adjectivenoun

I don’t think this site will return to normal until the US midterms are over, but I’ll try to be less of a dick until then.

Happy to contribute!

lmao I’m sorry. I tend to respond with the energy I’ve been given and this week Lemmy has been giving me lots of rude BS.

He’s referring to Ars Technica you box of rocks.

Wishful thinking?

Yep. And I’m sure you know this, but we toppled Iran’s democracy at the behest of British Petroleum (BP) through clandestine action of the CIA.

They used another tactic that I didn’t notice until one of the commenters on the Ars article/forum pointed it out:

Promising good stuff that’s not too close (~5 years) so you’ll remember it and say, “Hey, where’s my <good thing>?!” but not so far away (~25+ years) that you’ll say “That’s way too far you need to fix this shit now.” Apparently it was used in Soviet Bloc countries a lot to keep the population from revolting, and now I’m seeing it everywhere in our society. In this case, the O&G companies said things like, “Sure! We’ll be generating all your fuel with algae in ~15 years and then we’ll never need to drill again!” and “We’re developing amazing carbon capture technology that’s a mere ~15 years away and will repair all the damage we’re not doing!”

Ars Technica might be owned by Conde Nast, but it has a really smart userbase on average, so I tolerate that fact.

Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s just interesting to see yet more evidence they were lying as dishonestly as the tobacco industry. I think this article presents a pretty cohesive timeline of those lies: what they knew and when they knew it.

I think it’s a little of both, but one of my friends left my company producing weird semiconductors to go work at Micron making RAM. They’re definitely ramping up a little, but the equipment and techniques to fab those chips is very specialized. Imagine trying to drill zillions of really tiny, deep pits, and then making sure the very bottom of those pits get coated while the sidewalls are completely unaffected… and you have to do it everywhere uniformly on a hundred 350mm wafers per minute.

There’s a pretty big benefit to the solar panels: more efficient and also can be placed in a solar-synchronous orbit that is always illuminated. I can’t imagine that power advantage outweighs the disadvantages of cooling power-hungry hardware with no way to reject that heat to air or water. I’m with you: WTF are they thinking?

I heard Google just launched a test bed. Basically one mini server the size of a refrigerator that can only operate for 15 minutes before it needs to shut off to prevent heat damage. I’m guessing that thing will prove the case against celestial data centers, but we’ll see. The only good thing to come of this is that it might help advance cooling tech for satellites and suchlike.

Internal files add to evidence of an ExxonMobil climate deception campaign

That’s if they don’t decide the best course of action is to launch them into LEO lol. If they do (they will–they’re that stupid), the infrastructure will burn up in less than five years.

They could have made it even faster with a coat of red paint, but engineers thought that would have pushed the materials past their limit, so they chose to leave it black.

It feels like we’re losing ground. Why does 8GB of RAM feel totally insufficient to browse the same websites I used 12 years ago with 4? I’m so happy I maxed out my motherboard’s RAM (32) when I built a PC in 2021.

PROTIP:

Ebooks are trivially easy to find online, or you can check them out from your local library.

There’s a free and open source program called Calibre that can manage your ebook library, change file formats, edit visual formatting, and even remove proprietary DRM.

Don’t let Amazon being a bad company prevent you from using your old Kindle.

It just seems like this system is capitalism with extra steps, but the extra steps involve replacing the exchange of money with the peddling of influence. The capitalists are replaced by administrators, the hierarchy of wealth is replaced by rank in the decision-making apparatus. I get that it’s supposed to be democratic and protect the interests of the public, but so too is our regulated hybrid public-private system and we see how well that’s going. It also seems like, where our market system began as distributed and decentralized, which was a strength, and began to be ever more concentrated as businesses consolidated and corrupted government, this new system starts consolidated and married to government. A lot of people would say this is too much power in the hands of the state, and ripe for theft by an autocrat. I’m not saying it’s impossible for this to work, but the systems I have seen work best are those where the market does what it does and the government reigns in its worst tendencies when the motive of profit conflicts with the needs of people.

This all sounds philosophical. How does this system actually solve problems in a society where scarcity exists? Do people still have property rights? Who enforces those rights? Who makes the decisions on where scarce resources are allocated? Our current system has answers for all of these questions, it’s just contaminated by the influence of powerful scumbags. The thing is, the powerful scumbags are going to be scumbags in every system, and at least a decentralized market economy limits the ease with which they can exert control.

This is basically it. Classic liberalism is everything from Margaret Thatcher to Bernie Sanders. The MAGA movement has regressed to fascism–a form of corporate authoritatianism.

So are almost all progressives.

You can’t. He’s trying to use liberal as an epithet when he means neoliberal. If we’re being pedantic, liberal refers to the full gamut of people who think there should be an open and free society, which usually includes a market and certain property rights. The conservatives use liberal as an epithet to decry the left and now the left is using it to decry the middle.

It would be funny if it wasn’t being used to convince naive progressives to sit out elections and let fascists seize power because the center left “only” wants 85% of what they want. You’re seeing it really ramp up because the US is closing in on a big election, and convincing dipshits to sit out elections is easier than convincing anyone the right can govern.