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Comment Re:More Blatant Corruption (Score 1) 26

The Big Lie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie) worked in the 3rd Reich (and many other places and continues to work) not because the Nazis were a lot better at using it. The Big Lie works because, generally, people are dumb and without insight. Present the average person with anything where disagreeing might incur a cost, and they will readily agree, regardless of what they agree to and regardless of how evil that makes their action.

Comment Re:Financial in nature, no kidding? (Score 1) 26

In the ruling on Wednesday, the court acknowledged that Anthropic "will likely suffer some degree of irreparable harm absent a stay," but that the company's interests "seem primarily financial in nature."

Yeah, the company's interests are financial. That's what companies are for.

Actually, no. That just seems to be the primary motivation to create companies in the US. It is not the only reason and, for people that are not total greedy scum, it may not even be a goal besides financial viability. Profits a entirely optional and there strong evidence that running a company with a primary motivation of generating profits is detrimental for its survival. And society, incidentally. You have fallen for some thinly veiled religious fundamentalist propaganda.

Comment Re:dystopia (Score 0) 11

The compounds of the ruling elite that own all of the capital and AI will be thoroughly shielded against EMP attacks of any kind.

Nobody is coming to save you. That includes mother nature. Although there is a distinct possibility that these idiots will get their hands on nuclear weapons and end our species.

Comment I'm all for strategic voting (Score 1) 40

But for most Americans that would be a change in how they vote.

Most Americans vote based on who was in office the last time they got screwed over. We vote for the other guy. It literally doesn't matter how terrible or destructive the other guy is. If I'm having a bad time I'm voting for the other guy.

The problem is that creates a ratcheting effect. You're always moving towards the pro corporate direction because sooner or later if you're just voting for the other guy you're going to vote for somebody who's super super pro corporate and when those guys getting power they seize a lot of power and get a lot of shit done. Now during the next cycle other guy voters are going to switch to well, the other guy who will be significantly less pro corporate if not completely not pro corporate (although financially it's hard to make it out of a primary if you're not pro corporate to some degree, because if all else fails the corporations will spend up certain amounts of money defeating you in a primary if you're a existential threat to them). But the problem is you still have all the damage from when you voted other guy without really thinking about it because the last guy didn't fix every problem in the world in 4 years.

I don't know how you stop other guy voting. I don't think it's enough to expect people to vote strategically because people hate politics and it's a chore thinking about it and dealing with it so asking your average voter to vote strategically is of tall order...

What I would like to get people to do is to at least start to think about their vote. Also I'd really like to get something done here in America about county level voters suppression. We have a lot of it and it is drastically changing our politics...

But getting back to my original comment the main goal here is to get people to actually think about their vote just a little.

Comment Liability laws (Score 1) 40

Now lets bring these requirements into law, permanently, across all industrial and consumer devices.

Any obstacle to repair and maintenance other than the inherent difficulty of the operation is anticonsumerist and in the long run, economically damaging (and many of the inherent difficulties are as well, but we gotta start somewhere).

If we change the "right to repair" laws, we should also change the liability laws. If a home-repaired unit becomes unsafe and injures people, who is responsible?

In the case of farming equipment, suppose a farmer makes a repair to a piece of equipment and then his son is injured or killed by said equipment. Who is liable?

The company would say that the farmer took full responsibility once he modified the equipment, while the farmer could say that his modifications did not affect the safety of the device.

It's also not at all clear whether a physical repair done by the farmer could have contributed to an accident made by software. Lots of things can affect software, such as the alignment of the two welded pieces. The software makes a performance analysis of stopping distance based on information it has, but the repair might have changed those parameters.

People who like to race want to download new parameters into the ECU of their car, but that's illegal. It actually is: the parameters are set to maximize efficiency, and while you can get better performance with different numbers, it would promote climate change, so it was made illegal.

Being able to repair things is good, and it's very clear that open source has driven the software industry forward, but we need to be careful about liability as well. Jailbreaking your phone is one thing, but jailbreaking your EV might have catastriphic consequences. I'm not a fan of ID-tagging headlights (BMW, Mazda), but if an accident occurs because of reduced visibility the company could be held liable.

I'm completely in favor of being able to repair things, and John Deere is the worst sort of predatory behaviour, but just wanted to point out that there's another side to the story and we should be careful.

Comment sanctions (Score 1) 188

ensuring they can't be traced or confiscated due to sanctions

This got me interested. What exactly is he saying there? Does it mean what I think it means - that they immediately shift that money around, possibly through some mixers, to muddle the origin? And, of course, make it better suited to pay their proxies now that Qatar isn't sending suitcases of cash to them anymore?

Comment Re:Pyrrhic Victory (Score 1) 188

It's designed to keep people off balance, uncertain, distracted and misinformed

Thank you for writing that. I was starting to think I'm going crazy and I can't possibly be the only one who sees through that.

If you ignore the messaging, and pay attention to what's actually happening

And if you realize that Trump is just the clown at the helm. There's literally an entire bureaucracy underneath him doing most of the planning, deciding and executing.

Douglas Adams was right. The role of the president is not to excert power, but to distract from it. President of the Galaxy, president of the USA, no difference.

Comment Re:on the one hand (Score 2) 76

This.

You don't need billions to be care-free. Even double-digit millions in some nice safe assets already give you enough fuck-you-money to be good. And while everyone looks at the super-super-rich and they're in various public lists and tracked by not just the tax authorities, barely anyone knows the multi-millionaires. I know three or so that I'm sure nobody on here has ever heard anything about. They stay quiet, comfortable, private.

Comment Re:Fun fact (Score 1) 63

It'll leak all over the place. Hydrogen under pressure is too bulky to use in aircraft. It would have to be liquid cooled and it would leak all the way from the plant to the plane. Because as hydrogen warms up it evaporates and that gas has to be vented. Now perhaps we could vent / burn it safely, or perhaps we can't.

This is all irrelevant to the question of whether it would leak enough to be a greater greenhouse issue than burned jet fuel. As I established in another post in reply to you just now, that would need to be nearly a quarter of all of the hydrogen used in such a system. That is an extremely unlikely scenario.

Once again, I am not talking about any of the other logistical questions about using hydrogen like this. Only the greenhouse gas issue that came up.

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