sh34r

If you desire stability and you’re already used to Ubuntu derivatives, there’s always Debian.

A big part of that “downtown” everyone tries to hype up is a tent city these days, so…

I’m not sure how that makes you feel better spending all that money to live in a place that makes Cleveland look downright exciting in comparison. At least SF and Oakland have some more excitement to go with the unbelievable cost of living and quality of life issues.

Providence and Seattle are far better examples of urbanism. I’d agree that it isn’t worse than Orlando. That’s not exactly high praise. Why spend NYC money to live somewhere that’s no better than Orlando?

Ehh. It’s grating in California, but I think the epicenter of it is in Minnesota or Denver, actually.

CHIPS/IRA was the carrot. The tariffs, sanctions, rampant IP theft, supply chain shocks, Chinese lockdown labor shortages, specter of global conflict, energy shortages, etc were the stick. I suspect the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Organizations are not rational robots that weight every factor and risk optimally. The conversation is probably more just wild gesturing at everything while cargo cult mentality takes over in the dozen boardrooms that control a majority of economic activity.

The Bay Area is a car sewer that could be teleported to the middle of Florida or North Dakota, and it would fit right in. It's a place you go for a couple years to make a bunch of money and have zero life, and you get out as soon as you possibly can. No culture. Just asphalt, office parks, pollution, run-down houses, and tent cities.

I live in a town of 80,000 now, that feels more urban than San Jose. It's crazy. San Jose is not a real place. It's a million people all dispersed in a couple hundred square miles, seemingly at random, all in their little boxes on the side of a highway. No landmarks, no tall buildings, no walkable areas. It's not the middle of nowhere, it is nowhere. I'd say you could not design a "city" more poorly if you tried, but the rest of Silicon Valley sure proves me wrong there! Mountain View is even worse somehow!

I'd say that they'd have better luck selling New Yorkers on their dystopian suburban hellscape if they weren't so obnoxiously positive about having paved paradise and put up a parking lot, but toxic positivity is kinda California's whole thing. They're not capable of putting themselves into our cynical headspace. You have to buy into all that woo-woo crap to survive out there. We're fundamentally incompatible with it. Won't find anywhere livable west of Chicago until you reach Tokyo...

Watch the Anna Delvey documentary when you're bored sometime and tell me you don't low-key respect that hustle. Tell me you wouldn't have strongly considered nullifying that jury if you were on it.

Then compare that to what Elizabeth Holmes did, and tell me you don't wish she got a much harsher sentence.

There's a lesson there. To join the party, don't ignore your personal morals. Just bend them to grift the right people.

Inflation is the epitome of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You let a young Republican into one Econ 101 class and suddenly he thinks he knows more than actual economists. All of whom will tell you no one fully understands inflation. You don't know what you don't know. Economics is more of an ideology than a science anyway.

Who's to say inflation is even a bad thing, anyway? Argentina's had "hyperinflation" over and over again, and it's not exactly Weimar Germany. All the debt in the economy can never be repaid. Debt vastly exceeds the money supply. What is money, anyway? It's just another form of debt. Dollars and treasury bills are completely interchangeable. In a world that runs on debt, devaluing debt (aka inflation) is a good thing for everyone except the nested-yacht rich (up to a point).

These paltry stimulus programs largely went to pad oligarchs' bank accounts through PPP fraud. This doesn't contribute to prices at the grocery store, at all. It did jack up the price of crypto ponzi schemes, and made a bird app worth a meme number for a brief moment in time. That's about it. Giving money to the rich does not stimulate the economy whatsoever. They just hoard it and blow it on nonsense until it vanishes into thin air, from whence it came. They can't spend all that money on goods and services in ten lifetimes.

Supply shocks, trade wars, excess corporate profits, and a staggering lack of antitrust enforcement are playing far more of a role with inflation than those $1200 checks.

Lastly, raising taxes on oligarchs is pretty much the most popular position in the country, according to polling. Raising taxes is not political suicide at all, provided they're the right kind of taxes. Polls also repeatedly find that Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in the country. Unfortunately, public opinion has been scientifically proven to have no effect on policy in the USA. This is not a democracy. It's a fascist police state.

The student loan crisis is a cost of living crisis. The rent is too damn high. Room and board fees are a major portion of the total bill that everyone seems to ignore.

> It's not like people used to file bankruptcy on graduation day just to screw over the system

There used to be a social contract, where your country provided you with certain guarantees, and we felt some obligations in return. This was one of the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and also the founding of the USA. We abandoned that decades ago. Neoliberalism erased all "American values." The only American value left today is greed.

In that lost time, you're absolutely right: people would not have just bankrupted their loans on graduation day. College used to be affordable. The country provided for its people. There was a guarantee of a basic standard of living. You could raise a family as a single income household with just a high school diploma.

These days, no one can afford kids anymore. You need to have a Master's degree just to afford a crappy one bedroom apartment downtown. If you fall down, there is no rock bottom. Skid Row in LA has been described by the UN as more deprived than anything they saw in refugee camps or Brazilian favelas. US tent cities are gross violations of human rights. The decadent ruling class openly mocks the idea that human rights even exist in the first place, only pretending to acknowledge such things when manufacturing consent for war with Russia. You have no right to life, no right to liberty, no right to the pursuit of happiness. You will own nothing, and you will be happy (or else).

In this Brave New World, where the social contract has long been shredded and there's no such thing as society anyway, absolutely everyone would declare bankruptcy on graduation day if they could. Just like all the criminal business owners walked away from $4 trillion of fraudulent PPP loans they didn't need. Just like Jeff Bezos takes every legal tax deduction he can find and more, despite not needing them. I would declare bankruptcy on Graduation Day. You would, too. You would have to be an imbecile not to. In this world, you take what you can get as long as it's legal. If you find a loophole in the system, you exploit it unapologetically.

JFK's most famous quote was widely applauded at the time: "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." The underlying implication there is, the country already did a lot for its people back then. Half a century later, all these years of all take and no give, it's about time we started asking the reverse. America's Human Resources are all tapped out. No more blood left to draw from these stones. What has this country ever done for you? When has it ever given you a single dime back, in return for all the taxes you've paid? Even universal healthcare is too much to give for them, but they'll give Ukraine everything and more. They'll fund their universal healthcare system, their pensions, and all the things the oligarchs have stolen from us. The child tax credit cut child poverty in half overnight, but American oligarchs are demons, they enjoy seeing kids going hungry. It's good for business or something.

It will take another generation or two before your theory is true again -- that people wouldn't just declare bankruptcy to start adulthood at zero. You'd need to fully rebuild the social democracy that has been systematically destroyed piece by piece ever since black people got human rights in the 1960s. Even if we got FDR's Second Bill of Rights enacted tomorrow, young people have been completely broken by this Hellworld we've raised them in. They've been forced to ritually practice their own deaths on every equinox in these truly disgusting school shooter drills every year of their lives, since they were in preschool. Part of rebuilding that underlying social democracy would have to be making public university free again. There's no way around it. Either it's free again via declaring bankruptcy on graduation day, in some sort of quasi-baptism in the civil religion, or it's via direct funding as it was before higher education was desegregated. Honestly, I kinda prefer the graduation day jubilee. It begs the question, why don't we just reset all the debt? It would delegitimize the entire system of debt that enslaves the human race.

Why bother writing code? Most of it will be discarded shortly after. Why bother having garbagemen? The garbage will just be there next Monday, like clockwork. Why bother doing any job at all? Death is all but certain after 120 years.

What other profession is allowed to behave like a nihilistic teenager? They're paid to do a job. There's always more work to be done in every job. Otherwise, it typically ceases to be a job rather quickly.

Cops don’t want to work anymore. Their fee-fees are hurt after the 2020 protests, so they’ve been doing a work slowdown. In a sane country, this would lead to mass layoffs and defunding of the police, but somehow the answer in this insane country is to reward the petulant children.

Can you imagine any other profession refusing to work for three years and getting a raise for it? The police are a gang, running a city-wide protection racket. NYC voters even decided it’d be a great idea to put a made man in the mafia in the mayor’s office. That’ll fix crime alright! /s

The pigs are eating all that slop in the trough, getting fatter and lazier. Why would anything change? They keep it up and they’ll get even richer! What kind of idiot rocks the boat when they have a $200k a year job where you can just play on your phone all day? Cops are scum.

Stealing stuff and selling it through a fence is not a business. It’s organized crime. A racket.

You could effectively argue drug dealers and bookies are running an illegal business, and I would not disagree. They sell (illegal) goods and services to willing participants. The fences (eBay and other co-conspirators) are running a business too.

But shoplifting isn’t a business any more than muggings and “protection rackets” (give me a cut or I break your kneecap) are a business. It’s just violence.

The RICO Act is criminally underutilized. Use these 300 street-level knuckleheads to take down the online fences that are orchestrating this whole racket.

eBay already looks like the mafia after that psychotic terrorism campaign against a blogger. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/investigation-ebay-employee...

Put their dons next door to El Chapo and these organized theft rings will be severely disrupted.

IQ scores are pseudoscientific rubbish. They belong in the eugenicist dustbin, along with phrenology.

Let me translate the second mechanic's advice into our language: "Have you tried turning it on and off again?"

How much of your clients' time (and therefore money) would you spend chasing down a bug in software with an unknown root cause, which never appears as long as operations schedules a restart every couple of days? Software engineers are all too happy to dive into those rabbit holes, but that's because we don't usually have to look working stiffs in the eye and hand them the bill for our services.

That's likely not an incompetent or lazy mechanic. It's an honest one who doesn't believe they can solve your problem at a price you'd accept.

The first mechanic, on the other hand, I'm a lot more suspicious of. Did they bother testing the battery before replacing it?

Car doors are unlike any other door in your common, daily life contexts. They are not rectangular. They are heavy and float several inches above the ground. They have hydraulics and/or springs, and typically have two fixed points where they will remain open, even in moderately high winds. They have electronics, power windows, crumple zones, and side airbags. They lock remotely. Their latches and handles are very different from other doors.

A car door is like a bedroom door in the same way a MacBook is like a Cray supercomputer. A door is a door and a computer is a computer, but there is significant variance within that category.

I find that everyone has these quirks, regardless of gender. Sometimes it makes the world a more interesting place. Sometimes it's utterly baffling. Like my friend who refuses to use tissues because his parents taught him to blow his nose with a paper towel instead. Maybe we're the weird ones for believing Big Kleenex's ads though!

One gender difference is that when these quirks are presented to men, they're a bit more likely to change to a more sensible method. Women tend to get annoyed about the male tendency to suggest solutions to everything. Annoyance can motivate stubbornness.

So much of the government relies on staffers discreetly working around the kafkaesque bureaucracy, and everyone involved turning a blind eye and respecting their need for discretion.

You’re comparing two very different things there. Institutional libraries and government archives have records going back centuries, many of which can’t be found anywhere else. Even your local library might have some obscure local newspapers on microfilm from 100 years ago, that haven’t been digitized yet (we’ve admittedly made progress on this problem over the last decade).

To answer these “who am I” questions posed in the article, of unidentified historical photos, we need institutions like the Library of Congress digitizing their records, uniting them with other institutional datasets, and organizing them in a way that we can run facial recognition algorithms on them. The answer to “who are these musicians circa 1930” probably comes from a local newspaper that ended publication 50 years ago.

In case it isn’t abundantly clear, this is going to take decades to accomplish. These institutions operate on timelines measured in centuries, not weeks. They care deeply about problems like bit rot when replacing physical archives. If it is lost to the world in mere decades, it is not useful to them.

The Internet Archive is of little help here, beyond sharing technical information for efficient archival and retrieval of truly massive public datasets.

I’m sorry if you took offense to it, but none was meant and after some googling, it would seem most uses of the term are not offensive. I’ve heard engineers say it many, many times and never with malicious or hateful intent. Obviously, China is capable of manufacturing many wonderful products. For example, the Apple products I was just praising.

And then there’s AliExpress… I’m not sure how it’s racist to use a portmanteau of “Chinese” and “aluminium” in reference to low quality goods manufactured in China. But going forward, I’ll keep in mind that it could be considered offensive.

Personally, I wish fewer companies would store passwords in plaintext!

Murder rates are also down substantially since the 1990s. The leading theories include reduced lead exposure and fewer neglected and unwanted children thanks to reproductive healthcare. In either case, the missing murderers would’ve been more impulsive, more careless, and easier to catch. Many of the murders that go unsolved today, likely would’ve gone unsolved in the past, too.

Plus, some of the cleared murders in the past were simply blamed on innocent black men by a racist system. Look at the Innocence Project for examples. We still have a problem with all that, but surely it’s not as bad as it was in the 1970s.

Another contributing factor is that so much forensics and police resources are wasted on victimless drug crimes. It’s an lot easier to bust a corner boy selling drugs than to track down a murderer.

In a better world, we’d have more companies like McMaster selling people what they need and providing a highly valued service, instead of using ads and weaponized psychology to convince them to buy some more junk they don’t need that’s going to end up in a landfill by December.

Never mind industrial uses. It’s nearly impossible to find the right sized bolt or screw for a basic residential task on Amazon. For example, to replace a furniture screw that was lost during a move.

It’s arguably similar to the value proposition Apple brings to a lot of their customers. Time is money, and having things just work the way they’re supposed to seems to get rarer and rarer. Or maybe I’m just getting older, I dunno.

I wish we had more firms that still valued quality and proper customer service in this world. Too much chinesium junk out there these days, in a race to the bottom that everyone loses.