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Comment reeks of corruption (Score 5, Insightful) 93

The state has issued permits allowing the pollution and subsidized the crypto-mine through tax incentives despite having an affirmative duty in the state constitution to protect the environment for its citizens, according to the lawsuit.

it's not enough crypto mining is already the most useless, polluting endeavor on the planet (well, might be training ML models now), but the government of Pennsylvania decided to subsidize it.

and

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection declined to comment.

that's right, because they got caught doing something they shouldn't have.
Disccovery is likely to get very interesting...

Comment Re:I just feel sorry for the normal people in Oreg (Score 5, Interesting) 194

Sane people knew that base on what evidence ?

Prohibition sure as fuck isn't working.

I voted for this, and voted for it precisely to try it. It seemed like a more rational way to deal with the problem. Also, i'm not insane, thank you very much.

My thinking was, when I voted for it, was that it could be changed if needed, which is exactly what's happening.

There's one very important consideration in this type of effort that's being ignored - no one has made a serious effort to do something similar. That always carries heavy risk in implementation. Basically the problem was, as far as I can tell, is that you have to absolutely force addicts into treatment programs. So next time someone says that addicts will "choose" to do it we can point to this effort and say "no- they will not".

Meanwhile armchair quarterbacks like you have all the answers, none of which you have shared.

Or is your answer to spend 100s of millions of dollars on prisons to lock up users and then complain that we spend too much money on prisons ? That's generally what everybody else does.

Meanwhile, you're welcome.

Comment the unwinnable terminology battle (Score 1, Informative) 73

Just like hacker forever became a negative, now we're using "AI" for something that is most definitely, not , in any way, actually AI.

This automatically means the average person thinks that AI is going to be "smart" in some way when it's just a very energy intensive, resource hungry, bubble-inducing pattern matcher.

Is the level of it's pattern matching impressive ? yes it is.
is it impressive for the amount of power it costs to actually train it ? Not sure about that one...

Comment rot starts from the top (Score 1) 52

It may be that he deserved to be canned.
it is also probable that he was put in a situation to fail.

so he could either stand up to the execs above him and get replaced or ... let something bad happen and get replaced ?

Hard to say.

But rot most definitely starts from the top.

I wonder what the CEO was telling investor last year or the year before.
I wonder if the word safety was used in any way other than as window dressing.

Comment pure nimbyism (Score 3, Insightful) 177

There absolutely needs to be environmental impact laws, because real estate developers are parasites that will ruin an area to make a buck.

But San Francisco and similar cities have a very strong streak of maintaining property values by simply not allowing anything else to be built.

As always it's balance.

The most dysfunctional thing in America is the court system. It's absolutetly controlled by money.

Even when justice is served it's delayed.

You have money , you can tie it up in the court for YEARS. Poor neighborhoods get bulldozed immediately, or have highways put through them.

Comment well looks like the Boeing CEO is in big trouble (Score 2) 191

probably only make 20 million this year instead of 22

https://www1.salary.com/BOEING...

I wonder if he'll make more money getting fired than if he stayed.

Fucking wanker.

I mean, if I'm the Alaska Air CEO, i'm going back over all of those fucking airplanes from top to bottom.

Boeing has just cost them a fortune.

Comment Re:The result of yet another mega merger (Score 1) 74

The mergers are completely focused around monopolization, which is what happens when "over-regulated" companies are not regulated.

In the electronic CAD software space the goal is to absolutely milk customers for every last penny, because changing vendors is fairly painful.

The last thing you want to do is to allow a lower cost alternative, or any alternative, to exist otherwise you can't keep raising the license costs every year for no reason.

So naturally, you buy the competitors and do the absolute bare minimum of maintenance to keep them alive those former products alive, all the while using them as a list of victims to receive never ending calls about upgrading to the more expensive products. Also, eventually you kill those products because you allow existing customers to have them but don't allow new customers.

This is critically important now that there's virtually no way to get out of monthly/yearly licensing fees as you won't just go without upgrades, the software will stop working. So being able to raise prices year after year is easy money.

I guarantee there is no upside to this for VMWARE customers. Well, unless they like paying more for the same thing, then there's plenty of upside.

source: I use lots of CAD software and it's absolutely infuriating how you can look at versions 5 years apart and barely tell the difference in functionality. You're paying more though.

Comment growth is good? (Score 5, Insightful) 154

We still think that cancer is an appropriate economic model.


It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

RFK, Mar 1968

Comment never forget (Score 4, Interesting) 65

Just in case you ever thought you should feel bad for copyright holders when you're looking for a torrent of your favorite copyrighted work.

The Mickey Mouse Protection act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The court case to challenge the clearly unconstitutional extension of copyright

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Well worth reading the SC's opinion, and especially the dissents by Breyer and Stevens.
It's a great example of how these "brilliant" legal minds sometimes get shit very, very wrong.

Breyer understood (so did Stevens),

This analysis leads inexorably to the conclusion that the statute cannot be understood rationally to advance a constitutionally legitimate interest.

They broke the contract. Fuck 'em.

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