Thunderbird still supports RSS, however I’ve found many news sources don’t provide proper RSS feeds anymore

Somewhere in the In-between by Streetlight Manifesto

I’ve been slowly digging into their discography recently and holy crap Ska is so funny because it’ll be a bopping tune but then you catch the lyrics and find it’s a song about war, death, collapse, etc.

This music video definitely embodies that same disconnect. Cute animal animation with bopping music except wait what are those people doing? What are those animals doing? Oh my is that how this ends?!

To build off of this, if you collect $1000 in taxes from a million people and you’ve just pulled in a billion dollars. With 300 million people in the country that’s a lot of tax dollars.

Obviously if you can tax 1000 out of every million dollars in wealth and individual earns in a year you can easily collect far more in taxes given how many multimillionaires will see their wealth increase by tens or hundreds of millions in a year.

This is all super reductive for simplicity. It’s worth looking at how the super rich are able to avoid paying taxes. Are they not paying taxes because they’re doing things with their money that is directly incentivized and generally better for the country than if they simply hoarded the same money, such as running the money through charities, clean energy installtions, etc? I’m honestly asking because i really don’t know and I dont have the time right now to pull at that thread and research the question

That’s a lot of time to figure out an escape plan and execute it!

This was the premise of the Greek myth of Tithonus

In short, Eos fell in love with Tithonus, a mortal prince, and begged Zeus to grant immortality to him (but forget to specify eternal youth and eternal health) so she was forced to watch him age until he shrunk into a raisin and was eaten

The earth is traveling around the sun at about 67000mph (29,722 meters per second, the unit of measurement I’ll use from here on our for consistently) that means to fall into the sun (and this is once you’ve already expended a ton of Delta-V (delta-V being a count of meters per second in change to orbit your craft needs to make/can make) escaping the Earth’s gravitational influence) you’d have to slow down a significant portion (about 24,000 meters per second specifically) of that 29,722 meters per second that you’re hurtling through space at.

It takes so much energy to try to crash a craft into the sun it’s literally cheaper (only costing about 8,800 m/s of Delta-V, compared to about 24,000 m/s of Delta-V) to fly the craft very very far away, such as to the edge of the solar system, then zero out the angular velocity so it effectively falls into the sun, than it is to fly directly to the sun. This tactic also enables one to use another planets gravitational influence to “gravity turn” and save on fuel, but it’s still horrendously expensive to get even a small craft weighing a fraction of a ton from the surface of earth out to the edge of the solar system to begin with.

Rockets face a significant challenge in that in order to reach orbit they need a large amount of energy, sources from a large amount of fuel. To get 1 ton of payload to orbit it needs an amount of fuel which adds additional weight which then requires additional fuel to lift the mass of the fuel. Because of this it takes about 100kg of fuel to get 1kg to orbit

In short, I highly recommend spending a few days playing Kerbal Space Program to learn far more than will fit in a single comment about orbital dynamics. That game is amazing at teaching basic concepts of orbital dynamics and the incredible challenges space programs face in just getting payloads to orbit let alone incredible feats like interplanetary travel or interstellar travel

I have a better idea! Launch it into a stable orbit in the oort cloud and maybe we can create a new planet there to colonize in a few centuries! It’s perfect because then we have the perfect place to send the radioactive soil from WWIII and a perfect base to hide from WWV from!

I feel that. I like Linux, but I also like using the right tool for the job, and sometimes that’s actually Windows. The rates of Linux talk here reminds me of Reddit like 15 years ago. It’s nice, but also I forgot how weird it is to be in such a Linuxy echochamber

For the not all media played successfully, I found it was primarily down to transcode settings trying to hardware transcode file types my server can’t hardware transcode. It’s something worth playing with

Now yes, but it was briefly the basis for Firefox OS, which was almost early enough to the market to become a major player, but unfortunately too late and people were already attached to some apps they used regularly

Completely flabbergasted that we run internal services not indexable by google.

This is why it’s becoming the norm to have an Intranet with a links page to all of the internal and external webpages employees rely upon. Just make that the browser homepage with Kerberos authentication and the employees never need to know URLs or Google the internal/external service they’re trying to access

Fortunately Google messages filters all of it to spam and makes it very easy to toss whatever doesn’t get filtered into spam. Here’s mine from Wisconsin!

Personally I keep my installed apps to a minimum, heavily use Firefox on mobile with uBlock Origin, and heavily curate what’s allowed to send notifications and when, so my phone is quiet and not distracting but there when I want it/need it

If my grandmother makes it to the next election I might move her to an android phone for this reason alone. Her iPhone doesn’t block the spam at all, and even appears to not have a way to delete the messages

In China, they have a citizen score system based on data collection like this. And if you drop too low, you won’t get loans, or jobs.

More recent reporting indicates this is not true. It appears the earlier reporting indicating this was based on a mix of bad translation and poorly identified conjecture. But mass data collection certainly enables no shortage or scary totalitarian surveillance.

Really I just wanted to share a perspective that can help handle the mental load of knowing how bad things are with mass data collection

I found it healthy to find humour in companies collecting boatloads of telemetry data to sell to brokers who then manage to make the data worse while they curate it, then sell it to advertisers who manage to fail to properly utilize the data they pay boatloads to access, and you end up with “targeted” ads that are no better targeted than advertisements placed on broadcast television. It’s a cycle of money that somehow creates wealth and cash flow out of nothing and provides no value in the end. Its the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs. And by simply blocking and avoiding ads you make that money cycle even more pointless!

Holy crap that works too well. Have my plastic fork!

Camelcamelcamel is also good for seeing pricing shenanigans like this too. A box set a relative asked for was marked as $100 but on sale for $30 and checking camelcamelcamel I could see it’s rarely listed at its list price and basically always marked down to $25-35 with spurts of time at $40-50

Personally, I’m terrible about actually spending money on myself. Mostly because right now money is pretty tight as a single income household. A giftcard forces me to spend money in a more careless manner than I otherwise would. A giftcard encourages me to splurge and order a thing on Amazon or buy a super sugary treat or something else that can bring me joy. If I’m given cash I just use that to smooth over the daily grind, so giftcards absolutely hit different

To be fair, English has a bit of that too if you look at the first 20 digits

One, two, three… Eleven, twelve, thirteen… Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three… Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…

If English was fully decimal the teens would simply be “Onety-one, onety-two, onety-three” but it’s not because fuck following conventions!