[-] [email protected] 268 points 7 months ago

RIP Navalny.

I remember him flying back from Germany to Russia after the poisoning. Watching Ricky & Morty with his wife.

Very brave, but incomprehensibly stupid.

If ever there was a person who had a justified claim to political asylum, it was him.

[-] [email protected] 159 points 8 months ago

PSA: The old Opera guys have a new browser, Vivaldi.

It's quite nice and I use it daily.

[-] [email protected] 199 points 9 months ago

If there is no easy way to own what you buy, then piracy becomes a moral obligation to preserve culture for future generations.

[-] [email protected] 129 points 10 months ago

This right here.

The TV comes with the cheapest removable feet, because VESA mounts exist.

[-] [email protected] 130 points 10 months ago

Fully agree, but have to add:

Most of the aid to Ukraine is actually just money for the US defense industry and military. They get to donate old stuff without paying for disposal and get money to build new staff.

The ROI on supporting Ukraine is huge. The US is eliminating their second biggest threat without sacrificing a single soldier and only at the cost of donating old equipment.

Israel, on the other hand, is more of a leech on the USA. They don't provide much benefit and they cost a lot of money and soft power. Unlike Ukraine, they have a powerful lobbying group to get out much more from the USA than would ever be warranted if they didn't hijack US domestic politics.

[-] [email protected] 127 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's a joke.

UTF-16 already exists, which doesn't favor Roman characters as much, but UTF-8 is more popular because it is backword compatible with the legacy ASCII.

UTF-32 also exists which has exactly equal length representation for every character.

But the thing that equalizes languages is compression.

Yes, a text written in Cyrillic with UTF-8 will take more space than a Roman language, easily double. However this extra space is much more easily compressed by an algorithm like GZIP.

So after compression, the two compressed texts will then be similarly sized and much smaller than UTF-16 or UTF-32.

[-] [email protected] 171 points 11 months ago

Is she still living rent free in their heads?

[-] [email protected] 207 points 11 months ago

It's the same across the world.

The problem is that real estate has become an asset, a form of capital.

The only way out of this mess is to shift taxation away from labor and onto capital.

Higher property taxes (1-2%), that can be subtracted from income tax for working people are the answer.

Let's say Joe the Plumber and Elon the Muskrat both have an income of $100K and pay an income tax of $25K.

Joe owns one property worth $1M that he lives in and pays 2% tax on it, $20K. Which gets subtracted from the $25K income tax, meaning he effectively pays $5K income tax + $20K property tax = $25K combined property and income tax. Pretty sweet deal.

Elon owns 20 properties valued $500M collectively, which means $10M in property taxes. He officially resides in the most expensive $100M property and gets a $50K credit for that. The $50K is larger than the $25K, so he pays zero income tax.

Total tax is $10M.

This (or something like it) is the system the whole world must move towards if we want to simultaneously (a) lower taxes on working people (b) increase taxes on property and (C) not let working people lose economic power relative to the capitalists over the longterm.

The middle class has to outsmart the owning class if we want our children to remain middle class.

[-] [email protected] 135 points 11 months ago

Luckily the SCOTUS justices have no ties to the wealthy and are such excellent, impartial arbiters of blind justice.

I'm sure we all have full faith in them.

/s

[-] [email protected] 149 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The IPCC calculations were always criticized for being overly optimistic. Anyone following this debate knew that we would hit 1.5 C sooner rather than later.

We are definitely going to hit 3 degrees in our lifetime, once the melting tundras release their methane store.

[-] [email protected] 202 points 1 year ago

A megagram is 1000 kg, by definition. It's symbol is Mg.

In metric countries, we just use the word "ton" as shorthand/slang for it, since it is an easier term and was well known.

The only reason the US calls it a metric ton, is because they have archaic units (long and short tons).

Metric countries don't call it a metric ton.

[-] [email protected] 142 points 1 year ago

Or, perhaps this article is just trying to sow discord between workers.

One of the old tricks in the books to make people despise unions is to take the very best union deals and sensationalize them, so that others hate the union out of jealousy.

Make it appear like the UPS driver is getting paid $170K for 32 hours of work, in a fully A/C'd vehicle on a short, easy route, starting pay, right out of college without a degree, four weeks of vacation yada yada.

When in reality, the $170K probably only kicks in if you take the absolute worst routes, worst shifts (weekend/night) with max overtime and even then, a third of it is retirement, insurance and health care contributions. And you only get the max after 10 or 20 years of service, if they didn't fire you as you increased.

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alvvayson

joined 1 year ago