Explain Like I’m Five

Bike poggies are worth looking into to keep your hands warm. Studded tires can help with slipping too

The nice thing about trials of corporations is discovery. We have evidence of Google intentionally making search worse, increasing the time spent looking for results, and this improving ad sales. All that came out in discovery.

LMGTFY In August, before the United Auto Workers strike, the Biden administration announced $15.5 billion in funding and loans to help car manufacturers redesign their factories for electric vehicle production.

Dams are scary too, I just hope people are able to decommission them slowly when the time comes. Otherwise the deluge is going to suck.

I will say my Fairphone is a good bit thicker than my work Iphone but honestly it’s not a significant downside for me. The weight is a bigger deal but still not worth the trade-off for a phone I can be confident I can repair myself

Looks like you can do it manually. Build your own Google flavor https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/134847/how-to-filter-out-a-long-list-of-sites-from-google-search

The ones that are successful at enshitification have captive markets. They’re a monopoly, monopsony, or in another kind of inelastic market. https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/

Groups of humans have lived beneficially with other life before. Plenty of folks are doing it right now. The endless need for consumption and extraction are manufactured for the benefit of the few. Eliminate the system that requires endless economic growth and we can start making decisions that won’t destroy ourselves and others

Fairphone is also quite hackable. Hard to get in the US, only distributor is Murena. In Europe they’re pretty easy to find from what I hear. Sd exists but you need to power cycle the phone to access it so maybe not your best bet. Still, if I need to transfer stuff quickly USBC is really fast.

I bought a fairphone 4 awhile ago from Murena, the only US distributor. Other phones have more bells and whistles but I feel better knowing I can repair it if something goes wrong. If you’re in Europe the FP5 is a good bet but I don’t think anyone is selling them in North America. I don’t know about distribution elsewhere.

You can get a lot of rice and beans for 75 dollars. Definitely sounds like a rough couple weeks tho

Mirror for folks on voyager: https://web.archive.org/web/20240208172049/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/business/economy/commercial-real-estate-banking-industry.html/

I would call WWE shitty because of what they do to their performers. The performers are artists and deserve our respect tho.

I’ve seen the LTT video on that. Trouble is I’d need a computer to power it since my work computer struggles as it is. I work from home and the office and being able to use it in both environments would be helpful. Base stations are a pain in the ass to setup when you want to switch location a couple times a week.

One of the standalone headsets make a lot more sense for my use case. I’ve been thinking about getting a quest 3 but I need to use one to see if the fidelity is good enough. I wish there was a linux based headset I could tinker with but the VR market is still young. Hopefully Valve will pull a steam deck in VR.

Admitably I have too much money, but I might buy one of these in a few years as a monitor replacement. Depends on how good it is and how good the alternatives are

Joke aside, looks like they’re using a higher bandwidth of light, 222nm compared to more common 254nm uv for medical uses. It doesn’t penetrate the skin or eyes sufficiently to cause damage.

Country is a little vague so I’ll supliment state in it’s place. I’d argue there are communist societies but no communist states. “communist states” may be an oxymoron.

A useful way to think about self described communist states is that they are attempting to build communism. Whether or not their strategies are effective is up for rigorous debate of course.

Communist societies on the other hand have existed since the dawn of humanity. I read an interesting book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They cover a variety of indigenous groups’ economies and social structures. Some could be described as communism, others were as exploitative or worse than our current society. The San tribes are a modern example of an egalitarian society or maybe more accurately a group of egalitarian societies. I’m also interested in the Zapatistas and what the folks in Northern Syria are doing but I doubt they constitue communism.

Anyway I’m no authority on these things but I hope you found the perspective interesting. The audiobook for the Dawn of Everything is fastinating and a local library might have a copy if you want to check it out.

Any society that is not communism is not free. If your continued existence is dependant on you working for a wage you are not free. Being “free” to sign a contract that removes your rights so you can work and thus eat is not freedom.

A free society does not need to coerce you into doing things that are good for society. You do them because they are fun or fulfilling. In other words, the same reason people work on open source software.

I didn’t say they can’t, I said it was fraught. A better phrasing is “can cause issues a non-euro country does not have.” This quote explains what I mean:

So, in the eurozone a national (federal) government cannot run out of money as long as:

• tax revenues are high enough to bring the Treasury account back to zero or
• bond revenues are high enough to bring the Treasury account back to zero or
• tax and bond revenues together are high enough to bring the Treasury account back to zero.

This means that a eurozone national government does not run out of money until it has exhausted its tax revenues and bond revenues

The United States, Great Britain, Japan, and every other fiat currency country don’t have this problem. They are incapable of running out of money. They are capable of making so much money it is completely debased like Weighmar Germany or Zimbabwe. However, those cases are rare and extreme. As long as they ensure the supply of goods people want to buy us sufficient they can spend as much as they want. This enables them to pay off their debts on a whim (if they want to collapse the safest store for money that investors use to outweigh risks).

Sources:

The Deficit Myth I’d give you page numbers but I listened to the audiobook https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2022/number/2/article/modern-monetary-theory-the-right-compass-for-decision-making.html