>I don't know how good their analysis was, but that's the question you want to ask.

It is. There's not enough information in the two articles linked to say if it is encouraging people to turn in books late by eliminating fines, and more importantly, they are still charging people for books lost after 60 days, so there's not really much of a difference other than eliminating fines in the 30-60 day window.

>Excluding laptops, my computers have all been Ships of Theseus.

Ditto. This machine is still the same machine that I first installed Windows 95 on. Never reformatted. Running Windows 11 now. Upgraded every component in it many many times over the years, with the clutch tool being Acronis to clone the boot drive from one drive to another when expanding it without reformatting.

> We starve our schools for funds, yet require specific performance from students with penalties for teachers who do not deliver.

The state ADA average is $17,020 per pupil per year. That's more money going to K-12 education - for every student - than non-resident tuition at a UC ($14,318 per year). And that's not counting local supplementary property taxes which here is twice the state budget. Or federal grants, which are pretty substantial ($170M/year here in San Diego).

I would very happily run a class of 20 students and take them from Kindergarten to 12th grade if they paid me $170,000 per year to do so. They'd get a better and more individualized education than what they're getting now, and I'd only charge half what they were currently costing the state.

Money is not the issue. There's plenty of money. The system is awash in money. But the education still sucks. Only 1 in 3 high school students even hits the proficiency level on standardized tests.

They are independent contractors. They bring their own tools (cars), they set their own hours, they can accept or deny jobs.

California is a very liberal state, but voted for this bill with an 18 point margin. This wasn't the result of advertising or people being misinformed. AB5 (the bill that Prop 22 partly overturned) has been disastrous for part time workers in the state, effectively gutting the entire freelance journalist profession in the state. My only real issue with Prop 22 was that it was clearly a sweetheart deal for rideshare companies and didn't just overturn AB5 and return to the status quo ante bellum, so to speak.

>But that won't happen in a society predicated on greed, selfishness and short-term outlook.

The tuition costs are high exactly because of that thinking. We want to be "generous" and not "selfish" so we write a blank check (that is a combination of grants and loans) to colleges, so colleges just raise their rates every year and hire non-instructional staff to justify the expenses. Only a small fraction of the employees of Harvard are actually instructional staff, and that includes adjunct faculty:

https://www.univstats.com/staf...

2,455 instructional staff x $193k/faculty = $474M for instructional staff

19,178 non-instructional staff = x $91,111/staff = $1,747M for non-instructional staff

31,345 students (undergrad + grad). Cost of instruction per student - 474M/31k = $15,290 per student in tuition if they are only paying for instruction. Yes, that's a bit unrealistic given the cost of faculties and the need for deans and so forth, but it's a good baseline estimate for how much it should actually cost. **Non-instructional staff adds another $56k/year in costs per student**. This is absolutely ridiculous.

You could fire 90% of the non-instructional staff and not notice any difference to the quality of education, and charge $20k a year instead of $65k a year. Or you could just, you know, spend $20k/year to hire your own personal adjunct faculty to teach you everything you actually need to know. Because that's what Harvard pays adjuncts who teach 6 classes a year.

My former ISP (AT&T) would spy on my connections and send me nastygrams if they didn't approve of me doing things they didn't like, and threatened me with disconnection. So I used a VPN for a while so they couldn't spy on me. That's certainly a valid use case.

I eventually cancelled them, since I also wanted to send a message I don't approve of ISPs spying on their customers.

VPNs are annoying to use on a daily basis, though, with a lot of major web sites just failing to load if you connect from an exit node on a VPN.

Just pure virtue signalling from an abhorrent company.

I haven't bought an Apple product in decades, and have no plans to ever again.

I was in Vancouver last year and our AirBNB was a converted office building. Worked just fine.

I do game development, and 32GB isn't enough to run one of the Unreal Engine demos (the Matrix Open City), which requires 64GB of RAM.

Mostly, though, yeah, 32GB is fine these days.

They deprecated the old snipping tool for the new Win+Shift+S Snip and Share, but the new tool doesn't pop up the notification half the time, leading you to have to open up Paint or paste it into Discord or something to get your screenshot out, it's ridiculous. Under the old tool, you always got to review the screenshot and choose to save it or mark it up or discard it.

>games dont look particularly better in a 3090 versus lets say a 1070.

1070s don't have any ray tracing cores, so that's a pretty big generational gap. There are some games where ray tracing is like a night and day difference in image quality.

Plus a 3090 is 10x faster than 1070, so you can either turn the detail up 10x higher or get 10x the frame rate. Either way, it's a huge difference.

That said, after I bought my 3090 I went and played a hundred hours of Europa Universalis IV, so what do I know? It's a game involving mostly just staring at a map that doesn't change very much.

Eh I still check it occasionally. It's better than Google News' tech feed

>I would pay for content, if like a car from 2004; once I owned it, I could do whatever I want with it. Content is not the same. Most have copyright schemes that prevent it from being backed up. It have restrictions on where it will play for fucks sake. Whomever thought of that shit is who the movie studios should be mad at. Not pirates.

Yep. I actually bought a blu-ray for the first time in ages a couple weeks ago, and was baffled by why anyone would pay money for such crap. Windows can't even play blu-rays out of the box, there's a bunch of scammy "free" ad-based players, there's VLC which requires you to pirate blu-ray keys to get going, etc. I ended up just ripping the whole disc to my hard drive so I could watch it. Best of all, no FBI warnings, stupid looping menus, and so forth. I just click the MKV file and go, and it has chapters set up and everything.

It's the year 2022, why is the paid version so much more terrible than piracy? I would literally give Hollywood an infinite more money than I give them now if they made products that didn't just suck, but were actively hostile to their users to use.

>Still, what happened to the EFF over the years isn't as bad as where the ACLU landed. Splat. Face plant.

For a long time the EFF and the FSF were the two major organizations that I felt actually were acting in my best interest to represent me, and so I've supported them both over the years.

However, the EFF recently has done some troubling things, such as throwing Stallman under the bus for unwarranted reasons, and last year they fired their own (co-)founder, John Gilmore. For the first time in over a decade I cancelled my membership with them and sent them a note as to the reason why when they emailed me trying to get me to re-up.

Essentially, they just said "we're going to have to agree to disagree please send us money anyway" and I didn't. The FSF is getting their money now.

>I'm sorry to be the wet blanket here. But the first thing the EFF needs to do to celebrate its anniversary is to change its name. Frontier is the quintessential American concept, the idea that one's in some sort of no-man's-land or Wild West. Implicit in idea of the frontier is that of being the first somewhere, and being first, one does a land grab.

That's not true. Frontier is determined by boundaries, specifically the edges of boundaries. Hence, we can talk about "The Frontier of Medicine" or the "Electronic Frontier". It has nothing to do directly with America at all, other than the fact that from the perspective of America, the west was frontier territory for a while. Much of the same area was frontier for Russia, Spain, and then Mexico as well, as well as the homeland (not frontier) for the various native groups living there.

There's absolutely nothing problematic about the word frontier, and I find it annoying when people try to problemitize literally everything they can think of.