Somewhere in the In-between by Streetlight Manifesto

I’ve been slowly digging into their discography recently and holy crap Ska is so funny because it’ll be a bopping tune but then you catch the lyrics and find it’s a song about war, death, collapse, etc.

This music video definitely embodies that same disconnect. Cute animal animation with bopping music except wait what are those people doing? What are those animals doing? Oh my is that how this ends?!

I was a kid the first year after that went into effect, my computer automatically changed for the time change 2 weeks too early, so I had to have my parents fix it for me…twice. that was my first gripe with Dubya. Then his VP caused my luggage to get lost by seizing up all plane movement at Minneapolis St Paul because Dick Cheney had to take off but then stopped on the tarmac for 20 minutes for some reason while the whole airport was at a standstill for him, making every flight 30+ minutes late. So yeah I’ve got some personal gripes with Dubya’s administration

To build off of this, if you collect $1000 in taxes from a million people and you’ve just pulled in a billion dollars. With 300 million people in the country that’s a lot of tax dollars.

Obviously if you can tax 1000 out of every million dollars in wealth and individual earns in a year you can easily collect far more in taxes given how many multimillionaires will see their wealth increase by tens or hundreds of millions in a year.

This is all super reductive for simplicity. It’s worth looking at how the super rich are able to avoid paying taxes. Are they not paying taxes because they’re doing things with their money that is directly incentivized and generally better for the country than if they simply hoarded the same money, such as running the money through charities, clean energy installtions, etc? I’m honestly asking because i really don’t know and I dont have the time right now to pull at that thread and research the question

That’s a lot of time to figure out an escape plan and execute it!

This was the premise of the Greek myth of Tithonus

In short, Eos fell in love with Tithonus, a mortal prince, and begged Zeus to grant immortality to him (but forget to specify eternal youth and eternal health) so she was forced to watch him age until he shrunk into a raisin and was eaten

The earth is traveling around the sun at about 67000mph (29,722 meters per second, the unit of measurement I’ll use from here on our for consistently) that means to fall into the sun (and this is once you’ve already expended a ton of Delta-V (delta-V being a count of meters per second in change to orbit your craft needs to make/can make) escaping the Earth’s gravitational influence) you’d have to slow down a significant portion (about 24,000 meters per second specifically) of that 29,722 meters per second that you’re hurtling through space at.

It takes so much energy to try to crash a craft into the sun it’s literally cheaper (only costing about 8,800 m/s of Delta-V, compared to about 24,000 m/s of Delta-V) to fly the craft very very far away, such as to the edge of the solar system, then zero out the angular velocity so it effectively falls into the sun, than it is to fly directly to the sun. This tactic also enables one to use another planets gravitational influence to “gravity turn” and save on fuel, but it’s still horrendously expensive to get even a small craft weighing a fraction of a ton from the surface of earth out to the edge of the solar system to begin with.

Rockets face a significant challenge in that in order to reach orbit they need a large amount of energy, sources from a large amount of fuel. To get 1 ton of payload to orbit it needs an amount of fuel which adds additional weight which then requires additional fuel to lift the mass of the fuel. Because of this it takes about 100kg of fuel to get 1kg to orbit

In short, I highly recommend spending a few days playing Kerbal Space Program to learn far more than will fit in a single comment about orbital dynamics. That game is amazing at teaching basic concepts of orbital dynamics and the incredible challenges space programs face in just getting payloads to orbit let alone incredible feats like interplanetary travel or interstellar travel

I have a better idea! Launch it into a stable orbit in the oort cloud and maybe we can create a new planet there to colonize in a few centuries! It’s perfect because then we have the perfect place to send the radioactive soil from WWIII and a perfect base to hide from WWV from!

I feel that. I like Linux, but I also like using the right tool for the job, and sometimes that’s actually Windows. The rates of Linux talk here reminds me of Reddit like 15 years ago. It’s nice, but also I forgot how weird it is to be in such a Linuxy echochamber

Probably the easiest way to do an off-site backup for low-double digit terabytes is an external drive in a bank safety deposit box. Remember your home could burn down fall over and sink into a swamp and no amount of parity drives within the home would keep that data safe.

There’s a group called Improv Everywhere that used to do really creative flash mobs like the No Pants Subway ride where they would all claim to have forgotten to put on pants that day, or going into a cafe and lugging 90s desktops in and dialing in, or during the Great Recession they had a suicide jumper on a 2ft high ledge which they dramatically had to talk down.

They once tried to do a “writers against libraries” stunt but it ended up not being funny enough because people kinda went “oh yeah libraries are kinda weird in that they just give out books for free”

For the not all media played successfully, I found it was primarily down to transcode settings trying to hardware transcode file types my server can’t hardware transcode. It’s something worth playing with

AI at least provides a clear product that can be a helpful workforce multiplier, whereas Bitcoin provided an unprotected alternative to traditional markets with none of the safeguards nor legal precedents of traditional markets, so it’s only led to illegal activities piled upon illegal activities

To be fair, if I had an option to effectively invest in Google circa 2004 in 2024 I would toss some spare money at it, and that’s basically what OpenAI is offering at this moment. They’ve established themselves, shown strong leadership and established strong relationships with major companies. They’re a leader in a particular product segment and while they could falter and fail, there’s enough momentum that they’re more likely to be acquired than to actually fail, plus they’re swimming in extremely uncharted waters so there’s plenty of opportunities for them to both greatly improve ongoing operational efficiency and to create new products with new markets, much like where Google was in 2004

On the other hand some breakthrough in either hardware or software could make AI models significantly cheaper to run and/or train. The current cost in silicon is insane and just screams that there’s efficiencies to be found. As always, in a gold rush, sell pickaxes

Now yes, but it was briefly the basis for Firefox OS, which was almost early enough to the market to become a major player, but unfortunately too late and people were already attached to some apps they used regularly

Completely flabbergasted that we run internal services not indexable by google.

This is why it’s becoming the norm to have an Intranet with a links page to all of the internal and external webpages employees rely upon. Just make that the browser homepage with Kerberos authentication and the employees never need to know URLs or Google the internal/external service they’re trying to access

Fortunately Google messages filters all of it to spam and makes it very easy to toss whatever doesn’t get filtered into spam. Here’s mine from Wisconsin!

Personally I keep my installed apps to a minimum, heavily use Firefox on mobile with uBlock Origin, and heavily curate what’s allowed to send notifications and when, so my phone is quiet and not distracting but there when I want it/need it

If my grandmother makes it to the next election I might move her to an android phone for this reason alone. Her iPhone doesn’t block the spam at all, and even appears to not have a way to delete the messages

In China, they have a citizen score system based on data collection like this. And if you drop too low, you won’t get loans, or jobs.

More recent reporting indicates this is not true. It appears the earlier reporting indicating this was based on a mix of bad translation and poorly identified conjecture. But mass data collection certainly enables no shortage or scary totalitarian surveillance.

Really I just wanted to share a perspective that can help handle the mental load of knowing how bad things are with mass data collection