ragebutt

IP is a bullshit concept that slows down the progress of humanity. They take what is learned and improve on it then sell that because why the fuck wouldn’t you. The only people who have a problem with this are moronic capitalists that say “grrr how dare you improve my technology before I earn my money from it! It’s my idea! I own it forever”.

There is maybe some debate about a small reasonable period to allow someone to recoup r&d costs. On the other hand we can look to an example like during Covid: American pharma companies were not sharing research about mRNA vaccines with each other or the world in the hopes of being “the first” and the financial gains that would come with this. Accelerating this process through collaborative effort would’ve literally saved tens of thousands of lives. This was often defended by Americans who are so indoctrinated they couldn’t possibly conceptualize a world without this approach. “Of course Pfizer needs the IP? How else will they make their money??”

We excuse it because most of the time it doesn’t really matter. A slightly better phone or laptop or whatever is not a huge deal. But then you see things like the Covid example and start to wonder: if that broke down and everything was basically “open source” how much further along would we be?

Lmao no they fucking won’t. I mean maybe like 0.5% of consumers, or less, will. Some number that pales in comparison to the amount that just buy a bambu because “it’s just easier, FOSS needs to get on usability and make it so that it just works 🤷‍♀️” while failing to see that their utter laziness and incompetence to solve even the mildest of problems and expecting everything to “just work” in exchange for money always means trading their rights and privacy away.

Look at the people that complain about jellyfin but then also complain about plex becoming increasingly hostile. Look at the people complaining about Linux but also whining about windows descent into madness. Etc etc. and in cases like this the buy in cost is nothing but your time! You think the average consumer, who openly invites corporations to fuck them, is gonna be like “hmm I’m gonna spend money to build a solution.”

No goddamn way. They’re gonna bitch about the legislation, they’re gonna bitch about how things got this way, then they’re gonna give bambu and anycubic and Microsoft and openai and Google and apple etc etc all their money. They’ll probably sign up for subscriptions with each company

They were often franchised so whoever in your local community bought a blockbuster franchise decided games weren’t worth it (dumb)

Literally no one came

So did blockbuster. You could even rent consoles at blockbuster. But not porn and they put local rental shops out of business so fuck them, I’m glad they’re dead.

I actually worked at blockbuster on 9/11. I was in high school. They made me and this other girl come to work because they refused to close for the evening. Awesome

It’s probably an EAP which essentially means they pay for a small handful of sessions (4-10 typically) outside of whatever your copay/deductible burden is (though if you have a deductible the EAP almost never applies towards it fyi). Provider network is also more limited because reimbursement is much smaller. Once the sessions have run out you’re back to figuring out how to afford it on your own. If you have a high deductible that you never meet then you’re in the same issue that you had before a month and a half of sessions that probably didn’t miraculously fix all your problems.

EAP actually gives employers less access to data than health insurance but they can still see aggregate, eg “30% of employees used EAP benefit and most common categories of concern were anxiety and stress management” (wrt all employees, not any specific one). This is obviously more of a concern if you work at a company with 10 employees and the report comes back saying 10% of employees…, obviously that’s easily de anonymized

Whereas with the health insurance benefit the employer can see icd codes utilized within the claim system sometimes depending on the situation but again broadly and not like “your” chart or claims data. All this obviously goes out the window if you sign a release for them to advocate to the insurer or a provider on your behalf of course, and then they might get all kinds of record access

Always did, especially so with anime

On this note: if you root your webos tv there’s an app to truly disable Bluetooth, assuming you don’t use it. Imagine my surprise when one day my tv turned on with a request to allow my neighbors phone to connect to it? Modern convenience. I’m sure my neighbor just fat fingered the device list while trying to connect something else but the fact that it was even an option is absurd

Yeah this was my reaction, before AI cynicism there was “this is obviously scripted” cynicism and then even tropes that built on it like nothing ever happens

They murdered way more than that, no one gave a shit about the murders until it happened to a white lady. And really they been murdering for years. They just do the standard shithead “I’m technically within the letter of the rules so you can’t tell on me” shit where they game the system (that they set up).

Case in point: the tactic used by the guy who shot the white lady was not one of the recent hires. He’d been with ice for years and before that with border patrol. So why is he stepping in front of cars, especially when apparently he had an incident stepping behind a car somewhat recently that almost caused him grave injury? Oh and also it’s against DHS policy for agents to stand in front of, behind, or reach into vehicles:

People make mistakes but surely someone went over policy while debriefing the incident where he got dragged by a car or whatever. So why’d he do it again? Oh probably because border patrol does it regularly because if they purposely put themselves in danger it gives them an excuse to use lethal force with plausible deniability and basically never gets looked into because the overwhelming majority of the US populace couldn’t give a single shit about brown people being murdered:

Also note that in this internal review cbp points out what many have pointed out in the aftermath of this: a bullet won’t stop a car, shooting at a car runs a tremendous risk of hitting other people as it’s likely to be in a populated area, and even if you’re successful in incapacitating or killing the driver you’ve basically just created a several thousand pound missile that’s still barreling towards you (and others) with no feasible way to stop safely (which is exactly what happened here. Also note this review finds 15 cases of discharge, several of which resulted in occupants being struck.

This shit has been going on for ages and the apathy towards it in the past is part of what created the conditions for it. It’s escalating, for sure, but it’s not new at all

it’s not down because of digg, literally no investor cares about digg. It’s down because ad spending is down. Ad networks are spending steady on places like google and meta but they’re spending less on reddit.

Apparently this is because reddit sucks at the targeted ad game part and the advertisers feel they get a better return by just building a presence on the platform (eg bots that go “oh that’s cool. By the way have you tried the new Taco Bell™ PepsiCo™ Shitbowl®, now with 10% less petroleum byproducts?”).

This likely means they will become more aggressive about data collection and backend analysis of that data to get conversions up but they’ve been doing this for ages already. Reddits staff ballooned up long before the API fiasco and most of the hires were related to analytics. It only works if they can shift the culture away from nerd haven (aka people with adblockers who despise being advertised to and won’t click through) to facebook grandmas and ig normies that apparently love clicking ads.

They’re at least somewhat successful: while I and most of the people on this platform have shifted away from reddit they aren’t bleeding users like you want to believe. They’re not seeing exponential growth either, but they are seeing shifts to some of those populations. Anecdotally I have several family members in their 40s and 50s who were known for facebook drama and they are adopting tiktok and reddit nowadays. They eat up the obviously fake shit on relationshipadvice and places like that bc they’re primed from spending all day scrolling ig and youtube shorts to just digest content without any questioning of veracity and they ultimately love the outrage cycle.

People have been screaming this since right to repair, since FOSS, since Microsoft in the 90s, since stallman. Consumers consistently lose because the vast majority of people don’t give a shit and politicians that could regulate our way out of this are easily purchased.