admiralteal

You mean Half Life: Full Dive, followed by Half Life: Full Dive 2. The second in a trilogy never to be finished.

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 – pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.

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.

If you’ve ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service… you’d probably be the first.

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.

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.

deleted by creator

This is the exception to prove the rule that the other interests are definitely illegitimate. This is the website telling you that they give away your data for illegitimate purposes.

It’s not a surprise. We knew this was true. But seeing it’s spelled out like this is a little galling.

Illegitimate: not authorized by the law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules

The website is basically admitting that they’re using your data maliciously, intentionally, by having this distinction.

I think a lot of people might be sympathetic to the idea that in wartime, you need to be stricter because of the incredibly high stakes. That Ukraine is at war, so they need to find and deal with these sources of disinformation.

I think those same people need to realize that the policies never get rolled back to a more liberal state when the war is over.

It sucks that this is a systemic advantage for authoritarians. It really sucks. It feels bad. But it’s the handicap you have to accept to resist authoritarianism.

Absent an idiotic carrier/mfg skin that disables the feature, you just long-press power then click “lockdown”.

Or reboot the device. Rebooting the device will also leave it encrypted if your device has encryption (the PIN/password is needed to decrypt, essentially).

deleted by creator

Preventing the collection of data by the state may be impossible, but they should be accountable for who has it, who it’s given to, and they should need to go through proper due process to use it against you in any kind of official proceeding.

It might be impossible to get everyone out of the databases, but we can at least force warrant requirements and the like.

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 asking 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.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Wind’s not doing terribly, but in the last decade solar has seen something like a 7fold increase in prevalence while wind has only seen closer to a doubling.

There’s a chicken and egg problem here. These products are on learning curves. The more you sell, the cheaper they get, the more they sell. Solar has a killer feature – it’s ridiculous modularity. It scales from facilities that are acres and acres large all the way down to the roof of a van. That scalability has been a big part of driving demand for PVs beyond anyone’s predictions.

Wind needs some help. Again, these energy sources are ridiculously complementary and we need both for the future. I want to see wind keeping pace with solar PV. If it can do that, natural gas is going to be wiped out by them.

Comparisons to coal are pretty… ehh.

Coal is dead technology. It just sucks. It’s incredibly expensive and polluting. Outside of a few plainly-corrupt politicians (like a certain senator from West Virgina), no one is really standing up to defend coal. That’s even true internationally. China’s trying to export all theirs to places that have no regulation around things like flyash because only by completely externalizing those factors can it make any sense, and even then it’s a huge stretch. Germany has a concrete plan to decommission all of theirs (which has way too long a timetable, but that’s a separate discussion). Australia is starting to sort their shit out on the subject, too, though the politics around Aussie energy policy make wonk heads spin they’re so all over the place.

There are regions in the US I know of where local utilities are buying out coal plants in order to shut them down and terminate their purchase agreements because it’s cheaper than continuing to buy the coal power. That’s how lousy a power source coal is. Within my lifetime, I suspect I’ll see virtually all North American coal plants get sold off / decommissioned even absent the regulation we ought to be passing to shut them down immediately.

Solar is just cheap. It’s cheap cheap cheap. The market is going to continue to make it explode. There are actual terrawats of solar wanting to come online with the transmission infrastructure (and FERC et al.'s broken policy regarding interconnection queues) being the main thing holding it back.

What we really need to see right now is more investment in wind. It’s totally complementary to solar production – the wind tends to be blowing when the sun isn’t shining – but wind has not experienced the same wild learning curves wind solar has. That’s holding us back from having renewable grids and needs to change. If only backyard/rooftop wind were as easy to do as solar.

Also, how can we be assured the privacy practices of their subscription/payment platform are at least better than the (likely blockable) trackers?

Forming a financial relationship with a website is, theoretically, infinitely more traceable to your personal identity than all the cookies in the world.

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 the kind of service that shouldn’t be on private markets.

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 because the incentives of the system have defined ‘worse’ as being the optimal result. 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.

Or any of the nearly-unavoidable-because-it’s-a-monopoly evil big corpos like Amazon. Chase handles their credit card and definitely significant other financial parts for them.

I’ll never argue with someone who wants that true, rural/countryside/homestead life. The appeal is there for me too, even if my own calculus says the cons wildly outweigh the pros.

I’m pretty skeptical you’re going to find it 5 miles from a healthy town, though.