get to
Wasn’t it in the news a lot due to its failures? Or am I misremembering?
Septimaeus
joined 2 years ago
Conversely, when I read about the Holocaust as a kid, the last thing I would have expected future Jewish people to support was killing neighbors and taking their property. How are we making the same mistakes?
Bonk, horny jail. This is shower thoughts not locker room thoughts.
I don’t know about a hard cap. Shelves and caps tend to inspire “creative accounting” just shy of fraud, and we can curtail runaway capital accumulation by just making the curve more aggressive.
A simpler solution is public equity. This is an idea I’ve been selling for a while so I have a spiel. Tap below if curious.
Public Equity
Public corporations should not be taxed based on declared revenue. Instead, a portion of shares should be owned by the public such that taxes are paid by dividends.
Also, any direct funding or “stimulus” from the federal government should purchase additional shares. The government’s failure to demand equity on behalf of its people when increasing their shared national debt to fund large corporations would be considered gross fiduciary negligence in any other funding scenario. For example, full bailouts should result in a controlling stake, i.e. nationalization.
It eliminates poverty, easily solves a truckload of difficulties we have taxing these corporations and their shareholders, promotes overall economic health, and is above all more fair to everyone, including the wealthiest.
Specifically:
- If shareholders are paid, taxes are paid. It would no longer be possible for a company like Amazon to have $0 tax liability while at the same time distributing revenue to its shareholders.
- It skips the “trickle down” step. Share appreciation is reflected directly and automatically in public equity growth, so if the paper wealth of the richest citizen increases, so does the paper wealth of the poorest.
- It prevents runaway capitalism, the situation we find ourselves in, where a government is too anemic to reign in corporate greed and the public servants within it too starved to resist corruption.
- It offers more direct control of inflation, since the Fed can simply not reinvest a portion of dividends paid on shares.
- It makes Universal Basic Income (UBI) trivially easy to implement, since what we are describing is essentially a universal pension fund that everyone has fractional shares in.
Most importantly WRT principle, it more accurately reflects the value afforded to every public company by the actual public; i.e., the society in which it operates.
Edit: forgot to mention UBI
Mad Max the musical now on Broadway
It would be easy to find enough solar panels to charge an electric vehicle in most sunny areas, though it would probably be easier to just look for a large enough existing install and skip all the DIY. (Just look for the shiniest roof.)
But I think the real problem is in the EV itself. Batteries self-discharge and chemically degrade over time, so unless the apocalypse was recent, a lot of EVs you find might have damaged batteries, especially if fully discharged to begin with.
You could cannibalize one or more EVs to cobble together enough good cells to get past the safety cutoffs, but it would take a while and you would need to be careful since internal voltage in EVs tends to be high (like 400-800 volts).
TLDR: if this is a movie depiction, definitely use a montage.
Lol I noticed the same. They evidently have some ongoing internal disagreement as to their target audience. Docs and functionality says “our audience is enterprise developers” but their marketing definitely says “our audience is end users.”
It may be explained by recent partnerships with former custom ISO devs (seeking legitimacy and offering a sizable user base in turn). I expect the plan is eventually to sell premium support for an enterprise toolset, but for now their target audience is the non-dev-but-tech-savvy end user. And those happen to be surprisingly opinionated re: java and electron.
Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation.
- Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process.
- Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition.
- Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot.
- Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine.
- Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image.
- Telemetry refers to data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution.
- MS = Microsoft
- OSS = Open Source Software
- Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control.
- Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows.
Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.)
Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry
Just a tip: if you must use consumer editions of Windows regularly, consider adding an automatic provisioning tool like AME to your workflow.
The example above uses customizable “playbooks” to provision a system the way docker compose would a container image, so it can fill the role of a VM snapshot or PXE in non-virtualized local-only scenarios.
The most popular playbooks strip out AI components and services (there are many more than just Recall) but also disable all telemetry and cloud-based features, replace MS bloatware with preferred OSS, curtail a truckload of annoying Windows behaviors, setup more sensible group policies than the defaults, and so forth.
I have a few custom playbooks for recurring use cases so that, when one presents, I can spin up an instance quickly without the usual hassle and risk.
I’ve been involved for less than half as much time and haven’t been through what the older ones have, but one of them told me something I’ve been thinking about lately.
They said the political and legislative fights are important but the true battles are for hearts and minds. They take longer to win but those victories are final because once people see a world in which we belong they can’t unsee it.
So it’s a fact that hard-won rights now can be taken with the snap of a finger, or simply ignored, but it won’t stand for long because most people won’t accept anything less as just. That is, it’s too late to undo what you fought for. The battles you won are won.