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sylver_dragon

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sylver_dragon ,

He just wants a bit more Living Space.

sylver_dragon ,

First question: is there a documented Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) you or she is breaking?
If there is an SOP, follow that and only that. When coworker complains, point to the SOP and tell her that you’re following the SOP and will let management know that she isn’t. If you’re not following the SOP and the coworker is trying to get you to follow it, then start following the SOP. Those often exist for very good reasons. If there is no SOP, and it’s something which needs to be done regularly and might impact either life-safety or business operation if it’s not done correctly, then see if management is open to documenting the procedure and creating an SOP. Offer to lead the effort.

Second question:

The message has to be neutral and polite.

Why?
“If you would like to do it, I would be happy to let you. Until then, please fuck off and let me do my job.”

sylver_dragon ,

Probably worth noting that the Gregorian Calendar was an invention of the 16th Century. It was invented to deal with the problems of the Julian Calendar and the creators would have had a firm understanding of the concept of zero. The AD/BC split was all about the assumed year of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth (according to Christian mythology). The year of his birth was set as the first year Anno Domini or “The year of the Lord”. Or the first year where Jesus was kicking about. The year prior to that would therefore be the first year before “Before Christ” was alive, and therefore the year 1 BC.

sylver_dragon ,

Ultimately, they had to set the calendar’s dates based on something. Given the vast hold on Europe which Christianity had at the time, it’s not surprising that the starting date was based on such an important event in the mythology. However, trying to deviate too far from the currently understood order (the Julian Calendar) was likely to end in failure. So, they could either fight the tide of history or just accept a logical oddity. Given all the other logical oddities one must accept for supernatural belief, who’s going to complain about having a holy reason to eat, drink and be merry during one of the most terrible parts of the year?

sylver_dragon ,

Seems like a bit of a mixed bag. Given the source, it’s not terribly surprising though. Marxism is utopian in nature and is built on a highly centralized, command economy. These have had a history of difficulties as they tend to be slow to react to changes in market demand and rely on central planning of a very complex system. That said, some of these ideas are really good and are now part of social democracies. Like most “-isms”, it’s usually useful to borrow the better parts and be more careful about the rest.

  1. The whole of Germany shall be declared a united, indivisible republic.

Pretty much already happened. Though, there will always be quibbling over the borders and what time in history properly defines them. But overall, I think this one is done and good.

  1. Every German who is 21 years old shall be a voter and be eligible for election, assuming he has not been sentenced for a criminal offence.

I’m not sure about German culture, but picking an age of majority and being consistent with it seems like a good idea. I like something in the 20-25 range as that is when the human brain is mostly developmentally mature. But, there may need to be some phase in of rights and responsibilities from an even earlier age to help build maturity as the person develops. 21 seems ok for voting, but I could see an argument for both older and younger.

  1. Representatives of the people shall be paid so that workers may also sit in the parliament of the German people.

I agree with this one. While it does have the issue of creating professional politicians, when unpaid, the only people who can be representatives are those who are already rich enough to be able to not work. And most people who seek political power aren’t in it for the pay. If they are after money, they use the power provided to make money via corruption. So, it’s far better to make politics accessible to all by having pay to support those politicians.

  1. Universal arming of the people. In future armies shall at the same time be workers’ armies so that the armed forces will not only consume, as in the past, but produce even more than it costs to maintain them.

This is a tough one. On one hand, you have the Swiss model of conscription and it works. On the other hand, you have the US model of guns everywhere with zero responsibility. Certainly, in the late 19th century context, you can understand the desire to arm the people. Access to arms was one of the primary ways the feudal class maintained power. At the same time, in the early 21st century, does an armed populace stand a chance of over-throwing a corrupt government? That seems a more complicated question. While it seems unlikely for the people to resist a modern military, we’ve actually seen examples of this happening. Though the results tend to be pretty horrific. If something along the lines of a Swiss model of conscription, training and a true sense of responsibility can be done, I’d be for it. As a largely unregulated system, I can’t say I’d agree as much.

  1. Maintenance of justice shall be free of charge.

Interpreting a bit, I assume this means government paid access to lawyers and the courts. In which case, yes, absolutely. People’s ability to access legal help should not be dependent on their wealth. Granted, short of some really draconian regulations, there will still be issues of wealth buying better help, but that’s probably unavoidable.

  1. All feudal burdens, all fees, labour services, tithes etc. which have previously oppressed the peasantry shall be abolished without any compensation.

Ya, pretty easy one here. The feudal system was bad and anyone supporting it should feel the gentle kiss of a guillotine on the nape of their neck.

  1. All baronial and other feudal estates, all mines, pits etc. shall be converted into state property. On these estates agriculture shall be practised on a large scale and with the most modern scientific tools for the benefit of all.

This starts to get to the heart of Marxism: State owned industry. I do believe that such a system can work, though may be inefficient. As I stated above, highly centralized command economies tend to be slow to adapt to changing conditions and rely heavily on accurate reporting from the bottom up. There can be poorly aligned incentives where a central authority sets a quota and doesn’t have a good mechanism for reporting up shortfalls. Or, reporting a shortfall becomes so taboo that manufacturing points just start to lie about it. This results in an overly optimistic central authority and everyone thinking everything is fine, right up until there is no food and everyone starves. That said, with good reporting, well planned incentives and good systems for dealing with shortfalls, central planning has an advantage in being able to get something done. If the State decides that the country needs trains, trains will get built. Unsurprisingly, different approaches to an economy have different benefits and weaknesses. The goal should be to take advantage of each and try to create a mix which works well for everyone.

There is also a problem around the statement “most modern scientific tools for the benefit of al”. This is great, if the tools/practices chosen actually are the “most modern scientific tools”. If the central authority goes “all in” on a system, and that system is wrong, the result can quickly become a famine. And this sort of “tear everything down and do it our own way” mentality has a bad habit of destroying systems and then falling into traps the previous system spent years, money and lives learning. It’s often why, when a government is toppled, bureaucrats from the old regime end up in the new regime. Those bureaucrats have a lot of valuable experience and may be less wedded to ideology than to living and making money. This is also where decentralized systems tend to have a large benefit. If two farms choose different approaches, you are less likely to have both fail for making the same bad choice. This is just harder to control centrally and you will likely end up with people questioning if each approach is using “most modern scientific tools”. That phrase is easy to say and really hard to prove.

  1. The mortgages on peasant farms shall be declared state property. The interest for these mortgages shall be paid by the peasants to the state.

I’m more a fan of private property than the Marxist system provides for. But, I am all for a Land Value Tax, which amounts to much the same thing. Tax the land based on the value of that land, and it should tend towards more efficient uses. Also, kicking people off the farms they have been running seems like a good way to kick off a famine. Again, going back to the idea that the people currently doing the job probably have a reasonable idea of how to do the job. Replacing them with random people who have no knowledge doing it, usually results in problems.

  1. In the areas where leasing has developed the ground rent or lease payment shall be paid to the state as a tax.

As above, a Land Value Tax seems a good place to start. I’m not a fan of the abolition of private property. But, that’s really a philosophical difference and I can’t say this wouldn’t work. If nothing else, it would break up very old land holdings.

  1. All private banks will be replaced by a state bank whose bonds will have the character of legal tender.

I’d argue that this is an artifact of the time these ideas were written in. Having a central, State backed bank has become pretty common. There is usually some separation (at least on paper), such that the bank isn’t the State. But, it’s a pretty thin wall in most cases. That said, removing all competition might be interesting. Goodness knows private banks have been very damaging to the economy of late. Though, having only one bank may simply centralize such risk and make any problem systemic to the economy. Though, if that bank does not have an incentive to seek profit or engage in rent seeking behavior, many of those risks may simply not exist. I’m not sure on this point, it’s an interesting idea but it also seems like it could be risky.

  1. All means of transport: railways, canals, steamships, roads, posts etc. shall be taken in hand by the state. They shall be converted into state property and made available free of charge to the class without financial resources.

So, if you move to a complete, central command economy, the first part makes sense. The State should control the means to transport good and large infrastructure should similarly be owned and operated by the State. Heck, even without the central command economy, I’d like to see a move towards State ownership of basic infrastructure (road, rails, canals, electricity networks, communications networks). And then charge individuals/companies fees to access those networks to pay for maintenance. I’d skip the whole “means testing” bit, as that seems like more trouble than it’s worth. Instead, I’d build out a Universal Basic Income which would cover a basic level of use for that infrastructure. Higher levels of service would then be dependent on paying higher fees. The exception to “use fees” would be for transportation networks. Most train rides would be at no cost to the rider, roads would be open access.

  1. In the remuneration of all civil servants there shall be no difference except that those with a family, i.e. with greater needs, shall also receive a larger salary than the others.

Holy crap this is dumb. You want to disincentivize workers, this, right here is how you do it. This will also lead to a rapid “brain drain” from civil service. People will get just enough experience to get paid better elsewhere and move on. That, or you will see widespread corruption, as the only reason to hold a civil service job for any length of time would be abuse.

sylver_dragon ,

Hit the comment limit, so continuing on:

  1. Complete separation of church and state. The clergy of all denominations shall only be paid by their own voluntary congregations.

Yes, please. I’m not willing to go whole hog hunting down and persecuting priests, as has happened in some revolutions. But, religion should be something people keep to themselves.

  1. Limitation of inheritance.

This would be a question of what limits and how they are calculated and imposed. Something like a logarithmic tax might be a good way to set this up, such that very high values become very highly taxed. But, I do feel that parents have a legitimate interest passing down their earnings to their children.

  1. Introduction of strongly progressive taxes and abolition of taxes on consumption.

In general, this sound great. The problem is, it’s way to general of a statement to really discuss. The devil is always in the details. For example, “consumption taxes” sound bad, but does that cover luxury taxes? I’m all for a taxing yachts at obscene rates. Granted, I am also generally against “sin taxes” which are used to punish people for whatever “sin” it’s currently en vogue to hate. So, maybe yes?

  1. Establishment of national workshops. The state shall guarantee the livelihood of all workers and provide for those unable to work.

Arbeit macht… Oh,wait that’s kinda unfair. But, this sounds a lot like State run labor camps. Ultimately, this becomes a problem with a central command economy, who gets to choose the job you do? Unless we’re talking about a magical “post singularity, AI robots do all the hard work” society, we’re going to need people to do the less desirable jobs. I personally tend towards a system of Universal Basic Income providing enough money for a person to live on, with work being something you do because you want more than the basics and/or you just have a passion. This would also mean that the les desirable jobs would come with higher wages.

I think this point may have also been influenced by the times. With the move to industrialization, there seemed to be a need for large factories which employed hundreds of people. From that perspective, this may seem to make more sense. I just think it’s leaning a bit too hard into the central command economy and might result in a lot of Animal Farm style problems.

  1. Universal free education of the people.

And healthcare. But this list pre-dates modern healthcare or I suspect it would have been there. History has really proven the value of universal education and not having it is now seen as a very bad idea.

As I said above, it’s a mixed bag. I think there are some good ideas in this, but I also think it’s very much an idealized society and would face problems with corruption and issue in implementation. I think it’s telling that, when the early USSR tried to implement a government based on these ideals, things went sideways. And later the People’s Republic of China faced similar issues. At the same time, much of Western Europe has built off these ideas and created a much more equitable society and we can see the positive benefits in strong social programs.

sylver_dragon ,

Yo ho, yo ho off to the digital seas we go!

In fairness, I can see a use case for this as something to have on in the background while doing other tasks or as a way to discover new content either the algorithms would have never shown you or you might not have clicked on. But, I can also see the service providers using this to further try to show-horn ads into everything and fuck up the current system of “pick a show I want to watch and watch it now”. In which case, it’s once again time for them to learn that piracy isn’t so much a price problem as a service one.

sylver_dragon ,

While certainly an interesting development, this is just in a petri dish.

sylver_dragon ,

As others have stated, the existence of extra-terrestrial life seems a near certainty. We know that intelligent life can evolve in the universe (QED: we exist) and given the vastness of the observable universe it seems highly probable that it’s happened more than once. Limiting ourselves to just the Milky Way galaxy, again given the size and number of stars, it seems reasonably likely that there is other intelligent life here.

Have they been to Earth? This one strikes me as less likely. The universe is big, just mind bogglingly big. Even an infinitesimally small part of it, like the Milky Way galaxy is still insanely big. And as best as our current understanding of physics provides, we cannot exceed the speed of light. And even trying to approach that speed is fraught with all kinds of problems. At any significant fraction of the speed of light, bumping into tiny bits of space dust can cause real problems for spaceships (think: nuclear weapon level energies released). Even sub-atomic particles cause problems, as they will be the same as high energy radiation at those speeds. Even if those issues can be handled, there is the problem of reaction mass to get ships up to and decelerate from those speeds. Even electric ion engines need some sort of reaction mass to push against, and that has to be carried. This then runs us face first into the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation. For every extra bit of reaction mass you carry, you need even more reaction mass to get everything up to speed. Eventually, you’re trying to carry so much mass that the whole thing just gets unfeasible. As a related tanget this XKCD What-If gets into a lot of the same issues.

So ya, I doubt that ET has been to Earth, simply because crossing the gulf of intergalactic space would require an investment of resources which is so insanely big that no sane species would bother. And then there is the whole issue of time. Sure, at a sufficient speed and thanks to Lorentz Contraction you can actually cross the Milky Way galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, in your own frame of reference. IIRC, it’s something like a single year assuming 1g acceleration half way there and a similar deceleration after the half-way point (can’t be arsed to look it up. You, dear reader, have fun with that). However, to the observer sitting on Earth, it takes much, much longer. So long that the folks sending you off will be dead, decayed, fossilized and those fossils long degraded by the time you get there. When you get back, your home planet may well not exist anymore and and thing resembling your home society will have long been lost to the sands of time. Again, no sane species is going to make such an investment of resources for what is effectively no return.

But wait, what if aliens have some magic technology which lets them bypass the limitations on the speed of light? Ok well, if little green Gandalf can cast a teleport spell on Frodo the tentacled alien, then yes he can toss his thing in whatever crack he wants. But, absent any evidence to show that such magic is possible, then it’s not really worth consideration.

So, does “the government” have some secret knowledge about aliens? I highly doubt it. Mostly, because I doubt such exists. But, also consider the difficulty of maintaining such a secret for decades with possibly thousands of people knowing. One of the things you learn about, when you get a US FedGov Clearance, is the concept of “Need to Know”. One of the things the US Government learned during the Vietnam War was the fact that the more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to leak. If you have a ton of time and insomnia, I highly recommend reading up on Purple Dragon. Secrets leak, all the time. Yet somehow there has been a massive conspiracy around aliens visiting Earth. Oh and that conspiracy would need to extend beyond just the US Government to include other, hostile, governments. But, the only evidence we have is blury videos and crackpots. Ya, bullshit.

So ya, ET is likely “out there”, the math makes it pretty likely. At the same time, physics makes it really, really, really hard for him to get here. And no international conspiracy would be able to hide such events over decades.

sylver_dragon ,

Yes, for a completely unrelated reason. There have been filling deadlines for candidates at basically every level of government for a very long time and those have never been successfully challenged in court. And even with the most liberal Judges on the SCOTUS likely wouldn’t bat an eye at them. The problem here isn’t Alabama (for once) it’s the DNC being so high on it’s own shit that they assumed the laws wouldn’t be applied to them. Sure, the State Legislature could pass a law temporarily waiving that requirement. It seems awful stupid to bet on it when the convention could happen a week earlier and avoid the whole thing.

sylver_dragon ,

I was thinking that, too, but prior to the Sun becoming a white dwarf, the Sun is predicted to expand and swallow Earth (and Venus and Mercury), so the Sun’s mass will increase.

A quick look has the mass of Mercury, Venus and Earth at close to 2 times the mass of Earth by itself. The Sun is around 330,000 times the mass of Earth. Soaking up all the inner planets means a change of less than 1/10th of 1% to the mass of the Sun. It’s not going to have an appreciable effect on it’s gravitational pull. The Sun already holds the vast majority of the mass of the solar system. With Jupiter holding most of the rest.

Contrary to the headline, I suspect the only way the solar system will be destroyed by a white dwarf will be if one ends up whipping through our solar system. That would make for a very bad day.

sylver_dragon ,

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”
–Genesis 22:1-2

Ya, Yahweh is a bit of a dick.

sylver_dragon ,

It’s a mixed bag. Piped bot is just generally “meh” for me. With all the ad blocking I have turned on, I don’t really see ads on Youtube and would rather give what little support my views provide to the creators on the platform. I also subscribe to Nebula to try and support them directly.

Many of the bots, especially the really noisy re-post type bots I tend to block. Sure, I want to see content on Lemmy, but a bot reposting everything from a site has a problem with just creating a lot of noise without any sort of filtering for interesting content. But, since I can block them selectively, I’d rather people had the room to create and I’ll just remove the ones I don’t like from my feed. Everyone wins.

sylver_dragon ,

It’s like republicans are actively trying to lose in November.

Um, did you stop reading at the second sentence?

The Debt Collective named Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), and Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) as particularly responsible for the language.

I don’t have any love for the GOP, but this particular bit of “fuck you” is from neoliberal Democrats. They need replacing. Not with Republicans, but with better Democrats.

sylver_dragon ,

Yes, yes it has. And it’s directly because Russia engaging in exactly the type of expansionist wars NATO was set up to stop.

Scathing federal report rips Microsoft for shoddy security, insincerity in response to Chinese hack (apnews.com)

In a scathing indictment of Microsoft corporate security and transparency, a Biden administration-appointed review board issued a report Tuesday saying “a cascade of errors” by the tech giant let state-backed Chinese cyber operators break into email accounts of senior U.S. officials including Commerce Secretary Gina...

sylver_dragon ,

During my time contracting in the FedGov, they went “all in” on Microsoft products. From email to Teams to other products, they were becoming a Microsoft shop top to bottom. This was fine for products which were fully mature. For all the jokes about it, Microsoft email is actually pretty good. Azure AD is fine, as long as you have a team of sysadmins to unfuck permissions issues. Permissions will get fucked, as there is a dearth of tools for mapping them. But, that’s been a perennial problem with AD permissions well back to the NT 4.0 days (maybe longer, I was dealing with Novell before that). And there isn’t much better for centralized user management than AD, though third party PAM tools do help here, a lot. Their security tools were (and still are) shit on toast from a usage perspective. Seriously, the only reason people choose MS Defender anything is because “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM Microsoft”.

The main problem is that Microsoft is a “for profit” company. This means that there will always be tension between Security and Profit. So, it’s unsurprising that they have a lax security culture. Security isn’t profitable. The appearance of security is, and I have little doubt Microsoft will be able to roll out all kinds of documentation showing that they were “compliant” with all the required security controls. This means exactly dick, as it’s easy to have insecure systems be “fully compliant” and then do exactly fuck all to actually secure the systems. “Compliant” is a baseline and only proves that you’re not going to get hacked within the first ten minutes of plugging a network cable in. Actually securing the system means a lot of people, processes and efforts finding and fixing holes not covered by the baselines and watching the network for anomalies. That’s really expensive and makes ITs job a pain a lot of times. It also makes no money, as it doesn’t do much to enhance the appearance of security, so it tends to get ignored and eventually cut. The end result is exactly what we have here today, a major hack which didn’t get picked up on for weeks.

sylver_dragon ,

This seems like one of those technologies which may be useful as an investigatory tool, but should ultimately not admissible in court. For example, if law enforcement has a grainy video of a crime, and they use AI enhancement to generate leads, that could be ok. Though, it will still have issues with bias and false leads; so, such usage should be tracked and data kept on it to show usefulness and bias. But, anything done to a video by AI should almost universally be considered suspect. AI is really good at making up plausible results which are complete bullshit.

Ukraine packed a Cessna-style plane with explosives, added remote controls and kamikaze’d it into a Russian drone factory 600 miles away (www.forbes.com)

In a sharp escalation of its drone campaign targeting strategic industries deep inside Russia, Ukraine seems to have fitted Cessna-style light planes with remote controls, packed them with explosives and flown at least one of them more than 600 miles to strike a Russian factory in Yelabuga, 550 miles east of Moscow....

sylver_dragon ,

This is pretty embarrassing for Russian air defense. Though, I also wonder if they were hesitant to shoot down an unidentified aircraft after multiple cases of friendly fire bringing down VKS aircraft. I’m also amazed that there was seemingly no Electronic Warfare (EW) systems in the area to prevent remote control of drones. Sure, there are EW countermeasures, but this seems like a pretty significant failure that this drone could be flown in from that far away.

sylver_dragon ,

While embarrassing, the environment in which that happened was entirely different. You had Regan and Gorbachev actively working to improve relations. And no one was actively trying to blow up Soviet infrastructure. You’d think the Russian air defenses would be a bit more sensitive to small aircraft coming from Ukraine in this environment.

sylver_dragon ,

The West is perfectly fine supporting genocide so long as you only do it in your own country or in a country The West is not interested in.

Freight railroads must keep 2-person crews, according to new federal rule first proposed under Obama (apnews.com)

“As trains — many carrying hazardous material — have grown longer, crews should not be getting smaller,” said Eddie Hall, the president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union. He praised the FRA for taking the step President Joe Biden promised. Hall said keeping two people in the cab of a...

sylver_dragon ,

Are there many accidents that this would have prevented?

We don’t know, because the norm has been two-man teams. The question shouldn’t be “is this making things safer”? The question needs to be “will reducing crew sizes still be as safe”? The burden of proof needs to be on the rail operators to show how they have mitigating controls in place to prevent failures which may have been caught by that extra human operator. Ultimately, this is about systems failure and avoiding low incidence, high damage failures. While technical controls are fantastic and should be used, they are often inflexible and don’t respond in the same way that a human can to prevent or mitigate a disaster. Humans are often a critical layer in the Swiss Cheese Model for preventing these sorts of failures. Fewer humans may well mean fewer chances to stop something getting through.

That all said, if railroads really want to have data driven safety, then we really need an organization, similar to the FAA, which is empowered to enforce safety standards and require companies to comply with safety recommendations. And I doubt the railroads would be happy about that. It might mean actually implementing safety upgrades and maintenance in a timely manner.

sylver_dragon ,

I’m personally a fan of microtik products. It’s nice as they have a lot of built in management features. However, the downside is that there is a learning curve to their products which can feel like a vertical wall some times.

sylver_dragon ,

Ya, this is the sort of thing which would keep me from buying Tesla. While Musk’s antics certainly don’t help, everything I hear about Tesla tends to revolve around poor quality control, terrible customer support and long delays in getting problems fixed. Even without Musk, I wouldn’t want any part of that.

sylver_dragon ,

And Windows Me never even made the list.
Having been an early adopter of it, I know why.

sylver_dragon ,

Windows 10 released in 2015. Windows 11 released in 2021. It’s pretty much in line with other release cycles for Windows Desktop OS releases.

  • XP -> Vista - was about 6 years
  • Vista -> 7 - Was about 2 (But everyone sane basically skipped Vista)
  • 7-> 8 - Was 3 years, with a fourth year to get to 8.1.
  • 8 -> 10 - Was about 3 years.

If you only look at the releases which mattered, XP -> 7 was 8 years and 7 -> 10 was 6. So, it seems like Microsoft kinda accepted reality this time around and we didn’t get some sort of asinine Windows Mojave shenanigans trying to polish a turd. That said, I’m still running 10 on my main system and my experiences with 11 are making me consider an upgrade path to Linux when Win10 goes EoL.

sylver_dragon ,

Setup a trade. Russia gets Vasyl Maliuk (The Head of the Ukrainian SBU), if they hand over Putin for trial at The Hague for War Crimes. While I don’t believe Maliuk is guilty of anything (other than prosecuting clandestine actions in a defensive war), I also suspect he’d be enough of a patriot to take one for Ukraine, if meant Putin was held accountable for this war.

sylver_dragon ,

This has to be an AI written article, or maybe AI edited (or both).

sylver_dragon ,

Way down at the end of the article, they finally get to the heart of the problem:

And even before 2020, educators nationwide were warning that they lacked the appropriate mental health and social service supports to adequately deal with behavior challenges.

In the late 00’s, there was a push to address some of this and school districts were hiring and building out counseling services. Then 2008 hit, the economy cratered and the first thing cut was those same services. An entire generation of students missed out on what could have been much better mental health and social services, because of big banks gambling. But hey, at least we saved those big banks from their own hubris and mistakes, right?

sylver_dragon ,

Even with their recent problems, if you are driving any significant distance to the airport, you’re far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident on the way there than you are on the airplane.

sylver_dragon ,

Over the past decade, California has doubled its minimum wage for most workers to $16 per hour. A big concern over that time was whether the increase would cause some workers to lose their jobs as employers’ expenses increased.

Instead, data showed wages went up and employment did not fall, said Michael Reich, a labor economics professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

“I was surprised at how little, or how difficult it was to find disemployment effects. If anything, we find positive employment effects,” Reich said.

Quoted from the article and emphasis added for those with reading comprehension difficulties.
Wages got decoupled from profits many years ago. These sorts of increases are about bringing them back in line.

sylver_dragon ,

Well that’s very interesting plot twist, I’m almost concerned about as long as minimum wage grows higher and higher company tend to mass layoff it’s worker & replace the worker with robot equipment

Not really. This same saw about minimum wage increases leading to inflation and unemployment gets pulled out every time the discussion comes up. And while I am sure there is a point of diminishing returns, the doom and gloom has failed to materialize time and again. I’m old enough that I was working through several US Federal Minimum Wage hikes and have heard the same claims every time. And while there will be some marginal rise in prices, it will be nothing like the rise caused by actual inflation and is really just businesses using the opportunity to adjust prices up while having a convenient excuse.

Worker replacement with automation also isn’t new. The industrial revolution was devastating for many sectors. Weaving used to be an actual cottage industry, with people renting time on looms or making cloth at home. Now, we all buy mass manufactured textiles made in massive, highly automated factories. Sure, it sucked for people dedicated to weaving at the time, but it’s been a long term good for society. People and markets eventually adjusted, and people now benefit from cheaper textiles. It’s a cycle we’ve run through with many products and we’ll run through it again with many more. The real test of a society isn’t in that society trying to hold back progress, it’s in how we protect the dignity and well-being of the affected workers as the shift happens. We’ll need strong social services to support workers whose jobs are automated away. Holding down wages doesn’t do that, it only enriches the already wealthy by allowing them to capture more profit at the expense of the workers.

sylver_dragon ,

If you haven’t already done it, now is a good time to freeze your credit.

sylver_dragon ,

The percentage of inconsiderate people meeting the percentage of multi-family housing with basically no soundproofing is a recipe for sleeplessness and rage

This problem is exactly why I will never live in a city again. I’m sure it’s possible for multi-family housing to have reasonable sound proofing. I’m also sure it will never actually happen in anything except the most high-end units… And even that soundproofing does nothing when you try to have the windows open during nice weather and discover that your neighbor’s wife screams like an actress in a bad porno at 3am. Ya, no, fuck that noise. Gimme a small home in the forest with trees between me and the next asshole.

That all said, I quite like my current setup. I’m in a rural area with ~25k people in the county, last time I looked into it. The community I live in is more suburban in layout. We don’t hear our neighbors unless they are really, really loud. But, we also have BBQ’s on the regular with our neighbors and our kids are out and about together constantly. It’s pretty darn idyllic.

sylver_dragon ,

I work in Cybersecurity, Incident Response specifically.
I started off in IT and spent a lot of years as a sysadmin (Windows, mostly). A couple jobs ago, I often worked closely with the security team and when they had an opening, they all but held a gun to my head to get me to apply to move over. Some years and a few internal promotions later, I got a message on LinkedIn which (in part) read:

I came across your LinkedIn and thought you might be a great fit for a Sr. Information Security Analyst role that my team currently has open. It’s a fully remote opportunity with one of our top clients. Would you be open to a brief call to discuss further?

I said yes and now I’m a making good money while reading other peoples’ email in my pajamas.

Youngkin vetoes Virginia bills mandating minimum wage increase, establishing marijuana retail sales (apnews.com)

Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed two top Democratic legislative priorities on Thursday: bills that would have allowed the recreational retail salesof marijuana to begin next year and measures mandating a minimum wage increase....

sylver_dragon ,

What are you smoking and why isn’t it legal in Virginia?
State marijuana legislation has nothing to do with the flow of FedGov money into NoVa. The area owes its wealth to two factors:

  1. Proximity to DC, including areas which used to be part of DC. With easy access to the Federal Government, both businesses and organizations want to be there.
  2. It’s not Maryland. Because who the hell wants to be in Maryland? Kidding aside, Virginia has lower taxes and is usually considered more business friendly than Maryland.

Also, both DC and Maryland already have legalized marijuana and neither of them have been cut off from the FedGov money train.

Lastly, “Republicans in NoVa”? I’m sure there are dozens, but if you start driving West on I-66, you’re going to reach the border of West Virginia before you hit a major enclave of Republicans.

sylver_dragon ,

It’s always a “chicken or the egg” situation. Right now, there isn’t much need for a home router with anything faster than a 1Gbps port. In the prosumer space 10Gbps is available, but it’s not super cheap (about $300 with SFP module). But, if something like 50Gbps becomes common, manufacturers will be incentivized to make products for it. The economies of scale and the effects of competition will kick in and prices will come down.

I’m old. I was at one of the events where Intel announced 1Gbps over copper. This was supposed to be impossible, there was no way to push 1Gbps over Cat-5 cables. But, with Cat-5e and Cat-6, they had cracked it. At the time, there was no way this was ever going to be a cheap technology and it was intended for large enterprises for major switch interconnect runs. Now it’s everywhere.

Maybe 50Gbps to the home won’t happen. And this is just some exec blowing smoke. But, maybe they’ll do it and kick off the market for cheaper equipment in that class. While I do agree that we’re lacking the “killer app” to make that much bandwidth to the home necessary. Things like music and video streaming came about after the advent of faster speeds. It wasn’t until we had DSL that people realized that streaming music, in real time, would be a thing. We needed the bandwidth to be there for the use cases to be discovered.

sylver_dragon ,

Cultural appropriation is US culture. The UK and Ireland were just some of the earliest donor countries.

sylver_dragon ,

The investigation report is going to be interesting. While bridges can only take so much punishment, they are usually designed to survive some collisions with their pylons. I wonder what the state of the bridge was, prior to the collapse. If it’s anything like the rest of the infrastructure in the US, it was probably not good. Though, this may also be a case that the designers in the 70’s planned for a collision with a cargo vessel of the times, which were tiny bath tub boats compared to the super container ships we have now. The Dali was built in 2015 she is a 300m ship capable of carrying 116851 tons. That’s a lot of mass for the pylon and it’s barriers to stop.

sylver_dragon ,

From the unsaflok.com site:

Dormakaba uses a Key Derivation Function (KDF) to derive the keys for some of the Saflok MIFARE Classic sectors. This proprietary KDF only uses the card’s Unique IDentifier (UID) as an input.
Knowledge of the KDF allows an attacker to easily read and clone a Saflok MIFARE Classic card. However, the KDF by itself is not sufficient for an attacker to create arbitrary Saflok keycards.

Security is hard. Cryptography is even harder. Don’t roll your own algorithms, it’s just asking for a problem. And given that “oversight”, I’d bet that the rest of the kill chain involves equally bad encryption or hashing being used on the cards.

‘Keep your filthy hands off Trump Tower!’: Trump begs fans to pay his $464m bond (www.independent.co.uk)

Former president blasts New York Attorney General Letitia James as an ‘insane radical’ in a desperate plea for cash – claiming Democrats are trying to ‘intimidate’ him into abandoning his campaign for the White House...

sylver_dragon ,

Mr Trump’s lawyers notified an appeals court earlier this week that their client has failed to raise the capital to cover the bond, saying finding a surety company to help them was proving a “practical impossibility”.
The former president has approached “about 30 surety companies through four separate brokers”, his attorneys said, but had so far come back empty-handed in the face of “insurmountable difficulties”.
“Critical among these challenges is not just the inability and reluctance of the vast majority of sureties to underwrite a bond for this unprecedented sum, but, even more significantly, the unwillingness of every surety bond provider approached by defendants to accept real estate as collateral,” his attorneys wrote.

Wait, so you’re telling me that all those surety companies aren’t willing to loan money to a known grifter who is famous for not paying back his loans? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!
Ok, not that shocked.

Justice Department to sue Apple for antitrust violations as soon as Thursday (www.seattletimes.com)

The Justice Department is poised to sue Apple as soon as Thursday, accusing the world’s second most valuable tech company of violating antitrust laws by blocking rivals from accessing hardware and software features of its iPhone....

sylver_dragon ,

I hate the Orange Baboon as much as the next person, but from the article:

The Justice Department opened the latest case in 2019 under former President Donald Trump.

Unless Time Cook has a sudden change of heart and starts sucking up to Trump, I doubt that Apple is going to get a free pass.

sylver_dragon ,

For the US, the change would be minimal. The economy of Cuba is so small by comparison and they don’t have a heavy industry or tech sector to offer much to the US economy. Most outflows of money would likely be in tourism by US citizens to Cuba. And maybe some businesses would find ways to offshore some work. But again, I think the overall impact would be small.

As for Cuba, it really depends on the Cuban Government. Trade with the US and tourism are likely to have a much larger impact (as a percentage of GDP) on Cuba. The country could well see a sizeable influx of foreign cash. Managed well, this could create a lot of opportunity for the Cuban people. Managed by a corrupt regime, intent on enriching itself and it’s friends, this could lead to the same type of misery which usually results from corrupt government.

Trump can appeal ruling that kept Georgia prosecutor on case, judge says (www.reuters.com)

A Georgia judge on Wednesday said Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and eight of his co-defendants in the state’s criminal election subversion case could appeal a ruling that let lead prosecutor Fani Willis remain on the case....

sylver_dragon ,

Absolutely, no matter how careful they were about the relationship, Willis had to know this could create the appearance of impropriety. Which is exactly what the judge ruled and likely any sane judge would have ruled. Willis may as well have asked, “how can I snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?” Because she absolutely found the answer.

sylver_dragon ,

While I do enjoy the place, it can be an echo chamber. And you seem to have upset the Indigo Blob.

sylver_dragon ,

Piracy and torrenting was always a service issue. Sure, there is some core of people who will never pay for content or a service. But, a lot of people will be happy to pay something for content, so long as they can get what they want without too much hassle. And that has largely been the landscape for the past decade or so. Apple Music popped up and gave people the same sort of access to music Napster did, at a cost which wasn’t ridiculous. It also didn’t host a million viruses and didn’t carry with it any sort of moral questions or legal risks. Netflix did the same for movies and TV, shrinking the space for video piracy. And many movie and TV producers are finally accepting the new paradigm and trying to carve out their own space which mimics the speed and convenience of piracy, while still earning them some money. We probably have a long way to go and a lot of growing pains. But, the fact that torrent traffic is falling and official streaming services’ bandwidth usage is growing shows that they are doing something right. That said, I suspect that we will see them fluctuate for a while as customers punish the more outlandish attempt to monetize streaming services. When the official services start getting too bad again, we’ll see more black flags flying. And that’s a good thing.

American Bible Society to close its $60 million museum after 3 years (www.inquirer.com)

The museum created by the American Bible Society in July 2021 said it would be open to visitors until March 28. The Christian ministry nonprofit that translates Bibles and sends them around the world has recently been besieged with challenges including layoffs, funding troubles, and five CEO changes within two years.

sylver_dragon ,

While I wouldn’t have wanted to support the place,

a collection of historic Bibles, including William Penn’s own

would have actually been interesting to see. For all the harm done in the name of Christianity, there is also a lot of amazing artwork and historic significance tied up with it. It’s just better done in an actual museum and not a religious nutjob propaganda space.

sylver_dragon ,

That’s basically a Diceware passphrase. And, it’s kinda ok. The amount of entropy is pretty significant (close to what the comic lists, if the Wikipedia article has it right). And it’s really easy to add more entropy. I often recommend passphrases to my users (I work in Cybersecurity) and use them myself. Take a sentence, with spaces, capitals and punctuation. Now throw in a few numbers for fun and stop worrying about brute force attacks, until some idiot decides unsalted MD5 is perfectly fine for storing passwords. Most such passphrases will blow right past the 4 words in that comic and are very easy to remember. Even better, make that the passphrase for your password vault (oh look a plug for KeePass). Then have the rest of your passwords all be unique, 20 character jumbles of letters, numbers, and special characters.

Also, enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) wherever possible. Even if it’s just a One Time Password (OTP) sent via SMS (which is a shit way to do 2FA), that’s better than no 2FA.

sylver_dragon ,

The account is used for the ancient VPN software and all of our ssh management tools

And windows login if you’re using windows.

If you’re using one password for all those things, you’re doing it wrong. Even if the passphrases you pick are easy to remember and type, they should be distinct.

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