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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • They were never a thing in Europe.

    Not really a thing in Canada either. Bought a reasonably midrange ($600k) brand-new apartment back in 2006, it didn’t come with it. Also have never seen it in any other house that I’ve visited, except for the wealthy. And by that, I mean in a house that you would normally pay $4-8 million for. Which is certainly upper middle class where I am, but not overly wealthy.


  • Corporate cuts should always start with the greatest fat that does the least work - the ones at the top.

    Because if the company has found itself in a place where headcount needs to be reduced, these are the people who led it there and deserve all of the blame for hurting the company to that degree. Plus, you should always start cutting where you get the lowest volume of productive work for the greatest money spent, and that is always at the top.





  • OMG, like North Korea isn’t bad, it’s just the US that “doesn’t like them”.

    You’re linking North Korea to the conversation about communism, when that alone is a fatal error: NK is equally as much communistic as they are democratic. As in, not in the least.

    There has never been any kind of a long-term (5+ years) communist country on the planet. Prior power structures have always stepped in to decapitate communism in favour of a violently autocratic dictatorship much like a monarchy. What remained of communism was only ever kept as a thin veneer of legitimacy, much like a rotting Edgar suit.




  • It’s not just thinking that’s required.

    Oh, absolutely. It’s just an exclusive first step that needs addressing before anything else. As such, it becomes an insurmountable barrier for the vast majority of people long before the resource aspect comes into play.

    That’s not a world that exists though,

    And with how Capitalism is violently coercive (“be profitable to someone else or suffer poverty, destitution, homelessness, and even death”), this also means that it will likely be impossible to achieve until we eradicate greed from our society and make wealth accumulation a mark of deep shame instead of something admirable. Because until that happens, the Parasite Class will continue to find violently coercive ways to maintain and increase that labour-free stream of wealth they have stolen from the working class.

    We need government to enforce this.

    And until we develop benevolent AGI that have no “skin in the game” (no ways of being coerced and no desire to pick sides) to do the job of administration for us, we will continue to have inadequate governance. Because it isn’t so much that power corrupts, but rather that power attracts the corruptible. Exhibit A: Orange siphilis-dementia’d man with the incoherent talk.





  • Right, my bad. I read TCP/IP. It’s still early.

    🤣🤣🤣 Quite alright. It’s 5AM somewhere on the planet, no?

    I believe that makes you older than Arpanet, which is what I was really asking.

    If you had asked me if I was older than Arpanet, then no. It first came online a few short years before I was born.

    Even though the “IP” in TCP/IP came four years after TCP, the introduction of TCP is frequently cited as the “birth of modern networking”, and as such, the Internet.


  • But are you older than token ring?

    Considering that token ring was first released by IBM almost exactly a decade after TCP (which I was very specific about - TCP specifically, not TCP/IP), then I would most definitely say yes, I am very much older than token ring.

    Token ring was introduced as a low-cost networking option for smaller offices that did not require the use of (at the time) fiendishly expensive switching and routing equipment. If you wanted to hook a bunch of machines together into a network and had no need for external access, you quite literally needed only the cabling and the cards that were installed in the computers. No hubs. No switches. Nothing else.

    Of course, using token ring also allowed techs to engage in shenanigans such as - when the ring was broken in some way - getting a junior tech to crawl around on the floor looking for the break and the token that fell out of it, to stuff it back into the cable. Sometimes we even did that with particularly difficult customers.





  • I have a massive wingspan:weight ratio, so I always have to choose between sleeves being long enough on a shirt that’s 4x too big, or sleeves that end 3 inches short on a shirt that mostly fits.

    So you look like you just sauntered out of Auschwitz?

    <rant>

    You’re the reason why most shirts don’t fit me. I hate “slim fit” shirts, and anything fashionable is so slim fit you would have trouble fitting it over a skeleton or a 1,000-year-old Sahara-desiccated corpse. Why is your kind so common that the marketplace gets flooded with clothing that can only fit a famine victim?

    And I’m not obese in the least. I just have a 50-inch chest with a 36-inch waist. I have pecs, not some wafer-thin slabs of barely-there muscle that would have trouble bench-pressing an onion scape.

    About the only thing that fits me are 2XL tops that are regular or relaxed fit. Even jackets have gotten into the “reverse-vanity-sizing” madness that has recently beset Canada, with many “size 50” suit jackets really being a size 46 or even a 44.

    </rant>

    .