There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Copernican

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Copernican ,

How is Lemmy so anti corporate, but bends over backwards to defend steam as an immaculate corporation. I love steam, and 90% of my game purchases or from their store. 5% are from stores that let me redeem steam keys.

I think their market position should have some scrutiny.

Copernican ,

I’m for this. Don’t vote for war mongers when you or your kids or grandkids could be drafted for war.

China's government launched additional "local communication centers" to increase propaganda efforts worldwide (chinamediaproject.org)

The addition of external propaganda bases in Zhejiang and Tianjin over the past two weeks brings the total number at the provincial level to 23. These International Communication Centers (ICCs), also being launched at the city level, are meant to remake China’s approach to delivering its message externally....

Copernican ,

The Atlantic ran a great cover story on this propaganda war the west is facing. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/…/678271/

It’s interesting how the propaganda and fake news takes a few hops in other continents before being pushed into Western media.

Copernican ,

I got more of a Mirrors Edge vibe than Perfect Dark watching that trailer.

Copernican ,

But you could say it pushed the limits. It required the Ram Expansion Pak. I think only 3 or 4 N64 games required that. It was packed with weird game modes like counter op. The far sight gun as a weird experiment to see through walls. It really pushed the limits and tried to do a lot. TimeSplitters was a great spiritual successor to the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark series that continued the tradition.

Copernican ,

How does this work out with all in value when it comes to stock options or other vesting based non salary compensation? Aren’t you leaving a lot on the table if you switch every 2 years? Does salary alone make up for that?

Copernican , (edited )

Idk about it being locked in. I have seen people with Sr and Lead titles interviewing for a lower position these days. Those things don’t always stay with you the rest of your life. But titles are cheap. Salary, bonuses, and stock are money.

For me, I had considered job offers with higher salary. But then when I looked at the salary and reduced PTO I realized my hourly wage didn’t change that much. When I factored in the stock package and downgrade in 401k match these 10%+ percent salary increases put me behind near term (near term being about 3 years until the new company started to vest and become regular earnings).

Copernican ,

My company gives up to an extra 2 weeks of PTO based on years of service. Stock Options/RSU have like a 3 to 5 year pay out vesting timeline with a % of it vesting every year. but you get new grants every year. So after you’ve been working for 3 or more years, you basically have a “full” grant value vesting every year. throw in 6 percent 401k match at 100 percent match my on paper below market value salary actually returns a pretty good total comp package. I’m not sure if switching every 2 or 3 years would provide me any significant benefit because of how my long term tenure at the company has paid off with these incentives for staying. I imagine there’s a probably something about jumping around early vs mid vs late career that factors into this equation too.

Copernican ,

This really comes down to who has and hasn’t saved. If you are a millennial that regularly saves into a retirement account you are probably looking good because the market has been good. But not a lot of millennials save for retirement which is the problem. Some of that is low wage, but some of that is bad spending habits.

Housing on the other hand is totally fucked for millennials regardless of what you are saving. If you got a starter home you are unable to sell and upgrade with decent rates. If you are first time buyer there is no inventory for starter homes because folks can’t afford to leave them even if they want to.

Copernican , (edited )

I am very sympathetic to this. When I had a friend go through cancer, it made me realize a lot of important things about life. In the middle of that list, but critical in that list of things is paying for supplemental disability insurance. It was like a few hundred dollars a year that is the difference retaining an additional 20% of your salary in disability if needed. I am probably more likely to near term need supplemental disability insurance vs life insurance, and if I’m still alive and thriving and on disability that’s probably a bigger financial drain on my family that sudden untimely death.

Copernican , (edited )

I think the personal responsibility experiment of 401k’s is proving to be a failure. Yes, responsible people with sufficient incomes are somewhat at fault for not using the available retirement vehicles. But if individuals can’t be trusted to tend to their own future, we should probably be mandating retirement savings. And with that increasing minimum wage and considering UBI’s to make it reasonable for people save and have money in retirement.

But thanks for the sympathy for the downvote brigade. Merely suggesting personal responsibility seems to bring on the hate in lemm personal finance discussions. I have coworkers and friend’s with 6 figure incomes, top 75% of USA household incomes. They hardly use their 401k’s and use Roth IRAs when they have the means to be maxing those out.

Copernican ,

I love the comments in these discussions that are like “Fuck hedge funds, fuck investing, fuck the stock market, fuck 401ks. Bring back pensions.” And then I have to explain that pensions are investing in the stock market and actually own like 20% of common traded mid and large size company stock. Apparently folks want the benefit of being in the stock market without the personal responsibility to do it themselves, but in the process get to hide their guilt of personally investing in the market themselves. But that’s okay, and that’s why I think we probably should have mandatory minimum retirement savings and investment programs.

Copernican ,

It’s basically just British terminology for layoffs with a severance package.

Copernican OP , (edited )

I don’t think you understand how pricing works. Someone like Disney demands a high carriage fee agreement and mandates that ESPN must be in the basic cable package for all comcast subscribers, otherwise comcast doesn’t get any Disney owned TV. As a result Comcast has to charge basically 10 bucks a month to all subscribers to have ESPN, not counting the general cost breakout for other disney owned channels. Sure, comcast leases STB’s for X dollars and gets a cut of the subscription fees as well, but the point is the people that make the TV programming are the same. So it’s not magically going to make the cost of TV significantly cheaper by cutting out comcast. Comcast is the person that collects the bills, but Disney, ViacomCBS, etc, are very much involved of setting up the prices consumers pay on cable and streaming.

Edit: Also add in the risk and churn factor. With cable bundling, TV programmers had scale and predictability on their side. Basically all cable subscribers had long term subscriptions and could guarantee a high volume of subscribers to collect from. With DTC (Direct to Consumer) streaming apps, consumers can churn and temporarily subscribe for monthly intervals. That means you have less subscribers at any one time on your app and for shorter durations. Guess what that does to the revenue. So if you no longer have the economics of scale in terms of long term subscription length and volume of subscribers, the cost for individual subscribers will probably have to keep creeping up and get possibly more expensive than cable.

Copernican OP ,

Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn’t always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren’t easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it’s basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don’t own it all, but that’s fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.

Copernican OP ,

Bundling works at scale if you maximize customer pool. I don’t think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages; their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household. I wish there was more transparency into the costs to determine if you are coming ahead or behind in the bundling.

But at the end of the day everyone hates paying for multiple streaming apps. To me that means people just want a bundle that magically has everything they want to watch.

Copernican OP ,

Yeah. It took a while to work out the kinks of getting TV dvd seasons in the right order, but watching TV was easier when you didn’t have unlimited options and more or less a pres defined playlist.

Copernican ,

Weird choice of quotes and headlines:

From the OP article:

“He has been “uncharacteristically vocal” about his support during press calls for his new film, Unfrosted, The New York Times reported.”

From the NYT link in the quote:

“As Mr. Seinfeld, who has recently been vocal about his support for Israel, received an honorary degree, dozens of students walked out and chanted, “Free, free Palestine,” while the comedian looked on and smiled tensely”

But when you go to the link to the NY Times article that references Mr. Seinfeld as being recently vocal about his support of Israel, one of the concluding comments in the article is:

Surely, Mr. Seinfeld sees it differently. His public comments have largely avoided geopolitical specifics, dwelling little on the choices of the Netanyahu government or prospective conditions for a cease-fire.

And he can still sound hesitant even in recent discussions about the Jewishness of “Seinfeld” — which an NBC executive once described as “too New York, too Jewish.”

Nothing about this makes me think Seinfield is a a strong supported of the war. Support for Israel after the attack can be a lot of things and does not mean pro Netanyahu war machine.

Copernican ,

Doom was a top down 2d shooter that just happened to be rendered in first person 3d.

Copernican ,

Niagara is what I moved to from Nova. Less widget focused layout, but any app is literally 2 presses and one swipe away from the home screen.

Copernican ,

See league of nations.

Copernican ,

That’s not accurate. A UN recognition of nation state is not a pre requisite for self governance. FIFA recognizes more nations than the UN. If Taiwan can’t be recognized by the UN I don’t think there’s reasonable expectation for Palestine.

Copernican ,

Taiwan can’t get recognized despite its government being a founding member of the UN and folks surprised it’s contentious for Palestine to be recognized?

Copernican ,

It’s cheap and easy for me to use it while traveling around and going on god knows what public wifi network. I am not using google VPN for privacy, but using it for some sense of security out of my home. Already paying for Google One storage, so this was a nice perk.

Copernican ,

Then how do you charge the kid as an adult? If you treat the kid as a child it makes sense to me to look at the parents for negligence. But if you think the kid is legally responsible to be tried as an adult, how do the prosecutors also go after the parents?

Copernican ,

Yeah, but it’s weird when you 2 adults are tried for basically parental negligence of a minor, but that minor was tried as an adult. So if the minor is being tried as an adult, how can the parents be tried for not taking care of their minor? If the kid was tried as a kid this would make more sense to me.

Copernican ,

I think these are the types of cases that make liberal leaning folks take a really ironic position. We talk about ending the prison industrial complex, focusing on rehabilitation, etc… But school shooting that in some way is predicated on right wing 2nd amendement rights, let’s lock up as many people as we can for as long as we can, and screw juvenile courts for juveniles while we’re at it.

Copernican ,

I think the PBS documentary on Kip Kinkel is also interesting: www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kinkel/

There’s no parents to charge because they were murdered, but the sister wants him to have an option for release after identifying the mental health issues and rehabilitation. But he has 111 years without parole. www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/…/letter.html

Copernican ,

The distinction is (or should be) about the mental capacity of the perpetrator. Prosecutors just love to do it so they appear to be “tough on crime” for the next election.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Yes, but objectively applied criteria should used. And what is the mental responsibility of a child vs an adult should probably be about the age. What’s the purpose of this distinction if the measure of heinous the crime is trumps the mental capacity. And in this case, it seems like this kid also had mental health issues. Yet he him as an adult despite being a child that has mental instability.

Copernican ,

I thought they already had that during working hours. I swear sometimes while I’m working on the east coast hours, my west coast colleagues signs on at 12PM EST and signs off of 530EST and aren’t around to answer my 6:30 EST pings. Meanwhile I’m waking early for EU client calls, and handling 9PM meetings with Asia offices. So it goes. I don’t think we can have it both ways where you can be remote working from anywhere yet not be on the hook to work hours during the defined operational times. I’m not working 9 to 9EST, and take long breaks mid day if I have evening meetings, but there are operational realities of needing to talk to people to get work done and those times need to be defined.

Copernican ,

They read, but only if posted on archive links with client side ad blockers to make sure the papers don’t make a cent.

Copernican ,

The value of ad space includes things like viewability, interactivity, attribution. You can’t make ads harder to see and easier to skip without lowering the value of the ads and what the site takes in. It’s hard line to balance between maximizing value for your ad space and user experience.

Copernican ,

If they won’t accept responsibility or accountability for the material they are serving and effectively endorsing then it’s only prudent for the users to protect themselves.

Who is the “they” in this. Google destroyed local news papers. All these smaller players can afford to do is open their sites up to google exchanges. It’s a viscous cycle where the leaner your journalist team gets, the more you need click bait pages to drive ad views on those exchanges. I don’t know what the solution to this looks like to raise journalistic standards and ensure they are funded, but I think that whatever it looks like will require readers to pay subscriptions and/or tolerate ads in their news.

Copernican ,

The defense is free content. There’s operating costs for running papers. And they usually aren’t there to make a profit. So the combined income of subs and ad revenue need to cover the operational cost. If the content is free, then there’s going to be lots of ads. But even in print news, there were a lot of ads. Some full page ads. Fun front page stories that continued on Section C page 5 which forced you to flip through more ads to find it. User experience needs to be cleaned in digital to not drive users away because of the ads, but they will necessarily have to be there if folks aren’t paying for subscriptions.

Copernican ,

I agree. Google and double click were a trojan horse for a lot of print media orgs trying to do digital. What looked like the gift of added revenue cheaply made these news orgs completely dependent on Google. The news publishers became a cheap commodity for delivering ad space all flowing through Google.

Copernican ,

Mods should stop working as mods. But they don’t. 193 million maybe sounds fair for a person able to convince people to volunteer to free, and not quit despite this being obvious.

Copernican ,

So what stops my lemmy content from being used by Google to train ai?

Copernican ,

Default to subscribed communities views.

Copernican ,

The U.S. lawmakers say ByteDance may be using the app to collect data on Americans and pass it on to the Chinese government. The app’s algorithms also are capable of influencing public opinion in the United States, where the platform has about 150 million users

That’s not a selling data concern.

Copernican ,

I believe the article. My junior coworkers that are young fresh out of college grads landing 100k salary feel behind. Median us household income is like 78k. The article is about the psychological impact. Although I don’t doubt that there’s people struggling and inflation and wage stagnation are real, I think we shouldn’t doubt that what this article describes as money dysmorphia isn’t also real.

Copernican ,

This whole fuck show seems to be a series of firewalls and checks not being done because a series of people had KPIs not to do the checks or respond to the results of checks with urgency. Sometimes it is better to have more antagonistic and adversarial parties involved in these processes that have different KPIs.

Pentagon leak suspect Jack Teixeira expected to plead guilty in federal case (apnews.com)

BOSTON (AP) — Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member accused of leaking highly classified military documents on a social media platform, is expected to plead guilty in his federal case, according to court papers filed Thursday....

Copernican ,

I don’t understand. Are you saying that this outcome is the outcome a fair legal system would produce? Or is the fair legal system the treatment the rich get?

A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO | Reddit warned us that its users were a risk factor, and boy do they sound excited about shorting its stock. (www.theverge.com)

A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO | Reddit warned us that its users were a risk factor, and boy do they sound excited about shorting its stock.::Reddit seems like a likely candidate for a meme stock. But the actual reaction suggests that r/WallStreetBets isn’t going to send the stock to the moon.

Copernican ,

Don’t try to overthink the market. If you are wanting to invest with no plans to spend that money within say 3 to 5 years, just by low expense ratio S&P500 tracking ETFs. My goal isn’t to beat the market, just ride with the market benchmarks as best as possible.

Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis (www.theverge.com)

Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis::Google says it’s aware of historically inaccurate results for its Gemini AI image generator, following criticism that it depicted historically white groups as people of color.

Copernican ,

Is this that crazy though for AI since Hamilton the musical? All founding fathers were portrayed as people of color in the casting. Google image search for Alexander Hamilton is pulling a decent number of pictures from the musical cast.

Copernican ,

I had a very anti-war sociology professor that had been protesting since vietnam. Despite his qualms with military industrial complex, he would always say that the the military is the last vestige of upward mobility in the united states as it’s one of the few places where you can enter a playing field that is somewhat leveled for new entries, have merit impact your growth, and get access things like subsidized education. Sure there’s still racism, sexism, etc. but in terms of economic mobility it provides a decent ladder.

Copernican ,

Well a draft is for times of war. But mandatory military service in a democracy… Does that lead to anti war policies. If every family had skin in the game knowing their kid could go to war, does that help elect anti war politicians?

Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO (www.bloomberg.com)

Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO::Reddit Inc. has signed a contract allowing a company to train its artificial intelligence models on the social media platform’s content, according to people familiar with the matter, as it nears the potential launch of its long-awaited initial public offering.

Copernican ,

I understand. But I think from the get go of the announcement of closing the API’s, Reddit had always discussed not wanting to be harvested by AI tech for free. The point is they saw the value of their user content, and wanted to establish a model to profit on that. This announcement is just that; they now have something in market to allow AI to be trained on it’s user generated content.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •