his complete works. Good shit. Grab a copy off me.
When I got that side quest to internalize the racist shit he’s spouting I lost it. What a game.
Edit: fuck, you just reminded me of the horribly racist 7’2" Dutch exchange student. The way he goes on to justify his racism is very similar to the guy at Disco Elysium.
The article said the subscription was for “software updates” which really seems like something they should provide for free anyway so you’re really just paying for the privilege to use their precious machine that you already paid for lol
Well, if your washing machine was connected to the internet you would also need security updates. Of course the only reason you’d connect your washing machine to the internet would be in order to get said security updates in the first place.
Great job creating a need by developing the fix for it in the first place.
Alerts for when the washer finishes its cycle. Reminders on when to do a tub clean. More detail when certain errors or anomalies are detected. Additional wash cycles for special load/fabric types that don’t fit on the dial.I have used the internet connection on my washer for all of these things and it has been very useful.
Potentially more serious than that. A poorly protected washing machine (or any other IOT device) can serve as an attack vector into your local network.
I think maybe to turn in on remotely. Lets say you leave to work in the morning and you want to have your clothes washed and/or dried when you arrive from work, then you can turn it on remotely, but its still stupid
My washer has a delay timer on it. Is that not a common option?
I also have an option to start a small fan and spin the drum every few minutes, so it keeps wet clothes from getting mildewy. I use that every time, so I don’t have nasty clothes when I inevitably forget to swap stuff into the dryer.
I think it’s for “smart” washing machines that you can control from your phone etc. So that’s likely what the “updates” would be related too…why you’d need to control your washing machine from afar is beyond me but some people love smart gadgets and will by anything that connects to their phone.
There are cases for it, eg programming a wash to occur when energy demand is low.
In my opinion we should be pursuing technologies to do this that don’t require an internet connection. Even being able to program a schedule into the machine and it can detect if something is in there or not. That would be enough since energy usage follows a relatively consistent plot. These companies don’t give a shit about anything other than coming up with ways to make more money.
Ya it’s a shit idea to go subscription in any situation. You really do not need any kind of ongoing updates/subscription unless the product was built around a subscription model. If it can done mechanically on basic programmable outlets then it can be coded the same way. I would be fine buying a laundry machine, asking my utilities provider what time to run it, and then programming that into the machine manually.
Fucking software updates for a washing machine? If my washing machine needs a software update, that should be a fucking recall. A washing machine should be a fully embedded system imo.
It’s updates for the cybersecurity that exists strictly only because it is connected to the internet which in turn is something that exists strictly only because there’s software updates.
Megaman Battle Network was prophetic. Terrorist will flood your house using a phone.
I hope this is rage bait because I can’t think of any reason a washing machine would ever need a software update. Is it like a smart machine? If so then just let me disable it
A loan usually comes with full support and warranty service for the duration of the loan. With a subscription I bet you get to pay without receiving these benefits in return.
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