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.

NateNate60

@[email protected]

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

NateNate60 ,

The reason is because it supposedly creates a moral hazard. This is the logic behind pricing for all sorts of medical resources (such as co-pays and deductibles). If there is a nominal cost involved to obtain the resource, then you will be incentivised not to use more than you need. But if it is free or costs too little, then you (and others) may choose to use a lot of the resource, far more than you actually need.

For example, suppose there is a $50 co-pay (a co-pay is essentially a fee) to see the doctor, and you figure you should go once a year for a check-up. In this case, you will not schedule an excessive number of appointments because you know it is not necessary and it will cost you money each time you do. If scheduling doctor’s appointments were free or costs very little, like $1, you may instead choose to schedule two or three appointments per year, because why not? Or maybe you will go see the doctor for every minor cold or stuffy nose. It’s not like it will cost you a significant amount of money. Or so their thinking goes, anyway.

Remember, the $50 you pay isn’t all that it costs. For every $50 you pay, the insurance company is probably paying the doctor $150.

Similarly, suppose a drug costs $100, but the insurance company pays $90, and you have to pay a $10 co-pay. You buy one vial, which is good for one month. The fear is that if the insurance company pays for all $100, since the drug is now free for you, you might decide to get two vials instead, just in case. After all, they’re free for you, right? This means the insurance company has to pay $200 for two vials of the drug but the benefit to you is actually pretty small. Again, this is how insurance companies think.

Now, whether this logic is sound or not, I leave that part up to you.

NateNate60 ,

It sucks, but honestly we have to pick our battles and I don’t think a three-to-six month delay is really worth fighting to the death over

I was explaining to my daughter about the differences between Gimp and Photoshop and saw that Adobe had a page that claimed to compare the two. It never compares the two. It barely mentions Gimp. (www.adobe.com)

I expected ridiculous propaganda from Adobe, but they give absolutely no reasons why Photoshop is better than Gimp and list a bunch of things that Gimp can do too....

NateNate60 ,

I think for a real Photoshop vs GIMP comparison from the eyes of a professional, I’d like to share Franklin Veaux’s perspective. He’s an author, graphic designer, and the infamous local polygamist.

NateNate60 ,

For a real Photoshop vs GIMP discussion, I think I’ll leave a link to Franklin Veaux’s Quora post here.

tl;dr there is actually a lot of functionality in Photoshop not present in GIMP that most casual users will never use, but is very important to professionals. People don’t pay hundreds of dollars to Adobe just for funsies.

NateNate60 ,

Just a cursory glance, but GIMP still doesn’t seem to support additive curves and CMYK support is still rudimentary and needs a plugin

NateNate60 ,

I doubt that GIMP will ever overtake Photoshop. Adobe has the money to employ (and does employ) hundreds of experts in their fields to work on Photoshop for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Although GIMP is very impressive as an open-source project and a massive testament to how far the free software model can go, it is still, at the end of the day, made by a ragtag band of (mostly) amateurs volunteering their time. Adobe, by brute force, can deliver a higher-quality product just by having the resources to employ the best people to work for them.

I love GIMP. I use it for all my image editing needs and would never consider giving a dime to Adobe. But I don’t do it for a living and I respect the opinions of those who do when they say that GIMP isn’t a good replacement for Photoshop.

NateNate60 ,

I’m pretty sure there’s a GIMP plugin that does that if that is all you care about

NateNate60 ,

It’s more complex. In Photoshop, it’s a single tool. In GIMP, you make a circular selection, convert it to a path, and then stroke the path.

Not only is this more convoluted, it’s bewilderingly unintuitive to beginners and is definitely one of GIMP’s shortcomings.

NateNate60 ,

That doesn’t do the same thing, I guess the goal is really how to draw the outline of a circle

NateNate60 ,

ASM is high level. Real programmers use punch cards

NateNate60 ,

If you really wanted to, couldn’t you just compile it yourself?

NateNate60 ,

I think it’s also the case that it has a bigger impact on developing brains, who might be more easily addicted.

I don’t have any evidence for this, I’m just guessing here.

NateNate60 ,

The effectiveness of bans has always hinged on two factors:

  • The likelihood of being caught
  • The severity of punishment if caught

For example, everyone knows that the odds of being caught speeding are pretty low, but if the punishment for speeding is ten years imprisonment, then very few people will risk speeding.

Similarly, even if the odds of getting caught violating this law is only 1%, if the punishment is banning the platform and shutting down the company along with a fine equal to a year’s worth of revenue, then companies will probably not want to risk it.

NateNate60 ,

Where have I heard this one before?

NateNate60 ,

Unions help workers in all positions, but their effect is more noticeable when the worker has comparatively little bargaining power. When workers already have a large amount of bargaining power, such as in most white-collar jobs, unions don’t provide as many benefits than if workers have very little bargaining power and are easily replaced, such as in most jobs involving physical labour rather than mental labour.

NateNate60 ,

The IRS processed 162 million tax returns in FY 2023. If they raise $50 billion, then that means $308 for every taxpayer in America, courtesy of the IRS.

Honest taxpayers rejoice. Tax cheats, go cry about it.

NateNate60 ,

$30.80 a year is still $30.80, and that is literally money that requires no extra work or payment on the part of the honest taxpayer.

NateNate60 ,

I do think the long system makes more sense. That being said, I will not be using it.

—James Grime, mathematician, Numberphile

NateNate60 ,

Every other year is an election year or right before an election year. The IRS is not a political body. Its commissioner is a civil servant.

NateNate60 ,

Do you think before you post?

NateNate60 ,

Netanyahu has not come up with any end plan for his Gaza war (because the whole thing is a ruse to keep him in office and out of jail at this point). It seems the Palestinians have so generously done so for him.

The logical end plan is probably a tenuous peace with Israel. The Palestinian Authority is smart they’ll either make peace with Hamas or betray them all and turn them over to the Hague. The former will stabilise the Palestinian state at the expense of risking another Israeli invasion. The latter will stabilise relations with Israel in exchange for potentially weakening the unity of Palestine. But the PA cannot keep their heads in the sand and ignore Hamas.

Elections must be held. The Palestinian Authority has no claim to any mandate from the Palestinian people. Their latest election was over 18 years ago. If they want international legitimacy then they will need to demonstrate they have the confidence of the Palestinian people.

With a strong PA, there are two logical endpoints—a two-state solution with strong cooperation between Palestine and Israel, perhaps even to the point where there can be freedom of movement between the two or even united citizenship; or a one-state solution with the entirety of Palestine being absorbed under the state apparatus of what is now Israel, forming a bi-religious or secular successor state (due to the new voting power of Palestinian citizens).

Nobody will be entirely happy and get everything they wanted in the end, nor will everyone think that the result was totally fair, but I think at some people, people get tired of endless war and become willing to compromise. This may not happen in our generation, but it eventually must.

NateNate60 ,

I’ve never heard of that. Do you have any further reading?

NateNate60 ,

Well, we’ll see. The thing is that if the Palestinian Authority wants to be recognised as a state, it needs to act like a state and not like an ephemeral government-in-exile. Democratic governments can change through elections, but the state as an organisation is still there. The PA uses the name “State of Palestine” in its formal communications, so it needs to live up to that instead of acting like a ragtag band of desperados begging for whatever scraps of power Israel tosses to them.

Does the current government of the Palestinian Authority have the confidence of the people? Maybe. We don’t know. But I assume the answer is “no” until I am proven wrong. Fatah controls the PA but technically lost to Hamas in the 2006 election. Again, that was 18 years ago. A lot has changed since then! Hamas has turned Gaza into a shit hole. The pockets of the West Bank run by the PA at least are serviceable.

NateNate60 ,

Hang on a minute—the population of Israel is some ten million but the population of Palestine is only some five and a half million. Israel is 74% Jewish and 18% Muslim. Palestine is 93% Muslim. The rest follow other religions or no religion (they are mostly Christians).

This seems to mean that there are 7 million Muslims and 7.5 million Jews. And these figures predate the Gaza war; no doubt the number of Muslims in Palestine has gone down, due to obvious reasons.

NateNate60 ,

Wow. Shocking.

Not going to lie, I thought it was fake news.

NateNate60 ,

However, birth rates are more correlated to wealth, not to religion. Poorer people have more kids than wealthier people. Palestine is much poorer than Israel, partly because of the constant war and unrest there, as well as the lack of a strong state apparatus. This means nobody wants to invest money to start businesses and create good jobs Meanwhile, Israeli companies and people exploit this by hiring Palestinian workers at very low wages.

Palestine is also beholden to the monetary policy of Israel as they are forbidden by treaty from establishing a national currency. Thus, the currency of Palestine is largely the Israeli new shekel.

Once there is peace, there can be work to fix these problems and increase the living standards of Palestinians. Once that happens, history tells us that their birth rate will naturally decline.

NateNate60 ,

You’re probably right. At the same time, stability and the right environment for business can do wonders for a country’s economy. Just compare the dirt-poor China that Deng Xiaoping opened to global investment and the now-dominant regional superpower of today.

NateNate60 ,

If you’re developing software for one client who only uses a specific browser, I can see this being okay, but several times I have chosen not to buy things from websites that were broken in Firefox. I don’t bother to check whether they’d work in Chromium, I just buy it elsewhere.

The number of people who act like me probably isn’t large in absolute terms, but how many customers have been lost because of a broken website that you didn’t even know about because they just left without a trace?

This might not apply to you, but it’s some food for thought whenever Web developers decide to be sloppy and not check compatibility for a browser that still has significant market share.

NateNate60 ,

We tested for that

Genuinely curious—how?

NateNate60 ,

Edge is the same as Chrome, so no extra testing is needed for that.

NateNate60 ,

I showed this to my aunt because I thought it was strange that the Washington Post would run a hit piece on one of their own editors. But then she said “that probably means someone there doesn’t want him to be an editor”.

NateNate60 ,

If you are fired during your notice period, in most US states, you’re still entitled to unemployment insurance for the time between when you were fired and when your notice period would end

The default standard at law is whether a reasonable person would interpret your statement as intent to resign. Generally, that means giving a specific date and not just a nebulous idea of some time in the far future. This would probably be down to a case-by-case basis. If you said “I won’t be here in two weeks”, that’s different than “I don’t see myself continuing to do this job five years from now.”

NateNate60 ,

Do game support it? Last I heard it didn’t work on any games

NateNate60 ,

I think most of the complaints are that Microsoft Office doesn’t work. Which is true. The web version of Microsoft Office is honestly kinda terrible.

And no, people don’t want to use a product that does the same thing as Microsoft Office, they want to use a product called “Microsoft Office”. No, it’s not logical, and doesn’t make any sense at all but it’s how people are.

NateNate60 ,

Try Collabora Office!

NateNate60 ,

The answers to all these questions, for those curious:

  1. The unfinished pyramid symbolises that the United States is constantly changing and evolving.
  2. The Antarctic Treaty says that Antarctica isn’t part of any country’s sovereign territory. Countries can and do venture into Antarctica, and in fact, you can even do this yourself if you want. There are Antarctic bases all over Antarctica.
  3. There is no commercially popular commercial plane route that requires it, but there are people who have flown planes over Antarctica. The problem is just that there aren’t any major population centres that far south. The equivalent is not true for the Arctic because there are a lot more big cities in the northern hemisphere.
  4. The footage isn’t lost. You can view it on YouTube.
  5. They mounted the camera on the lunar module. The most popular picture of Apollo 11 is actually one of Buzz Aldrin. Armstrong is the one who took that picture.
  6. There’s not much reason to. It’s cool, sure, but there’s not much interesting to see on the moon and it costs a lot to get there.
  7. Humans didn’t evolve from monkeys. Humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor. That common ancestor is no longer around.
  8. “Garbage DNA” isn’t “garbage”. Most of it is just DNA that we haven’t figured out the function of yet. Some DNA is actually unnecessary though. Those are telomeres. Since cellular reproduction involves copying DNA, and the process also involves some DNA at the end being lost, the extra unnecessary bit is needed to prevent the good parts from being lost.
  9. They wrote down on paper where they wanted bricks to go and then piled bricks in those spots. While people didn’t exactly live in “wooden huts” (they lived in houses that looked like actual medieval houses, because they were), cathedrals and the Houses of Parliament are more extravagant because their owners had a lot more money to spend on their design and construction.
  10. (I could not determine the meaning of “pre-Luvian” architecture)
  11. They’re not spaceships. They just look like spaceships. The Ancient Egyptians put out so much art that it’s very likely that they eventu,ally would draw something that resembled a spaceship (or some other modern object).
  12. Most such findings have been fabrications, but those that were found were probably just really tall humans. Human height follows a normal distribution, and there have been tens of billions of humans alive, so eventually someone, by luck of the draw, will end up two and a half metres tall. Additionally, the idea of “really big person terrorising smaller people” isn’t exactly super original or particularly hard to come up with.
  13. A search of early Christian art, which would have been made around the first century CE after Jesus’s crucifixion, doesn’t show any examples featuring mushrooms.
  14. (Missing)
  15. This is probably referring to the Tree of Life. It’s not even shaped like a pine tree, mate. There are plenty of Old World plants with leaves like that.
  16. Dragons primarily appear in European cultures. Eastern cultures don’t have the same dragons. We also call those creatures “dragons” as well but they really look nothing alike. Western dragons are like flying lizards, while Eastern dragons are more like snakes.
  17. Because people find it cool and will buy media with such imagery, particularly those who aren’t religious.
  18. Because people find killing others as a gameplay mechanic fun.
NateNate60 ,

For right angles in particular, the Egyptians have known for millennia that stretching out a circular rope of 12 cubits into a 3-4-5 triangle will produce a right angle.

NateNate60 ,

That and West Linn next door

California socialite Rebecca Grossman sentenced to 15 to life for killing 2 kids in crosswalk (www.nbcnews.com)

A wealthy California woman who co-founded a burn center foundation in the Los Angeles area was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison Monday for the hit-and-run killings of two children while they were in a crosswalk more than three years ago....

NateNate60 ,

Socialite = “unemployed, but rich”

NateNate60 ,

I’m pretty sure most libraries also have that.

NateNate60 ,

I donate 12€ a year through OpenCollective. Donate here!. That’s 12€ more than any other social media site has ever gotten out of me. Donations also support mastodon.world.

If everyone donated 12€ a year then they’d be so flush with cash that it’d make the Wikimedia Foundation look broke.

210 Palestinians reportedly killed during Israeli hostage recovery operation (thehill.com)

The bodies of 109 Palestinians including 23 children and 11 women were taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, and spokesperson Khalil Degran told the Associated Press that more than 100 wounded also arrived to the hospital. In addition, he said the rest of the 210 Palestinians killed were taken to Al-Awda Hospital after the...

NateNate60 , (edited )

Correct, and that’s very much part of the problem. We have very unreliable information about the state of the war. They stop journalists to prevent information from getting out, and they succeeded.

NateNate60 ,

I don’t doubt the accuracy of those figures but when it comes to things like Israel accusing Hamas of using human shields or setting up bases inside schools and Hamas saying “nuh uh”, without photo or video proof it’s hard to say either way.

NateNate60 ,

I don’t believe it is correct to call them “Palestinian” figures. There is no unified government in Palestine. There is a collection of multiple organisations exercising various amounts of authority over the Palestinian territories. The figures from the Gaza Health Ministry regarding civilian casualties are probably close to reality. But that doesn’t mean anything else is accurate. I give credibility to the Gaza Health Ministry on the topic of civilian death counts and other related humanitarian figures only.

Israel rescues 4 hostages taken in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and 210 Palestinians are reported killed (apnews.com)

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel on Saturday carried out its largest hostage rescue operation since the latest war with Hamas began, taking four to safety out of central Gaza amid the military’s heavy air and ground assault. At least 210 dead Palestinians, including children, were brought to local hospitals, a health...

NateNate60 ,

Right. Let’s check back in eighty years and see how many are alive then.

NateNate60 ,

Although I don’t deny that the Israeli military is generally quite reckless with civilian casualties (and this is probably purposeful to an extent), it’s also true that Hamas doesn’t exactly pick the most civilian-free areas to set up their base of operations either.

Like, if Hamas sets up shop in an orphanage with 100 kids inside, the IDF will bomb it to smithereens without second thought and kill all 100 just to get the 3 Hamas commanders inside, as long as none of those children were Israelis. That kind of scenario. The next day, Hamas blames Israel for killing 100 innocent children and Israel blames Hamas for endangering them in the first place.

So it’s not fair to finger only one side when both parties to this conflict are so unapologetically shit and treat the rules of war like an achievements list.

NateNate60 ,

I don’t disagree.

NateNate60 ,

Yes, firing missiles at Tel Aviv would be a legitimate military tactic, as long as you’re actually aiming for military targets and not just shooting randomly.

This is like saying that the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker are in Berlin and questioning whethering bombing Berlin is a legitimate tactic. Of course it is. You just have to hit actual targets.

Israel definitely has the capability to hit targets with precision. They have the best weapons in the world, courtesy of the United States. But there’s been too many “oopsies, we obliterated the entire neighbourhood killing a thousand civilians” for it to be merely sloppy aim.

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