• 0 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

help-circle
  • The et cetera: Shouldn’t be allowed to work overtime either. And they should get taxed more if they work a second job, so only 40 hours per week. Attach ridiculous fees to any attempt at saving money in a bank, can’t have their money earning interest for them. They should also be in a high cost of living part of hell with no public transportation. And they should be forced to buy their own safety equipment. They should have to pay for healthcare out of pocket, no good health insurance. And they should be penalized for aging the same way too, with new billionaires coming in cheaper and forcing them out of their position and making their experience a liability in finding new work. Let’s throw in some inflation to keeps things spicy. An HOA that is constantly fighting them and won’t let them grow food. How about random detentions and beatings for being the wrong shade in the wrong part of hell town, the part they work in. And they should never be allowed to forget for one moment what they had in life and how they squandered it on petty selfish things.




  • It’s not a completely different thing. They were both trying to fully integrate the operating system and the web browser into one monolithic and inescapable thing: Windows XP + Internet Explorer to squash competition on the desktop; Linux + Chrome to squash competition on laptops; Android + Chrome OS to squash competition in the mobile space. The money to be made on operating systems is trivial in the consumer space compared to the power of control over platforms (like web browsers) that deliver advertisements and harvest data from comsumers. M$ saw the writing on the wall way back then in their fight with Netscape Navigator. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    I feel like I’m talking to an AI chatbot completely unable to reason abstractly or consider the full context of the conversation.






  • The best part is the random bill.

    • Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
    • Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

    The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

    Or another variant.

    • Go to the emergency room.
    • Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

    The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.


  • Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.




  • “non-lethal” Oh, boy! What an infuriating misnomer that is.

    This is also a good time to remember nothing here in this context is “non-lethal”. All of these things (sand bags, tear gas, tasers, pepper spray, mace, rubber bullets, batons, shields, tactical holds, etc.) are accurately called “less lethal” because all of them can and will kill under certain circumstances, even when used by trained officers with good intentions. (I know. How often does that happen, right?) It doesn’t take much to cross that line between “not intending murder” and “actual fucking murder”, often something as simple as a common medical condition or simply falling while moving over hard ground like curbs and sidewalks. If a reporter is using the term “non-lethal” in the context of police brutality, that’s a pretty good sign that you are being lied to.





  • I bought SUSE Linux once upon a time. It was a physical CD and the packaging that I paid for. Maybe a little support was bundled, probably not. That was a time when the internet was slow for most and not an option for others, wifi wasn’t ubiquitous (and if it existed, good luck getting the proper drivers loaded without internet), live distributions weren’t really a thing yet, booting from usb was finicky and unreliable, and the install CDs would have the entire OS and basically all the software you could want to install bundled. These would have been the days before the fall of Napster and the rise in other “Linux ISO sharing tools”. Ubuntu would even mail you like a half dozen physical CDs and some stickers just for asking and promising to share them in your community.

    There’s nothing wrong with buying the physical things or paying for support. That’s not what this meme is showing though.