You are paying too much for car insurance.

Ah, eternal September. This is why we can't have nice things. Now, pardon me while I go call AOL technical support and report the 4chan for violating terms of service!

https://youtu.be/FxIUs-pQBjk?s...

We're all gonna die!

Let the utter enshitiffication commence! It's getting deep, folks.

It's already been tried. In 2023 S. 1838 was introduced by Senator Durbin and from what I recall the credit card companies launched a huge political campaign against it. Even Forbes (spit) had an article on it. The argument against it was that it would lead to "reduced rewards" and somehow harm consumer security. We all know that that "1% cash back reward" is actually the credit card company charging the merchant a processing fee of like 3%, then tossing 1% back to the card holder. As a result, many places just tack on a 3% surcharge if you're using a credit card, but most just tack it onto the price regardless so even people who pay in cash or by check get to eat the cost too. Remember, surcharges like this aren't paid by the business, they're paid by the consumer. That also means that it's in the customer's interest to pay with the credit card, but then at least they're only getting nailed by 2% instead of 3%.

From what I remember, that bill was introduced to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, where it was killed.

Why don't they just take the leap and develop their own alternative to Visa and Mastercard? Or there are these things called gift cards you know. But hey, anything to justify another $hitcoin. Maybe I should go out and buy some new Trump Bucks or whatever it's called. Maybe gift cards?

Here's an idea. If I have $1000 in USD and inflation is 2.5%/year, I effectively lose 2.5% buying power every year to inflation. If I put that in something that is inflation-adjusted (the typical example is gold but that isn't perfect) I retain my value. But when I go convert that back to USD, the IRS wants to tax my (really nonexistent) "capital gain." So I hold buy $1000 in whatever it is, hold it for five years, and then sell it for around $1130. The IRS swoops in and wants to tax that $130 at 0-23.8% depending. If I hold it for less than a year, I'm taxed at the regular income tax rate of 10-37%. Effectively, the tax and Federal Reserve system is rigged so that people always lose.

Interestingly, a decade or more ago there were some guys along the southern border who were issuing "patriot dollars" or something like that. Basically, they came up with their own alternative currency. It was supposedly backed by gold or something. If I remember correctly, the IRS blew in there and shut them down, and if I recall correctly a couple guys went to jail over it. It probably had something to do with not paying capital gains taxes or something.

That said, a quick search shows that there are a lot of various local currencies in use around the world, including in the United States. I guess in theory you could index it to the price of airline flights, cheeseburgers, pizza, or anything else. The problem is that once you exchange it, here comes the government wanting to tax it again. Look what they did to Bitcoin.

It is typical with Windows that a program fails and you get some garbage like "Error 0x87e0000f" or, more often, "This program has stopped working..." So I go into the event logger and look, and if I'm lucky get some idea what the hell happened, but I can't fix it. With something like Linux, you get "Segmentation fault." Okay, whatever. The difference is with open source (in this case example Linux) I can then go run a trace on the program and find out where the hell it's dying. Then I can work around it or go into the source and fix something. Sometimes it's as simple as "Oh, why the hell is it looking for that file THERE?" and fix it.

This is why it should be demanded that the software involved be open source. There is absolutely no excuse for some application failing silently (i.e., almost everything on Windows) or throwing out some inane error message. At least with something like a Linux application I can {s,l}trace the thing and have some vague idea where it might be failing. In Windows, stuff just goes tits up and says something stupid like "This program has stopped working..."

Imagine being under fire and dealing with this. "Vampire! Vampire! Vampire! 285 at 35 miles, five...no, ten track!" "Battery release!" "Engaging incoming tracks with birds!" ... "Uh, Captain? I just got a blue screen of death." "Fuck! Engage with CIWS when in range!" "CIWS just went into a mandatory software update!" "Skipper, it's asking for a license code!"

Any organization that places critical medical devices "in the cloud" should be shut down and sued into oblivion. It wasn't too long ago that someone scanned with shodan.io and found IV pumps, PCA pumps, heart monitors, and radiology scanners open to the Internet. Then we just had the story about security cameras in the same regard. Having worked IT in healthcare, I can confirm places that have left all this stuff open, left patient records unencrypted on globally-accessible Windows shares, and worse.

We call that the Soylent Green meatball.

He's referring to the flight progress strips that list flight number, aircraft type, departure, and destination. The entire US ATC system looks like it came out of the 1970s because, well, it kind of did.

You are paying too much for car insurance.

More than none.

Be my guest.