CamTin

If you're set up for it, you can always set it up on a sandboxed SSID with access only to the internet (or even just to sites you choose, like an FTP server of your ebooks). This is probably a good idea with most sketchy gadgets that "need" access to the "internet" but will probably be off the table in coming years as it gets cheap enough for manufacturers to embed 5g connectivity if they want.

This is the main lesson we've learned in Texas this week. Why go it alone? We're asking for help from the rest of the country anyway (Federal emergency funds, etc). If we'd just played nice to start with we wouldn't be in this kind of trouble at all.

I'm watching https://floss.social/@forgefed very closely. It's a project to provide a federated GitHub-alike/JIRA-alike application (code hosting and ticketing) on top of ActivityPub/the Fediverse. I think it should do wonders for allowing the choice to make these moves easier.

So is the Declaration of Independence. So is Matthew 5. What's your point?

I think this is legally the case in most places, but IMO it is extremely unfair to give ownership acting through the corporate entity the same rights as employees, which are actual people.

"the editor becomes the ssh client itself" is effectively how I use Emacs. TRAMP (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode) makes editing remote files pretty much as seamless as editing local ones. I even semi frequently do slightly-crazy-seeming things like open files via chains of several ssh hops and I can "save" them (read: marshal a complex operation involving scp, base64, and other sourcery) in exactly the same way I can save something to the home directory on my workstation. TRAMP is a default part of the Emacs distribution (and has been for over 10 years), so it doesn't require installing extra packages or even enabling anything. It's just on by default.

This capability, plus "frame" management commands and the various terminal modes make my use of Emacs roughly equivalent to they way I see colleagues (I'm an ops/sysadmin type, not really a developer) using vim + tmux.

It's not clear why this would be the case. Why should we care which "party" somebody is from when then issue at hand is a revolving door between DC and the Valley? The military-industrial complex has done fine under a two-party system and so presumably will the private-public corporate surveillance state. Everybody in power in the US has to pick one of two letters to put after their name, but they're all part of the same ruling class.

The Sanders campaign was trying to address these things but was ratfucked by party insiders (who are in the pocket of the ones benefiting from all the regulatory capture) and is currently, humiliatingly, stumping for Biden.

You can't fight city hall.

A lot, if not most, of America's current problems are the result of the settler-colonial pattern that Columbus established.

The United States before 1924 for one. Passports and travel documents didn't really exist at all until Napoleonic-ish times and weren't widespread until about WWI.

I personally feel that defining "citizen" in any other way than "people who are currently living here" is a form of apartheid and antithetical to our constitution.

This is correct IMO. Most of the workforce at any office-y (including tech) company of significant size isn't a positive investment for their employer. We're all just spending our days trying to prove that there's good reason to hesitate in firing us.

It is absolutely a concern for us if something happens that makes it more difficult for us to keep up this charade, especially if it coincides with a dramatic recession that gives management a reason to sniff around for cost savings.

Because their power rests on fossil fuel revenue?

This is the premise of Cheapass Games' "US Patent No. 1"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Patent_No._1

this sounds like "dc" except with dc you'd need to add a "p" at the end to print the top of the stack

If there's one thing the Air Force is known for, it's doing things fast and cheap, with restraint and elegance.

The "remind" program has a pretty well-developed DSL to represent dates and recurring schedules, with backends to produce postscript/html/etc calendars.

https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/

It's available already-packaged in most mainstream distros I know of.

It doesn't but it would continue buying for longer if the price went significantly and permanently up. But the point of this whole thread is that labor isn't just another commodity like aluminum. It's a special, weird thing and the market in it is just different and probably less "efficient" than the markets for metals and grain. The question isn't "how can we best model this using our existing theory?" It's "what is the best way to model this?", so if the existing theory isn't very helpful, we should look for new ones that are better.

(almost) nobody would dream of working for Facebook if the salaries weren't there. The "problem" with the games industry, and other industries with prestige jobs like publishing, film, etc., is that their toxicity derives from the drive of jobseekers to desire these jobs all out of proportion with their benefits and compensation. There's nothing inherent with the production of computer games that requires this attitude other than employees' and jobseekers' irrational (and very human) love of games. There are exploitative games that are bad, but there's no reason that all games have to be this way.

Facebook is toxic because it fundamentally makes money in an exploitative way that is bad. There is no way for Facebook to both be a business and not be sleezy. I think it's potentially possible we could build something Facebook-like as a non-business, but if we expect it to make a return for investors, it absolutely has to do fundamentally objectionable things to its users and society.

Yes, this was exactly my point. We shouldn't care about productivity: we want affordable childcare, as much sick time as a doctor tells us to take, and guaranteed vacations. Making the argument that ownership should give us these things because it will make them richer is a losing game. They should be forced to give us these things because we want them, and we're the ones in charge.

I'm in favor of treating workers better as much as anyone, but I'm dubious about claims that European-style pro-worker policies are actually better for the bottom line. The US has higher productivity than most EU states. Given broadly similar capital and infrastructure, it would seem at least some of this gap is due to people being more afraid to lose their jobs in the US than in the EU.

Not only that, but couching pro-worker policies in terms of benefits for ownership obscures the issue, and implicitly makes the argument that we should only have pro-worker policies when they are also pro-ownership. That's nonsense, since there are millions and millions of workers and we ostensibly have a democracy.

The traditional Inuit diet is obviously much much lighter on starches and vegetables.

Right, the point being that even absent the requirement to do so, dairies have figured out that it's cheaper/better to all use the same packaging.

If your business is essentially burning VC money for a decade to buy a ticket in the Unicorn lottery, then the easy answer is to spend a lot more money. You can do this by poaching expensive people, by offering more, or by hiring lots more people than you need and keeping the ones you actually want. The result will be more manpower faster, at significant expense.

You can also, as many companies default to, ration yourself by imposing very grueling hiring requirements (months of fly-in interviews and hours-long take-home assignments) and "competitive" (as determined by some non-market mechanism like an industry survey) pay. The result of the latter will be long hiring times for good-enough talent that is willing to work for whatever you've pre-determined to be fair.

It's really no different from looking for a car: you can have a known high-quality thing right now (buy new from a dealer/pay $$$ for top talent), or you can buy a lot of potential lemons for cheaper until one happens to last (grabbing random by-owner cars from Craigslist/hire-fast-fire-fast), or you can just wait things out until you find the perfect deal (trawl Craigslist a couple times a week until something jumps out as an incredible deal/pay "market" rates and have a long hiring process).

There are tradeoffs to be made, and you have to make them according to what you actually need and the resources you have. There's no physical law that says you're entitled to unlimited world-class talent at bargain rates to build your adtech startup.

On the other hand, many container types are already de facto standardized: the lid of the pint of the cottage cheese and the quart of yogurt in my fridge right now, for example, are interchangeable even though they're from totally different dairies. Milk jugs and cartons are standardized. Cereal boxes, most pop bottles. Instant noodle bricks. The list isn't as long as the list of all possible products, but there are clearly benefits to standardization even in the absence of legislation mandating it.

The situation is similar, if not worse, in the US, and the latter is true: absent government pension programs like Social Security, almost nobody can afford to retire. Social Security is the retirement plan for regular people. Basically only union workers with defined-benefit pensions and high-salary professionals who are able to fund their 401(k) meaningfully have any kind of plan for retirement besides living on Social Security. The luckiest can also draw on help from family, life insurance, and getting part-time work as e.g. a Walmart greeter.

Thinking about retirement savings at all is kind of a luxury.

If you do elect for a trial, you are going to be waiting for a long time (on Rikers), because the system is overloaded and isn't actually provisioned to provide justice for the volume of people forced through it. This is the same reason that prosecutors are pressured to plead everyone out and public defenders are pressured to take those deals.

It's easy to score public dollars to hire cops and build prisons, but it's much harder to add judges, public defenders, clerks, and courtrooms. The result is more people with a right to a trial than we have the capacity to give a trial. Justice is therefore a scarce good and must be rationed by some means: you can either queue (wait in jail), pay in cash (by hiring private representation and making cash bail), or roll the dice and go to trial with a public defender.

The solution isn't to find another way to ration justice, it's to reduce the imbalance between people with rights to a trial and the number of trials we can provide. We can do this by arresting fewer people by, for example, ending the war on drugs (among other things) or by expanding the number of judges, clerks, and public defenders in our justice system to be able to handle the whole load. Maybe both are needed in some measure.

They basically are. There are some "Mormon" sects that aren't LDS but they are much smaller, and LDS adherents want to disambiguate.

The possible upside of this may be the decentralization of massive content silos like youtube or facebook, toward federated or self-hosting platforms where the administrators of individual "sites" can better know their users. I can see the "fediverse" (the main public ActivityPub network, notably including most Mastodon users) benefiting from this, for example, since a club/gaming clan/media company could run their own Mastodon instance and be responsible for the things posted using it.

Arguably you shouldn't be able to enter into such a contract, similar to how you can't contract yourself into slavery, even if you want to.

Yes, you've described exactly why this is a bad practice.