Notices by mike805 (mike805@noc.social)

@GreenSkyOverMe @gsllc How about the UK. It's a monarchy, but the monarch can't actually do anything politics. And in the middle of the capital is a square mile that is not part of the capital. It's a separate city. Or maybe a separate country; that seems to be poorly defined. And the people who run it like to perform odd Masonic type rituals. Oh, and all the money is in that square mile.

@MikeDunnAuthor Property taxes on empty homes should double every year they are empty, with no maximum. They can reset back to normal when the house is occupied.

@lauren So why can't these charging lots be somewhere outside the city? Or at the top of a mall's parking structure, which is presumably empty at night? Electric robot taxis are a potentially green alternative to LA's parking nightmare, but they need to not be a nuisance or people are going to mess with them.

@lauren Human-driven taxis are never going to replace private cars, unless you bring in a servile class to drive them.

Robot taxis could eventually be the primary mode of transport in cities. You could then have smaller parking lots, and charge people to park.

Robot taxis could either seat four with hard partitions between them so people would feel safe sharing, or they could be half-wide and share the lanes.

They can form convoys when they are all going to the same area, reducing traffic.

@n_dimension @lauren Specifically thinking of LA area here. It is obvious that the people who run this city are not capable of fixing the transit in any reasonable time. Yes there is some, and people who happen to live and work around it use it, but otherwise it's faster to drive despite the traffic.

Robotaxis can be deployed quickly without any infrastructure building. Technologies like that usually win out, whether they are a utopian ideal or not.

Just move the charging location.

@alisonphipps The USA has made it clear that only nuclear armed countries are considered sovereign by the Empire. North Korea is weak in every other way, but is treated as an equal. The long term outcome of that is that every small nation will want nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons for small nations is the same argument as gun rights for individuals: it's the only thing that deters a bully. By being a bully, the Empire makes everyone want the only weapon that seems to deter the Empire.

@kkarhan @AAKL @joeo10 Yes, getting a bunch of cloud stuff shoved in your face, use Google, use Pocket, put sponsored links on your start screen, etc. At least you can turn that stuff off.

Having a sugar daddy in Google search made them think of themselves as a commercial enterprise rather than an open source support organization.

@benroyce @cruftyold @pmonks @draNgNon A LOT of Trumpers were talking just that way after 2020!

"They stole 2020 and they will steal the next one. It's hopeless."

No, elections can be won if you get a margin of victory larger than the margin of cheating.

Demoralization is enemy propaganda.

@inthehands @dalias If Trump wants to blow up the oligarchy-sustaining machine, why not let him? It's a dirty job but someone has to do it.

@ekis @skribe I remember the utopian articles from the mp3.com days. How evil the record labels were and how wonderful things would be once they were dead.

Now artists miss the old days of merely being ripped off by record labels.

A lot of people have proposed utopian schemes to get musicians paid, by counting plays and paying out from some fund. Nobody has figured out how people discover new music in such a system.

@skribe @ekis What would spotify on top of Mastodon look like? Are we reviving Napster here?

Some of us never stopped keeping our own music files. So a better file sharing system sounds interesting.

@patsytheshark @darkuncle @r343l @skinnylatte @pluralistic https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat is the one I use. It gets rid of the ads. Let me know if you have any questions about how to use it.

Windows 11 non-MS local account:
Unplug Internet before doing this.
On the “Oops, you've lost internet connection” or “Let's connect you to a network” page, use the Shift + F10 keyboard shortcut. In Command Prompt, type the OOBE\BYPASSNRO command to bypass network requirements on Windows 11 and press Enter.

@darkuncle @r343l @skinnylatte @pluralistic I am in user support, and I see it every day. I am tired of fighting it, and would not enter the field today.

I refurbish old work laptops, load them up with ad blockers, run debloat on them, and give them away.

I remote support employees' families with TightVNC and clean up their machines.

The tech industry, except for the chip makers, is really not worth saving at this point. It's the 1970s Big Three just waiting for Toyota and Nissan to show up.

@ekis What did Kamala Harris offer to the ordinary working class person who is suffering economically?

What did Trump offer?

There's the problem.

@ekis You too? I slept poorly as the windows were rattling and the wind howling.

@ekis Not attacking, just arguing for my preferred system.

We could fix a lot of things with a universal PKI system. People would scream "big brother mark of the beast" if they tried, but giving everyone a security token would solve a LOT of problems. From IRS fraud to voting.

Offer a prize of one billion dollars for anyone who could crack it.

@ekis There is absolutely nothing wrong with mark sense voting. It does not require electricity or sysadmins. It can be counted at machine speed, and examined by hand if the election is close enough to warrant that. Best of all, it can be supervised using basic human skills like counting and observation. You do not have to trust a machine or an expert.

@Annaeus @HistoPol The South was ready to pack up & go home at the Constitutional Convention, causing its failure. They demanded and got such things as equal representation of states in the Senate.

How would history have been different if the South had demanded an explicit exit clause in the Constitution?

@br00t4c It should have been obvious to everyone, around the time of the Arab Spring, that the American social media companies are intelligence assets of the US and its allies.

TikTok is an intelligence asset of China and its allies.

None of these things can be trusted.

@jenzi @kaye Aliens receive the stock quotes, along with what are apparently videos of our planet, from our satellite transmissions and conclude the Earth is a fantastically wealthy place they cannot wait to visit.

When the first diplomatic mission arrives, they find an entirely dead planet. The stock quotes were from AIs. The videos were advertisements for video games also written by AIs.