joecot

Being a plumber who works for a company means you are given tasks and show up at those assignments. You need to know how to plumb.

Being an independent plumber means handling: marketing, networking, customer service, etc, plus plumbing. Like any other freelance position it's not easy to break in and get enough work to live. And we're not in the days of people just opening the Yellow Pages and calling a random plumber. Now it's a labyrinth of competing search engine results, yelp reviews, HomeAdvisor references, etc.

Some people will take the time to find an independent plumber. Most people call RotoRooter or whatever company has advertised the most in their area. The plumbers, electricians, handymen I call are all independent, but they're also old, at the end of their careers, having a set of regulars they could take with them going independent, and having saved a bunch of money because they were getting paid fair wages in their prime. There are economies of scale in the skilled trades, they're just not the trades themselves.

If retail stores are making record breaking profits, why are service workers paid so little? If medical costs are so high, why aren't nurses and nurse aids making more?

It's not rocket science. People aren't getting paid for the value of their labor, and productivity has rocketed up while wages have stagnated for decades. Your plumber charges 200 an hour and doesn't make anywhere near that much, because they work for a company who profits massively off their labor and exploits him as far as the law and supply and demand will allow.

The original premise was that trades are where all the money is, and Gen Z should be listening to that. My point is that we were previously told: the money is in college degrees, the money is in STEM, the money is in nursing. And people invested a lot of time and money in taking that advice and it went nowhere. Then we were called stupid and foolish and entitled for believing that advice.

So why aren't Gen Z taking this magical advice on trades? Because they know older generations don't have a crystal ball, they've seen what happens if they listen to that crystal ball advice, and they're not falling for it. And if you talk to Gen Z, they have very little hope for the future, given we are doing very little to stop climate change, runaway capitalism, and they're watching jobs get automated without any change to the "cost of living" agreement when people are watching jobs disappear.

Boomers don't have to worry about any of that anymore. And there's nothing more tone deaf than Boomers giving advice on a world that no longer exists for younger generations.

I'm a millennial. First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. So everyone went and got a college degree, and since so many people had it it wasn't a status symbol anymore, so that wasn't enough to get a good middle class job. And then a bunch of people were told they shouldn't have gotten those degrees and they were worthless.

Then we were told to go into STEM. So lots of people went into STEM even though they didn't want to, there are not enough STEM jobs for all of them, and in some cases the reason there are always jobs available is because they chew everyone up and spit them out (looking at you, Amazon). I got lucky. A lot of folks did not.

Then we were told what we really need is nurses. So folks went to nursing school in droves. I'm not sure where we are with that, because it seems like hospitals still never have enough nurses but that those folks that went to nursing school also didn't manage to improve their situation much.

Now we're told the money and demand is in trades. And that might be true, and that might remain true, but we've been given the wrong advice for so long we just stopped listening.

> And if you think about it, it does make financial sense for them to forbid streaming. As-is, I am sharing one purchased copy of the game with my friends. We have one cheap GPU server with Hetzner and we take turns playing the games. Or we play a couch-coop game online with multiple Gamepads connected to that one server. If you prevent this form of sharing, each of us would have needed to purchase a copy of the game to install locally, so the publisher is potentially losing money by tolerating game streaming.

You can essentially do all of this with Steam anyway. You can use the Steam Family Sharing to share your video games like that if you're playing at different times. And you can use Let's Play Together to all remote to the same computer and play split screen.

Also while it's nice that this shortener doesn't obfuscate where the link goes, in general url shorteners make it easier to run malicious sites. Yes, it's ridiculous that Twitter is marking Mastodon sites as unsafe. But if something is marked as unsafe, and you use a url shortener to link to it anyway, it is terrible security on Twitter's part to not also mark the shortened link unsafe.

Whenever I make the mistake of discussing anything political on Hacker News, I remind myself after that I appreciate HN for its purely technical discussions.

Look up the history of the Monroe Doctrine for the US. The US overthrew (or attempted to overthrow) any government in the Western Hemisphere that allied with the USSR. Even now, imagine how the US would react if Mexico declared a military alliance with a US enemy, while sharing thousands of miles of border with the US.

> Can you provide the source for this, please?

Sure[1]. If you google you will find the direct quote in this paragraph in many places.

> The present crisis has its roots in a long-brewing contest over Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine became independent but for decades joined neither with Russia nor with the West. The United States, for its part, expanded its NATO alliance but initially sidestepped Ukraine. It recognized that Russia, sharing deep ties and a 1,426-mile land border with Ukraine, might oppose such a move by force. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” William J. Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia and current CIA director, cabled from Moscow in 2008. “I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/12/23/ukraine-ta...

While I of course condemn Russia invading, and support the US and NATO funding Ukraine's defense, a very cynical read of the situation would conclude exactly this.

US and NATO diplomats were crystal clear that after the USSR's fall, the former Soviet states should not be invited into NATO. And later that they should not be invited into the EU. Even with USSR gone, they were in Russia's sphere of influence, and making those overtures would be provocative.

The US pushing for a military alliance with Ukraine is what initially set Putin on trying to take control of Ukraine. That is a mighty long border to share with a US ally. Everything went downhill from there.

So a very, very cynical read of this situation would be that the US and NATO goaded this war specifically so that Putin would play his hand, and the entire world would watch as Russia crumbled. That their entire military was a front for crumbling soviet era technology and resources. The problem with building a society where the powerful steal everything not nailed down is that they also do that to the military. US and NATO intelligence likely knew this.

And given how brazenly the US and NATO have supported Ukraine through this, I would also hazard a guess that they know that most if not all of Russia's nukes won't actually fly.

EDIT since multiple responses have asked about a source[1] on the nato comment:

> The present crisis has its roots in a long-brewing contest over Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine became independent but for decades joined neither with Russia nor with the West. The United States, for its part, expanded its NATO alliance but initially sidestepped Ukraine. It recognized that Russia, sharing deep ties and a 1,426-mile land border with Ukraine, might oppose such a move by force. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” William J. Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia and current CIA director, cabled from Moscow in 2008. “I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

> Later that year, however, President George W. Bush pressured NATO to pledge that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” Although momentum toward membership stalled for multiple reasons, Ukraine pursued an association agreement with the European Union that moved more quickly. When, in 2014, Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity replaced a Russian-oriented government with a pro-Western one, Russia swiftly annexed Crimea, home to its Black Sea naval base, and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/12/23/ukraine-ta...

Correct. No matter how down AWS is, their status page will only show a disruption if a manager approves showing a disruption. There is nothing automated to display the status, so the status page is mostly worthless except for whatever AWS admits is down.

When you're administering a server, that's the difference between Silence and Suspend. If a server's content causes problems but it'd be fine if users followed them, then they're "Silenced" (on some servers this shows up as "Limited Content"). If an instance doesn't want their content no matter what, it's "Suspended". For most instances, other instances are only suspended if their "inappropriate content" is often illegal.

a) When you're using Discord, IRC, or a forum, all the conversations happen in separate gardens, and you have to jump between them. Mastodon lets you look into each of those gardens, see who you like, follow them, and talk to them, all in one place. There are some great communities, but you don't have to pick one of them. You use them as starting points to make your follow list. And it's not just Mastodon, it's also the Fediverse, which has Diaspora (like Facebook), Lemmy (like reddit), personal blog software, spinoffs of Mastodon and the others, etc. And you can connect to all of them. So it's like if Discord, IRC, and whatever else also worked together.

b) If their your friend, you know their user@domain, because they tell you, same as they would their email address. Unless you're on an Antifa instance and your friend is on a Nazi instance, it is highly unlikely they will be disconnected from each other. If you join one of the instances on joinmastodon.org they have agreed to give 3 months notice for any shutdown. You can move to a different instance at any time, export your follow list and redirect to the new instance.

c) They're already joining and there's a list on fedified.com . Of your use cases, this is IMO the least important. Most of the celebrities will join Bluesky and that's fine. But not only does Mastodon allow you to verify using your personal website, fedified gives a list of important verified accounts, and a number of organization specific Mastodon instances have started up for people in those organizations.

Mastodon is not Twitter, it isn't supposed to be. But if the point is to have social media with interesting conversations with friends and people you'd like to discover, it does that. And it can't be destroyed by a single billionaire. If the point is an algorithm that makes you sad and sells you things, and brands that want to grow followings to sell things, either hope Twitter recovers or Bluesky works.

All of his complaints are intentional.

* There is intentionally no global search. Mastodon is about conversation among people, not about searching out every single person in the entire fediverse who mentions your name or a topic you want to argue about so you can argue with them.

* Mastodon instances can intentionally choose to not federate with other instances. This is why, even though people regularly bring up that there are servers full of Nazis on Mastodon, you never see them. Because everyone blocked their instances. Everyone blocks The Gab immediately for example. If someone on an instance is harassing people, the first step is to report them to their instance admin. If they don't take any action, the next step is to defederate from that instance because they don't have the level of moderation safety your instance expects. Defederating is what keeps out harassment and trolls, because the instances that don't moderate them get iced out of the Fediverse. But it is not, as described, a situation where one instance "Doesn't Like" another. Harassment ~= "Doesn't Like." There might be a few who defederate with that little reason, but not the vast majority.

* Sure, the small instances are an old server in someone's basement. There are also massive instances with many servers and redundancies. You can also get a managed Mastodon instance. You could also run an instance for just you on a Raspberry Pi. Your choice whether you put it in the basement or your living room.

* I'm surprised he didn't also mention a lack of quote tweets, but that's also intentional.[1]

All these complaints come down to: join an instance that runs how you want it. Join one with text search or not. Join one with strong or no moderation (but with no moderation, expect it is isolated from many other instances). Join a small instance in someone's basement or a big one with a huge patreon. Or just put up your own, in your own basement, at a host, or managed.

Or just don't join mastodon. Don't tell people to quit having fun because you choose not to understand it.

1. https://scott.mn/2022/10/29/twitter_features_mastodon_is_bet...

Yes, this is true, but I still get better delivery through delivery services. For example a lot of email providers send any email coming from a cloud hosting IP directly to spam.

I know it's hard to imagine under Capitalism, but lots of things work without a financial incentive. The early-ish internet was powered by web forums. There are thousands of community run game servers. Wikipedia editors and contributors are unpaid. Volunteers do things because they want to see them happen and they like the community.

Bitcoin has brought out the worst in many people, to the point where coal power plants were coming back online in order to handle the power demand of generating bitcoin, and miners were grabbing up as many video cards as they could, boxing out gamers from reasonable build budgets for years. Bitcoin is how society runs when it only cares about financial incentives. There are plenty of parts of society that run without a financial incentive at all just fine, and I'm hopeful the future of the web is a lot more like Mastodon than it is like web3.

The only problem with doing this could be mail deliverability. But if you setup SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and use a mail service, it works fine if you're not spamming. Mailgun, Amazon SES, Mxroute, they'll all deliver your mail and for cheap. There's no single point of failure needed to get your mail delivered.

Trying to pass the compliance risk on to the engineers is insane. And I don't think the FTC buys it. It's a long shot because the ultra wealthy rarely have to face real consequences in America, but there's a real possibility that Elon Musk goes to prison over his flippant disregard of the FTC.

Probably this

> In a note posted to Twitter’s Slack and viewable to all staff that was obtained by The Verge, an attorney on the company’s privacy team wrote, “Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them. I do not believe he cares about the human rights activists. the dissidents, our users in un-monetizable regions, and all the other users who have made Twitter the global town square you have all spent so long building, and we all love.”

Twitter became a de facto official communication channel for many organizations and politicians. Despite all his flaws Trump showed how important Twitter was to political discourse. I'm hopeful that the move to the Fediverse / Mastodon will allow organizations to maintain official discourse, but using their own server instances, such that they're not beholden to the whims and changing owners of a VC funded corporation, who apparently stopped caring about FTC decrees.

> help line his pockets

And his ego. The world already has both Mastodon, a decentralized twitter-like social media, and ActivityPub, a protocol for decentralized social media services to connect to each other. Dorsey has chosen to support neither, and instead make his own service and protocol that can't connect to it.

Bluesky has a wait list, while there's already a google doc full of Blue Checks that have moved to Mastodon[1]. I'm hoping grass roots open source succeeds over a billionaire with VC funding, but we shall see.

https://journa.host/@WalterShaub/109305242003516901

I gave up. I submitted an inquiry on their sales form for dedicated and got no response, I contacted their support and got "we'll let you know." They've at least added nvme storage for instances, but in at least their Dallas data center the iops suck. In Newark it's a bit better.

If you've got a bunch of servers at a linode data center and want bare metal ones, I ended up just looking at what other hosts are peered with their nearest exchange. Our servers are in Dallas and Vultr, Equinix via IBM Cloud, and Servermania all had peering to them through a local exchange at infomart or nearby. We ended up moving database servers to those bare metal services and connecting over wan to our linode ones. Latency less than 5ms.

Linode also contacted us to ask why our monthly usage halved. We told them, they offered no alternatives.

Not even that. They already have Twitter Blue, a premium service that's 3 bucks a month. So they already have payments, they already have subscriptions and membership periods. They literally just need another plan tier added.

For the most part this is me. The only reason I go to a theater is if the movie demands it (Dune in IMAX was heavily touted, so I made the trek for that), or the Drive-in. There's a Drive-in movie theater that still runs about 45 minutes from my house. 2 movie double feature for 11 bucks a person. When the weather's nice, I'll drive there with my friends, put lawn chairs in front of my car, pull out the boombox, and make a night of it. I can manage the volume and we can talk to each other without disturbing anyone.

The reason is they want to bundle stream quality to stream quantity to keep squeezing subscription money for features you don't use. I share my account because 4k streaming is locked behind their Premium tier, 4 simultaneous stream account. I pay double the price in order to get 4k streaming. If they don't want me to share my account, I'd be happy with a 4k quality, 1 stream quantity account, at a lower price. They don't want to do that. When they keep the pricing the same and now try to charge me for account sharing, I'll just cancel.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926

There's a longer tail effect than that. I used to put 100 miles a day on my car, now it's maybe 2 if I go to a couple stores. This isn't just commercial real estate, it's car manufacturers, gas companies, all the service businesses for commuters (parking lots, the starbucks on the corner, all the restaurants near offices), etc.

I don't think that's a bad thing. Anything that means less car usage is a good thing, and as commercial real estate keeps losing demand, those spaces will end up converted to residential real estates in cities with ludicrous housing prices. Work from home is good for workers, for the environment, for residential renters. It's the companies who benefit the most from forced office commutes that are hand wringing.

> For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it.

If we didn't live in a Capitalist society, that would be fair. But we currently do. That Capitalist society cares little about the well being of artists unless it can find a way to make their art profitable. Projects like DALL-E and Midjourney pillage centuries of human art and sell it back to us for a profit, while taking away work from artists who struggle to make ends meet as it is. Software Developers are generally less concerned about Copilot because they're still making 6 figures a year, but they'll start to get concerned if the technology gets smart enough that society needs less Developers.

An automated future should be a good thing. It should mean that computers can take care of most tasks and humans can have more leisure time to relax and pursue their passions. The reason that artists and developers panic over things like this is that they are watching themselves be automated out of existence, and have seen how society treats people who aren't useful anymore.

You don't. But in the US I'm rarely in a place where I have no data but SMS still works. And Europe has more effective telecom service.

It has nothing to do with "toxic femininity", it's classism. And no one's "banning" you from using this term, you're just getting downvoted for your performative "Cancel Culture" signalling.

Trains move significantly slower than planes. They're also on the ground, mostly below the towers, while planes are in the air, moving very fast, with multiple towers in line of sight.

This looks like the sort of website my friends and I would've setup when we were running local community teams for Ubuntu and running computer expo and flea market tables trying to get people to try it. In 2005. I checked, this domain was registered May 2022.