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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • 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.


  • This comes from a memory of a digression during a lecture in an ecology class I was in 20yrs ago… so you know, grain of salt.

    From this particular professors point of view. Symbiotic was the term to describe mutualism until recently. And then. A few papers started using symbiosis as an umbrella term for all relationships with sub-terms to describe the “benefits math”. This, to him, was annoying pedantry. But eventually all the textbooks adopted the new hierarchy of terms and the world moved on.

    If you took a biology class with a text published pre-2000s, it’s very possible that your book described symbiosis as a mutually beneficial relationship between species.

    Long story short: the language is fluid and ever changing, even in science fields.



  • I mean it’s only 30ish seconds so it’s not a lot of investment, BUT, it really is just noise, you can barely pick out the trombone until the last 3seconds.

    It is grating and unapproachable, but the rest of the album feels like it could have had half a dozen radio hits in an alternate version of the early 90s.

    Edit: just re-read my comment and noticed the ambiguity in my closing sentence. Sigh… sloppy writing. Anyway I was playing with the fact that phish fans are known to be a little bit evangelical (not unlike trek fans tbh). And if one tells you not to listen to a song you should listen to THEM, and avoid the song.


  • Jonathan Frakes fun fact:

    He has a gold record for an album he appeared on as a trombone player. Apparently the band phish saw an unusual mailbox when they were driving up to meet a record company guy and the guy from the label told them that his neighbor with the strange mailbox was in fact Lt Riker. Knowing he played trombone from the show they asked to be introduced and invited him to join them in the studio on a record they were working on (Hoist). Well as Jonathan tells it he got to the studio and pretty quickly realized that the charts for the part were probably beyond his ability, but he bravely recorded a few attempts and everyone was very nice about. The band did not use the his takes for the intended track but they did cut them up and make a track out of them called “Riker’s mailbox”. When the record went gold the band made sure that a gold record plaque was also sent to Jonathan.

    Story pieced together from interviews with Jonathan and Trey, heard on a podcast at some point but I would have a hell of a time sourcing it further. The song, which also feature bela fleck on banjo, is pretty much just noise and not worth the effort to chase down. If a phish fan tells you NOT to listen to a phish song you should listen!




  • 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.



  • Amazingly native English speakers the world over seem to have this genetic predisposition! All of us just can’t seem to get it together when it comes to becoming multilingual.

    OR… maybe it comes from being born into mastery of the language everyone else on earth is trying to learn. I get three words in Spanish out before my conversation partner asks to switch to English. What am I gonna do? Stamp my feet and demand I get to practice my hobby and deny them the opportunity to work on a valuable career skill. Nah. We’ll speak in English.

    Your ancestors (assuming you are British) created a global language hegemony. My ancestors moved from southern Italy to the US and learned their language.



  • I have received a somewhat unusual vaccination and my antibodies were valuable to a drug company for a while. They were paying 120$ for plasma for a while and you could go 2x a week. The plasma center, like most, wasn’t in the best neighborhood and the cash was doled out be an ATM like machine when you were finished. Well 120 took a hell of a lot more “kachunks” that 15 did and by the time you got your cash there was a whole room full of pissed off desperate folks staring at you. Not that fun.

    I have had to sell plasma to make ends meet in my life and I know what those people must have been feeling watching some kid in nice clothes get paid 10x what they were for the same unpleasant procedure. Fucking rough. I used the money to buy a house. They would be lucky to get a groceries out of the deal


  • I’m not sure there are realistic strategies for the region that would be similar. Who is going to take over administration of Gaza when Hamas is out? Israel is. Germans didn’t hate British people. They did not spend generations teaching their children that Americans were subhuman scum. Your average German was able to snap out of the delusion easily. You and I both know that isn’t a plausible reality in Gaza.

    I’m not saying there is a need for genocide. But Hamas could agree to terms tomorrow and the war would end. Then it would start again. There can be no peace in that place. Not while both peoples live there. Maybe when Iran builds nukes? MAD is pretty high price to pay but it might sober everyone up a little. Hard pill to swallow.



  • 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.