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admiralteal

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admiralteal ,

In a city a connection like that is probably going to be in the area of $60 to $100. I pay $80 all in for a similar fiber connection.

Outside of a city you just aren't going to get it.

There are a few places that have Community ISPs where it will be substantially less expensive, but those are the exceptions and many states have actually made it illegal to operate community ISPs.

admiralteal ,

Do the new mainstream Republicans (i.e., bigots and fascists) or the Dems hate him more, I wonder? He repeatedly broke his word and betrayed the trust of everyone on his quest for glory, and didn't even ultimately get to claim the glory.

admiralteal ,

It's a pub pint.
There are a lot of beer can sizes.

Imperial, the common ones are

  • 24oz (usually only VERY cheap beer)
  • 19.2 oz "imperial" pints (often called stovepipes/smokestacks)
  • 16oz pints (usually called tallboys, though larger sizes are ALSO often called tallboys)
  • 12oz "classic"/standard cans
  • and nips (8.4oz) which I don't know the reason they're the size they are.

However, in bar tradition, a "pub" pint is a typical size, which is what this can is -- about 14oz. These happen a lot since they're served in a shaker pint glass that LOOKS like a typical pint glass but has an extra thick bottom that makes those 2oz disappear. The commonness of this style of glass is why so much EU glassware has the mandatory 40cl line.

Metric cans come in a lot more sizes, but as I understand it the standard ones are 330ml, 440ml, and those same 568ml (19.2oz) stovepipes.

The point is, this ridiculous number is a pub pint. Why that can size exists I do not know.

admiralteal ,

Nope. The 4ml diff from 400 is within a margin of error I'm sure, so this size really seems arbitrary to me. Wolfram's language model doesn't recognize it as some obscure unit either.

admiralteal ,

330 and 440 are standard metric can sizes. 404 is weird.

admiralteal ,

It's not a dumb question, but you're presuming standards and exactness that do not exist in practice.

A pub pint is a pint glass that is deceptively smaller than a full pint, usually about 14oz. That's all it is. This can is the same as a pub pint -- both in spirit and practice -- as far as I can tell.

admiralteal ,

Statistically not true. And even the retail industry lobbyists has started backtracking on the claims.

The only city that has seen an increase in shoplifting in the last ~4-5 years, as I have seen in actual data analysis, is NYC. Everywhere else has seen an overall trend downward.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/11/shoplifting-retail-data-moral-panic/676185/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/17/business/shoplifting-retail-crime-stores/index.html
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-key-claim-organized-retail-crime-2023-12-06/

These narratives are all about trying to make you sympathetic to stores, creating justifications to close poorly-performing locations without suffering PR consequences, and to get the public to invest in security for retail stores so that the stores can save some bottom-line cost. And just regular ol' conservative love of the penal system.

In the raw numbers, shrink in general is not a major issue for retail and shoplifting only makes up a relatively small percent of shrink. It's just a great story to point to and makes great viral videos.

admiralteal ,

Yep, "Organized Retail Crime" is a straight-up moral panic. As are most of these modern crime stories about how everything is getting more dangerous and blah blah blah. It's just conservatives and capitalists lying to achieve conservative and capitalist goals.

The real objective here, as far as retailers are concerned, is to force communities to spend more of their limited policing budget on providing security services for their stores so that they don't have to. And, of course, to have a convenient excuse to close down a poorly-performing store without as much of a PR headache from the community left behind.

Shop local. These national chains exist to funnel money out of communities. That's their purpose. That's the only reason they exist. And if your city council doesn't make it just as easy for a local to open a business as a megacorp, hold your city council to task.

admiralteal ,

A shame the writers of the law didn't have good enough knowledge of the underlying technology to mandate not just the USB C connector, but specific USB C standards. The fact that USB C cables are very much "you can't even tell what it does without plugging it in" is a bit of a nightmare.

But on the other hand, there's always changes for further revisions in the future.

admiralteal ,

So protesting is only ever acceptable if the only people impacted by the protests are precisely the offenders being protested. If anyone else is affected, protestors should go to jail for their heinous crime of protest. If the very people the protest target make themselves inaccessible to protesters, then protest is not allowed.

admiralteal ,

Or you could say these protestors are regularly getting in headlines, showing that there's an escalating culture of absolute rejection of social mores so long as major, vital changes don't happen. Creating serious problems for bureaucrats and elected officials that forces a response that often makes those officials and bureaucrats look like assholes.

The protests are factually inconveniencing and causing problems for people that have the influence to get policy changed, at least so long as democracy is functional. You aren't going to be able to protest an oil magnate. They are not accessible for protest.

Your thesis is that people will vote against climate protestors just because they were late getting to work one day. If that's correct, we may as well get out the Flavor-Aid because this world's beyond saving. Everyone needs to be reminded and thinking about this crisis. Every day. It needs to be front and center. Time is running out. We have the solutions needed to avoid catastrophe, but too many are simply not aware and thinking about how terrible the danger is and need daily reminding.

We seem to be forgetting that protests once involved burning down neighborhoods and executing rulers. Which really is what we should be doing, given the enormity of the problem. This is a more civil compromise. Don't buy into the media powers that want to turn you against anyone expressing discontent.

If the Earth Day protests happened today, the media narrative around them would be "Look at all these fuckers, on the streets, stopping me from getting to the gas station to buy a Slim Jim!" It's fucked. The attitude is fucked.

admiralteal ,

No, that's basically misinformation.

There's a major donor who's the daughter of a family who's previous generation made money on fossil fuels and has since divested and wants to distance themselves. Based on the fact that it is now clear how utterly destructive fossil fuels are.

Conservatives / climate deniers use some parts of this fact as part of a campaign to discredit the organization and keep the media narrative around these protests on "oh, this style of protest does not match my aesthetics so it must be bad" instead of "the climate is on fire and the perpetrators are getting rich doing it and we should ALL be in the streets making noise and inconveniencing people until something is done."

admiralteal ,

Ah, more ways you aren't allowed to protest to add to the list.

  1. You aren't allowed to protest unless the protest only affects the Officially Designated List (ODL) of "influencers", politicians, or industries. Other people affected by protests is unacceptable.
  2. Democratic action cannot be a goal of protest. Protest must only be targeted to inconvenience bad guys (see ODL) and nothing else.
  3. Protests must not cause spectacle. The must be subdued, quiet, and easily ignored.
  4. Protestors must always be of a positive nature; only protests that have specific solutions and plans of actions are allowed. Protesting against things is unacceptable, you must only protest FOR things.
  5. Protest that involves property crime must be entirely shut down, permanently, with the entire organization tarred and feathered. ESPECIALLY if the property crime was throwing soup at a museum painting that was fully-sealed behind glass and totally protected. Protecting fine art matters more than keeping our civilization running.

Let me know if you've got more Unacceptable Protest Options (UPOs). I'll maintain the list for you.

admiralteal ,

And how is picketing roads for cars any different than that?

It's fucking not and you know it. You just don't like protests.

admiralteal ,

He wants them to do something that doesn't work because he wants to be able to ignore it. He doesn't like the aesthetics of social protests and doesn't understand the history of Civil Disobedience movements.

That's all there is to it.

admiralteal ,

I like the way you shifted from gas stations to car dealerships when you realized that your first attempt really was the same thing.

And now you're okay with vandalism and threats of property crime, but making some people a little late to work oh that's unacceptable. So long as the protest has no effect on you personally you won't ban it. Thanks.

admiralteal ,

They would simply get arrested at the first threat because that's already illegal and people like you, who dislike protest, are in charge of the levers of law enforcement. Your theoretical protest wouldn't even happen.

admiralteal ,

It's not really true, see: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/22/just-stop-oil-van-gogh-national-gallery-aileen-getty

This is one donor, not "the person behind". The family made a lot of money on oil and has since entirely divested. The "heiress" in question is on the record saying she believes climate change threatens all of civilization and so she wants to put her fortune -- especially given that a lot of it came from oil -- to use stopping fossil fuels.

It's basically EXACTLY what a sane person with a functional moral compass should do in that position, but it's used as attack and slander regardless. Threads like this you ALWAYS see the right-wing talking points parroted faithfully by people who are either too gullible to do basic fact-checking or else are flatly disingenuous and manipulative.

admiralteal ,

So long as it does so quietly and without disturbing the neighbors, he's fine with it.

admiralteal ,

It's not a recent thing.

There was about 5 minutes under Warren where the court looks like it might actually be progressive. Other than that essentially it's entire history it's just a archconservative institution that exists as a check on civil rights.

Black Ohio woman criminally charged after miscarriage underscores the perils of pregnancy post-Roe (apnews.com)

The 33-year-old Watts, who had not shared the news of her pregnancy even with her family, made her first prenatal visit to a doctor’s office behind Mercy Health-St. Joseph’s Hospital in Warren, a working-class city about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Cleveland....

admiralteal ,

Oh man and that's free?

admiralteal ,

Nope, ChatGPT tells you it is a nonsequitor and asks for more context or intention if the question is sincere.

admiralteal ,

It cannot be automated or systematized because neural networks are the tool you use to defeat systems like that. If there's a defined, objective test, a neural network can train for/on that test and 'learn' to ace it. It's just what they do.

The only way to test for 'true' intelligence would be to perfectly define it first, such that when the NN aced the test that would prove intelligence. That is, IF you could perfectly define intelligence, doing so would more or less give you all the tools you needed to create it.

All these people claiming we already have general AI or even anything like it have put the cart so far before the horse.

admiralteal ,

Cool.

Both the phrases you're calling out as clearly AI came from me. Not used by ChatGPT, just how I summarized its response. I wonder if this is the first time someone has brazenly accused me of being an AI bot?

admiralteal ,

Don't buy into the techbro nonsense. Just because they're called "neural networks" does not mean they work the same way the human brain does. We don't know how the human brain fundamentally processes data so anyone telling you these NNs work in a way that is the same as blowing wind out their ass.

admiralteal ,

I thought Android auto was free.

This is all about maintaining and selling your data for themselves. There was just a report out last week about how cars are one of the most data insecure devices you can own because of how poorly all the big auto manufacturers treat their customers.

admiralteal ,

This is what it is to be a police state.

It doesn't necessarily mean brown shirts are going around demanding papers. It means you live in a system where civil rights are valued less than the ability for police to conduct easy investigations.

Civil rights are supposed to bind police. They're supposed to make the job of the police harder. That is a primary purpose of them. When anyone talks about how much harder the police's job will be if we have to protect every little right by following every little procedure, that person is asking to live in more of a police state.

admiralteal , (edited )

I think you mean WASN'T threadiverse already a term.

Yes, it used to be. Soon, it won't be.

Biden tells donors Israel is losing support, Netanyahu must change his government | CNN Politics (www.cnn.com)

President Joe Biden said Tuesday Israel’s prime minister needs to change his hardline government and support for the country’s military campaign is waning amid heavy bombardment of Gaza. … “This is the most conservative government in Israel’s history,” Biden said, adding that the Israeli government “doesn’t want...

admiralteal ,

They knew they would get this response, too. How could they not?

Israel can't ignore the hostages and rest on its laurels. There's no option to not respond when your citizens have been violently seized, held captive, tortured, maimed, raped. And Hamas knows their own defensive strategy relies heavily on using Palestinians as human shields, which will cause that inevitable response to be absolutely horrific. Hamas was relying on these horrors -- though I think perhaps the response has been a LOT sharper than any anticipated.

I think a lot of critics of the war, oddly, focus too much on what has happened after October 7th. When really we should be looking at what led up to it. And that's not to say that Hamas was justified because that level of depraved violence never is. But it IS to say that the Bibi administration was utterly complicit and that the fuse on this powder keg was lit long ago and no one with the power to do so seems to have made an effort to extinguish it. On October 6th, the whole world knew that the Bibi administration was made up of a corrupt, lunatic fringe of far-right religious fundamentalists bent on the total destruction of Palestine and a total takeover of Israel. On October 8th, the protests against Netanyahu for doing things like sending suitcases of money to Hamas or deleting the oversight of their Supreme Court were replaced with a completely different narrative.

I think both Hamas and Bibi's team thought they would politically benefit from this kind of violence. I think both are finding out they terribly misjudged things, though I am sure none will admit it. And the people -- mostly Palestinians, but also no doubt some Israelis -- are suffering terribly as a result of these two intractable right-wing theocratic organizations going about their religious war.

admiralteal ,

There's a reason you have organizations like the NLRB, meant to be the "first step" before a labor case goes to a more general trial -- it lets a bunch of people who are actual subject matter experts (in the NLRB's case, labor law experts) be the first pass at reviewing the legal claims before a general court that doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about gets involved. It lets you set the tone for the whole ensuing trial process, grounded in understanding and truth.

The average judge doesn't know jack shit about ANYTHING other than the technicalities of the law. Most of them haven't done a real day of work in their life. But being a judge gives you the confidence you need to think your understanding of the technicalities of the law can be applied to just about anything, even something you find utterly baffling outside of the trial.

We really lack a qualified commission or board to be the first pass for these big tech disputes. The FTC is asleep at the wheel. And the result is that our ongoing legal frameworks around these issues continue to be arbitrary, unpredictable court rulings based on random judges' limited understandings and gut instincts. It's a very bad situation.

In a similar vein, that's why the fascists on the Supreme Court are trying so hard to undermine and delete Chevron deference. Because when you want to use the courts to just enforce your preferences and write your own laws, having to appeal to subject matter experts just gets in the way.

admiralteal ,

It is worth being wary of any pledges that list net zero as the end line.

Net zero is actually not good enough right now. It's almost certainly necessary to get to negative emissions for at least some period of time to undo damage. Which means it's not a goal of getting to carbon neutral, the goal is to eliminate as many carbon emissions as we can.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that net zero is a very achievable goal even on a fairly short timeline. That all of the promises so many conservatives have about the disastrous effects it would have on the economy to pursue it are complete nonsense, and so we need to just commit and go for it. So now a lot of the biggest deniers and evildoers, are trying to subtly push for net zero being the final goal post instead of just another mile marker. It is a sort of thought-ending cliche, and it's very clever.

admiralteal ,

Not to mention a lot of that paperwork might criminally prosecute you if you use some other address.

Think of the stories of people who were accused of being fraudulent voters for putting their address as a nearby grocery store or something like that.

It's part of the conservative design of society, to be as cruel as possible to people who don't comport.

admiralteal , (edited )

Some claim it, but the definition of the word conservative has nothing to do with small government and individual liberties.

Wanting a better, more effective and efficient government is the domain of progressives.

Wanting a government that respects and protects individual liberties is the domain of liberals.

And wanting a government with fairness for all is the domain of the socialists.

What it means to be conservative is wanting to preserve traditional hierarchies and values even at the expense of individual rights, a well-functioning state, or fairness and justice for all.

Conservatives tell us they are not progressive, they are not socialist, and they are not liberal. Believe them.

admiralteal ,

Also, Spotify is actively trying to ruin and fragment podcasts by running exclusive content. Fuck them with a rusty rake for trying to ruin one of the last mass interoperable platforms with their walled garden horse shit. Fuck them so much.

Don't use Spotify. Even if they fix the app and make it good, don't use it. They're evil little fuckers. Use literally any other podcast app.

admiralteal ,

I like to imagine there are starfleet scouts with bullshit merit pips.

admiralteal ,

Microsoft outdoes every other (paid) OS including Chrome, Android*, iOS, and Mac in terms of their longterm support, as far as I am concerned.

But Win10 is still the end of the line for me, I suspect. All the MS Account stuff deeply integrated into 11 is a bridge too far.

*(which is free, but also doesn't get properly supported on older devices)

admiralteal ,

It's 100% Google's fault.

The recipe sites that would feed you the recipe right at the top are downranked in search because you don't spend as long on them.

admiralteal ,

By design.

Bitcoin has pretty much no incentive to make the transactions efficient. The load is distributed to other people (their customers), and their biggest customers have a perverse incentive to want the transactions to be as inefficient as possible in order to discourage competition.

Vista et al have to pay for their own transactions, so keeping it light is simple cost savings and totally rational.

admiralteal ,

The difference is that there's enough unused capacity on your personal device to handle all the traffic any typical user needs to handle in a day many times over, for simple messaging. Likely, that load is so little it won't even affect your battery life.

admiralteal ,

Sure, but you also just... don't have to do that. None of that is necessary fore core functionality of a messaging service, IF you stipulate that both devices must be online at the same time to ping each other.

The only thing you need is some very basic addressing service so they can find each other, and there are entirely P2P solutions for this that already exist and work without issue. See: bittorrent.

The ONLY drawback of having no server, fundamentally, is that the two devices need synchronicity. If they both aren't online at once, messages won't get delivered. Which is not a big deal for a modern smartphone given that most of them are online close to all of the time.

admiralteal ,

And now here I am, nostalgic for the good old days of having one chat app that could connect you to everyone over XMPP/jabber.

admiralteal ,

What business model? Why does a messaging app need to be a business? And again, how is someone who doesn't have service supposed to be receiving/sending messages? Makes no damn sense.

Basically all bittorrent programs include allowing a peer to act as a tracker directly.

admiralteal ,

Which really illuminates how fucked it is that they aren't paying those people.

These tiny artists earning barely anything are evidently a major enough cost sector that it's worth Spotify just telling them to get fucked. Playing their content is evidently significantly important to Spotify, but not enough to justify an annual check that isn't even enough to buy a beer.

admiralteal ,

To be clear, what I said is Spotify should be sending them their annual several dollar checks. They shouldn't be allowed to just trim away that cost entirely because the artists are small and Spotify wants more profits.

And what you're saying is that they shouldn't get anything because it's "just a hobby".

Fuck you, seriously.

admiralteal ,

But that's not what is happening.

What is happening is directly pointing out that this was is NOT different. That this war is ALSO unjustified.

In war, the aggressors are the problem. Period. And lending support to the aggressed is not the same as supporting war.

It would work, simply letting Russia finish a genocide against Ukraine or Israel finish a genocide against Palestine. The conflict would certainly be resolved that way. But if you think it is an acceptable outcome, you value peace too highly.

admiralteal ,

One of several reasons we have so much reported "human trafficking" cases in the US is because our current laws make it so that any time more than one person is working in an organization involved in sex work, it can magically get redefined as human trafficking even if no workers were forced to be there doing the job.

There have been cases of two sex workers that were roommates being accused of trafficking each other because the material aid of being roommates qualified them as traffickers. Or drivers employed by a sex worker to literally escort them to and from clients/airports to take them to and from the airport being busted as pimps and traffickers.

And of course, the whole thing about interstate travel turning sex work into trafficking is loaded with its own horseshit. It's just a reality for a sex worker that the "new girl in town" gets more business, so there's a huge financial incentive for the worker to occasionally do some business travel.

On top of that, when a brothel or organization gets broken up, frequently all the sex workers are offered deals where they have to say they were trafficked and go after the businesses organizers, seen as the "bigger fish".

For one layer worse, now hotels are being super, super hostile to "human trafficking" but really all their "warning signs" and policies are just meant to stop sex workers. So sex workers are forced increasingly to ply their trade in unsafe locations like cars / client accommodations instead of fairly safe hotels. Meanwhile, the hotels themselves ACTUALLY benefit the REAL human trafficking threat that we should be trying to address -- immigrant wage slavery. Because the hotels frequently are the ones subcontracting things like cleaning to incredibly shady sub-minimum wage exploitative employers that are doing actual trafficking-related stuff. So many of the very things that are causing REAL trafficking are using trafficking to attack sex workers for no reason other than puritanical bigotry.

There's infinitely more to say here, but I just can't do the whole thing justice. Here's a really good podcast episode on the subject that is sensitive and clear about how much nonsense there is in the current, widespread "trafficking" moral panic and how much harm it does compared to the good it preaches.

admiralteal ,

It's the exact opposite way around. Early car users were plowing their way through crowded streets, which were designed for and primarily used by human beings. The streets also had their fair shares of carts, horses, trolleys, etc., but they were primarily for people walking around.

The fledgling auto industry was under SERIOUS fire for the HUGE number of people getting killed by reckless, inattentive, unsafe drivers. Serious risk of cars being fully banned from many cities. So they ran a giant PR campaign to flip the blame. The issue wasn't reckless drivers carelessly charging around crowded streets and killing people -- it was actually the peoples' fault for being in the streets (that had ALWAYS been theirs to be in previously and which were built for them by them).

Worked great. Streets rapidly became places people were not allowed to use -- only cars were permitted, and nearly rent-free. A total hostile takeover.

admiralteal ,

I think removing the stigma is the best pathway towards decriminalization.

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