The only thing I am not sure about is the upside down flag.
Under the US Flag Code flying the flag upside down is a sign of distress or great danger. It’s worth noting that the US Flag Code is an advisory code, i.e. These are guidelines, not laws. There’s a long history of attempts to codify the Flag Code into law and various levels of government being smacked down by the courts. Ultimately, Alito (or his wife) is well within his rights to fly whatever flag he wants, however he wants. It doesn’t mean he isn’t a terrible person, but even terrible people’s speech is protected.
They are supposed to be non-partisan in their professional capacity. Asking anyone to not engage in politics in their personal life would also likely slam face-first into the First Amendment. US Federal Employees do have limitations on partisan activities, but only while on the clock or when acting as in an official capacity. They also cannot hold elected office at any level of government. While those rules do not apply to the Supreme Court Justices, it does provide a good baseline for expectations.
Supreme Court Justices are still citizens of the US with all of the rights that entails. While they should be held to a much higher standard, while working in an official capacity. Once they get home, if they want to hang out in their chonies and wave a flag which overtly states “I’m a fucking moron who hates people for no reason”, well that is their right, just like any other citizen.
Ultimately, this whole flag kerfluffle seems like more “outrage culture” crap. Sure, I agree it makes Alito look like an asshole. But, anyone calling for criminal prosecution has their head so far up their own ass they are likely to see daylight again. Free speech, is one of those really tough things to support. It’s easy to say, “I have a right to free speech”. The hard thing is saying “and so does that asshole”. But, iot’s important top protect, because eventually, you might the the “asshole” to the people in charge.
That’s going to be one of those things which would need to be demonstrated on a case by case basis. Does being an asshole make him biased in a case on corporate law? Probably not. There could be cases where such a display might be used to question if he should recuse himself, but it’s going to be much harder than “I think a reasonable person could question his impartiality”. Honestly, if my lawyer was planning on that to make or break a case, I’d go find a new lawyer. Really, the interesting part of that code of ethics is the bit around political activities and the limits placed on the court and it’s staff. Though, even those have been severely weakened for lower courts, where the limits are actually enforced.
And, as has been noted about the code, it’s really just a paper tiger.
The Supreme Court upheld a pro-Republican South Carolina congressional map Thursday, rejecting the argument raised by civil rights groups that lawmakers impermissibly used race as a proxy to bolster the GOP’s chances....
The crux of this issue (and the Supreme Court identified this while more liberal leaning) is that it’s really fucking hard to measure gerrymandering-ness
Yup, for anyone who hasn’t heard it, I’d highly recommend people listen to FiveThirtyEight’s Gerrymandering Project. While this isn’t to say that gerrymandering isn’t a problem, it’s not as simple as many people make it out to be. Especially with the high level of self-sorting which has been going on, packing lots of Democratic votes in a single district tends to happen, even without trying.
Title needs to be “AAA Gaming is getting worse every year”.
I’m getting tons of fun out of smaller games.
The problem with AAA games is that we are going through a period of consolidation and contraction. This is just a normal business cycle and we’ll be back to companies throwing money at games in a few years. I’m reminded of an old comic (I think Far Side in the 90’s, but I can’t find it at the moment) which has a class staring at a black board with the following:
Business Strategy 101:
Convince Microsoft you are a threat
Accept their buyout offer
This has all happened before and it will all happen again. I doubt we’re staring down another video game crash like the 80’s, but things may slow down for a bit and we may go through a period of the major studios putting out more shovelware. Eventually, the economic situation will rebound and so will AAA games.
It’s a convenient way to avoid having to actually provide an answer, nothing more. Take religion out of it and just consider the underlying argument:
You must believe this, without evidence, because you can’t see the evidence.
Ok, there are certainly things which we cannot perceive directly. Radio waves, for example. However, no one was saying we should just accept they exist, without evidence. Humans eventually found a way to detect them and create a reliable, repeatable, predictable way to detect them and show that detection in a way we can perceive. There is no need to take the existence of radio waves on faith, you can actually build a simple radio yourself.
And this is where such arguments fall over. There is some very powerful being. But, it is incapable of giving one of its prophets a framework which can be used to describe the universe in a testable, repeatable, falsifiable way which demonstrates the existence of said being. It all boils down to, “trust me bro!”
Ya, no thanks. If the claimant cannot provide better evidence than a bunch of stories someone may have once said, I’m not buying it. History is lousy with prophets claiming to hear gods. It’s the perfect con. Do what I tell you or something bad might happen after you die. Evidence? No sorry, the gods only talk to me. And this Al Gayeb argument is just more of the same.
I know this is just being silly, but stop and think about the difference in scale between a yacht and the larger ships in the ocean. There was a recent case of a cruise ship showing up at port with a whale over it’s bow. The ship rammed a whale, effectively beached it on the bulbous bow and no one on the ship noticed. And then you have things like an Eisenhower Class Aircraft Carrier. At over 1000 feet long, 250 feet wide and displacing over 100,000 tons the sheer scale of the ship is hard to imagine without seeing it. Imagine taking a sky scraper, tipping it on it’s side and floating that out to sea. That’s what we’re talking about. You could have 10 large blue whales laid out tip to tail along the length of the carrier. An entire pod of whales ramming such a ship would just result in whales with concussions. And then CWIS goes brrr….
Whales, dolphins and other marine animals are amazing, but their scale and coordination pales in comparison to what humans do. We have basically no natural weapons or advantages in strength or speed. But, we dominate the planet because we can plan far ahead and work in groups much larger than a local tribe. We also harness energy in ways well beyond what animals do. Even something as simple as fire is outside the ability of other animals to create and use effectively.
Microsoft doesn’t care about you. So long as businesses are choosing Entra, Azure and O365, you the average end user can go suck a penguin cock for all they care. I’d still agree it’s a bad long term plan. Eventually, people will start growing up not using Windows, not knowing Microsoft products and not understanding why anyone would choose Microsoft. But, that’s some other person’s problem in the far off future. Until then, it’s time to pump those short term numbers up.
People being assholes over it is dumb, but I can’t say I would want one. I saw one recently at my local grocery store and I couldn’t stop thinking how poorly built it looked. It just seemed like the fit and finish of the body panels was kinda bad. I got an overall feeling like it was something put together by a couple of teenagers in metal shop.
what is the advantage in using Windows 11 over 10?
Many years ago, I was at a Windows XP launch event and the Microsoft Rep had a really honest line:
“Why should you start using Windows XP? Because we’re going to stop supporting Windows 98!”
And ya, that’s pretty much been the cattle prod Microsoft uses to push new versions, eventually you stop getting security updates for the older OS and at some point there are enough security vulnerabilities which make it no longer safe for daily use. That said, with Windows becoming more and more user hostile, other options start to make more sense.
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
Humans don’t exist in a vacuum, even if we think something is wholly our own, original idea, it likely pulled in stuff we don’t even know it pulled in. This doesn’t take away from the individual contribution of that inventor. There are lots of people who will see something and not think anything special about it. But, sometimes the right person sees the right thing and it kicks off a series of connections in their brain and they come up with something novel. But for that particular person’s unique set of experiences, that novel thing may not have been created.
I know it’s a rude question, but it’s been on my mind… I’m wondering roughly what I should be expecting to outlay when I finish my set-up? So I’m assuming it includes things like domain names, hosting for backups, email providers, VPN, etc. What’s a good budget to set?
The answer to that will be everyone’s favorite “it depends”. Specifically, it depends on everything you are trying to do. I have a fairly minimal setup, I host a WordPress site for my personal blog and I host a NextCloud instance for syncing my photos/documents/etc. I also have to admit that my backup situation is not good (I don’t have a remote backup). So, my costs are pretty minimal:
$12/year - Domain
$10/month - Linode/Akamai containers
The Domain fee is obvious, I pay for my own domain. For the containers, I have 2 containers hosted by the bought up husk of Linode. The first is just a Kali container I use for remote scanning and testing (of my own stuff and for work). So, not a necessary cost, but one I like to have. The other is a Wireguard container connecting back to my home network. This is necessary as my ISP makes use of CG-NAT. The short version of that is, I don’t actually have a public IP address on my home network and so have to work around that limitation. I do this by hosting NGinx on the Wireguard container and routing all traffic over a Wireguard VPN back to my home router. The VPN terminates on the outside interface and then traffic on 443/tcp is NAT’d through the firewall to my “server”. I have an NGinx container listening on 443 and based on host headers traffic goes to either the WordPress or NextCloud container which do their magic respectively. I also have a number of services, running in containers, on that server. But, none of those are hosted on the internet. Things like PiHole and Octoprint.
I don’t track costs for electricity, but that should be minimal for my server. The rest of the network equipment is a wash, as I would be using that anyway for home internet. So overall, I pay $11/month in fixed costs and then any upgrades/changes to my server have a one-time capital cost. For example, I just upgraded the CPU in it as it was struggling under the Enshrouded server I was running for my Wife and I.
I haven’t played any games in the Final Fantasy series since the Super Nintendo era…
I think that, right there, is the problem SqEnix is facing. It’s games were fantastic a couple decades ago. While I wasn’t a fan, it could be argued that they peeked with FF7 and it’s why they keep re-making it. But, as the capabilities of systems and games themselves moved on, SqEnix kept pumping out the same, formulaic JRPGs. It’s all teens and girls in too short skirts out to save the world with MASSIVE MELODRAMA!!! (cue closeups of all characters looking shocked and screaming like idiots). And we all kinda out-grew that. While there is still a lot of terrible writing in games, I think there’s a bit less tolerance for that particular brand of schlock. We have such an amazing array of options available to us today, that we can be choosier with what we put up with. If SqEnix intended to compete, they may need to come up with something a bit new-er than “Final Fantasy 7, Rebirth, Again, Look at how well rendered Tifa’s tits are this time”.
The advantage of having officers carry malpractice insurance is the same as it is with doctors. Eventually, the premiums to insure a bad officer get so high, no one is willing to pay them. Or, they simply uninsurable, as no company is willing to take on the risk. It also means there will be a large and politically connected organization (insurance companies) which have a financial interest in collecting data on bad police officers. Sure, that should be the government’s job, but since we know that’s not happening, why not exploit corporate greed for a positive thing?
That’s a fine bit of bit circular logic there. The price of food is used in the BLS’s basket of goods for calculating the Consumer Price Index (CPI). So yes, the goods used to track inflation do, in fact, track with inflation.
That said, the US economy (at a macro level) is doing rather well considering that we weathered a global pandemic, we have a war on in Europe involving one of the world’s major oil and gas suppliers and inflation has been stubbornly high. Yet somehow, wages are up and unemployment is at historic lows. Seriously, if the administration could actually do something about the housing situation and prices rising, this election would look a lot more like 2008 than 2016. But unfortunately, people vote based on how they feel, not on an analysis of macro-economics. So long as people fell like the gains they have made are being squeezed back out of them via rising prices, the incumbent president is in trouble. When you get down to it, it’s still the economy, stupid.
The polls are actually pretty good. There are two problems:
The US is very closely divided when it comes to the Presidential Election. In 2016 the popular vote split was about 2%. In 2020 it was about 4.5%. And most of the polling was right in that range.
People are shit at statistics. Most of the polls will be published with an error margin of 5% or so. For situations where on candidate is ahead 10-20%, this still puts that candidate winning by a comfortable margin. When the poll is showing a race with one person ahead by 2%, that means the poll is also showing that the other candidate winning is well within the expected result.
And unfortunately, people like clean story-lines and news organizations are more than happy to supply them. Journalists looked at the polls in 2016 and confidently proclaimed that Clinton was leading. The reality was that she had a slight lead and Trump winning was well within the normal margin of error. This turned into a rather famous spat on twitter.
Sadly, we’ve been stuck in that situation ever since. In 2020, Biden was a slight favorite, but Trump winning was within the margin of error. Right now, polls show a dead heat and either candidate winning would not be a surprise, if the election were held today. One upshot in this, is that pools this early are not very predictive of the final outcome. They shouldn’t be ignored, but that also shouldn’t be taken as gospel.
So ya, the polls are fine and do a good job of reflecting the actual results of the elections. The problem is idiots that only look at the top-line outcome and don’t look at the actual numbers and see that they are actually saying “it’s close and could go either way.”
Amen.
I was one day a week in the office during the pandemic. We had assets which required a physical presence, but with a rotating shift of 1-2 people in the office each day, we could keep the required coverage. Then my workplace started bringing us back to the office in 2022. It started with 3 days a week and we started hearing rumors of a full return to office. It was well know that upper management was hostile to remote work. So, I flipped my LinkedIn profile to “looking” (or whatever the setting was called, it’s been a while). And I started both actively applying and responding to recruiters. I eventually got a message from a reciter who led with “REMOTE WORK OPPORTUNITY”, yes the message started in ALL CAPS, though the rest was normal and hit all the points I was interested in. I figured, what the hell, can’t hurt to talk. That was just shy of two years ago, I have been into an office since late 2022. It’s going to have to be a hell of a bad situation for me to deal with commuting again.
Pay attention to the hand she gave me to put the ring on. Oh well, not sure anyone noticed.
Tapped the keg much earlier in the day for the reception. I had no idea that it needed time to settle.
Make sure we had someone to get the snacks out while we were taking pictures. Seriously, have one designated person, who is not in the wedding party, handle stuff like that.
Find a different caterer. While the food was pretty good, they missed the vegan plate for my brother-in-law, despite us being really, really certain it was covered. Drinks and water were a disaster. I really think we could have just brought in a fuck-ton of tacos, sodas and water and we’d have been good enough.
Make damned sure the jeweler’s idea of the ring is clearly the same as yours. We had a custom ring made for my wife and I think the jeweler failed to take good notes and the result was bad, very, very bad. We had the ring re-made, after it was presented and before the wedding. Her ring was very nice for the wedding.
But, not a lot. Sure, the year or so before the wedding was stressful. We did the planning ourselves, put together complex invitations, “save the date” fridge magnets and all the programs. But, because we did give ourselves a year to get it sorted, we had the time to find what we wanted. We had also been living together for a couple years by the time we got married. So, it was more a “ya, we should probably finally do this” than any sort of pressure to “start our life together”.
The funny bit is, it’s probably more human that the distribution wasn’t very close to the ideal. Humans suck at both probability and randomness. When trying to be random, we tend to fall into (often predictable) patterns.
Anything where the nut will regularly be in a counter-clockwise rotation. Ideally you want the nut spinning toward tightening, so that it doesn’t back out over time. So, for some application “left-handed” threads make more sense.
Leading Democrats demand Alito face investigation after second report of far right-linked flag (www.theguardian.com)
Supreme Court approves South Carolina congressional map previously found to dilute Black voting power (www.cnn.com)
The Supreme Court upheld a pro-Republican South Carolina congressional map Thursday, rejecting the argument raised by civil rights groups that lawmakers impermissibly used race as a proxy to bolster the GOP’s chances....
Making healthier choices (lemmy.world)
PC gaming getting worse every year (www.xda-developers.com)
deleted_by_moderator
Who would win: Marine animals or Humans?
Since whales are teaming up with each other to take down yachts and teaching others how to do it I thought this would be a fun question....
Microsoft's quest for short-term $$$ is doing long-term damage to Windows, Surface, Xbox, and beyond (www.windowscentral.com)
Maine Cybertruck Owner Sad Everyone Hates His Truck (jalopnik.com)
Microsoft stoops to new low with ads in Windows 11, as PC Manager tool suggests your system needs ‘repairing’ if you don’t use Bing (www.techradar.com)
Can you name any objectively unique human creations or thoughts that were not derived/inspired from another source?
This is intended as a very abstract philosophical question....
Does anyone print planter heads? (sh.itjust.works)
What Are Your Recurring Costs?
I know it’s a rude question, but it’s been on my mind… I’m wondering roughly what I should be expecting to outlay when I finish my set-up? So I’m assuming it includes things like domain names, hosting for backups, email providers, VPN, etc. What’s a good budget to set?
Final Fantasy Maker Square Enix Will Aggressively Pursue a Multiplatform Strategy After Profits Tumble (www.ign.com)
A teen said a deputy threatened him as he filmed his mom's arrest. A jury awarded him $185,000. (apnews.com)
Microsoft wipes out evidence of real ads in Windows 11 Start menu (www.xda-developers.com)
CNN's Burnett asks Biden how he is going to turn the economy around. He said he already has. (www.cnn.com)
Xbox’s Shift To ‘High-Impact’ Games Is Misguided At Best, Reckless At Worst (kotaku.com)
What podcasts have you been listening to the most during the year?
I’m getting close to the bottom of my backlog on a few podcasts, so I’m looking to get something new in there....
Federal judge indefinitely postpones Trump classified documents trial (www.cnn.com)
Forcing workers back to the office could be terrible for the environment (www.motherjones.com)
Married folks of Fediverse, if you could turn back time to few weeks or months before your marriage, what you would do differently (if you would like to)??
LLMs Can't Do Probability - Brainsteam (brainsteam.co.uk)
What is the answer?
Share some objective or subjective wisdom you’ve learned recently.