SirEDCaLot

@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is waiting for Japan⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem isn’t capitalism. US has always had capitalism and once we put good protections in it worked great, like post WWII up until like 1990ish. That golden arrow was mainly because there were strong protections for workers that were relevant to the time. A man working minimum wage could live decently and feed his family.

  The three factors of production are land, labor, and capital. All three are supposed to have equal seats at the table. But starting somewhere between the Reagan years and 1990s, we started to let capital run the table. Labor took a back seat. And what we have now is the result.

  Housing and health care became investments rather than services. Minimum wage didn’t track inflation, didn’t track CPI, and sure as hell didn’t track worker productivity. The federal minimum wage has less buying power today than at any point since the minimum wage was implemented. And there is a very real trickle down effect, in that if the lowest worker is making $7.25, all other wages adjust based on that. IE, the slightly higher end worker makes $15 or $20 because that’s double or triple the minimum wage. If the lowest worker was making $20, the slightly higher end worker would be making $40 or $60.

  The result is that the American people have less buying power at their disposal than they have in a very long time. Significantly less than during those golden years of the latter 1900s. And that is why shit sucks.

  Capitalism is not the problem. Unchecked unregulated capitalism is the problem. Regulatory capture is part of that problem. And that’s what we have now in many industries.

  Fix that, raise the minimum wage, and stop letting corporations exploit not just workers but the nation as a whole. Then you have some capitalism that works for everybody.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is waiting for Japan⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sadly Japan may be a culture in decline.
  Their culture is basically work yourself to the bone even more than the US. Young people study their ass off and get a job working long hours while still living at home because they still can’t afford their own place. And you have stuff like if the subway is a minute late they hand out apology slips to workers so they don’t get in trouble with their bosses for being 30 seconds late. Meanwhile there is a very strong ‘defer to elder authority’ note in their culture. And in many industries people are expected to work a 10-hour day and then go drinking with the bus until 2:00 a.m. only to be back at work the next day at 8:00 a.m.
  The end result is young people have neither the time nor the money to have kids. So they don’t.

  Their population is literally aging and shrinking. They are facing a very serious problem in wondering who is going to take care of their elderly. Their birth to death ratio is 0.44, meaning that for every baby born in a year more than two people die. In a nation of about 125 million, the population is shrinking by just under a million every year. That’s not good.

  And while the Japanese people are highly educated and very capable, the ‘defer to authority’ culture prevents the sort of entrepreneurship you see in the US. An example of this, Japanese companies have a stamp called the hanko, when a paper memo is circulated around the office each employee stamps it with their personal hanko stamp to signify that they have read it. Many Japanese companies stayed in person during COVID simply because there was no digital equivalent to the hanko and managers refused to give it up.

  If you wants an example, look at Toyota Motors. It’s been obvious to everyone with eyes that electric vehicles are the future, and it has been obvious for probably 8 or 10 years. Every major automaker is investing in EV technology. Except Toyota, which up until recently was still betting the farm on hybrids and hydrogen. But that’s because the good Mr Toyoda didn’t like EVs, and unlike in an American company no one would dare challenge him on that.

  It is really too bad. Japan is a wonderful place with an amazing culture and rich history. But if they are going to survive they need to make very serious changes to their society and they need to do it soon. That is going to involve dumping most of what currently qualifies as Japanese business culture, an instituting some real work-life balance laws with teeth. I don’t know if they’re going to do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"You should probably just throw it away"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh of course. For them and their OEM partners too. Nobody else benefits from throwing 2-5 generations of perfectly functional hardware in the fucking trash.

  That all said though, Microsoft has been one of the biggest pushes behind replacing passwords with more secure authentication. And TPM does play a role in that. Certainly not the driving factor for throwing away millions of perfectly good computers though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"You should probably just throw it away"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I really wish there was something regulatory that could be done about this. There are millions of perfectly good fully working computers that are going to go in the fucking trash because of this. I understand the desire for a TPM on every machine. It makes sense in a way. But the pure environmental impact is just indefensible. All of those computers had a significant environmental footprint to build them and ship them and again to dispose of them plus building and shipping their replacements.
  If Microsoft had such a hard-on for TPM, they should have worked with computer manufacturers to make some sort of retrofit system or way of easily determining if a TPM can be added to an existing computer

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is smarter than a genius⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember reading a story a while back about the documentary they were making on him. He had his special diet of juices and supplements and whatnot, which he claimed helped him while his liver was failing. The actor who portrayed him started following the same diet to better get in character. Only then he collapsed on set with liver problems. They did a full medical work up and basically told him whatever you’re doing stop doing it because it’s killing you. He went back to his normal diet and he was fine. Raising the serious question, did Steve Jobs outsmart himself to death? If he had given up all the diets and supplements and whatnot might he have lived?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jon Stewart lacerates hand on air, for the second time.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  His old electrician is correct. Paper towel wrapped around the wound, wrap it with one layer of duct tape or gaffers tape and you’re good to keep working. This is one of those ‘everybody who’s ever worked a trade knows it’ type things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon lives with his sister⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Answer is simple. Invite him to come over some Saturday. Go find something else to do when he arrives. He can go take your sister out on a date and they can hook up. Then you get back and play RDR with him. Everybody wins :-)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google is now forcing gemini in their gmail app⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m in the same boat. Keep getting android popups like IMPORTANT ACCOUNT NOTIFICATION YOU HAVE TO ADD YOUR BIRTHDAY no I don’t fuck you swipe away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon goes on a first date⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re missing the point.
  It sounds like you took my post as ‘anime fans aren’t all losers’. I didn’t say that.

  I was trying to say that it’s okay she rejected him for that and he should be happy that he won’t waste any more dates on a person who considers his hobbies a turn-off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon goes on a first date⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is why people fail at dating and relationships. They look at it like fishing- that your goal is to tempt a big fish into biting. That is wrong. Dating is a SEARCH. In your area there is somewhere between a few thousand and a million potential partners of your desired gender and age and other characteristics. You aren’t trying to persuade the first one you see to like you, you’re trying to find the one who already likes you but doesn’t know it yet because they haven’t met you. The person you are compatible with will like you for who you are. So when this girl rejects him because she doesn’t like anime, he should not take that as a personal failing. He should smile and say okay on to the next one.

  And if you’re into stuff like anime put that shit in your profile. That will attract the right people and screen out the wrong ones. That’s not ‘making a bad impression’, the people for whom anime is a turn off are people who you wouldn’t want anyway if you are an anime fan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help me out: which looks better for the Duck - the neck tie or the bow tie?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Bow tie for sure. I suggest raise the hat a little bit so you can see the eyes a bit better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will pilots-less airplanes happens first, or driver-less cars? Why?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Lol Just because the automation exists doesn’t mean it’s always used. In big planes, the system is called cat III autoland and it only works at some airports. It also produces a notoriously rough landing. In little planes, it’s an emergency assistance feature that gives you a ‘emergency land’ button in the cockpit. Not something that you use everyday.

  You can still get a private pilot license if you have 20/40 vision or your eyes can be corrected to 20/40 with glasses or whatever. Even without that, if you can drive you can fly a light sport aircraft. That’s a different category that has more limitations. But those limitations are rapidly going away, FAA is working on something called MOSAIC which will expand the definition of light sport to cover an awful lot of single engine airplanes. And with that you only need a driver’s license.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will pilots-less airplanes happens first, or driver-less cars? Why?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pilot here.
  There’s already a huge amount of automation available for airplanes large and small. The current top of the line will allow the airplane to connect every phase of flight except for the takeoff, coming all the way down to landing on the runway. In your average airline flight, probably 80 to 95% of the flight is flown by computer. The pilots are managing the aircraft, talking to ATC, etc. So you could argue that that is already there.

  If you mean the ability to conduct a trip without an operator, IE little girl jumps in the back of the car and says ‘Tessie take me to school!’ and the car drives her to school, that will absolutely happen in cars before airplanes. The simple reason is edge cases and emergencies. In a car, if something goes wrong, you simply pull over. Or, worst case scenario, just slow down and stop. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. If something goes wrong in an airplane, you need to keep operating the airplane for anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours including a landing. A lot of what pilots do in emergencies is figure out exactly how their airplane has been damaged and strategize around that. A lot of that is intuition, the rest is deduction based on understanding of how the airplane works. Since the computer can’t see out the window or feel things like buffets and sound, a computer won’t necessarily be as good at that. So the pilots aren’t going anywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon hates smartphones⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No but if I’m going to watch porn in the bathroom I’m going to use a laptop or tablet not a little postage stamp phone screen

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon hates smartphones⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Add in ruined music to that. Shitty speakers, super lossy codecs to preserve cellular bandwidth, even shittier Bluetooth compression, listening to music on a phone is convenient but it sounds like shit. And we’ve got generations of people who think that’s what music is supposed to sound like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon hates smartphones⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Shitty for porn. Tiny screen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does it seem most people, mainly conservatives, against Trans people? Unless I am wrong I never heard of one shooting up a school church or whatever. The ones I have met have been pretty cool.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  create an out-group so they can control the in-group

  That’s not just the media. It’s basically everyone in power. Media, politics, government, corporations… Everyone.

  It applies to the Democrats too. Especially in the 2016 election, they managed to successfully make Republicans the out-group. But I believe that was hugely damaging to the country, it created a lot more division when what is really needed is unity to focus on the issues that most people can agree on.

  Because here’s the cold truth- there is a body of policies that probably 80% of Americans would agree on. Things like efficient government, ending government corruption, reducing corporate control over government and elections, reducing income inequality, etc.
  To quote Dylan Ratigan’s famous rant, the United States is being extracted. And I think most people would like to stop that extraction.
  But no major candidate stands for that. Bernie did, but the DNC iced him out because their wealthy corporate donors didn’t want Bernie.

  And that in my opinion is why Trump won. Harris certainly didn’t push any major message of radical reform, just a bunch of the usual ‘help the middle class’ talk. Trump may be terrifying, but he does push a message of radical reform and changing the system.
  To write that off and say half the country is racist or misogynist is to avoid learning from this situation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does it seem most people, mainly conservatives, against Trans people? Unless I am wrong I never heard of one shooting up a school church or whatever. The ones I have met have been pretty cool.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think most commenters here are missing the point.

  There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people’s sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women’s room and being around there little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.

  Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as ‘transphobic’ Don’t actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.

  For me personally, I don’t know what the answer is. I generally don’t care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means. At the same time though, I don’t think it’s transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
  So while I certainly don’t want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women’s sports to those who are genetically female.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I. Do. Not. Care. About. The. Tech.

  Exactly. The tech doesn’t matter. Tech only exists in service of the gameplay, and (introduced with HL1), the story (previous to HL1 the ‘story’ of most games was just a quick blurb on why there’s monsters and why you have to shoot them).

  Gamers DGAF about new tech. Gamers wanted to be told a story. We LOVED the story.

  Valve could’ve used the existing engine, built NOTHING AT ALL NEW, and just finished the story with existing assets and we’d all have been over the moon happy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But yes.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In a sense, you’re right. And there’s a bit of magic involved. If you cut a certain special rock into slices, engrave runes on one side of it, and inject lightning, the rock starts to think. I don’t see how you can describe that as anything other than magic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In the era of remakes and remasters, what niche game would you like to see receive the treatment?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Half-Life. I know there’s been some successful efforts to modernize it, but those only bring it up to Source 2 era.

  I would love a fully modern remake. Modern lighting and raytracing could do great things for the detail of a headcrab infected scientist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In the era of remakes and remasters, what niche game would you like to see receive the treatment?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely. Game had a great mix of large-scale, good pace of a fight, and social element.

  VGW

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon has priorities⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s an old quote, ‘never blame on malice that which can be explained by incompetence’.

  I would adapt that to be, ‘never blame on homosexuality that which can be explained by stupidity’…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon has priorities⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Should have invited her to go watch the eclipse together

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech CEOs are backtracking on RTO mandates—now, just 3% want workers in the office full-time⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The smallest ones are the most agile and the least to lose by going virtual.
  Big ones however have a conundrum. If the company has spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars building a giant headquarters, and then they go virtual or largely remote, then that money becomes basically a wasted investment. And so they have to admit to their investors that money was wasted, much of which can’t be recouped even if they sell the building. That goes triple for companies with big campuses like Apple or Google. That’s why you get a lot of companies demanding things like in office 3 days a week, to create justification for having the office in the first place.

  There’s also a simple human factor. A lot of management, even tech management, still has the attitude that being able to physically watch the employee somehow enables better control or management or increases productivity. It’s crap of course, unless you have lazy unmotivated employees they will work just as well from somewhere else as they will with you breathing down their neck.

  But it’s caused some interesting shake-ups. A while back I read a great interview with a (fully virtual) tech startup CEO, he said whenever their bigger competitors announce RTO his HR department quickly buys a bunch of LinkedIn keywords targeting them.
  He found, as almost anybody could figure out with basic logic, that the best and most valuable employees know their worth and thus are the first to quit rather than RTO, and his company is right there with an offer of ‘work on some exciting new tech and we will never push RTO because we have no office to return to’. Said he’s gotten some of his best people that way.

  So when the bigger CEOs are now saying they don’t see full return to office, I think that’s because they are realizing they have no other choice, the labor market has changed and demanding full-time in person or even hybrid has become the same as a significant salary cut.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech CEOs are backtracking on RTO mandates—now, just 3% want workers in the office full-time⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is absolutely the way. One of the companies I work with, a couple years ago had a great employee who was moving out of the state. They had an office, but they didn’t want to lose her, so they let her go remote. That employee became unintentionally a work from home trial. She did just as well remote as she did in the office. So when COVID happened everybody got a laptop and the exact same VPN setup she had. Business continued and the sky did not fall due to lack of ‘water cooler chat’.

  So when lockdown lifted, it was ‘welcome back to the office everybody it’s great to have you back here, first order of business pack your shit and get it out of the building cuz we’re breaking the lease next month’.

  They moved all their servers to the cloud and became a totally virtual company. Now they can recruit from anywhere in the country and pick the best people for the job no matter where they live. And what they pay for cloud costs is a tiny fraction of what they paid for office space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I’ve been locked out of PayPal for years because of their mistake⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Zelle works pretty good, the main problem is the security limits.
  Let’s say you hire somebody to build a shed for $5,000.
  You can’t just pay him $5,000. The first day maybe you can pay him $1,000, then the next day you can pay him another $1,500, then you’ve reached the 30-day maximum for a new contact so you have to wait till day 31 to pay him the other $2,500. After that if you want another shed you can pay the $5,000 instantly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t participate in wanton consumerism.

  This is the answer. And it comes with other benefits also.

  I do okay financially. I don’t have problems affording necessities. But I have found there is also a lot of satisfaction in being more self-sufficient, in relying less on supply companies to deliver my every need. And it saves a ton of money.

  Food is a big one. I used to spend a ton of money on takeout, delivery, junk food. But here’s the thing, basic cooking really isn’t that hard. It doesn’t have to take up a lot of time, especially if you meal prep. And the resulting food is both better in quality and better for you.

  On that same thread, the grocery store is not always your friend. Especially if it’s one of the big national chains. You will find much better quality produce at your local farmer’s market, and it’s often cheaper too. Certainly way more flavorful, the vegetable that was in the dirt yesterday tastes way better than the one that’s been in a warehouse for a month. Happier chickens lay tastier eggs. Etc.

  And there’s a lot of stuff you can do yourself. A vegetable garden is a great place to start, if you have even a tiny backyard. Think folding table size. Plant yourself some tomatoes and put up a net frame so animals don’t eat them, they will be the best tomatoes you’ve ever had. But planting and growing stuff is one of the most efficient ways to get food- Stick it in the dirt and water it and you get food for free!

  Then think about all the shit we buy. How much of it do we really need? How much of it ends up in the landfill in a year or two? When purchasing things, think about the product entire life cycle and how each step will affect you. IE, Don’t just think about the dopamine rush you’ll get from unboxing your shiny new toy, or the novelty of using it the first couple times, ask yourself is it going to enhance your life owning it over the long term, and is that amount of enhancement worth its purchase price and the space it consumes?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Possible headcanon reason why consoles always explode on the bridge⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Easy. Electroplasma is very hot and very energetic. When it ruptures out of the conduit, The hot energetic plasma not only mechanically fractures the materials around it, but the plasma itself is a form of matter that will, when it’s energy is released and it cools, return to whatever state it would normally be at room temperature.

  Surface ships use deuterium and anti-deuterium as fuel, deuterium is liquid at room temperature. Assuming the combined plasma is also deuterium, that would mean it is eventually condensing to liquid. So I imagine the interaction between the plasma and some other material would turn the other material into a sort of spongy texture, which is probably dark due to being scorched. Thus, I don’t think that’s rock at all. It is scorched material from around the plasma conduit, that has been melted and integrated with the plasma which then returned to a lower energy state, namely deuterium steam or liquid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Possible headcanon reason why consoles always explode on the bridge⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The explanation I’ve always had- I think this was from some official source but I could have just made it up.

  Starfleet ships use EPS (Electro-Plasma System) to route power around the ship in the form of electro-plasma (a highly energized form of plasma). The warp core generates a lot of this plasma, which is piped through conduits to various devices around the ship. The EPS system and its related systems generate a lot of treknobabble about ‘scrubbing plasma conduits’ (apparently done from the outside using a field generator tool, but still boring), ‘replacing plasma relays’ (the valves that route plasma around, apparently they go bad frequently); problems like ruptured plasma conduits are dangerous and require immediate repair, etc.

  Because this all works in a grid system, whenever the ship takes damage (especially energetic damage like weapons fire) the EPS conduits can carry energy spikes all over the ship. That’s why as the ship takes damage you see random small explosions and sparks all over the place- something hits or spikes the EPS grid and the shockwave ends up, well, wherever in the grid it ends up.

  Of course many EPS conduits go to bridge terminals, especially as those terminals may have direct connections to the ship systems in question.

  ---

  Of course in reality this would be seen as a horrible safety risk, and a bridge terminal that could probably run on a car battery shouldn’t have explosive plasma running through it especially when it can explode and harm the operator. In fact one could argue a safe starship should keep all EPS stuff as far away from any essential human-inhabited areas of the ship as possible (especially the bridge).

  One counter to that might be that perhaps the consoles actually play some role in EPS switching, but that seems a bad tradeoff to me.