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arensb

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arensb ,

Or we can just implement a wealth tax like any reasonable nation.

Yeah, the problem here is the implementation: you and I and most people here would benefit a little from a higher tax on billionaires, enough to motivate us to send a letter to our Congressional representatives and send a few bucks to whichever campaigning politicians promise to do it.

Billionaires, in the meantime, stand to lose millions, or even tens of millions of dollars. Enough that it makes sense for them to start PACs, schmooze, and even bribe the Congressional representatives who’d be in charge of raising taxes. So even though there are hundreds of them and millions of us, they have greater means and motivation.

arensb ,

Unless I’m mistaken, a regent is someone appointed to rule temporarily, e.g., if the rightful king or queen is still a child, a regent can be appointed to rule until they grow up.

Maybe a non-binary ruler can be “Emperox”?

arensb ,

The nafety for safety.

arensb ,

I’m pretty sure I saw that headline, with X = Obama or Elizabeth Warren or someone. Then it got shot down because… Idunno, they probably would have blown it all on rent and food and car repairs instead of Job Creation.

Trump and company liable for fraud in New York lawsuit, judge rules (www.cnbc.com)

A judge on Tuesday ruled that Donald Trump and his company are liable for fraud by misstating the true values of multiple real estate properties for years and thus grossly overstating the former president’s net worth by billions of dollars....

arensb ,

Oh, wait. You’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.

arensb ,

And yet, none of them will support using an Electoral College to elect the governor of their state. I guess mob rule is fine when it comes to governors, senators, mayors, and sheriffs, but not presidents.

arensb ,

And so, neither party is going to bother trying to court your vote: one can take you for granted, and the other will write you off. So I hope you have the same concerns as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona, because that’s what you’re getting.

arensb ,

No, but a Kansan’s vote should have the same weight as a New Yorker’s or Californian’s, or even a Pennsylvanian or Michigander. Not all Kansans vote the same way, and it would be nice to have a system that recognizes this.

arensb ,

Fun bit of trivia: which state had the most Republican voters in the 2020 election? Answer: California had more R votes than Texas or Florida or any deep-red state. But neither party gave a shit what California Republicans wanted: Democrats knew that the Electoral votes would go for Biden no matter what, so they didn’t need to campaign there or court anyone’s vote. And Republicans knew that there was no way to get even one of those Electoral votes, so their time and money was best spent campaigning elsewhere.

arensb ,

As it stands, there’s this notion that a candidate has to try and have broad appeal; they need to spread their campaign out a bit in order to “capture” the electoral votes of a state.

That’s currently not the case: in most states, the vote isn’t close, so we know before the campaign even begins how most states will vote. There’s no reason for Republicans to appeal to Kansans, because Kansas will vote R no matter what. Likewise, there’s no point for Democrats to appeal to Kansans because it won’t do them any good.

Sans the electoral college, I see presidential campaigns becoming even more polarized and exclusionary. The Democrat campaign will become the “big city loop.” Continually visit Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, and Miami.

There’s a word in politics for a candidate who wins in big cities, and nowhere else: “loser”.

Check the demographics. Get a list of the 20 biggest cities in the US and add them up. You’ll see that’s only about 30% of the vote. So even if you somehow managed to get everyone in the big cities to vote for you, including children under 18, felons, and people on student visas, that still wouldn’t be enough to determine the election.

Maybe they slide in a few secondary metros if it’s convenient. The candidate won’t have to worry about any non-urban messaging, and if they’re particularly incendiary could even preach “dumping those hicks in the sticks.”

Just in passing, there are more Republicans in the California sticks than the total population of several other states. If the president were elected by popular vote, candidates could no more ignore those voters than California gubernatorial candidates can, today.

arensb ,

How do you do that without violating the First Amendment right to freedom of association?

arensb ,

Mostly. Yes, RCV tends to elect compromise candidates, ones who may not be anyone’s first choice, but that most people can live with. I think Joe Biden is a good example of this. Everyone was rah-rah for some else during the primaries: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee… but Joe Biden has broad tepid appeal.

arensb ,

Part of that is due to the feeling that one’s vote doesn’t matter. IMO having the president be elected by popular vote would bring a lot more people to the polls.

arensb ,

Reminds me of the Blackadder episode where Baldrick won by 16,000 votes, even though there was only one voter:

H: One voter, 16,472 votes — a slight anomaly…?

E: Not really, Mr. Hanna. You see, Baldrick may look like a monkey who’s been put in a suit and then strategically shaved, but he is a brillant politician. The number of votes I cast is simply a reflection of how firmly I believe in his policies.

arensb ,

That’s not even it. At the time the Constitution was adopted, there were states like Virginia that had a lot of people, but rather few voters. They were afraid that they wouldn’t have a real say in who the president was. The Electoral College was a way to inflate slave states’ power, and entice them to join the Union.

arensb ,

And they will, as soon as mapping is more profitable.

Tech's broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap (www.businessinsider.com)

Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.

arensb ,

Also known as the Wal-Mart business model.

arensb ,

A big part of why this season feels stale is that its topical references are several years old. Like Dune and Ivermectin, in this episode. Was this season written two years ago and is only being released now?

arensb ,

So they name this episode Parasites Regained.

Not sure if everyone here knows that Paradise Regained is Milton’s sequel to his earlier Paradise Lost.

arensb ,

For some reason, that one didn’t annoy me as much. Maybe I saw that season only after it came out on DVD, and thought “yeah, this is dated, but I see how it landed when it was still fresh. This season, I’m watching the episodes within a day or two of them coming out, so it feels like getting stale bread at the bakery.

arensb ,

Some years ago, employees sued Amazon because the company had a lengthy security scan when people left, to prevent theft. Apparently it could take half an hour to go through, and they argued that this was unpaid overtime.

They lost, which seems like bullshit: as far as I can tell, the sane way to look at it is, if you’re obligated to do what the company tells you and go where the company says, then you’re on the job and should be paid for it. Once you’re out the door, you can choose whether you want to go home or go to a bar or just sit on the sidewalk; you’re not on the clock and you’re not getting paid.

If the company wants you to work 8 hours in the warehouse, then spend half an hour in the security scan, then you’re doing company business for 8.5 hours.

arensb ,

I can say that some websites don’t work on Firefox

threads.net comes to mind. That annoyed me until I opened the console and saw that it was because of an infinite number of cross-site origin violations, at which point I lost interest in Threads.

arensb ,

Step 3: Profit!

arensb ,

Could you do a better job than him

“I could’ve not drunk-bought Twitter, thereby saving $44 billion.”

arensb ,

Who would have thought actively courting Nazis would make risk averse corporations stop using your ads!

Nobody could have foreseen this! Nobody! Unless by some miracle they happened to look up who’s advertising on far-right platforms like Gab or Pravda Social.

arensb ,

Step 3: Profit!

arensb ,

But he’s not. He’ll be fine. He’ll always be fine.

It’s hard to comprehend just how vastly, mind-bogglingly rich the ultra rich are, so consider: according to Wikipedia, Musk’s net worth in July 2023 was about $239 billion. That means that he could lose 99% of everything he owns, and then lose 99% of what was left, and be left with over $20 million, more money than most of us will see in a lifetime.

He’s not going to be applying for EBT any time soon. Hell, he’s not going to be selling off the spare Lamborghini any time soon.

arensb ,

“Pravda” is Russian for “Truth”. I find it ironic that TFG named his social media site after a newspaper that’s synonymous with "shameless propaganda’.

arensb ,

Oh, just for contrast: imagine someone who graduates from med school, immediately gets a job as a neurosurgeon making $200,000/year — No, let’s say she really works hard, and is very good at her job, and spends wisely, and actually manages to save $200,000/year. Let’s say she manages to keep this up every year for 50 years. How much does she have when she retires? $20 million, less than if Elon Musk lost 99% of everything, and then lost 99% again.

arensb ,

This was what made me push my mom to go out and get a smartphone to replace her old flip phone. (That, and the fact that she had no idea how to send or receive text messages, or check voice mail.)

arensb ,

How can something sarong feel so right?

arensb ,

It’s right there in Matthew 15:

22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.” 23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

People act as though Jesus was a paragon of virtue, but even according to the Bible, he could be a right bastard sometimes.

arensb ,

In fairness, it’s pretty smart, IMHO: one of the big difficulties in getting a social site started is getting a critical mass of people together to sustain conversation. Facebook already has plenty of Instagram users, so giving them all access to Threads seems like a pretty good way to bootstrap Threads.

arensb ,

All your base are belong to us!

arensb ,

That 15% battery status is giving me anxiety by proxy.

arensb ,

When the Internet was created, not only did phones not have batteries, they had their own power grid, separate from that used by other appliances.

arensb ,

Downvoted for misleading description: the beans aren’t fucking. Not even snogging.

arensb ,

The algorithm decides what you read and how you engage, even if it’s negative content or something bad for your mental health.

This may be the wrong place to post this, but it's something I've been thinking about for a while. "Algorithm" isn't a dirty word. And in fact, IMHO Mastodon could benefit from a few alternatives to its most-recent-first algorithm.

For instance, I might want to see posts by emergency services in my area first, followed by posts by friends, and posts by a bot that posts a cat picture every minute further down. Or someone might be going off on a rant, and I'd like to turn their firehose of posts down to a trickle for a few hours. Or maybe I'd like Mastodon to just stop showing me anything after a few hours of activity, to encourage me to take a break.

The reason Twitter's, Facebook's, algorithms are evil is that they encourage you to do things you wouldn't want to do, and because they show you content you don't want. Not because they're algorithms.

In a perfect world, every user on every instance would be able to choose how posts are presented. But that may be too computationally expensive, especially for large instances, especially when you start trying to figure out things like the mood of a post. But maybe each instance could decide which algorithm it wants to use, and user can migrate from one instance to another, depending whether they like how things are presented.

arensb ,

I don’t have any retired hardware from my current job, since I’m 100% cloud (and I don’t miss hardware one bit (well, except for the one time I found that I didn’t have any spare power cables for the homebrew PC)).

I have, however, converted my old QNAP NAS to TrueNAS, and it’s much better now.

arensb ,

undefined> On-prem infrastructure is way less fun than having a full cloud stack, how are you enjoying that, and are there any big snags you all have run into?

There are people who do enjoy playing with hardware, and I’m not going to say they’re wrong, especially since I’m glad they’re around. But that’s not what I want to do for a living.

I think the biggest challenge I’ve seen is: with on-prem hardware, you can brick a server or a router, and have to go down to the machine room to reimage it from the console. With cloud infrastructure, it’s possible to not just brick, but destroy your entire machine room.

Having said that, I really like infrastructure-as-code. I’ve set up racks of hardware, and IaC is way more fun.

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