Not to mention a wide variety of devices and platforms that make use of the Linux kernel but are not remotely what you might expect from a free software kernel -- everything from Android to smart televisions to cameras to light bulbs.
Ironically, proportionately speaking there's probably more locked down Linux devices than there are locked down Windows devices.
I recall it was some absurd number, like half of books struggled to get more than 12 sales. I got more than 12 sales, and I'm just some shitposter on the Internet!
On a lark I checked out who published the Mark Twain anthology I've got on my desk right now, and honestly I don't even recognise the parent company.
(I guess though the service they're providing isn't the book or even the printing, it's putting it together in a suitably pretentious package - and that isn't a criticism, that's the reason I bought it)
First, your wage loses X% of its buying power every year so if you don't get a wage increase you just lost X% of your earnings forevermore.
Second, higher wages are taxed at higher rates due to progressive taxation, so despite having the same buying power on your new wage you're taxed more.
Third, inflation causes nominal capital gains that aren't real. Let's say that you bought enough stock to buy a basket of goods in 1980. If you sell the stock, assuming it kept up with inflation it should buy the same basket of goods. The problem is that the number of dollars it takes to buy the same basket of goods doubled (even if you believe the "inflation has been 2% lie) so the stock doubled, and so now you owe taxes on a 100% gain, even though it didn't actually gain value. In that sense, inflation *is* a wealth tax because the government gets a cut despite your wealth not increasing.
One big thing is I keep hearing that many of the protestors aren't even students and don't necessarily even believe in what they're protesting but are paid professionals.
I really think there's a case to be made for forcing paid protesters to disclose that they're being paid and by whom.
You know me, I'm a huge supporter of the 1st amendment and free speech in general, but disingenuous astroturf protests that are paid for by moneyed interests in my view becomes more like other forms of regulated political advertising and should be treated as such.
There was also an incident in the news recently that an onlyfans thot admitted to being paid by the Biden campaign to talk about how happy having minorities on the supreme court made her "as a woman of color", and that she shouldn't disclose that at all because she wasn't selling a commercial product so it would be fine. More astroturfing, and I think it's deceptive and should be treated like other deceptive advertising.
When I was in college;
1. I didn't have money for a nice-ass tent to go protest something that had nothing to do with me. Many of those tents look like they'd cost my food budget for a month. When I wanted a bike, I had to ride that bike to and from school and work every day because I paid for it using my bus pass fund.
2. I was paying five figures to be there (and ivy leaguers would be paying six figures to be there), I wasn't going to pay thousands of dollars to not graduate because I was living in a tent to go protest something that had nothing to do with me.
"And this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them.
That is pretty much the case, he said.
The people are a third class, consisting of those who work with their own hands; they are not politicians, and have not much to live upon. This, when assembled, is the largest and most powerful class in a democracy.
True, he said; but then the multitude is seldom willing to congregate unless they get a little honey.
And do they not share? I said. Do not their leaders deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people; at the same time taking care to reserve the larger part for themselves?
Why, yes, he said, to that extent the people do share.
And the persons whose property is taken from them are compelled to defend themselves before the people as they best can?
What else can they do?" - Plato discussing democracy in book 8 of The Republic. This is part of a description of how democracy descends inevitably into Tyranny.
I think it's important to be reasonable in this respect.... It's already been 3-4 years since many people got their first shot, and just like we didn't actually have carts of dead people in the streets from covid, we don't have carts of dead people in the streets from the covid vaccine.
Now don't get me wrong -- what I'm not saying here is that there's no effects from the untested experimental vaccines and that there never will be. What I'm saying is that we need to live in the here and now and look at what's actually happening rather than predictions from people who don't have the real world data to make extrapolations.
Early on I watched a video about COVID that suggested that billions would die, and while the videos were very convincing at the time, we now know they were entirely wrong. Even in countries that largely didn't have any of the interventions of the west such as in Africa, things were mostly fine. More deaths than usual, but not a black plague "bring out yer dead!" piles of bodies thing.
In one show they talked about how good it is that the government says everything is fine. in another it says entitlements are great and the guest shrugs off the existential crisis of government debt with a dismissive "it's a political problem, we can figure it out", and "entitlements are fine, America economy big!"
No wonder my predictions got so much better after I stopped listening to them. Imagine how disgraceful it is that these alleged economics reporters are likely to die in the gutter penniless because they don't seem to know fuck all about the markets or the economy.
I think this goes to show how bad just latching onto a word is. Enshittification allegedly deals with the way services get worse due to capitalism. The problem is that scientific journals and the peer review process isnt capitalist and is often part of systems run by people that explicitly hate capitalism.
Honestly though, I'm impressed that the ai generated image of the rat with the giant penis was both peer reviewed and published in a journal of science. Neither the author nor the reviewer were paid for creating and approving that photo, but it got published regardless!
I saw a great post a while back that pointed out that most of these little cloistered and highly curated instances die while the "evil" instances that do much less work curating content survive and often thrive.
We all have lots of ARM devices, and for the most part none of them are open like a PC. You can't boot off of a standard USB stick to start up some thing, because for the most part there is no real bootable standard, because none of these devices are standard. They're each their own proprietary thing, and often they're running their own proprietary software. You make a different sort of media for each one, often running a different sort of OS.
Contrast the open PC, where you can use the same USB memory stick to install the same OS on pretty much every PC, give or take a couple device drivers.
If we lose that openness, I don't think we'd get it back anytime soon. Potentially every laptop becomes a semi-proprietary ecosystem.
Yeah... It's an equation with two sides, caloric intake and caloric output. If you take two people, and one of them is sitting there posting on Twitter all day and the other one is riding in the tour de france, it should be self-evident that if they are eating the same amount the outcome will be significantly different.
So let's take another situation, two people sitting on Twitter all day, but the basal metabolic rate is slightly higher in one than the other. We know that certain things affect the basal metabolic rate such as general activity levels or genetics, and potentially certain foods may it affect that as well.
The composition of the food can also make a big difference. As I recall, the test for caloric intake of food basically involves burning the food in a controlled manner. Well there are things that are highly calorie dense but also somewhat inedible. For example, a piece of wood is made out of all kinds of carbon that will burn, but it is insoluble fiber when it comes to our body's ability to break down and use those calories, and so it will basically leave the body the same way that it entered. If you have one person eating 2,000 calories of wood and another person eating 2,000 calories of sugar the body is definitely going to be interacting with those two things in a fundamentally different way, and so one person will starve and the other person will be more or less just fine.
The nutrients contained in food can also have a big difference. When I first started taking vitamin b complex, I was shocked I just how much energy he gave me, because vitamin B is critical in helping your body process fat.
All of this is true, but it's important when trying to lose weight not to get bogged down in details -- in that case calories are the easiest way to gauge where you are and where you're likely to go, but we're not talking about individual weight loss here but the populations, and given the date points we're looking at the details start to matter.
It's filled with an extremist monoculture. The mere idea that someone might believe something different than the Reddit monoculture is thought of as if you're trolling, they are so used to seeing nothing but their own opinions that the only reason anyone might have another opinion is that you're trying to attack them.
For a long time I had a reddit account, and it was my main place to see things and have discussions about things. After a while I started to erase my account every few months because there was a very real threat of having some psycho track down where I lived based on hints in my posts. Eventually I deleted my account for the last time, because there was only one opinion you were allowed to have, and if you didn't have that opinion you'll be down voted into oblivion, banned from a subreddit, adjust face a torrent of low effort "refutations" that essentially beg the question -- the assumptions built into discussion mean discussions can't even take place.
A lot of redditors moved over to lemmy, and now lemmy has the exact same problem. There were once a couple decent instances that got chased off the platform, and the large reddit population now socially polices that platform too.
I have ended up on the fediverse, and it's absolutely incredible. The level of intellectual diversity is beautiful, I'm mutuals with on one hand people who have hammer and sickle in their name, and on the other hand people who have black suns and swastikas in their name. That doesn't mean that I endorse either ideology whatsoever, but it does mean that all across a broad spectrum I can see all kinds of different opinions and that's kind of what I want.
Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not likeAdversary of FediblockAccept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...