psvrh

psvrh, 4 days ago

Maybe y’all should have spent the time making things better for poor people in real, measurable ways, instead of fellating billionaires.

Maybe, just maybe, that would have avoided the rise of right-wing demagogues promising easy fixes for the problems created by the inaction of the neoliberal establishment.

But no, it was more important to make sure that the rich got richer than to worry about democracy.

psvrh, 4 days ago

This is what neoliberalism ignoring the needs of anyone who isn’t a billionaire for couple of decades gets you.

Well, that and the political left selling out.

psvrh, 4 days ago

Somewhere, Jeremy Corbyn raises an eyebrow.

psvrh, 5 days ago

When you say that the keyboard works: do the brightnesss, mute and volume controls do what they’re supposed to do?

HP laptops–at least business-grade ones–are notorious for sending nonstandard scan codes and requiring custom drivers.

psvrh, 6 days ago

More like seventy five cents, given Google’s profit margins.

psvrh, 5 days ago

Doctors are compensated this way because our tax system punishes wage earners, so this setup was done to allow them to make more money without fixing the overall issue of fairness.

Maybe we should just pay doctors a fair wage?

psvrh, 4 days ago

The Liberals could have done this eight years ago, or even three years ago.

That they didn’t until their collective backs are up against the wall tells you that they never really intended to do this because, done this late, it will be trivial for the incoming Conservative government to undo.

If you want examples of things that a political party really means to do, look at what they do early in their administation. In the Liberals’ case, this pretty much amounts to “nothing” because Liberals, provinicially and federally, actively try to do as little as possible, “leading from behind” and doing only that which is performative and/or designed to offend as few people possible. The LPC really wanted to buy TMX for Alberta, for example. They did not want to do electoral or tax reform or pharmacare or what-have-you because they saved it for an election-year bribe.

Another really good example is Mike Harris’ Ontario: he wrecked the welfare state on day one, ramming through the common-sense revolution platform in his first year so that it would be impossible for his successor to undo.

psvrh, 6 days ago

Pirate an old, pre-CC version.

That’s what I do. Admittedly it’s Photoshop 3.0 on a Mac Quadra.

psvrh, 7 days ago

As a Marathon fan since 1994, the plans for the new Marathon make me sad.

psvrh, 7 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

These people really need to read up on Fritz Thyssen, Jack Ma or any one of the many Russian oligarchs who’ve been defenestrated, ventilated or irradiated under Putin.

A small amount of taxes in a functioning democracy when you’re already a billionaire is a lot cheaper than a hole in your chest under a thin-skinned fascist autocrat.

None of these folks think they’ll be a line in Niemoller’s poem. They’re horribly wrong.

psvrh, 8 days ago

He’s also a right-wing douchebag, if that helps.

psvrh, 7 days ago

I’m thinking of my Bard’s Tale C=64 saves which easily fit on a 160k floppy.

psvrh, 8 days ago

The other point from that thread is that the whole idea of having to price shop when you need care seems sadistic and inhumane to anyone from any other civilized country.

Even if pricing was transparent, it’s still the wrong way to manage it. Healthcare should be a utility, paid for by taxes, like it is anywhere else in the world that isn’t a capitalist dystopia like the US is.

psvrh, 8 days ago

I’m Canadian. I know.

Apparently our fiscally responsible conservative leaders are a-ok with paying private nursing agencies and clinics more than they would if they just staffed public facilities adequately.

I’m not sure why, but I’m always told that conservatives are “good with money” and “fiscally responsible”, which Ive learned means “good with transferring public money into private coffers”.

psvrh, 9 days ago

Al Franken quit. Bob Menendez is facing trial. Rod Blagojevich was convicted. Wiener and Cuomo were shamed from office

Jim Jordan is still there. Matt Gaetz is still there. It took comic-book levels of evil to turf Santos.

And then we have Trump.

So no, being critical of your own team isn’t bipartisan. It may have been at one time, but that’s at least thirty years ago.

psvrh, 9 days ago

Because the money was soooooo good.

psvrh, 9 days ago

Every action is a confession.

This group sees election fraud everywhere because they know—they know—they would do it if they had the opportunity, so they can’t see why everyone else wouldn’t.

psvrh, 9 days ago

That they even have to say that they’re having to have these discussions speaks volumes on its own.

psvrh, 9 days ago

Apple doesn’t actually make it at all difficult to use a Mac or iOS device without an Apple account. You’re asked once during setup and that’s it. At most there’ll be a red dot in Settings>iCloud.

psvrh, 9 days ago

Microsoft would like to introduce you to EntraID.

That’s the enterprise version of this.

psvrh, 9 days ago

There’s one notice, and it’s in the System Settings app. And it’s a little red dot beside the iCloud section. That’s not really the same league as what Microsoft is doing, or Even Google’s nag to use Chrome across all their Web properties.

You’re right about the first-party apps that you can’t remove, but it’s also not the same as, eg, Edge where those apps are used constantly and your preferences are reset on every update.

On my Mac I set my browser to Firefox in 2018. It’s never reverted to Safari, not once, where Windows really wants me to use Edge and goes so far as to not just reset it periodically, but also direct start menu searches and in-app web links to an ms-edge: url instead of using the http handler.

Apple has problems, but this isn’t one of them.

psvrh, 9 days ago

That these articles are normalized is horrifying.

Ten years ago, being seriously compared to Hitler should have been a political death sentence. Now? Now it’s just this week’s op-ed.

psvrh, 9 days ago

I realized I composed that entirely incorrectly; here’s what I should have said:

I hope they use full-motion video for characters, rather than rendered CGI models. This didn’t look great in Myst, and it was really nice when an enterprising modder added FMV back to Myst. I get why (FMV doesn’t always work with VR) but I hope they give us the option on day one with Riven.

psvrh, 9 days ago

A handful of years ago, I read an article which concluded that unrestrained capitalism will inevitably result in an entire industry sector being controlled by roughly three companies, working as a collusive oligopoly.

This was a punchline in Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird

psvrh, 9 days ago

This is happening with hospitals in the US.

It’s happening with vets, it’s happening with restaurants, with contractors, utilities, with anything and everything. Anything that can be bought, will be bought, and it will be squeezed relentlessly.

The rich will not be happy until they’ve wrung every cent of value out of us, and even then they won’t stop. They can’t stop. They don’t even understand how they could stop any more than a tumour might understand why it shouldn’t grow uncontrollably/.