• 2 Posts
  • 497 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • A key part of federating, at least notionally, is ease of migration. The local pub locks their customers because there’s no alternative. Twitter locks their users because their “followers” aren’t on the new platform.

    The fediverse facilitates migration, all the way down to redirecting from the previous account. Doesn’t look like there’s a way to automatically update followers’ following, and there probably shouldn’t be, but follower count (including all of the inactive and bot accounts) is one of the tools commercial social media use to scare people into staying.



  • Sensors. Especially sensors in your living space where fans or other noise from the proper server would be distracting, or in a tight space - inside your HVAC, for example - where a proper server wouldn’t fit.

    Media front-end. Most of those SBCs are more than enough to run a kodi or jellyfin frontend, fanless for minimum distraction.

    Robot. Low power requirement so it could be mobile; but there are lots of stationary possibilities. GPIO libraries are great for running servos and there’s tons of libraries to facilitate.



  • federal EMTALA requirements have not changed, and continue to require that healthcare professionals offer treatment, including abortion care, that the provider reasonably determines is necessary to stabilize the patient’s emergency medical condition

    At the time of the discussion, Farmer was medically stable, with some vaginal bleeding that was not heavy.

    Sounds like she was not experiencing an emergency medical condition that would have required stabilization. It could have become more severe, which explains why conventional care would have been abortion, but it was not, at the moment of presentation.

    Sure would be nice if they would just let the physicians practice medicine, without having to second guess which law takes precedence.


  • For small businesses, a president taking power can immediately affect business. Small business owners make decisions based on their expectations of future, colored by their emotional state, so if they believe that a Republican President will be good for business, then they’re more likely to order new machinery, hire an extra person, etc. In an ecosystem of small businesses, that optimism feeds on itself.

    Happens in big business, too. S&P500 gained 3+% the day after election, which (if you don’t believe the daily stock market is just gambling) presumably means that ‘the market’ expects 3% more growth out of all those companies, just by Trump’s win being formalized. Stock price up makes it easier for companies to raise capital to expand, buy out competitors, etc

    Neither of those things is “the economy,” but they can feel like it, if you’re close enough.




  • I can see that. If you just want to hang out in a space, then VR Skyrim definitely has some cool places to hang, but how long are you really going to spend in that Skyrim tavern?

    When OP asks whether VR is a long-term option, that’s what I think. My favorite 2D games I have 500+ hours, probably a half dozen of them; I can still go back to those, some 10+ year old, and sink another 50+ hours. The only VR game I have more than 50 hours is the mini-golf game that’s glorified chat.

    For me, VR as an experience has been really amazing. It’s a level of immersion that’s just indescribably better than anything 2D, but each of those experiences has had limited staying power, which I think is because the physical demands of VR constrain my playtime and focus. I can left-mouse-button all day, but my back gets sore if I stand for three hours. So I can handle beat saber because I treat it like a gym session, but the idea of VR walking 7000 steps to Skyrim’s Throat of the World…just no.


  • It’s not going to replace flat screen gaming. It’s hard to be in VR for hours, especially when you have to manage battery life, but I’ve had a headset for a year or two now, and it’s still amazing where it’s good. I’m better with smooth moving, but I still prefer teleporting, for headache/dizziness.

    Tried Skyrim, couldn’t make it stick - VR just isn’t right for massive open worlds. Halflife Alyx is amazing - it’s the right scale for VR, the attention to manipulatable objects is amazing, and some of the puzzles just couldn’t be done in 2D. Blade & Sorcery is good, too.

    Games I keep going back to are Beat Saber, because I’m old and need something to make me stand up and move, and Mini-golf, which is mostly a focus for hanging out with remote friends.



  • Money doesn’t win the election, it’s more of an entrance fee, and campaign financing is more complicated than just ‘the campaign.’ You have to account for PACs, party, and all the free messaging from sympathetic media outlets. Bernie pinned his hopes on going viral on social media, and mostly demonstrated that it’s not a viable strategy, at least at the Presidential level. Might work OK for smaller races, like AOC, in a geographically small, relatively young district, but not nationally. Most people actively avoid political messaging, which is a fundamental problem if you plan to rely on organic distribution of a political message through social media. Especially social media controlled by billionaires that might be hostile to messages like ‘billionaires bad, unions good.’


  • The reality of American political process is that it takes at least a billion dollars to run a Presidential campaign. (Thanks, SCOTUS) That kind of money doesn’t come from unions, social activists, or proletariat donors. It comes from corporations and billionaires, and those people don’t like revolution.

    Until someone can demonstrate that you can get more votes with progressive, worker-friendly policy proposals than with a well funded propaganda machine, the DNC is going to keep chasing the less conservative billionaires. And no third party will even be relevant.


  • Yeah, rereading your text, I may have confused all the negatives and inferred that you support the post’s implication that they’re targeting children, but I meant to comment on the data in the context of ‘biggest bar,’ not to criticize opinions. Seeing OP’s chart, the first thing I wanted was a population chart, and I’m glad you’d already provided one.


  • The post title asks you to look at the “biggest bar,” which seems to imply that the biggest bars - children - must be targeted. OccamsTeapot population graph is important context because, as war-crimey as indiscriminantly bombing civilian populations is, intentionally targeting children feels so much like comic-book villany that people dismiss it as propaganda.


  • They do look pretty similar to me, but can’t say without numbers. Keeping in mind the population graph is a couple years old - half of a bar height - they both show a minor peak/inflection around age 30 that’s maybe 2/3 of the major peak around 5. Babies seem to be spared from the bombing, but that could be fewer births or increased non-violent infant mortality.

    IMO, it’s not a great data set to claim Israelis are intentionally targeting children, but it is pretty good for saying they are not intentionally targeting military-age men.




  • The filibuster is just a Senate rule, though, which they can rewrite any time they like (though usually only after an election).

    The 2017 repeal effort used a budget reconciliation mechanism that is not subject to filibuster. In fact, a lot of the 2017 legislative awfulness used the budget reconciliation hack, where the Senate can change laws in order to ‘balance the budget,’ so long as (by convention) they don’t change policy. 2017 repeal, of course, famously failed because John McCain thought they shouldn’t use that process and voted against it.


  • Dems definitely lack a coherent, interesting economic message. Any new proposal - medicare for all, UBI - immediately gets sucked into a quagmire of details. Turning to Republicans for the votes they need to win in general elections has been such a consistently losing strategy that I have no idea why they keep doing it.

    Meanwhile Republicans keep running on “You feel poor and it’s Their fault,” continues to resonate, for varying definitions of “Them,” as long as GOP is out-of-power. It’s simple. It feels good. It completely absolves them of needing any policy more complicated than “Get rid of Them.” It’s a winning strategy as much as the Dems have a losing strategy.