merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Internet picture of a monkey 1 day ago:
NFTs were bought with crypto, which had various hidden costs, scams and thefts, so it’s basically the same.
- Comment on Internet picture of a monkey 1 day ago:
True, but while you’re still paying those timeshare fees, you still have access to the place.
The real difference is that a time share is never thought of as an investment where you buy low and sell high. It’s thought of as getting a good deal on something you plan to use. For it to be similar to an NFT it would have to be something like a dude in Nebraska buys a time share in Australia and then tries to make money from Australians or something. AFAIK almost everybody who buys time shares does it because they plan to use the place as a vacation property and actually do use it that way, at least for a while.
- Comment on Internet picture of a monkey 1 day ago:
Gambling / FOMO. The more informed people at least realized they were gambling. The less informed thought they were missing out on a big money-making scheme and that everybody else was getting rich except them.
- Comment on Internet picture of a monkey 1 day ago:
The two aren’t even remotely comparable. A timeshare may not be as valuable as you thought it was, but it exists and you can use it. An NFT is basically an entry in a star registry, but the people think (or at least thought) they actually own the stars.
- Comment on Ska ftw 5 days ago:
Pop: I have a crush on a boy. World broken? Sorry, um… I don’t follow the news.
Gangsta Rap: I’m the king of this 'hood, and don’t give a shit about anything happening outside of it.
Country: My truck is my whole world, and the world is broken.
Classical: I will describe the great forces at play that are breaking the world using music.
- Comment on you're doing ReSeArCh rong!! 6 days ago:
we should teach them these things directly, instead of relying on science classes
Ok, so by “these things” you mean logic, argument analysis, media literacy, critical thinking, etc.
Yes, I had classes like that, and I think they’re much more important than science and math classes. You can learn science and math on your own from YouTube videos, but you need the media literacy to know which YouTube videos you can trust.
- Comment on Anon tries to understand credit scores 1 week ago:
Also worth mentioning: what’s the alternative?
If there are no credit scores but there are still loans, the banks / entities making the loans have no real way to know if their loan is going to be paid back. Because of that, the loans are a lot more risky. What happens when a loan is riskier? The interest rate is higher, or people are just outright rejected.
- Comment on I hacked mars! 1 week ago:
They work, but there are no humans inside them.
- Comment on I hacked mars! 1 week ago:
It’s amazing how complicated just the O2 cycle is. Basically, we don’t yet how to do it without a whole planet being involved.
Like, plants do release O2 sometimes, but they also use O2 as fuel when they grow. Growing a plant requires light. On the earth that’s easy, just put it in the sun. On Mars there’s no atmosphere and no magnetic field, so if you just put a plant on the surface they’ll die. So, you need to grow them underground in a mostly earth-like atmosphere at mostly earth-like pressure lit by artificial lights.
So, you plant a lot of plants deep underground lit by bright artificial lights. Then you need to supply the plants with a lot of water. Some of that water will be released into the air, but some of it will be incorporated into the plant’s body. There’s a whole water cycle that isn’t yet fully understood.
What about the soil? On earth worms and other bugs break down leaf litter and other things into usable soil and bees pollinate many of the plants. So, do you ship up a bunch of bugs? You’d have to supply a whole ecosystem of them so they live in balance. You could go with hydroponics instead, but then you’d need a constant supply of nutrients for the plants, and given the amount of plant matter needed for just one human, that would be a huge supply of nutrients.
I’d love to see another honest, scientifically rigorous attempt at a biosphere project. Building a closed ecosystem on Earth is easy-mode compared to doing it anywhere else, but so far all the Biospheres have been failures. IMO until we can easily do it on Earth, we’re nowhere near ready to do it in space, on the moon, or on another planet.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 2 weeks ago:
Just a little.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 2 weeks ago:
English has a rote greeting in “How are you doing?” But, you can respond with anything from “great!” to “oh, okay”. It would be a big faux pas to take that as an opportunity to launch into all your medical issues. Maybe in Chinese it’s ok to respond honestly, but just not to assume someone is actually asking you if you want to eat something.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 2 weeks ago:
IMO, English Canadians don’t really have a food that they can call their own. Quebec has poutine, tourtieres, pea soup, and other things. English Canada eats many of those things, but also a lot of generic North American or European things: hamburgers, steaks, North-American style pizza, pasta, stew, etc.
Where I think Canada might be a bit different is that after decades of high levels of immigration, Canada has a lot of foods from other parts of the world. It’s common to find South Indian, Pakistani, Punjabi, Turkish, Persian, Carribean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Mexican, etc. restaurants in a city. Many of them cater to immigrants from those countries, so they’re authentic tasting.
A lot of that is made at home too. While a home-made stir fry probably wouldn’t taste authentically Chinese to someone from China, there are many meals from around the world that have been adapted for Canadian tastes. Very white people in Canada often cook adapted versions of Indian curries, Chinese stir fries, Mexican tacos, Thai curries, etc.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 2 weeks ago:
How do you know people don’t like spicy food? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 2 weeks ago:
And what’s the correct formulaic response to that?
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 2 weeks ago:
That’s a great video.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 2 weeks ago:
German bread and beer is good. The only problem is that they have extremely narrow definitions of what makes good beer and bread. For example, the Reinheitsgebot law means that most German beer tastes the same. It’s not that it tastes bad, but the number of varieties is lower as a result. Similarly, with bread, Germans like a very specific style of bread. Sometimes they put seeds on it. But you have to search to find naan, corn bread, challah, roti, milk bread, injera, etc.
- Comment on I dunno 3 weeks ago:
Yes it does.
- Comment on Actual theft 3 weeks ago:
Did people care enough about the Best Buy commercial for this to be on Gamestop’s radar? Did she have a fan club or something? She’s fairly attractive, but not in a memorable way. It seems like good casting in the sense that she looks like she might be someone who works a retail job.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 3 weeks ago:
I never signed up, mainly because there was never any need to sign up. You could just go there, paste an image, and get a link to it.
Why would you sign up? It would be like signing up to use a URL shortener.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 3 weeks ago:
It still surprises me that people use Imgur as a social media site. Imgur to me is a place that hosts image to be used on other social media sites. Using imgur as a social media site is like using a url shortener as a social media site. What’s next, Captcha becomes a social media hangout?
- Comment on We're going backwards 3 weeks ago:
Normal ones? But as infrequently as possible.
- Comment on We're going backwards 3 weeks ago:
Part of the reason for the rise of AirBnB is that hotels suck too:
- “Your $225 per night hotel”, oh sorry, all those rooms are booked, we do still have these $250 per night rooms though…
- Oh, you didn’t want to be next to the ice machine and hear that crunch sound all night? There’s another room here but that will be $275…
- Not next to the elevators? Well, there’s this $300 room down the hall
- Yes, the room has a mini-fridge. Oh, we didn’t tell you but it’s 100% full of overpriced things, and if you touch one you bought it. No, there’s no way to put your own things in the fridge.
- Oh, you wanted to use the TV? Well, we have HotelTV and every time you turn it on it goes to the HotelTV channel, you can get all the local TV stations too. HDMI? No, sorry, we don’t have that feature.
- Of course we offer a free “continental breakfast”, it’s offered between 4:35 and 5:20 AM, and consists of reconstituted dehydrated eggs, malk, cereal, taste-free muffins, and pancakes. We’re out of pancakes.
- Internet? Of course we offer Internet. Just sign on to this captive portal and you can use Google. Send emails? You should be able to get to gmail… Play games? You mean like backgammon? I think we have a backgammon set in the back here. VPN? That sounds like hacking…
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 3 weeks ago:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
- Comment on It will be great, they said... 3 weeks ago:
I’m still there. I’ve always wanted to be able to offer an email service to family or friends. But, even though I’ve been doing it for a couple of decades, it’s never been stable enough to offer to them. For part of that time it’s because I didn’t really know enough of what I was doing, but the more I learned and the better I got at it, the more I started to lose the war against both spammers and against the major service providers who kept making it harder and harder to prove you’re not a spammer.
The latest one was literally issue 3. My provider splits an IPV6 /64 among multiple VPSes, when most of the world, including blocklist publishers, think a /64 is for a single “entity”. The only way to resolve it was to not use IPV6.
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 3 weeks ago:
One reason why there are so many nonsense lawsuits in the US is that unlike Europe and the UK, it’s unusual that the loser has to pay the winner’s costs. In Europe that’s standard. As a result, an American person or group is much more likely to sue, because if they lose all it costs them is their own legal fees. AFAIK they also do the reasonable thing and cap fees so that if someone sues a rich multinational corp and loses, they’re not out millions of dollars because the multinational hired a huge, expensive team to defend themselves.
Justice would really be a world where these nonsense lawsuits didn’t happen at all.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I think they’d be relieved looking at just how far we are from AGI.
Judgment day was originally supposed to be August 29, 1997. It has changed a lot due to all the time travel. But, every date has passed and now the techbros are going nuts over a form of “AI” that can’t count the number of "r"s in “raspberry”.
- Comment on why 4 weeks ago:
Ok, so what’s the rule for those 3 examples?
- Comment on A rogue object so strange, scientists aren’t sure what to call it. 4 weeks ago:
That’s gotta add up to something, even with the inverse-square law fall off
No, it doesn’t, precisely because of the inverse square law.
- Comment on why 4 weeks ago:
What if it’s a loan word from another language, like “the facebook” (El Feis) or “playstation” or “hentai”?
