brianary

@brianary@startrek.website
0 Post – 109 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

It's the same argument I've heard about the "complexity" of Mastodon: too many choices, which is I guess why people largely stopped going to websites outside the major social networks. Monopoly over competition, it's like everyone is pining for a monarchy.

Allman is the way.

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"Just Kidding" Rowling

He took a series of very shallow breaths, and then said as quickly and as quietly as he could, 'Door, if you can hear me, say so very, very quietly.'

Very, very quietly, the door murmured, 'I can hear you.'

'Good. Now, in a moment, I'm going to ask you to open. When you open do not want you to say that you enjoyed it, OK?'

'ΟΚ.'

'And I don't want you to say to me that I have made a simple door very happy, or that it is your pleasure to open for me and your satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done, OK?'

'ΟΚ.'

'And do not want you to ask me to have a nice day, understand?"

'I understand.'

'OK,' said Zaphod, tensing himself, 'open now.'

The door slid open quietly. Zaphod slipped quietly through. The door closed quietly behind him.

'Is that the way you like it, Mr Beeblebrox?' said the door out loud.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

They've put all their eggs in the Trump basket, with no clear line of succession. Once he is humiliated again this year, the fever will break for some, and the rest will splinter into infighting. This was their last clear path, which is why they are forcing through everything they are able while they can.

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But voting third party doesn't actually accomplish anything. Take it from someone who did it for decades. It doesn't shake up or change the system, it just perpetuates the minority rule set up by Project Redmap.

The right way to do it is to vote your conscience locally, until there is enough support at higher levels. Skipping right to voting for third party presidential candidates is simply naive, I'm afraid.

Edit: Steve Hofstetter lays it out well (I wish I could find this one elsewhere) https://m.facebook.com/stevehofstetter/videos/why-voting-third-party-for-president-makes-no-sense/359024631794244/

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Like sending a few choice SCOTUS judges to gitmo

He's active on Mastodon, too!

As I've said elsewhere: I wonder what controls Mozilla has in place to prevent gradual takeover of their board by those with an interest in removing Firefox as a competitor. We've watched the sleeper cell in the Supreme Court transform that body into an illegitimate partisan puppet. Mozilla's actions over the last few years would make much more sense if it were being manipulated into self destruction.

There is work like construction, transportation, and customer service that can't really be remote.

I'm not sure if there's a good argument for work that can be done remotely to insist on both in person and remote work. It doubles the amount of workstation resources required, or compromises on at least one of them.

Maybe teams benefit from in-person communication? That's probably simpler for some that haven't found comparable online versions of whiteboarding tools or whatever. Good tools do exist, but feel people that haven't adapted to them by now, it'll take some real demand to make it happen. This might not be a characteristic of a highly effective team, though.

Most frequently, hybrid insistence seems do be more about justifying middle management, based on my highly unscientific observations.

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A job is not a social club. You may need a mix of personality types, but if you lock yourself into a candidate pool from a tight geographic area, that'll be far more constraining.

You can't just make up a percentage based on anecdotal observation and expect anyone to take it seriously.

Generally, my online meetings work great. When there's lag, or for low-priority or asynchronous points, we use the text channel. No interruption. That's not really available in person. It also allows more input from thoughtful introverts, which typically get steamrolled and ignored in person.

It's literally impossible to fully boycott Amazon, I've been trying for years. Even if you buy elsewhere, often you'll find out after the fact that Amazon does the shipping or payment processing.

We should nationalize their monopoly or break it up.

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None were leftist, and only one got as far as violence.

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Give it time. Soon enough he'll hire a reputation management company, shave his beard, show up for Dancing on the Stars, then SNL will put him in a sketch as Waluigi.

Beating them at their own dishonest game has worked much better than trying to fact check them, and getting completely outpaced, ever did.

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Zero is freezing

10 is not

20 is pleasing

30 is hot

40 frying

50 dying

"Puritanism — The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." — H L Mencken

This company has been caught multiple times going back and changing the location of recorded shots in their system after the fact. I don't know why they're still in business.

I did not attend the funeral, but I approved of it.

Dismissing entire groups based on stupid labels is ugly.

At first I was annoyed, until I realized "drop" is an antagonym.

There's a whole book about this: # Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/nickel-and-dimed-20th-anniversary-edition-on-not-getting-by-in-america-barbara-ehrenreich/9836607?ean=9781250808318

Americans explicitly didn't want a national ID.

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I'm pretty sure they only care about their performative solipsism.

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It's actually meditation, isn't it?

The risks of sodium aren't universal (some people appear to have immunity), and were exaggerated by the sugar industry.

Don't forget the burned monkey testacles

Democrats aren't authoritarians. It's a bad comparison. Democrats are always fragmented, it's virtually a defining characteristic. Post-Biden unity has been quite unusual.

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No

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There's a little historical baggage, but look at Windows: multiple letters for drives, and all of the paths can be modified, so you have to ask Windows where any important directory is physically mapped (like SystemRoot or Documents or Temp or Roaming AppData or many others), because it doesn't have this nice consistent structure like Linux. Linux presents a logical layer and manages the physical location automatically. Windows makes you do the logical lookup yourself, but doesn't enforce it, so inexperienced programmers make assumptions and put stuff where the path usually is.

That's part of why logging in to Windows over a slow connection can take forever if you have a bunch of Electron apps installed: they've mismapped their temp/cache directory under the Roaming AppData, so it gets synched at every login, often GiB of data, and they refuse to fix it.

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No, I'm sorry, that's dangerously naïve, and a self-serving, solipsistic moral panic. How old are you?

If we used RCV or anything better that winner-take-all, that would be different, or if we had a parliamentary system. But we don't.

Military, sure, but driver's licenses are state-level, not federal. Health care has been using birthdate like a password (one that is largely publicly available) for way too long now. At least financial institutions can use account numbers and financial history and code words, but even all that isn't great.

It's a messy patchwork, but I think at the time of the creation of the SSA, the US may have still thought of itself as a land of second chances. IBM numbering Holocaust victims probably didn't help the idea of a national ID, nor did the victim narrative of groups like the NRA.

I'm not sure if it's possible not to have a national ID anymore, so denial of it just forces a terribly kludgy implementation from whatever is around.

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That's not what you said. Your original "only" indicates that you think that votes + splitting your opponents votes isn't a strategy.

If splitting votes didn't matter, there wouldn't be so much effort put into gerrymandering. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

Voting is a practical, strategic act, not an ideological one.

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The fixation is because there is no clear line of succession. If he fails, who steps in? They'll splinter and fragment. They'll still be deplorable, but less effective when not united behind a single authoritarian leader.

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Maybe there's some precedent, but I can't see why equally proportionate punishment should be unconstitutional.

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"nobody feels good"

"after childhood, it's a fact of life. I feel rotten. So what?"

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I think you have confused several things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

True, but two copies is one, and one is none. Multiple backups are critical, especially as archive.org has been targeted by the last few book publishers, who want it gone. As politicians and news sites quietly modify their content and hope nobody notices, this should really be a service of the Library of Congress, too.

Why simp for American healthcare?

Two big assumptions here.

First, multiple business systems are already being supported, and the OS only incidentally. Assuming double or triple IT costs is very unlikely, but feel free to post evidence to the contrary.

Second, a tight coupling between costs and prices. Anyone that's been paying attention to gouging and shrinkflation of the past few years of record profits, or the doomsaying virtually anywhere the minimum wage has increased and businesses haven't been annihilated, would know this is nonsense.

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