dgriffith
@dgriffith@aussie.zone
I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.
- Comment on The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff 2 days ago:
Mmm I’d take Common Sense Skeptic’s spaceX videos with about a ton of salt. They’ve got a real big bug up their ass about spaceX for some reason.
- Comment on Sydney man wrongly named as Bondi Junction stabbings murderer settles defamation claim with Seven 3 weeks ago:
So there’s a history of this kind of bad reporting. You’d think they’d learn.
It’s a race to get the scoop and breathlessly report names before other news agencies do. This, to them, is just minor collateral damage compared to being FIRST TO REPORT ON THIS BREAKING SITUATION.
- Comment on space 4 weeks ago:
I prefer the H.G. Wells style, where you affect the flow of time instead of a discontinuous jump.
You’re still attached to your current location, things just happen faster (in forwards or reverse). It also means that time travel takes time, which can be a handy plot tool.
- Comment on Are We Watching The Internet Die? 2 months ago:
And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, “content that only sort of helps”
Hello, my name’s dgriffith. I’m a Fediverse Support community member, and I’m here to help.
Have you tried running sfc /scannow and making sure your antivirus is up to date? That usually fixes the issue that you are describing.
If that does not help, a complete system reinstall often solves the problem you have.
Please mark this comment as useful if it helps you.
Regarding the death of hyperlinks, it’s probably more a case of “why bother clicking on yet another link that leads me to another page of crap?”.
That is, it used to be the case that you’d put information on the web that was useful and people would link to it, now it 80 percent of it seems to be a variations of SEO’d recipe sites and AI hallucinations.
- Comment on Where have all the websites gone? 3 months ago:
Small ISPs at the start of the internet used to provide you with space that you could ftp a few html files to and they’d be visible on the internet at myisp/~yourusername.
Of course that cost them a little bit of money and storage space so when they all got absorbed into megaISPs that kind of thing got dropped. Then it was all up to Geocities and friends or you had to go buy hosting from your ISP, both of which was enough of a hurdle to stop the average person from playing with it.
- Comment on HP sued (again) for blocking third-party ink from printers, accused of monopoly 4 months ago:
HP and/or Compaq used to make their own PCs in the 90’s going into the 2000’s.
For example they used to have special motherboards that were basically backplanes and CPU cards to suit.It’s quite possible they did dumb shit with IDE connectors/pinouts that meant that some devices didn’t work.
It wouldn’t have been a major scandal, it just would have been, “yeah some aftermarket drives don’t work with HP”, which was pretty common across the entire market back then. We’re basically in the golden age of system compatibility right now, things were an absolute shitshow back then.
- Comment on What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. 6 months ago:
You’re absolutely right, but I’ll just point out that superannuation (pension) funds in Australia are hitting 8 percent annual returns over a 30 year timeframe. You need a broader investment base to do that, and that’s hard for individuals to do by themselves. How do you diversify your $50 a week investment to maximise return? You can’t.
Here, superannuation funds do all the heavy lifting for you, it’s mandatory for employers to put a nominal amount of each pay into one. There are no minimum investment amounts with them and fees are waived if the balance is below a few thousand, so even if it’s $10 a week you get something back eventually.
So it’s possible to have it work if your government sets things up right.
- Comment on What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. 6 months ago:
Yes it’s paid for via general income tax here in Australia, not something you pay into yourself per se. So even if you never worked you still get it.
Which is why the government set up superannuation schemes in the '90s because they realised a pinch point was coming down the line in the 2030’s or so. At that time there would have been too many people on the pension for it to be sustainable.
- Comment on What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. 6 months ago:
It’s pretty much the opposite in Australia with our setup. Those starting work now will end up with the required 3-ish million at retirement if they work the standard average job here for most of their life.
But I think what you refer to as “social security” is the government “aged pension” here which is about $550 a week or so. That’s enough for a pensioner to live a very modest lifestyle here if their accommodation has been sorted previously.
It’s also suffering the same kind of squeeze you mention and is means-tested on a sliding scale so the more you can afford not to have it, the less you get of it.
Right now most boomers are on the aged pension to some degree because superannuation schemes here only really kicked in during the last 15-20 years of their working lives so they didn’t have much of a balance.
Probably in the next 30 years or so only the truly destitute will be able to get it and the rest of us will have to rely on what we’ve saved.
- Comment on What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. 6 months ago:
Is there any form of “mandatory” saving in the US? I know you guys have company pension plans of some sort, is there a government version?
Eg where I live, Australia, employers are required to put in 10 percent of an employee’s wages into a superannuation fund. This is basically “invisible” to workers, it’s a cost that’s factored into the cost to have an employee basically. The superannuation fund can be a “default” one selected by the business, or an employee nominated one, and you can transfer/roll over your accumulated funds between any superannuation fund you like as you hop between jobs. You can draw from it in some specific dire circumstances, but usually you can only access it at retirement age.
It seems that a lot of things in the US are carefully designed to keep you in servitude to your current employer, which I find a little ironic coming from the land of the free.
- Comment on What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. 6 months ago:
I saw a report that someone my age will need $3m to retire at 65. The average total income from 22-65 for people my age is around $1.4m. So I guess we never get to retire.
Compound interest might get you to that goal, maybe, if you start saving now.
The “start saving now” part is the bit that fucks most people.
- Comment on An £8 sandwich in Starbucks 7 months ago:
Same. Been to a few places in southeast Asia and Starbucks is pretty much the same everywhere there. So I can step off a street full of stalls selling all sorts of food items that I would class as “extremely adventurous” into a store with recognisable sweet/savoury cafe food options. I can relax in consistently dark-hued wood decor with a consistent assortment of tables/couches/chairs/charging points, and a consistent range of coffee drinks that each have enough calories to sustain a local family for a week.
- Comment on An £8 sandwich in Starbucks 7 months ago:
It brings that consistent Seattle blandness everywhere it goes.
Neal Stephenson said it best in Snow Crash :
In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.