SpaceCowboy
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Do you think that Edward Snowden is a hero? 1 hour ago:
Anyone who cared already had a good idea about what the NSA did. Go and read The Cuckoo’s Egg, a book published in 1989 goes into what the NSA does. it was public knowledge in 1989 that the NSA was monitoring all phone calls and all internet traffic back in the days of modems.
Nobody cared back then and the NSA continues to do what it does and nobody cares now. Nobody actually cares about privacy and constantly willingly share pretty much all information about themselves that’s possible to be to be put onto a computer.
Snowden essentially just revealed that the NSA exists to people that were ignorant of it. But while doing so he revealed other state secrets to adversaries.
When the EU makes laws that require companies to disclose they’re tracking you, people are angry at the EU because the cookie popups are annoying. It’s very clear people would rather be tracked without knowledge of it than have even a popup on their screen. All of the information these companies collect is bought and sold regularly.
It’s trivial for the NSA to just buy all of your purchase history and all of your activities online because all of that is tracked by marketing companies and no one gives a shit. Suddenly you’re upset if the government knows what everyone else knows? It’s like putting your personal information on a billboard and getting angry if someone that works for the government happens to drive by and see that billboard.
The only thing of significance that Snowden did was share specific state secrets to adversaries. He currently lives in Russia and says whatever Putin demands that he says. He’s just a Putin stooge now.
People like the narrative of this guy who blew the lid on something nobody knew before, but anyone who cared to know already knew the NSA monitors communications, it’s kinda their whole thing. According to the narrative, the evil governments are after because he revealed the existence of the NSA. The truth is the existence of the NSA wasn’t a secret it’s just the ignorant didn’t know about it. The whole point of the NSA is to monitor communications, and it was widely known the degree to which they did this. The budget of the NSA is something you can see in public records.
Not long after the Snowden story went from the limelight, everyone went back to not caring about the NSA. Nobody actually cares about privacy, they just pretend to be upset about it for a short time before there’s some other story to pretend to be upset about.
- Comment on A FYI from Skeletor 2 hours ago:
I think the point they were trying to make was that black men should just listen to white people and dress the way they’re told to dress, talk the way they’re told to talk. White women should be with white men and it’s really bad if black men get involved with white women.
That’s what I got out of it anyway.
- Comment on So guess what boss 2 hours ago:
Kinda. Had the CEO want some code changed while the VP of my department was on vacation. Changed the code, and the VP had a grudge against me afterwards because it was code he wrote. A year later a project failed (due to mismanagement) so it was blame game time and the devs got blamed and it was firing time. I didn’t work on the project that ended in failure, I was working on a different project which was a success.
Guess who got fired?
I guess technically it was because the VP didn’t like me. But the reason he didn’t like me is because I did my job and made the software work the way the CEO wanted it to work.
That’s just how she goes. Catch-22 scenarios happen no matter how likable you might be.
- Comment on How not to advertise 101! 15 hours ago:
Which is why so much advertising is geared towards young people. Some a pretty weird, designed to look like TikTok videos. No idea if it works, they give off a “hello fellow young people vibe” to me.
I also notice there’s a lot of Asian representation in the ads I see, and there are a lot of Asians that immigrate to where I live and/or come for university. Makes sense, someone comes to a new country, don’t have any preferences for brands in the new country. If there’s a person that looks like you enjoying a certain brand in an ad, it’s more likely that’s the one you’ll try first.
- Comment on I swear it won't hurt you if you use it for like a second 15 hours ago:
I’ll only use the Open GNW (GNW is NOT a Window) system.
- Comment on I'm doing my part 15 hours ago:
Most of my bags are given to me by boomers that can never remember to take their bags to the store and just buy more. I think I’ve only actually bought one shopping bag about 25 years ago, which is the one that had it’s handle tear off after about near to two decades of service. I don’t put more weight in the bag than a plastic bag would be able to carry. I have a fabric tote bag and a backpack to use for heavier stuff. I just exercise some common sense with my shopping bags, I guess.
Are you claiming that disposable plastic bags would never have the handles tear off (or the bag just split open) if you put too much weight into them? I think the same rules apply to either, it’s a mess either way if you put too much weight into a single bag, so… don’t do that.
- Comment on This is gonna go just fine 💯 16 hours ago:
Nah, that was after she was retconned to no longer be space royalty. She was at that time a space politician that started her career when she was elected to be the leader of a planet when she was 15 years old.
Because that’s how you do great world building!
- Comment on I'm doing my part 16 hours ago:
Consider buying less shitty bags then.
- Comment on I'm doing my part 21 hours ago:
Electric motors don’t use gears… we have gears to grind because the oil companies have made a lot of people think they’re necessary.
- Comment on Ez gg 23 hours ago:
Well his Iran war resulted in more purchases of solar panels globally than anything any other President has ever done.
- Comment on Supermarkets destroy food if it doesn't sell. We can always feed the world. We just don't. 23 hours ago:
Ok so what happens when you put food that close to going off onto a ship for a few weeks? You’re just shipping rotten food to people.
The problems of logistics isn’t “a choice” it’s a very real thing.
Since the advent of GMO, starvation ls largely about political instability and conflicts. It’s hard to get food to warzones. Something to think about before promoting violence as a solution to a problem.
- Comment on I'm doing my part 23 hours ago:
Yeah, if you convinced Taylor Swift to stop using a private plane, it’s analogous to fast food companies switching to paper straws while keeping everything else plastic. It helps, but it’s just demanding a token solution instead of taking on the bigger problem.
- Comment on I'm doing my part 23 hours ago:
That’s bullshit from the oil companies. They did a “study” that concluded that but if you read the methodology, they made the assumption that the reusable bag would be unusable after 20 uses.
Meanwhile I’ve been going to the grocery store every week for quite a few years using the same bags without much issue. I’ve had one strap on a bag break after ~10 years of use, so there’s that I guess. Still haven’t thrown it out, keep meaning to repair it which I never get around to doing.
Anyway, if you read between the lines of the study conducted by the oil companies, if you reuse the bag more than 20 times (half a year of going to the grocery store every week) you are reducing plastic waste.
- Comment on Nice 1 week ago:
There’s a saying in Jamaica: If you throw a stone at a group of pigs, the one that squeals is the one you hit.
I mention antisemitism and now you’re doing a whole lot of squealing about it.
- Comment on Superman is a meanie 1 week ago:
This is basically the plot of The Boys, except instead smashing cars they splatter people.
- Comment on Dammit 1 week ago:
It’s why we put so much money into space travel. You can do pretty much everything you need to do with robots, but that’s not the point. The point is to get out of bullshit meetings.
“Houston is on comms and wants to discuss the status of the mission”. Fuck it, let’s fly this thing into the nearest black hole.
- Comment on Nice 1 week ago:
I understand the statement “Jews secretly control X” fits the pattern of how antisemites talk. I see many people on this site fitting that same pattern.
If it walk like a duck, and talks like a duck…
I also note there’s a broad movement to discredit any claim of antisemitism before it even happens. What’s the goal of this?
- Comment on Nice 1 week ago:
When you’ve become accustomed to using rhetoric that makes you indistinguishable from an antisemite, you have a couple of ways to go.
- Do some introspection and ask yourself "am I going down a bad path?"
- Do zero introspection and conclude “This is more evidence that the Jews really do control the world!”
- Comment on Dammit 1 week ago:
Nah, the fish crawled out of the ocean just to escape some bullshit meeting with the other fish.
- Comment on Nice 1 week ago:
I think someone is secretly manipulating you, but it’s not the Jews or the “Zionists.”
- Comment on Whatever those lyrics are 1 week ago:
People always quote Queen Victoria as saying “We are not amused”. But this was a misquote. What she actually said was “We will, we will rock you”.
- Comment on Email came out of nowhere 1 week ago:
“Slavic adventure” doesn’t give enough context to consider it not to be a white power kind of thing.
If they were runes within the game it’s fine since you’d know from playing the game it isn’t about Nazi type shit. But the subject line of an email that just says “slavic adventure” followed by the SS symbols isn’t really enough.
- Comment on About bajoran's actors makeup 1 week ago:
Yeah because of the demands by the changeling members of the cast. They have a really strong union.
- Comment on Email came out of nowhere 1 week ago:
Culture is always evolving. Some words and symbols have had different meaning in the past than they do now. With context it can be fine to use them without association with the stronger cultural associations. If I see a swastika on a Buddhist temple, I’m not going to assume the Buddhists are Nazis. But if I see a symbol or word without context I’m going to assume the strongest association to that symbol in my culture. Just how culture works.
- Comment on Answer that, ye handsome homos!!1!!!1!!! 1 week ago:
You aren’t required to participate in gay pride celebrations this month. You can instead go watch the He-Man movie and enjoy a fun action movie about totally straight men.
- Comment on Answer that, ye handsome homos!!1!!!1!!! 1 week ago:
You’re supposed to don your gay apparel in December.
- Comment on Looking for a career change? Then look no further! 2 weeks ago:
God damn them all!
- Comment on What are some of the biggest continuity errors in Star Trek? 2 weeks ago:
The Defiant is big enough for a runabout to easily fly around inside of it.
- Comment on What are some of the biggest continuity errors in Star Trek? 2 weeks ago:
This my head canon… In the movies they were working on transwarp drive on the Excelsior. The warp factor on transwarp drives is different from a regular TOS warp drive.
When Sulu put the hammer down on the Excelsior in ST VI, it proved that transwarp was just way better than regular warp drive. For whatever reason they couldn’t make transwarp work on the Constitution class so most of them were decommissioned.
By the time of TNG, pretty much everything is transwarp, so no one bothers calling it that ,they just call it warp drive since it became the standard. The transwarp factor is used everywhere, but everyone just calls it warp factor.
So it’s kinda like a change from imperial to metric units.
- Comment on What are some of the biggest continuity errors in Star Trek? 2 weeks ago:
Presumably every warp capable species would have the ability to construct a few thousand hydrogen bombs (or weapons even more powerful) so would have the capability of wiping out life on a planet if they wanted to. So the Genesis device wouldn’t be a thing that would change the face of war, the problem was that a crazy person had such a weapon.
Though Star Trek is kinda hand wavy around nuclear weapons in general… maybe photon torpedoes are more powerful than an H-Bomb? But it doesn’t feel that way. At any rate, Starfleet, the Klingons, Romulans, etc. all have technology to wipe out a planet because we have that technology in the present day. They just don’t do that I guess? To me that’s the real continuity error.
And the time on TNG that they stumbled on a weird transporter trick that could make it so no one would ever need to die of old age ever again.
Another time a transporter accident led to a copy of Riker (with all of his memories) both on the ship and on the planet. You could recreate those conditions and create endless copies of people. The Federation wouldn’t do that because of morals and stuff, but the Dominion wouldn’t give a shit. They could have their best squad of Jem Hader stand on a transporter pad and beam down endless copies of them down onto a planet. They’re cloning people anyway, so why not take it to the next level?
The transporter is just endless continuity problems. Shields are down, oh no they’re beaming over boarding parties! Why are they doing that instead of using the transporting the crew of the enemy ship into their brig (if they’re good guys) or into space (if they’re bad guys)?