admiralteal
@admiralteal@kbin.social
- Comment on From 2017 to 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor recovered $3 billion in stolen wages from employers 6 months ago:
Also the DoL is perpetually under-resourced and short staffed. They aren't one of the "good" law enforcement agencies that get bipartisan support -- only the ones who beat up protestors get that kind of universal appeal, somehow. Even though funding to places like the IRS and DoL have insanely good return on investment.
- Comment on From 2017 to 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor recovered $3 billion in stolen wages from employers 6 months ago:
The whole "retail theft" wave is a moral panic anyway. It's not backed up by numbers. NYC and LA saw some elevation because of a small number of actual criminal organization that largely got rounded up and prosecuted. Most other "organized retail crime" stories are utter nonsense.
Most of the rise in theft that people cited was based on a completely bullshit statistic which came from the NRF citing one of its own members testimonies in which that member cited an incorrect number. It was actual dogfooding being past as statistical analysis and even they have backed down on it.
- Comment on Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface 7 months ago:
You mean Half Life: Full Dive, followed by Half Life: Full Dive 2. The second in a trilogy never to be finished.
- Comment on An Interview With Jack Dorsey 7 months ago:
I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He's a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.
Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires -- most of them were just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandoise delusion.
- Comment on What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs 7 months ago:
Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.
Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that's a highly competitive title.
They also don't offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they're intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.
- Comment on Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers 7 months ago:
The user above is just one of those guys who looks at anything the dems do and thinks, look at this bitch eating crackers.
Nothing good can ever be celebrated or praised. It has to always be bad.
- Comment on Had to buy a certain product to use a certain substance and there's a really stupid new law. 7 months ago:
I think you may be forgetting that weed is illegal, federally. The product you're buying is for tobacco -- officially -- because if it weren't it would be a federal crime to ship it across state borders.
- Comment on If you're selected for jury duty (US), should you give up your anonymous social media accounts? 8 months ago:
Good answers here, but ignoring probably the most realistic and practical truth of the matter in my opinion.
You won't immediately be sent to the stocks for saying "I don't want to answer", the worst case scenario is that some officer of the court informs you that you must answer the question even if you don't want to. And even that is only going to happen if the attorney answering the question insists. And I struggle to imagine a situation where a competent attorney would do so.
Being hostile towards your prospective jurors, making them feel exposed and uncomfortable, is not a way to march to victory in a trial. They want to ensure you aren't prejudiced against their client/case. Making you dislike them personally IS prejudice. Causing prejudice is a bad way to eliminate prejudice.
They will ask questions, mostly yes/no ones, that you need to answer honestly. They may ask for clarification. If you don't want to answer and say so, it's unlikely anyone will press you because that unnwillingness to answer is just as clear an indication of who you are as anything else.
- Comment on If you're selected for jury duty (US), should you give up your anonymous social media accounts? 8 months ago:
Good answers here, but ignoring probably the most realistic and practical truth of the matter in my opinion.
You won't immediately be sent to the stocks for saying "I don't want to answer", the worst case scenario is that some officer of the court informs you that you must answer the question even if you don't want to. And even that is only going to happen if the attorney answering the question insists. And I struggle to imagine a situation where a competent attorney would do so.
Being hostile towards your prospective jurors, making them feel exposed and uncomfortable, is not a way to march to victory in a trial. They want to ensure you aren't prejudiced against their client/case. Making you dislike them personally IS prejudice. Causing prejudice is a bad way to eliminate prejudice.
They will ask questions, mostly yes/no ones, that you need to answer honestly. They may ask for clarification. If you don't want to answer and say so, it's unlikely anyone will press you because that unnwillingness to answer is just as clear an indication of who you are as anything else.
- Comment on Why do we have to do the health insurance company's job for them? 8 months ago:
And what might be the most important part cannot be elided over: market capitalism is HIGHLY efficient at solving optimization problems, but it only responds to incentives.
So if you can create the right incentives to reward the result you want and punish results you don't want, a market solution is going to do a marvelous job. It's great at, say, price discovery. But if the incentives do not align with the desired result, it's going to grind you under heel.
The incentives the insurance companies are responding to, frankly, are the ones you have outlined and essentially no others. Collect more premiums, make fewer payouts. There's no "breaking point" here because they have an absolutely vast customer base that has no choice to opt out of the system for a variety of reasons (ranging from the ACA individual mandate to the fact that it is not possible for an individual to make fully-informed financial decisions about their health even WITH advanced knowledge and training that nearly no one has).
Health insurance is pretty much a textbook example of a service that the free market is ill-suited to provide.
So over time, market capitalism is going to make them collect endlessly-increasing premiums and pay out less and less. It is going to continue to get worse. Period. It will eventually get nationalized. Period. All the argument in the meantime is just over how long we want to continue to let people be sick and broke before we apply the only fix.
- Comment on Windows users don't want copilot on their taskbar 8 months ago:
Also known as a SASSS
- Comment on What produced the old dead channel tv static audiovisuals on tvs? 8 months ago:
If you put a TV in a Faraday cage that blocked the relevant radio spectrum, would there be no static on it? I expected the answer to be a quick Google, but it wasn't.
- Comment on Chatbot letdown: Hype hits rocky reality 8 months ago:
They are very useful for outlining and similar "where do I start" writing projects. They help break the dam and just get some damn words on the screen, at which point it's often easy to continue and flesh things out to a complete thought.
- Comment on Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’ Draws Fire in China, Praise From U.S. Conservatives | The Hollywood Reporter 8 months ago:
This is literally a "random people too unnoteworthy to even name on social media are saying X" article.
This is tripe. It's not journalism. I don't care what the overall message is, the publisher and reporter should be embarrassed to release it.
US conservatives will ALWAYS find an angle to say something is related to how much they hate the imaginary and undefinable threat of "wokeness". PRC goons will ALWAYS find a way to say something western-produced is anti-China.
It's a decent albeit brief write-up of the scene and the story if you take all this social media horseshit out of it. But instead they led with it.
- Comment on Amsterdam testing system that can remotely slow e-bikes down 9 months ago:
There are no US roads I am aware of where the speed limit is over 80mph.
Why can a stock US car go faster than 80mph, then? Why does NHSTA approve of cars that can go double, triple that speed? Makes no sense to me, for sure. Especially when similar agencies are doing idiotic and pointless shit like banning Kei Trucks for "safety" reasons when these vehicles are objectively safer and better for the public than any current-model "light truck" 120mph+ road yacht.
Europe approached this same question with a pretty straightforward answer: Intelligent Speed Assistance. It'll be mandatory relatively soon for all new cars, as far as I am aware. There's some nasty privacy implications of it, obviously. Very possibly nasty enough to bring me to a "no" overall on the idea. But the safety considerations are without doubt correct.
- Comment on That gourmet luxury blend... 9 months ago:
Assuming the label isn't inaccurate, there is at minimum equal parts of the honey and corn syrup. The list must be in descending order by weight. I'm not sure what the rule is for equal quantities; I'd assume alphabetical, but there may be no such requirement.
- Comment on That gourmet luxury blend... 9 months ago:
It's also mostly honey, unless the label is inaccurate. Ingredients are listed in descending order of quantity.
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
Well, I certainly don't get 10 hours, more like 5-6, but have also never in my life and hopefully never will need to sit in the same public place for 10 continuous hours using my notebook. God help me, my life is so off the rails if that ever happens that I don't even want to consider it.
The rest of those things my budget notebook does just fine. Maybe if I used these touchpad shortcuts that the Mac offers it would change my life, but I've always massively preferred navigating the OS with the keyboard and have always found the way Mac application windows and taskbars work totally unitiutive and fighty.
On the whole though, even if I accept everything you said at face value, it's still just... not an argument for "there is no alternative". Seems to me my ancient ASUS is a perfectly reasonable alternative, especially considering it was a less than a third the price of the Macbook even when it was new.
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
I hear this all time to time and I just don't understand it.
My 9-year-old Windows laptop does literally everything I need a mobile notebook to do (which unfortunately includes a bunch of software like AutoCAD which just gives a double middle finger to Linux). It's reliable, boots quickly, doesn't frequently bug out, has more than enough battery to never make me stressed and scrambling for outlets, and all these things. It's windows 10 and not signed into an MS account. It can run powershell, python scripts, all those little sugar things that make computers less horrible to use. I'm not forced into any weird proprietary rabbit holes by the OS and have all MS telemetry shut down on it.
If not for bad actors like ASHTO or AutoDesk, I'm quite confident the notebook would be working just as well with something like Mint Linux on it.
What the hell is it that Macbooks are doing that my notebook can't? I just don't get it.
- Comment on None of these people exist, but you can buy their books on Amazon anyway 11 months ago:
- Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her 11 months ago:
In all 50 states, firing someone with cause without cause to avoid paying them benefits is illegal.
- Comment on This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom 11 months ago:
At least for some, those are what are being discussed. In the US, it's totally normal for a places like large public parks to have totally free restroom facilities. I'm not sure I've ever encountered one with a paygate in the US. Not even in tourist traps.
I've come across more that have 9-5 staff like a security officer than ones that require payment.
- Comment on Android users could soon replace Google Assistant with ChatGPT 11 months ago:
Anonymized Bing is the back end for DDG. It's already happening.
- Comment on The march towards an all-EV future hit a major roadblock. What went wrong? 11 months ago:
I ride a bike 95% of the time for my trips, but I have to own and maintain a car because the city I live in, which is FAR better than most in the US, still doesn't make it possible to let me function without needing an occasional ICE trip. And the box hardware store near me almost never has its light truck rentals available for those occasional errands.
I was very seriously investigating a Kei import for my needs. They're cheap, small, easy to maintain, and insanely versatile. I arrived at doing this after researching what kinds of small, reliable trucks I might be able to find for my rare uses and ultimately gave up -- all of them are roadboats these days.
Then some state bureaucrat arbitrarily declared that imported keis were somehow less safe for their drivers than motorcycles, bikes, and scooters and so cannot be registered any longer. There's basically no vehicles for sale that I would want and find useful at this point.
I've honestly been looking into setting up a trailer for my bike for hauling a sheet or two of plywood. It might be my best overall option, since I can't fit them in my ancient Honda.
All that to say: yeah, there's no middleground anymore. There's ONLY road yachts for people who view them as status symbols and transit vans for people who actually have work to get done, but either way too expensive for me to justify.
- Comment on The march towards an all-EV future hit a major roadblock. What went wrong? 11 months ago:
Rental cars are still a thing. Plus they get regularly cleaned and you aren't responsible for their maintenance/depreciation.
If you live in a city -- and if you are getting municipal water/sewer, you definitely do -- there's a car rental place close enough that will doubtless be happy to do a same-day rental.
The car rental may be expensive, but you're comparing it to owning and maintaining that car year-round for those occasional trips. And if that car is anything bigger than a small suv, it doubtless costs more than the EV would've [in real terms](
And the cost to own an EV is not significantly different than any of these other vehicles: https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/YDC-Fact-Sheet-FINAL-8.30.23-1.pdf). - Comment on The march towards an all-EV future hit a major roadblock. What went wrong? 11 months ago:
People also forget that rental cars exist.
For the handful of actual long-range drives a typical person needs to take in a given year, it'd almost certainly be cheaper to rent a different car rather than spend extra to get a huge-range EV. But relatively short-range EVs are basically not a thing because of how universal these range anxieties are. Not to even mention that the available rentals aren't a great situation either, given how universal it is for people to own these long-range vehicles.
Our society is a damn prisoner's dilemma.
- Comment on The march towards an all-EV future hit a major roadblock. What went wrong? 11 months ago:
The crazy thing is, outside of the US, small and cheap vehicles are the norm. Both ICE and EV.
I'm still convinced that if a major automaker brought a line like they have in the likes of China or France to the US market, they'd be hugely profitable. I think there's massive untapped demand for things like mini city cars and kei trucks. But the profit margins would be lower for the manufacturer, so even if it was still a profitable business model the US automakers don't do it and exert their influence in various ugly ways to prevent it from happening (e.g., all the states that have used administrative levers to ban registration of imported keis based on total nonsense safety arguments).
- Comment on Aaron J. Waltke: "Prodigy has cracked Netflix Top 10 lists in six different countries and counting." 11 months ago:
I'm about 6 episodes in and so far it is enjoyable, though I doubt it'll go down in my heart as a one of the very special shows. It's pretty heavy-handed with its kids writing, which is still TBD if it will wear me out before I get to the end. And at about 6 episodes in, it is not at all episodic. I'm hoping that eventually changes. All the best of Star Trek is mostly episodic.
Extreme disappointment that the hologram did not introduce itself with "Please state the nature of your ___ emergency."
- Comment on Another example of shrink flation... oh, my beer... 11 months ago:
330 and 440 are standard metric can sizes. 404 is weird.
- Comment on The hardest workers get the smallest pay. 1 year ago:
Absent the coercion brought on by the threat of starvation, illness, and homelessness, most people wouldn't be able to handle a lot of minimum wage jobs. They wear down your body and soul. But having a gun pointed at you and your family is a hell of a motivator.
Who cares, though? Laziness is not the problem with billionaires. I wish for everyone to live in a world where they can get away with being "lazy". Where they can pursue their passions and refuse to do the tasks that make life a drudge.
The wealth hoarding is the problem. Even if every single billionaire was provably the hardest worker in their company, it doesn't change how I feel about the inequality.