I see you registered here 3 minutes before me. I remember when this place was hosted in Robs dorm room.

About 25 years ago, I began to take a serious interest in climatology. I started buying textbooks and reading them - and for the most part, that went smoothly, because I could easily understand the math and physics. (I struggled a bit with some of the organic chemistry, and had to spend a couple of years coming up to speed on that.) After a while, I could read all the reports and some of the papers being published, so I made my way through things like the IPCC reports -- which are thousands of pages. Eventually, I got to the point where I could read almost anything published in the field -- but admittedly, some of the material still takes me a long time to get through.

And the single biggest takeaway from all that work is: climatologists, as a field, have been consistently underestimating how bad things are and how bad they're going to get. This is because they're scientists, and all scientists are trained to be conservative in their assessments. Whereas a non-scientist might write "X proves Y", a good scientist will write something like "X suggests that Y may be happening" or the equivalent. This approach implicitly acknowledges uncertainty and the possibility that future work will yield different results: it's how science self-corrects over time.

This mindset is commendable: it shows intellectual honestly. But unfortunately in this particular discipline, at this particular time, it doesn't ring the alarm bells loudly enough. We need a Samuel L. Jackson moment: "The world is on fire, mXXXXrfXXXXXrs" We need radical changes, e.g. all fossil fuel production and consumption must end. We need vast reductions in energy consumption. We need sweeping societal changes, e.g., an end to daily commuting as the norm, it should be an exception. And even if we do all of that, it may still not be enough, because this is an exponential process with a huge amount of momentum -- in other words, we're going to keep sliding up the curve for some period of time even if we do everything that we should have done decades ago.

I've said, for all these years, that I'm not going to live to see the hellscape that's coming - the mass starvation, the killer megastorms, the wars over water, the refugee crises, the political, economic, and societal chaos. Now I'm not so sure.

"[...] Sanger invited his 91,000 followers on X to influence that discussion."

should read:

"Sanger invited 91,000 racists, misogynists, bigots, homophobes, xenophobes, and fascists from a well-known Nazi bar to influence the discussion."

The way things are headed, the only way people are going to be able to obtain money to pay for those widgets is via social welfare programs.

All true - but also a young arrogant engineer who completely failed to read and learn from people who have entire closets full of computing awards (including Turing Awards) for a reason.

There are only two valid use cases for systemd: first, as an interview question. I use it as a fast and easy way of classifying candidates; anyone who thinks systemd is in any way, shape, or form a good idea may safely be dismissed from any further consideration. Second, as a security wedge: there is so much new, poorly-written code in systemd -- with more being shoveled in all the time by Poettering's submissive kneeling fanboys -- that it provides all kinds of opportunities. (I'm being snarky but also serious: read the damn code. It's absolute crap, so much so that one could argue that the number of security holes exceeds the corpus of useful code.)

strncpy() was not intended for null-terminated strings at all. It should have been named copy_null_padded_buffer(). Then its operation would have made sense to almost anyone. People wouldn't have minded the longer name much either, because hardly anybody uses null-padded buffers in modern software.

Note that a null-padded buffer that is completely full doesn't have any nulls in it at all. That's why strncpy() doesn't necessarily add a null termination. It also fills the entire destination buffer with nulls after the end of a short copy, which can be very inefficient when used with null-terminated strings.

TL;DR: don't use strncpy(). It doesn't do what anybody thinks it does.

Every single person involved in Polymarket is a scumbag -- to the bone. They should be shown no pity or mercy when the scam they're orchestrating turns on them -- and it will.

Just don't buy these crappy licenses. Retro-gaming is booming for a very good reason.

And, if you're looking for another reason not to buy -- the way hardware prices are going, retro emulators are probably all we'll be able to play soon because nobody will be able to afford the GPUs and RAM needed to play the next wave of new release games anyway.

It was easy: Turn the hue knob to the left for purplish skin, to the right for green skin, and then carefully center it for purplish-green skin.

Risk without labour is just jumping off cliffs.

But hey, let's talk about risk. Most of these ultra-wealthy people don't know what risk is. Some of them really did come up from nothing, sure, but Musk had millions of dollars backing him in the form of his wealthy father. Trump, famously, would have made more money investing the money his father gave him in a stock ETF than going into real estate.

And further, I think it's reasonable to make a profit on some risk. I'm sure that the folks that own my favourite local coffee shop took on some risk to do it. You can't be sure a shop is going to succeed. I'm glad they have, and I wish them every success.

Of course, they've also worked VERY hard at making it a success. For those people that do take risks, it's their own LABOUR that makes these businesses work (that, and a bit of luck--opening up a month before COVID would have been bad luck, and nothing to do with risk OR labour).

But once you get in to the many hundreds of millions of dollars, I think we should be able to agree that there's never anything risky in their lives ever again. I'll keep repeating this every time I get a chance, but you can't make a billion dollars on a salary. $5000/day for 500 years is still not a billion dollars. It's a level of wealth that is impossible to accrue by any work of your own. It takes the work of other people.

As I said in another comment, if you have Jeff Bezos and no workers, Amazon is nothing. If you have all of Amazon, but no CEO, you can probably make a lot of money. The labour of the people at Amazon is what made it huge, and what made him rich. It is necessarily the case that those people produce more value than they are remunerated for--that's what a profit is. But when you have such a huge profit value, it tells you that the gap is *enormous*. Why is that okay? Why don't we think that those people that actually made the software and delivered the packages--the things that define Amazon as a company--don't deserve the value that they created?

It used to be that a CEO would only make 20x what their workers did, and they would be paid a real salary, one that could be taxed. Now they get paid hundreds or thousands of times what their workers do, just in stocks so it can't be taxed. They have an endless army of lawyers and accountants. They'll pay $80 million to avoid a $10 million tax, just to show you that they actually HAVE the money, they just refuse to give it back to the governments and people that provided the conditions to make them so fabulously wealthy. The roads, the education system, the laws, the safe borders--all these things went into the building of these hoards.

Work is how you make value. You have to plant crops and harvest them; or drill into the ground and extract and refine the petroleum; or write the software and fulfill the orders. All of that is labour. I have plenty of ideas and if I never execute on any of them, the idea is worth zero. That's why I'm banging on about wealth.

It's not impossible to tax; that's loser talk for defeatists. We made these laws, we've created these monetary fictions, we can write new laws and come up with more equitable systems. Stocks and bonds don't HAVE to exist, but given that they do, I think we can figure out a way to make sure that people don't become extremely wealthy and leave the rest of the country fighting for scraps, living paycheque to paycheque, hoping that their insurance premiums don't bankrupt them before the medical expenses do.

And hey, it doesn't have to be a wealth tax the way I define it--I think the things you suggested are de facto wealth taxes. But based on what you're saying, it sounds like you also believe in the necessity and the moral correctness of taxing them, especially when you and I are paying much higher proportions of our comparatively meagre holdings.

It's small segment of the population, the 0.1% and the 0.01%. They can be taxed. They are not special.

Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

Statism creates billionaires.