Oof. There’s fucking up, and then there’s getting banned from Wal-Mart. The only lower position is getting banned from the dollar store.

The loss of real winters is what has made my grudge with climate change personal. Winter is my favorite season. I recognize that I can say that mostly because I have the privilege to have a good experience with winter, but that’s my context. And, to be fair, I’ve enjoyed it even during the times I’ve been flat broke. I’m a transplant to central California, and a lot of millennials and older will tell you that winter here has changed dramatically. The boomers will too as long as you don’t use trigger words like “climate change”. We barely ever get fog anymore. My wife said she almost never went trick or treating because it was always raining, but my kids have never missed a Halloween yet. Supposedly it would start raining gently around the end of October and just not stop until the end of February or so; now it just stays kind of overcast and then we’ll get hella rain for a week here or a week there. It’s a la Niña year this year, though, so it’s probably going to stay dry and sunny the whole winter. A lot of the older folks in the mountains will tell you that snowfall at lower elevations is dramatically different. I work EMS in a town at around 1000 ft elevation in the Sierras, and the old timers in town will tell you that they used to get flat out snowed in. Now, it’s kind of a big deal if you get enough snow to make a footprint.

We keep in touch with some people in New York state and they tell us that it doesn’t even really snow in New York anymore, which is kind of blowing my mind.

It’s a swedish expression

It is 1990 and the media serves the interest of the state in promoting war.

It is 2001 and the media serves the interest of the state in promoting war.

It is 2003 and the media serves the interest of the state in promoting war.

It is 2024 and the media serves the interest of the state in promoting war.

I’m 99% sure it is. The only hesitation is that the Trump presidency was so unhinged that you could make all manner of nonsense up and it would seem truthy. There was a whole thing where the owner of Goya beans endorsed him or something and Trump and his cult got really weird about buying and promoting Goya products for like a month.

I mean, just do a little due diligence, Jesus. I’ve bought PalWorld, Planet Crafter, Traveler’s Rest, and more in early access and had a blast with all of them. In fact, I’d say it’s some of the best bang for my buck in the last ten years of gaming. I’ve also not bought early access games because the five minutes of due diligence suggested that it was a garbage game.

I particularly think it’s fine with small, indie studios that don’t have a lot of devs or resources. No way in fuck am I buying an early access AAA release.

Same vibe as many of the other classics like “excuse me, you can’t use this public BBQ”, “feeding homeless people is illegal”, “you can’t jog here”, “what do you think you’re doing picking up litter?”, “if you want your money back, you need to come and prove your innocence”, “I saw that kid Jaywalking [on a suburban street]”, and “you can’t flip me off!”

Cops could be trained mind their own business unless there’s actual harm at stake, but then it’d be a lot harder to have a Karen state.

Don’t make me tap the sign:

Authoritarians owe their allegiances first to hegemony, and second to murder.

That’s how Israeli state officials can vibe with actual fucking Nazis and still turn around and say that you’re a Nazi if you want them to stop murdering non-combatants in Palestine. If they see it as helping to enforce hegemony, to create civilization out of the barrel of a gun, they can (temporarily) set aside the murder they plan to do to each other.

I can’t believe it’s not cum

Those little mistakes drove me nuts. By the end of my second day with copilot, I felt exhausted from looking at bad suggestions and then second guessing whether I was the idiot or copilot was. I just can’t. I’ll use ChatGPT for working through broad issues, catching arcane errors, explaining uncommented code, etc. but the only LLM whose code output doesn’t generally create a time cost for me is Cody.

tl;dr: prices =/= costs, price is cost + what the market will bear.

I have an anarchocapitalist friend who is convinced to his core that prices are driven by costs, which any economist will tell you is not the case. He believes, therefore, that lowering wages, lowering taxes, and lowering costs on businesses in a truly fair and free market will make things more affordable. And maybe he’d be right if we had a spherical cow kind of economy, with perfect competition and elastic demand for everything, but that’s not we have, and most sane economists will agree that that’s not the way things are.

In reality, any MBA can tell you that prices are independent of costs insofar as you just have to be bringing in more money than is going out. The role of a corporation is to make money (to make a return on investment), and this has been especially true since the Friedman doctrine (tl;dr: the sole moral obligation of a company is to its shareholders) has been the dominant school of business thought. So if your costs are a dime and you can sell for a dime and a penny, then you sell for a dime and a penny. If you costs are a dime and you can sell for a dollar, then you sell for a dollar. If your costs go down to a penny and you can still sell just the same for a dollar, you don’t lower your prices nine cents. The only force that drives down prices is competition, because in a spherical cow economy, if your costs are fifty cents, you can’t sell too much above that or your competitors will undercut you and murder your profits, so you have to be very careful about price increases and constantly seek new means of cutting costs. In reality, there’s very little competition and demand is highly inelastic for a lot of important things like housing and healthcare, so it’s pretty easy for prices to just go up until so many people get priced out that the price increases yield a negative return. I think we’re already there, and have been for a while, but not to worry, we came up with a solution: debt and subscriptions/payment plans.

Few people can swing $40-80,000 for a college education, you might have to settle for lower prices to get the volume you need, but if you say “not to worry, we’ll just have you pay us back later,” you can suddenly charge a lot more and still get a high volume. If you charged $100,000 up front for lifesaving care, people would just die because nobody has that laying around, but if you just make it debt, well, hey, nbd, charge whatever the fuck you want and worry about it later. You can’t sell a $60,000 truck, or a $1500 phone, but you can sell a $600/mo truck (apparently, as much as that amazes me) or $35/mo phone. We’re seeing this same phenomenon at work with the latest push towardss 40-year mortgages amid continuously insane housing prices.

So, to answer your question, it’s going to keep getting worse as long as production is highly centralized, as it is continuing to be, because investors need their profits. Who’s got odds that we’ll see an egg subscription plan before the year end?

P.S. this is why tax breaks for businesses never translate into more jobs, higher wages, and/or lower cost goods and services. There’s no obligation whatever to pass those savings on to the customer or re-invest them into jobs or technology, so they just turn into stock buybacks or dividends (read: gimmes for the investors). That’s why stock buybacks got so popular after the Trump tax cuts.

It’s bewildering to me that, after decades of getting (deservedly) dunked on by Europeans for our shitty systems, not only are American leaders still giving the whole flaming garbage heap the five finger salute, but European leaders are now saying “well, yes, the American system is awful, but we swear it’ll work for us.” And people are believing them. Unreal. I can’t even imagine the frustration you must feel.

We’ve talked about moving to Denmark or NL, but we’re just not there yet, and with NL getting their own dollar store (there’s a Dutch joke in there somewhere) Trump, I’m not so sure if we ever will be.

Americans when European leaders start making the same choices that got America to this point.

Big problem here is that the freight railroads are all being run like vulture capital operations. They own the trackage, so it’s their responsibility to maintain it, and it’s not like they don’t have the money. Norfolk Southern’s profits (not revenue, this is after costs) Sept 30 2022- Sept 30 2023 were over 8 billion dollars. Union Pacific did $14 billion in 2022. They can afford to maintain their shit, but they’re not; they’re just letting their tracks and rolling stock go to hell and shrugging when it blows up. Just flat out not paying your cost centers is not a thing a sane business does if it wants to keep doing business for long. I’m convinced that the major rail carriers long-term plan is to just not pay to repair a goddamn thing until the rail infra is completely broken, declare bankruptcy, and then sell it to the government. The government will make CONRAIL 2 (see: CONRAIL, which is what happened the last time they pulled this shit), spend an ass-ton of taxpayer dollars fixing this bullshit, and then sell it back to the privates for pennies on the dollar because of FrEe MaRkEt EfFiCiEnCy.

I didn’t think it was that good anyway, but it boggles belief that they spent that much on one season of anything. 200 million is a ludicrous amount of money, and they just flushed it and went “oops lol, anyway, here’s wonderwall”.

Quick, somebody teach this man JavaScript.

I’d like you to meet windows 11. Windows 11 bricked my Alienware computer for two weeks until I said fuck it and installed Linux. They pushed an update that triggered the Bitlocker secure boot policy, which is annoying but not a problem. Except that the Bitlocker recovery key page on Microsoft’s website has been down for over a month. There’s other users like me who’ve had their machines bricked because Microsoft fucked up a webpage and can’t be assed to do a git revert. It took me hours of navigating Microsoft’s intentionally terrible support pages to figure out how to talk to a person (over IM, phone support is not a thing anymore), another 40 minutes to get a support tech on the chat, and then they told me that basically my options are to wait or wipe the drives and re-install windows 11.

I didn’t want to wipe my drives, I liked my drives, but I’m not going to just let a machine sit there and be bricked for three months until Microsoft can be assed to un-brick it. So, I wiped the drives and installed mint. I can’t play all the games I used to (I can access probably 75% of my game library) but the performance is WAY better, like, obviously and shockingly better. Turns out that Bitlocker throttles your SSD performance significantly, and it also helps when your OS isn’t trying to both run a game and send your delicious, delicious data to ad servers or whatever.

And windows wants even more live service dependencies with 12? Fuck that. I’ve been with them since '95, but I won’t follow them there. 11’s live service dependencies have been a disaster, and I can’t see myself getting excited about even more of that.

Probably because it’s leet.

Good to know, thanks!

Okay, I guess. This isn’t really a hill I’m prepared to die on. The point is that it’s still a cost that’s real to the user, even if it’s not a direct financial one.

Well, it’s mastodon. You’ve got a little over 400 characters to say what you’re going to say in the most shocking, attention-getting way possible. Yes, it’s not a perfect analogy, but no metaphor is perfect or else it wouldn’t really be a metaphor, would it?

Anyway, it’s a time and convenience cost that becomes extremely significant as your IT proficiency decreases, and you’ve got another think coming if you think those costs don’t matter to people.