For me the extra resistance the mass gave against acceleration made it really good for playing first-person shooters.

Could be the USB controller. I’ve had pretty terrible USB problems with certain AMD systems. Typically only with high-bandwidth applications, but I know some people have had problems even with peripherals like mice.

Agreed. I imagine this working group would be working in the direcrion of the minimal viable options, including figuring out whether they need to do anything at all.

And/or going through a powered USB hub.

I don’t think that means they’re planning on doing age verification. Mastodon and anyone running a Mastodon instance has to operate within whatever legal regime their country imposes. I interpet the above as putting some work towards figuring out ways to do that. If a country mandates age verification and Mastodon has no ability whatsoever to comply, then Mastodon becomes illegal in that country. Maybe we don’t care about that for a few countries here and there. If that happens in the EU however, that’d be a problem and a likely blow to the Fediverse.

Not yet, but likely would. #soon

The HC530s drives I bought in Nov are 40% more expensive now. My local computer store used to sell 16TB Barracudas for CAD $250 last year. They’re $400 now and only available in-store.

Ayyyy 👏👏👏

I can hear this picture.

I’m considering it from the self-interest PoV of Trump. Difficult to predict but a strike on Saudi oil prod should cause massive inflation in the US overnight. Trump has been hell bent on getting people to forget about inflation. Being as unpopular as he is I think that sort of move might get him to reconsider doing what Bibi wants again. Of course a lot of other actors would be upset by it so someone else might decide to pull the trigger. Hard to say.

Well all of this is pretty good for larger business owners. Merz is a rich pro-business guy. They take a part of every hour worked by workers in their firms, or firms they invest directly/indirectly in, more hours worked - more profit collected. So they’d directly benefit from Greece-like working conditions.

During a visit by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to Berlin last year, Merz praised labor market deregulation in Athens that allowed a six-day workweek. He said Germans who consider a 40-hour week unreasonable should “take a look at Greece,” adding that Germany could learn from the country in this area. He acknowledged, however, that German labor productivity remains much higher.

Same shit different day, so here’s what I said the last time this brainrot hit the news:

Someone does not understand what productivity means and how it’s meaningfully improved.

If you (you being the proverbial CDU brain here) need people to marginally increase their working hours, in order to achieve higher economic output, you’re in deep trouble. The increased output is also marginal and a one time boost. If you want meaningfully higher economic output, with sustained growth, you have to use machines and automation to achieve more with the same work hours. In other words you gotta do productive capital investment. Unfortunately conservative brains can only think of the cheapest solution (for businesses) first, at the expense of workers quality and quantity of life.

Every time Bibi vists, he gets a present.

Hey, you appreciate what you got and think of the less fortunate.

No politic here!

Too few places. There’s a cluster in Italy as well.

Added a bit on that. 😊

The availability of capital for this type of organization, the capital concentration on the opposing side and its market power is what’s holding us back.

To elaborate:

Coops are fundamentally anti-capitalist, they’re socialist. Why? Because they threaten to change the capitalist model where only people who hold significant capital get to decide how to profit from most workers’ labour, to a model where most workers decide that democratically and equally own their workplaces. If coops are to become the dominant firm structure, it means no more Zuckerbergs or Thiels wielding unimaginable power over hundreds of thousands of employees directly* and the rest of the economy indirectly. This means that the people in this position of power today would do everything they can to stop coops from taking significant root. Since they are the VCs that dole out capital for startups, that means no capital for coop startups from them. It also means applying every market and non-market leverage they have to kill any coops that threaten to become viable competitors.

This doesn’t mean we can’t start coops and make them successful. It does however means it’s much more difficult than starting a normal capitalist-funded startup. People who are in a position to attempt it probably should. I think a lot of capable, professional tech comrades would join and work a lot harder than they would at your typical startup. But it would still be an uphill battle without gov’t support which already goes to capitalist tech corpos. This is why this battle has to go on multiple fronts. One is creating coops where and when possible. The other is unionizing existing corpos to gain labour power that can be leveraged to curb the oligarch’s power. The third is fighting at the political level for state funding for coops and labour rights. Those three reinforce each other in increasing the economic power of employees (workers) both at coops and traditional corpos relative to the power of the oligarch (capitalist) class.

* For example forcing their employees to develop software for digital addiction instead of working to eliminate misinformation on the biggest social network in the world at the threat of termination.

Interesting. I han’t thought about this aspect, where the toaster is capable to do more human activities to harass the person. This is actually a problem if there isn’t a way to stop it wholesale. And there isn’t and probably won’t be. For a while if it ever changes. If this thing grows in occurrence, it might force people into private communities and systems to escape. That particular effect being arguably positive.

🫨 Something must have shifted for the worse if the US admin is taking a step back.