If there is somebody willing to pay more for what is ultimately a limited supply of potatoes, why not sell to them. If the price per ounce of chips is too high for you, you’ll buy less chips. People who just can’t live without those chips might buy less candy to make sure they can afford them.

All the while people who make chips are asking for raises because the chip market is hot and the boss just can’t get enough people into the plant to make them. The workers know their boss needs them badly so they are comfortable asking for more. The boss relents because he needs them in there making those chips or he’s gonna lose money with potatoes rotting in the warehouse.

Sellers raise their prices because they have buyers ready to pay that higher price.

Say your have the best restaurant in town and you have a line down the street and everyday you sell out of food before lunch. If you raise your prices the line will get shorter as some of your more price sensitive customers decide to go elsewhere. Keep raising them and your shop will be empty as nobody wants your food at those prices. The “right price” is where you get the most money you can for the work that you do in a day. Right?

You should be looking at your wages exactly the same. Ask for 10k per hour and you’re going to be jobless. As for 5 per hour and you’re gonna have lots of offers but not make enough money. Try to find the “right” wage. This is why wages have been going up faster than inflation pretty much every quarter since some time in 2022.

And no, we shouldn’t punish you or our hypothetical restaurant owner for setting your prices properly.

Also, taxes don’t remove money from the economy so it would be neutral from an inflation standpoint. But that’s a much longer story.

I have to know what the Detroit soccer team did to get so high on that list. Somebody here must know. Please!

Anybody who tries to arrest him will be at war with Israel and probably the US and probably a lot of other nations. They will break their treaty with ICC before they start that war and everyone fucking knows it. Why do we pretend?

No, it means they were ONLY held accountable because they lost the war.

Nobody prosecuted Churchill for Dresden

People’s take on this stuff always seems so naive to me. All war ever can be viewed as an attempt to arrest the leader of another group for “crimes”. When you get arrested… that means you lost the war. Winning a war means you didn’t get arrested.

The ICC is such a silly stupid waste of human attention. It’s like an idea that children came up with after watching Star Trek. It has no utility whatsoever for our species. We fight, we have winners and losers. If you start a fight with somebody stronger than you, you are gonna have a bad time. If you start a fight with someone weaker than you, others will think you are dishonorable. That doesn’t mean you get arrested.

This joke is both very good and EXTREMELY local.

The never ending growth thing is complex. But set all of that aside, if your company doesn’t peruse the growth, somebody else will. There is no future where nobody bothers to try and sell to a market that is begging for a product.

Nobody needs Microsoft to exist, but people want free software and services (windows is functionally free, the last time I paid for it was win7). They can take a privacy purist route and change $3-400 for a license w/ an update every 5yrs but the product will die and everyone will switch to chromebooks.

Microsoft can “be better”, and then they would stop being relevant. If you want a little better, pay the Apple tax, if you want A LOT better pay the time tax and use Linux.

First the money was in the hardware. Then, the money was in the software. Then, the money was in the services. Now, the money is in the data you can harvest from the users.

If being a sponge for ads, and a source of data to sell and use for training LLMs, is not your thing, using computer systems produced by for profit companies is probably out.

Enshitification isn’t driven by some new and unique greed. It’s the only way left to earn money in the space. Customers WANT subsidized hardware running free software and cloud services. If MS doesn’t give them that somebody else will and that will be that.

I don’t want to blame customers for all this. But to most folks trading something they didn’t know had value (their data and attention) for something that they know has value (software and services) seems like an awesome deal. The corps are following the customers to some extent, and we have to acknowledge that.

Started playing with arch this week for the first time. Got a pretty good laugh when I realized that I forgot to install a dhcp client and had to boot the install media again to add networking.

I appreciate what they’re doing and I’m going to keep poking at it, but my first impression is that philosophy is driving and the utility is in the back seat.

I was in the rough carpentry game 20+ yrs ago so it’s been a while for me also. For the most part I think if you buy SPF you’re getting some sort of pine species. But it wasn’t super uncommon for us to find a couple dozen fir studs in a bundle.

Framing material in the US is called SPF, which means spruce pine fir. Any of those species may be used and they have similar enough engineering characteristics that they are interchangeable. Occasionally a building will be designed to use a specific species (southern yellow pine etc). But mostly we engineer stick built structures for SPF framing.

Ha, I roasted you for having the good sense to let somebody else handle some of this stuff for you.

Nobody in crazy rabbit hole club is allowed to do anything the easy way!!

I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.

Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.

HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??

I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.

Sigh…

People who have enormous fame or import like miss swift can’t exactly travel public roads in an unmodified car from fucking Avis. Not only is fame a tremendous distraction on the road, but she is also a lightning rod for insane people who are known to be heavily armed.

I mentioned the president’s motorcade because she has some of the same problems. She and the president share security problems you don’t have. Those security problems have expensive and carbon intensive solutions. You’re not smarter than all the people who work on the problem. I promise.

Now, before you start name calling on the internet why don’t you flip that dog’s breakfast of yours into the on position.

How does car get to the place the jet landed? Another bigger jet full of cars? That’s how the presidential motorcade works. Seems really consumptive, but it’s one person who leads a nation of 350M, so it also doesn’t make me angry.

Meh, sometimes I drive places a really should have walked. Same shit different scale. I am not moved to anger by this. Eliminate fame or accept that it’s resource intensive.

I’m not sure I fully understand the criticism to be perfectly honest. Is it actually possible to have a mega pop star of that type without them having a more intensive carbon footprint? Like she can’t really fly commercially for a lot of reasons. Tour schedules are one thing but can you imagine the scene it would make?

Fame is really just letting one person, who we consider special for some reason, use the resources of many. They get to live an extravagant lifestyle and we get the cultural benefit their work.

Bottom line: private jet travel seems to me like a requirement of her job. I’m not about to sit here and shame everyone for the carbon output that their job requires of them. She is not some capital class, passive income, leech. The lady works.

FWIW, I don’t really think I could name or identify one of her songs. Everything I know about her is what bleeds through into my media sphere. She could be a real shitheal for all I know.

The real charlatans were the “the technology has promise” people. No, the technology was dumb.