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The state of Facebook Ads
  • The heat generated by a dumpster fire would not be good for forging steel.

    Forging steel requires a minimum temperature of 900F

    This scam ad is also something that if you showed it to anyone that knows anything about metallurgy would get you laughed at.

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    Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris
  • I’m sure some reporters talked to him. There are some pretty amusing clips of him just sorta standing around awkwardly.

    There is a non-zero chance that some reporter told him about the Taylor Swift endorsement. I truly hope he responded with the grace and elegance he had on display all night 😂

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    Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”
  • Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.

    Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.

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  • The mathematics I’m speaking of is that first past the post voting mechanisms result in two dominant parties and third parties being non viable.

    You might not like that FPTP results in this, but that’s how math works.

    Formally it’s called Duverger’s Law so if you don’t like it take it up with him.

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    Side by Side
  • That’s the neat part, if you aren’t American you can agitate and tell people “don’t vote, voting for the lesser evil means you end up with slightly less evil and that’s bad, instead you should not vote or ignore mathematics existing and vote third party which is a fancy way of not voting” and then suffer no consequences.

    Tell people not to vote and the party that wants to “hurt the right people” gets into power, doesn’t matter, those policies don’t touch foreign agitators.

    I’ve been in the depths of the leftist circle jerk about this. You see if we all sat home on Election Day reading Marx, then the oligarchs who rule over us would see that no one is taking part in the charade anymore. Then those oligarchs who wield tremendous wealth and power would just give up, you know, the turnout too low. All those people refused to endorse the democratic farce any further and so clearly those with power would be so red faced with embarrassment they would voluntarily give up that power and abolish capitalism.

    Those oligarchs certainly wouldn’t be delighted by the fact that the population is even cheaper and easier to control because people are sitting out. Nope, we will certainly show them by allowing them to dominate us with even more ease and at bargain prices, certainly that will end the system.

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    Does Wikipedia really need my donations?
  • Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

    I think this is the latest one available.

    As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

    On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

    I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

    I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

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    Ubisoft Stock Tanks to 10-Year Low After Lukewarm Star Wars Outlaws Launch
  • Really enjoyed Farcry 5 but Farcry 6 was ok gameplay wise but the story was really underwhelming especially with the amazing talent they got in Giancarlo Esposito.

    The real problem with Ubisoft games is that they are all 95% reskins. If you’ve played one farcry game you’ve played most of every farcry game, same with assassins creed, etc.

    Now those games often end up having relatively fun mechanics so when another farcry comes out I’ll still play it because it’s a fun game to me.

    I do wonder how much they are just hitting a saturation point where the same couple games reskinned over and over are just underwhelming

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    Kristi Noem's dog killing used as retort to Maga's latest Tim Walz attack
  • Dogs instinctively recoil and begin snarling at MAGA supporters so the idea that a strange dog would willingly come up to them for pets is unthinkable.

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    The foorprints... this was premeditated.
  • If I can’t take things I see on the internet at face value then I’ll also have to discount your completely unsupported assertion that “someone just slapped a caption on this picture”

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    Need help with pico-8
  • Pico8 carts are just a special flavor of png. I would try running it directly or if it won’t run them with the png extension just rename the file from .png -> .p8 without converting and see if that works

    Relevant section of the user manual

    There are three ways to share carts made in PICO-8:

    1. Share the .p8 or .p8.png file directly with other PICO-8 users

    Type FOLDER to open the current folder in your host operating system.

    Although if you are having trouble you might have more luck getting started with the built in SPLORE command

    Relevant section of the user manual

    This might be easier to get started with since it will all get wired up automatically for you

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    Costco to start scanning membership cards at the entrance of all its stores
  • That’s a shitty way to treat someone, sorry that happened to you.

    If you have storage space though and look for good deals, ironically a Costco membership could help with your finances, and you could have cheap hotdogs again.

    The trick to Costco is that, while everything they sell is normally of very good quality, only some of it is a good deal. I’ve yet to encounter particularly bad deals at Costco, something where I feel like I’ve been ripped off. That said, some things are a better bargain than others.

    If you happen to have storage space, which isn’t the case for everyone, you might find that by purchasing some items in bulk and storing them that you end up saving more than the membership costs.

    Some items that I find Costco normally has stable good pricing on that you can easily calculate out if it would make the membership worthwhile

    • eggs
    • milk
    • toilet paper
    • paper towels
    • soda
    • beer (depending on brand, there’s normally something that’s a good deal but it might change month to month)
    • fruit
    • meat (depending on cut, ground beef is normally a pretty good deal if you have freezer space for a few pounds)

    Although if your bad experience with the food court person put you off that’s reasonable too. Anyways, just thought I’d share what I’ve found having a Costco membership for like a decade, I didn’t really want to pay upfront to go to a store but when I sat down and ran the numbers I came out ahead. But I have enough budget flexibility and storage space to make that viable and so I’m in a privileged position in that way so your mileage may vary.

    Anyways still sucks that the person decided to belittle you, no one deserves to be treated like that. Hope your days ahead are filled with nicer people.

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    If a tunnel boring machine were installed facing downward in a cemetery, you wouldn't need to expand the cemetery
  • I think it’s a shame that when we figured out skyscrapers we didn’t start doing that with the dead. Catacombs in the sky reaching to the heavens.

    I’m gonna go pay my respects to grandma she’s in the towns bonescraper. Smash cut to a giant tower made of skeletons.

    Aliens come down to that kind of society, they’d want to party with us because that’s metal as fuck

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    Capitalism and fascism
  • I gave you 3 concrete examples of things happening right now. I put them in the context you asked for. You said I’m over pattern matching the past, which tells me you got to company towns and quit reading.

    Feel free to respond but know that I’m done engaging with you. If you can’t engage in good enough faith to read what I wrote then I don’t really feel the need to humor you any longer.

    Your brilliant solution is to remove zoning laws and building codes. As an engineer I can tell you those codes are written in blood, they exist because people were hurt or killed due to some home builder thinking “do I really need to ground this, I could save a 50 cents and I would really like 50 cents”

    You are sitting there thinking you’ve cracked the code and if you could just get people to understand you’d win. I understand your point just fine, it’s just wrong headed.

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    Capitalism and fascism
  • What do you think they would do with less government? Do you think they would be benevolent titans of industry and not hurt you if it meant greater profits for them?

    It’s not like we have to wonder. There is plenty of history to go read about what people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would do without any restraints on their power. Factory towns where workers are paid in scrip and kept in effective indentured servitude were a real thing that happened.

    What magical force brings down the price of necessities when there’s less government? Look at what the free market did with respect to Amazon. Investors are happy to play the long game, they bank rolled Amazon for 9 years to compete against retailers, when the locally owned hardware store has to turn a profit to keep the lights on but the capital class says Amazon can sell hammers at a loss for 9 years, then at some point the local hardware store goes out of business. An enterprise that doesn’t need to turn a profit can out compete one that does.

    Why would investors be ok with Amazon not turning a profit for 9 years? Because they knew that once they crushed the competition, they would have a bunch of people locked in, habituated to using Amazon and they could slowly decrease quality while increasing prices and make a return on that investment. They created a machine that destroyed jobs and businesses and for a while the consumer got a great deal. Subsidized high quality goods conveniently delivered to your door.

    That isn’t a gift though, it’s a Trojan horse. That subsidy stops at some point and Amazon has a nearly impenetrable moat. Every year they can increase the cost of prime, increase the cost of goods, and now half the search results are some jumble of letters company that was just formed to shovel low quality goods at you.

    The end result is harm to you as a consumer, a worker, and a taxpayer.

    Those retail jobs are gone, instead of dozens of local business each with a workforce in every town, there can be one mega warehouse with a couple hundred people serving a huge swath of customers. This is great for amazons bottom line but if you need to work to make money to buy food and shelter, it means fewer jobs. The law of supply and demand works for the labor market just like it does anywhere else, if the demand for jobs is the same and the supply is lower then the glut of workers means employers can pay less. If there are enough unemployed people they will be willing to accept lower pay, they will be willing to accept worse working conditions, and if they aren’t there’s a hundred more unemployed people willing to take that spot. Those are direct harms to people.

    Those locally owned businesses use to make up the tax bases of communities. Now instead of buying that hammer from your neighbor, you are buying a Chinese hammer from Bezos. Towns still need fire departments, police, roads, so your taxes go up because it has to come from somewhere.

    Now when you go to buy a product you get whatever you get from Amazon. Enshittification is a real thing. And people can’t compete with Amazon, with their scale and their reach and their logistics. The best you can hope for is that people will try to sell through Amazon, but amazon in control of the search and there are thousands of dropshippers working to get their slice of the pie pushing quality down down down as they import cheaply made goods from alibaba and resell it to you at a mark up.

    So no, the price of necessities being high is not good for me, but the government isn’t doing that. Capitalism is about the accumulation of profits to those with the capital, and more money means more ability to buy the market. There’s a reason that monopolies form in capitalist markets. Greater profits allow for greater market capture which leads to greater profits which leads to greater market capture and so on.

    Competition isn’t sufficient because nothing stops people with a lot of money from going “outcompete them for a while by selling at a loss, we can do that longer than them and then we can jack up the price once our competitors exit the market.” This is exactly what investors did with Amazon.

    So yes, they have the power to hurt me and you. You keep talking about less government, ok fine, what part? Which function of government would you remove that would improve the situation? What mechanism replaces that function and how does it work?

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    Capitalism and fascism
  • I hear your point it’s just wrong.

    It’s clear that you believe the government is the bad thing here. I see you completely skipped over all my points about how their market manipulation harms the consumer and the worker. That manipulation is purely from them having a bunch of money and using it to their advantage and does not require a government boogie man.

    It’s not that I can’t see the point you want to make, they corrupt the government and then the governments power is the thing that hurts me. First it’s wrong because if we were some sort of anarchy society, bezos using investor money to undersell and falsely outcompete the rest of the market until he has a stranglehold on the economy and can exact a tax on every item sold would still happen.

    The fact that you don’t think high speed rail can be built, despite it existing all over the world, is just your opinion. The fact that musk has said he promoted the hyperloop in hopes of pulling funding and support from high speed rail is a thing that happened in reality

    Let’s say that we took the power away from the government. Poof just like that they can’t regulate how much rat shit is in your Amazon prime food or if Elon can dump the toxic waste from his battery production in your drinking water. The harm of regulatory capture and lobbyist power just gets replaced with capitalists directly harming you. How is that better?

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    Capitalism and fascism
  • I’ve been so sad to see the privatization of NASA. It feels very similar to me. SpaceX celebrating about launching a rocket into low earth orbit after spending billions in taxpayer money. How is this progress? We could do it back in the 60s with the equivalent computing power you can find in a $7 wristwatch today. Why didn’t we just keep building on our success, no we had to privatize, so that we could reach a beautiful end goal where space would not be for science and exploration funded by the people with its fruits improving humanity.

    No we all had to pull together so spacex can build a massive taxpayer funded toll booth and every time America would like to visit the stars some billionaires can collect their cut. And people cheer

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