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.

jj4211

@[email protected]

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

Greater Idaho movement: 13 counties in eastern Oregon have voted to secede and join Idaho (ktvz.com)

On Tuesday, voters in Crook County passed measure 7-86, which asked voters if they support negotiations to move the Oregon/Idaho border to include Crook County in Idaho. The measure is passing with 53% of the vote, and makes Crook County the 13th county in eastern Oregon to pass a Greater Idaho measure.

jj4211 ,

Funnily enough I have one of each of those within about three miles of my home.

jj4211 ,

They wouldn’t want that if course.

However, of they do this, then they would likely make an argument for reallocating electors…

jj4211 ,

Keep in mind the presumptive next step is reallocating electors to give Idaho more of them

jj4211 , (edited )

Easy. If Oregon loses a bunch of population and land area to Idaho, then they will probably then make an argument for taking away electors from Oregon and give them to Idaho.

Republicans struggle to get popular vote but can get electoral college, slim margins. This would potentially increase their electoral college advantage.

Edit: it has been pointed out that that wouldn’t even need to argue for it, the elector transfer would be automatic at 10 year interval.

jj4211 ,

Well not going to say, but it is funny because it is a “swing state”.

But realistically this specific area is deep blue, but TSC has a healthy enough market, between nearby rural area and suburbanites that want to play farmer with a couple chickens in the backyard and buying their pet food there.

jj4211 ,

Depends on the capital.

If it applied to your primary residence, then your prospects to afford to move would be pretty slim. Of course, for most people this won’t matter, since primary residence is exempt for a good amount every two years.

I could also imagine a capital gains offset to account for inflation. If you have 5% gains with 9% inflation, you get to pay taxes despite in real terms losing money.

jj4211 ,

Without some sort of long term strategy, it may not be.

I’ve always said this would be good if also paired with some moves to improve things longer term, because random infusions of lots of free money without any checks on the university side has already worked to make the education more outrageously expensive. Continuing the strategy without any sort of price management will make things work.

Same could be said of healthcare, if as much money as they ask for is provided to the pharmas and hospitals, they will ask for more and more. Relief must be paired with some sort of plan to mitigate that.

jj4211 ,

I can understand the perspective, but if the Trump administration deliberately interfered with the PSLF, then it’s a fair point in the obvious goal (to contrast his approach versus Trump’s). Of course, conveniently they waited for an election year, when they could have done this in 2021…

jj4211 ,

I was thinking more on the university side, some sort of strings attached to have universities a bit more mindful on expense. Waving interest is again a good thing for the borrowers, but it’s still a relatively blank check for the universities.

jj4211 ,

I hope so, but I’m pessimistic that even with full control that they have the political will to make reasonable reforms. Hoping I get to see what they do with full control for two years at least.

jj4211 ,

I think an individual jolt of this magnitude will not necessarily move the needle, but I’ve heard commentary about this just being a regular presidential thing to do going forward, which would be a pretty inadequate and unpredictable way (each time binging on happenstance of election, assuming that at least one of them even wants to do the “tradition”). Might be unfair for me to think overmuch on those suggestions, but they always stick in my head in these conversations. Still find it odd that the executive branch should be able to do this sort of thing unilaterally.

jj4211 ,

This is “unpredictable” only insofar as the previous president refused to let the programs work.

The end result was a promised program that didn’t work as intended and was unreliable. The details are a little less important than the results. However, I’m actually referring broadly to some folks that I saw saying that it should be some sort of presidential ‘ritual’ of forgiving debt, rather than being confined to select programs.

Worry about loan forgiveness to businesses and rich people rather than to poor people and public servants.

Note that I’m less concerned about the loan forgiveness, but instead worry about the “blank check” effect and future affordability and whether or not a student gets stuck with debt assuming they will get forgiven and then get screwed because a future administration refrains from doing so or interferes with ‘forgiveness’. I’d rather circumstances result in no significant debt at all, that government’s willingness to contribute happens up front and universities are somewhat held accountable for their costs to keep that affordable. We can also worry about the crap done for businesses and rich people, but the current situation kind of sucks for planning if you are poor, having to go into massive debt hoping maybe you’ll get in on some forgiveness down the line.

jj4211 ,

On the other hand, assuming the social system isn’t the right one, hypothetically AI fully realized could make it more unreasonable and more tightly stuck the way it is.

jj4211 ,

Another interesting thing to consider.

To be clear, he is rich. But he’s not crazy crazy rich, like nowhere near billionaire status.

With that in mind, his kernel is a key component of RedHat’s, SuSE’s and Canonical whole business, with at least two of those being multi billion dollar businesses.

His kernel is a key component of Android phones, which represent over 50 billion a year in hardware spend, and a bunch of software money on top of that.

His kernel is foundational to most hosting/cloud services with just mind blowing billions of revenue quarterly.

It’s used in almost every embedded device on the planet, networking gear, set top boxes, thermostats, televisions, just nearly everything.

People with a fraction of that sort of relevance are billionaires several times over. A number of billionaires owe much of their success to him. Yet he is not among their numbers.

Now there’s more to things than just a kernel to be sure, but across the hundreds of billions of dollars made while running Linux, there was probably plenty of room for him to carve out a few billion for himself were he that sort of person, but he cares about the work more than gaming the dollars. I have a great deal of respect for that.

Means that while he may not always be right, but I at least believe his assessments are sincere and not trying to drive some grift or cover some insecurity about being left behind.

jj4211 ,

I think it’s a shining example of the ‘right’ sort of rich. Despite a significance that overwhelmingly exceeds usual billionaire level, he’s not nearly so ‘rich’ and yet he has enough to just not worry about money, but he has earned it.

jj4211 ,

Think the point is that alternative strategies were in play when the biggest, most overwhelming cities in the world were maybe 100k people, the world population was 1% of what it was today, and economic activity was relatively limited in what sorts of goods and services were for trade.

Currency came about because as the indirect bartering relationships became overly complex and the number of participants exploded.

Though the currency situation did set up a sort of ‘meta’ of gaming the numbers for sake of the numbers themselves, which grew out of control until breaking the gold standard. Of course it’s still out of control, but what we see is nothing compared to the instability of a gold standard currency trying to tackle current day human activity.

jj4211 ,

Sadly, any time a politician should dare change their mind in the face of new experience/evidence they are attacked for waffling, indecisiveness, untrustworthy, or unpredictable by competitors. Nuance and evolving perspectives are punished severely in politics. Of course in this case it’s nothing so noble, but many good politicians have been undone by admitting to changing their minds.

Trump floats idea of three-term presidency at NRA convention (www.theguardian.com)

Donald Trump flirted with the idea of being president for three terms – a clear violation of the US constitution – during a bombastic speech for the National Rifle Association in which he vowed to reverse gun safety measures green-lighted during the Biden administration....

jj4211 ,

That is just another article about the exact same incident…

jj4211 ,

Exactly. Of course, by putting forth the belief that 2020-2024 was his second term, he should just bow out since he has also said he would not want to challenge the 22nd amendment.

jj4211 ,

Ah, yes, much better. And also more unambiguously directly a call for a third real term, whereas this time it’s plausible he could be claiming that 2020-2024 was his ‘second term’ already.

jj4211 ,

You forgot about the golden rule… it’s not gay if it’s in a three way

jj4211 ,

I spent way too long ignoring the park and rides at major events. Then I started paying attention and they always had them and it was always so much nicer. No more excessively long walking, no more mpossible traffic getting in and out.

As long as the event clearly highlights park and ride options, it’s fantastic and has been going on forever. These events pay the bus charter companies to generally provide rides free of charge to the riders.

jj4211 ,

You just run the same query a bunch of times and see how consistent the answer is.

A lot of people are developing what I’d call superstitions on some way to overcome LLm limitations. I remember someone swearing they fixed the problem by appending “Ensure the response does not contain hallucinations” to every prompt.

In my experience, what you describe is not a reliable method. Sometimes it’s really attached to the same sort of mistakes for the same query. I’ve seen it double down, when instructed a facet of the answer was incorrect and to revise, several times I’d get “sorry for the incorrect information”, followed by exact same mistake. On the flip side, to the extent it “works”, it works on valid responses too, meaning an extra pass to ward off “hallucinations” you end up gaslighting the model and it changes the previously correct answer as if it were a hallucination.

jj4211 ,

This seems like an overblown concern. To prove it, I’m going to make a video putting my finger in the way as it closes and I’m sure it will be fine… /s

jj4211 ,

You fucking squid.

jj4211 ,

In this case, I’d say it’s less about how the registry works, and more about how deliberately obnoxious Microsoft makes the experience for the sake of their agenda.

Sure if you have to deal with the registry at all, it’s “hard” but that’s casting stones from a glass house as dconf can be just as hard, and then you have the odd occasion where someone suggests dbus-send, which certainly doesn’t have room to mock registry handling as hard. The point is that most people never have to touch dconf/dbus directly to do what they want, and in Microsoft some things are deliberately obscure due to user hostile intentions.

jj4211 ,

Well, sure, but this has a user hostile motive behind it.

Microsoft could have offered a right-click/disable internet search to facilitate. However, they wanted people to just give up and soak in start-menu driven internet action, so they buried the option in an obscure registry key.

The key is the start menu search to internet really makes the experience suck, as you try to type something on local system and some internet result gets prioritized, and by nature of the internet search, the internet search is unpredictable, so the search you do every day that usually opens up what you expect suddenly starts going to some internet site in edge.

jj4211 ,

For the “don’t care” computer user? absolutely. Given that the key doesn’t exist at all by default, means it’s not discoverable even for someone that might think to randomly peruse the registry hierarchy. Even if you know it, it’s a typically tedious registry path. Based on Microsoft’s track record, the fact you know the registry key today doesn’t mean that key won’t change behaviors or move somewhere else randomly, or start having to be paired with some other registry key.

Contrast with Plasma, where the same capability is possible, and I just right clicked the button to check out settings and could easily figure out without help or internet search how to enable/disable internet results in the search. Further when I enabled it, the non-internet search stayed blazing fast. Then disabled it again because, well, why would I want that. I did however add browser tab search since I bothered to look because that is handy, just removed history and web search.

jj4211 ,

Well, the 9/11 wasn’t about the human body. Rubbing ass against the screen is outright unsanitary.

jj4211 ,

There’s an assumption that these companies actually value competency.

For many companies, once they established the brand value, competency becomes an expensive superfluous thing. From that point forward it’s about high margin while churning so the customers don’t immediately catch on that the good folks are gone. Especially once they’ve converted a critical mass of customers to renting their product, then the money keeps rolling in and the product can pretty much plateau.

In companies serving businesses, it can take a long long while before the right people at the customers catch on enough to care. When the product sucks for the users and they gripe to leadership, well a few rounds of golf with the vendor and that can is kicked down the line. The employees need to suck it up because this is the premier solution in the industry…

jj4211 ,

I mean if you read some of what his first wife wrote, he was pretty much this bad. Though at the time she was saying it the world didn’t want to hear it. He also did the whole retcon Tesla to be founded by him over 15 years ago, in some pretty petty behavior. When x.com failed relative to PayPal, he somehow managed to get them to merge and make him the head of PayPal, and then they kicked him down when we almost tanked PayPal.

It basically seems that a critical mass of people were covering for him and propping up the brand of his name and image, likely for the sake of their investments. Which should be a fairly familiar story, because 80s Trump had the same things going on, very bad business results glossed over by investors needing to keep the Trump brand strong for the sake of their own money. Both trump and musk successfully tied up some big business fate with their names specifically, forcing investors to play into the conceit.

jj4211 ,

Not only did he never apologize, he paid for investigation in the hopes that the diver randomly turned out to be a pedo and vindicating him. Then when that failed, he tried to play it off as “of that’s just a common south African generic insult, no one takes it literally”, with no one banking him up on that one.

jj4211 ,

That’s a good point. Back in the day if he was leading a big brand to a cliff, others intervened and kicked him out and had the side effect of saving his reputation. Notably, it’s probable his leadership would have destroyed PayPal, but others took the reigns away from him. So when Tesla pretty much made his name, folks simply noted his early leadership at PayPal and retconned attributing him with the crazy success, despite PayPal originally outcompeting the online payment company he was a part of, getting the leadership briefly nearly tanking it, and getting kicked out allowing it to flourish.

jj4211 ,

Depends on their prospects.

For example right this moment, if my employer pulled this on me with a 10% pay cut, it’s probably still better than my prospects in the open market at this moment. I would normally have a pretty strong network of connections, but at the moment they are all in hiring freezes, so I’d probably have to take a huge pay cut to find a job.

But you would be sure I’d be heavily watching my chances and leave as soon as I had a competitive offer on the table.

Hello GPT-4o (openai.com)

GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds,...

jj4211 ,

Just yesterday I was faced with someone complaining because something that was “supposed” to work didn’t work. They proceeded to describe a function they wanted to use that didn’t exist. Finally it came out that it was what GPT says to do… Sigh…

jj4211 ,

Seinfeld is a Billionaire. If I ever had 1% of that, I’d never try to force myself to be relevant and happily accept I’m not relevant anymore.

I’d expect that’s in fact the natural trajectory of being in pop culture, that your time of relevance is fleeting, and plan accordingly. No hurt feelings that no one is lining up for your material anymore, it happens to almost every single person in that field. You only can make your legacy worse by trying to force things, exit on a high note.

jj4211 ,

I wouldn’t bother with the webcam monitoring, but there are absolutely people who will barely work if they aren’t actively engaged with teammates frequently.

It could be because they don’t understand something or don’t have confidence to do task without some ad-hoc training, and sometimes this is just easier to navigate face to face (someone getting starting may be shy about soliciting help, or may feel intimidated by the prospect of “interrupting” someone important.

It could be that they just lack the discipline to stay on task if too many options open up.

It could be that they need the cover of work as “bad guy” to get them away from family members that don’t take their remote work seriously and impose on them.

Americans are choking on surging fast-food prices. "I can't justify the expense," one customer says (www.cbsnews.com)

Kevin Roberts remembers when he could get a bacon cheeseburger, fries and a drink from Five Guys for $10. But that was years ago. When the Virginia high school teacher recently visited the fast-food chain, the food alone without a beverage cost double that amount....

jj4211 ,

In isolation, maybe a good thing. Problem is that it’s a bit of a sign of a broader trend of crazy expensive dining out.

The stuff a fast food customer is likely to eat at home is likely even worse than the fast food. Also, groceries are also pretty expensive, though not quite as bonkers as restaurant pricing.

jj4211 ,

Note that “cook at home” is likely to mean “toss box of pre-cooked factory food featuring mechanically separated ‘meat’ and enough junk to keep it shelf stable for months into microwave or air fryer to reheat”, which is unlikely to be any better, and in fact may likely be even worse (going harder core on some of the processing to last months in a customer pantry).

jj4211 ,

Post said 5 guys has been over priced, not all fast food and not McDs. And that’s right, 5 guys I always found to be… “ok” but dreaded when the work guy would select 5 guys as “the lunch place” on his turn. Always about to spend a lot of money for a burger when I don’t even feel like a burger that day.

jj4211 ,

I suspect this reckoning is coming for other industries too.

In some companies when the post-pandemic shortages hit for real and hard, they rose prices until they actually could source enough stuff to actually serve customers. Then a very vocal group of “told you so” folks saying the fact they made same money with higher prices and fewer customers and thus less expense was what they should have been doing all along. So even as shortages eased, suddenly a lot of companies switched to “low volume, high margin” strategies, e.g. screw most customers, we can gouge a few and make the same money while taking care of fewer people.

Now you can see erosion in the “high margin” businesses, because that temporary success and the extent it continued was built on:

  • Having no choice during the shortages
  • Habits or some sort of lock in causing people to keep spending even after alternatives start opening up, but those wear out, and I think a lot of businesses are starting to feel this.
jj4211 ,

The “No Purchase Necessary” isn’t about giving everyone fair access to the winnings, it’s about being legal even where gambling is not, since “maybe winning” something in exchange for money is either illegal or highly regulated throughout the US.

jj4211 ,

That’s not the only motive. The other is that if people are in the habit of using the phones and kiosks to place their orders, then that’s less money spent on people stuck on order taking. I’d even speculate that is the primary driver of “discounts in the app”.

For many of the restaurants, I’m actually in favor of tapping in the order, since it’s less likely to screw up getting the order right when I’m tapping it in.

jj4211 ,

Your 1200 calorie figure is about right for a “combo” with large drink and fries and a quarter pounder at McD.

That’s about the same as half a fairly modest frozen pizza and a soda. Which would be a plausible “cooking at home” solution that I’ve seen people do, and that’s assuming they stop at half the pizza. Similar story for a lot of frozen “air fryer” fare, they pour from the bag until they have “about a bowl’s worth” and that’s usually about the same calories as the food part of the fast food. They read the “nutrition facts” and see “200 calories” and miss the part where there’s “20 servings a bag” and eat what the packager counted as 6 servings.

Also, that’s only the calorie counting, a TV dinner will have even more added sugars and sodium than the fast food meal.

jj4211 ,

A cheese pizza and a soda at Panucci’s is $10.77

jj4211 ,

I used a Digorno’s pizza as reference. On Totino’s, I was looking more toward how I’ve seen family members eat Pizza Rolls, where they have a cereal bowl full and that’s fast food territory.

As I said on some of the TV Dinners, they may eek by with fewer calories than a McD meal if you get large fries (small fries bring it down to “comparable”), but the added sugars and sodium make them in some select ways worse.

I’d suggest that the sort of person to be selective about their home diet when faced with fast food is likely to get the better options. I think the “biggie size everything” crowd will have bad at home eating habits, and more careful are likely to do things like skip fries and drink and maybe have a smaller sandwich.

I just have the general impression that people think the choices are:

  • Grab an unhealthy fast food meal
  • If they can’t do that, folks will be breaking out fresh vegetables and fish or poultry and making a reasonably healthy dish from scratch

When I’m reasonably sure the people that go all in on unhealthy fast food are filling bowls of pizza rolls and pouring from the 2 liter soda bottles, which is hardly better.

Undoubtedly it is easier to eat healthy at home (portion control, having the right ingredients), but just not sure “once they can’t afford fast food they’ll be on the road to healthier eating” will work out, as has been commonly expressed in this thread.

jj4211 ,

Whatever people like doing at 16 is likely going to persist to what they like at 32 or 64.

To the extent people should be discouraged from soda (and other added sugar drinks), it needs to pretty much be the case from the onset, not just a fact of “growing up”.

I’ve seen children raised on relatively healthy food and drink from the onset and it’s much less of an uphill battle for them to happily eat healthy as they grow up. They actually like the healthy stuff rather than forcing themselves to eat unhappily because they know it’s the right thing.

jj4211 ,

Honestly, not just poor people. People with money also happily slurp up much of the unhealthy food.

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