I've been reshuffling my retirement savings to mimimize exposure to tech stocks. All mining and Agriculture, because by my reckoning, no matter what happens people will still need to dig holes and eat food. Fairly safe imho.

caveat: Not american agriculture however. Those Tarifs are doing *stupid shit* to the sector.

Theres actually a better reason to drink in moderation.

Because its fun.

And life is too fucking short and you only get it once, and living it in misery is not fucking worth it. If my life is 5 years shorter and 5 times as fun, well, seems like a good trade off to me.

The fairness doctrine was a lot more narrow than that. It was specifically around electoral politics and making sure that when there was an election on that the media doesnt blockade non prefered parties from getting their platform out. The FCC never interpreted it to mean shit like "Every time nasa is on TV, you must also have a moon landing denier" or whatver.

Yeah, we're looking at pulling our manufacturing out of the US because its just too much bullshit and risk right now. Add that to the tariffs making the US about the most expensive place to manufacture on the planet right now, our international staff getting monstered at the airports and the fact that the economy seems to be an absolute basket case at the moment, yeah the risks are too high. And thats not even touching on the fact that we cant bring commercial-in-confidence information into the country because ICE keep fucking with peoples computers, its just a hostile environment for business.

Theres actually pretty strong evidence from cognitive science that theres actual physical brain differences in people with inclinations towards ultraconservative authoritarianism. Basically a failure to properly integrate information that conflicts with their ideological inclination that manifests in fear and anger, and yeah, this always seems to incline towards authoritarians.

Theres an old documentary from, either late 90s or early 2000s about the rise of the neocon movement called "The power of nightmares" that observed that historically politicians tried to sell people on big dreams, but in both western neoconservatism and eastern islamism politicans switched to selling a battle again the evils of liberalism by constantly trying to scare people. The only differences being the islamists claimed the devil was foreign (america/israel) and the neocons claimed the devil was local (gays/"communists"/liberals/etc)

If someone is commissioning a billion dollar GPU scale-up and not asking "Can this thing play Crysis" , then one is GPUing wrong.

This really is the endpoint of the whole "balance" bullshit myth. Good journalism is never about "balance". its about truth. The truth is inherently biased, towards truth. When I did journalism school (Before I moved into sciences I did a journalism degree first), this was drilled into us. Don't look for approval, dont look for telling "all sides of the story", look for the truth, even if the truth makes the powerful angry.

It doesn't *matter* what your political bias is , and to be clear EVERYONE has a political bias. What matters is, are the facts. Theres of course times when you need to hold your tounge. You dont snitch on sources. You never death knock (try to beat the cops to tell a family whos loved one just died the news to capture the reaction, its an evil practice, and usually banned by news agencies), and you never defame (less banned, alas). You refrain from naming underage or vunerable victims. But above all, tell the fucking truth.

Balance is ass. Putting on a climate change denier to "balance" as a science doesnt increase the balance, it just reduces the truth. And getting a trump official to make excuses for human rights violations doesnt reduce the human rights violations, it just spreads bullshit.

One of the worst rackets I've ever encoutered, and I've encountered it at multiple companies, is the whole board salary thing.

The way it works is this;- Say I have some shitty acronym-as-a-service startup, no path to profitability, not even a minimum viable product, but lots of buzzwords. Seems like a way of accruing a lot of debt with no way to pay it off. Well.... Retirement funds to the rescue! It doesnt matter if I'll never be a good investment, as long as I can offer investors a $250K "job" on the board. See those investors aren't investing their own money. They are in *charge* of that pot of money and apparently have no fiduciary duty to make good investment decisions. So they give me a couple of mil to keep the lights on for a few months, and all they have to do is turn up once a year to the AGM and maybe join a few investor calls. And thats a free $250K wage for them, not their fund. There might be 10 of these parasites on the board, but for that $5 mil in wasted nonsense money the company gets 20 mil to pay the wages of this nonsense company.

And nobody will ever say "Hey this is a terrible idea!", because everyones getting paid.. Startups are getting funded, wages are being paid. The investors are happy, Everyone wins. Except the poor fools who actually own the money being invested.

That is to say;- Your grandmother.

But even then, That investor has 20 of these things going on. He's making millions of dollars a year to keep for himself, and as long as a few of those are earning big dollars, the lines will keep going up so grandma won't complain as long as her chunk of retirement funds seems to increase. Its not like she's ever asked the hard questions on why her retirement fund manager is driving a McLaren supercar. After all, arent bank guys always rich? And if they are rich, they must know what they are doing?

The C-Suite are bad. The Board is worse.

It didnt used to be like this. I remember back in the NT days and while I was solidly in camp linux, I was always impressed at the level of integration between the various components in the microsoft ecosystem. SMB talking to a domain controller overseen by AD syncing it up with exchange and all coordinated by kerberos. It all seemed very smooth. Admining it could get perplexing with all the registry and the like, and when things went wrong they went *really* wrong. But when it worked it was very smooth, particularly for the end user (really the only metric that counts, an IT guy does hard so our users can do easy) And yeah I get that Office365 is in some respects a play at regaining some of that integration, the push away from in-office integration to cloud integration has made the actual work environment kinda messy.

It seems like we kinda moved backwards.

I've been hearing this a bit from very traditional greybeard linux users (I mostly just use linux at work and I'm very much a terminal jocky. tmux is my "terminal manager".) who have come around to KDE from being strong dislikers of it in the past. That Mate is just crusty and old, Gnome hasn't really been fun for a while but KDE has solved most of its nonsense problems and is now a quite complete and useable system, so its become their daily driver.

I just want to get alpine functional again so I can revert into terminal world permantly and never see a web page again lol

Yeah I work in an adjacent field in soil science but studying how soils retain and release carbon and doing work with farmers on trying to capture more carbon by looking at soil practices. Turns out you can sink a LOT of co2 in soil if you do things right. (Well I mostly just take extremely shit python written by scientists and make into competent python (and in strategic areas cuda and C) and stuff it into giant pipelines. But I guess since I also write research proposals I SORT OF count as a scientist. One day the boss will let me drop a little bit of that NDA and write a paper on my "DumBoScan" algorithm..... I guess I'm a Lab assistant maybe lol.

But there is DEFINATELY serious concern about this with the boffins. We do rely on a lot of stuff from NCAR and related labs (Ie WRF model and so on) so .... yeah this is a huge worry. Its going to impact farmers for sure as those guys are very dependent on understanding weather and climate trends for planning harvests and the like.

Not like trump gives a fuck. I'm really glad I'm in australia, though a lot of our clients are in the US, we do seem a BIT more isolated from it as the euros and brazillians have been picking up some of the research funding slack.

Unfortunately flattery doesn't feed the kids or pay the rent.

One of the more appalling things I've seen in the US on this stuff is people saying "Well actors are so well paid why should we care". The thing is theres a very very tiny number of actors that are paid well, the stars. But the vast majority, and the ones currently being sold by the AI firms as being replacable by AI, are background actors and bitpart actors and these are the guys who MIGHT be getting $30K a year if they are in regular work, and more likely far far less (The mean wage for actors is around $56K but its heavily skewed by a small number of very highly paid star actors so in reality its down around the $40K wage. Burger flipper wages.

And thats not even touching on the majority of workers in film, the crew, who have been getting fucked on ever since covid, worse in LA where large numbers of crew have been struggling with the fallout of the fires.

I TOO AM ANGRY AT EDUCATION.

My dude. You might be the first accout I've seen where almost every post is marked -1 TROLL

I'd suggest sitting with that fact for a while, but I know your not here to think are you champ?

Im actually not a fan of the AGPL at all. I think its intention is noble, but in practice it tends to get used as a shareware license instead of a free software license.

The GPL is very clear about its mandate. You can do whatever you want with this code, as long as you dont go distributing it, and if you do distribute it, here are your responsibilities.

The AGPL however violates GPLs freedom 0 , the right to USE the software however you wish (as long as you dont distribute it without source and a few other distribution requirements).

That means , for a start, its not compatible with GPL2 (GPL3 has a waiver for this). But to my mind the bigger issue is how its used. I have found very few examples of AGPL3 being used without an option of "dual licensing" (aka "shareware"), and since the AGPL3 pretty much prohibits almost any commercial useage as part of a web service, the end result is a license that effectively say "You cant test this, but if you use it for real, you must pay up".

Its a shareware license, not a free software license.

Tell Python programmers that white-space block delineation is dumb and braces are better. :-)

The reason people will roll their eyes at you over that is that its an incredibly boring debate that ended 30 years ago. Its pure surface level semantics and it just isn't interesting and tends to suggest people haven't actually spent much time understanding what they are complaining about.

Python has plenty of serious problems. But if what you get hung up on is whitespace, it means you dont know what the serious problems are.