sj_zero
@sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
- Comment on Do you have any “headcanons” (so to speak) about the Star Trek TNG characters? 4 hours ago:
You kind have to admit that Star Trek isn't much of a post-scarcity socialist utopia.
For one thing, it's viciously elitist and hierarchical. You'd think a "post-scarcity socialist utopia" would have ways that a decorated captain would be able to get their hands on a ship in a pinch, but every Star Trek captain has had to steal a ship at some point because turns out there aren't a lot of them and they don't hand them out very easily.
Now you might say "Yeah but they can't just give out prime war assets to whoever asks for them!" -- at one point the ship they steal is an Enterprise that's being decommissioned -- you can't even use their junk without permission! Then ended up sending half the fleet after a piece of junk they were in the process of throwing out!
"We're delivering food and medical supplies to the colonies!" why? Why is that a thing you need to deliver? I thought this was post scarcity?
For another thing, Seems to me like there's plenty of racism in the star trek world. I mean, you don't want to be a borg, and God forbid you're one of soong's androids, you'll be on trial because they want to dissect your brain.
God help you if your ancestors were genetically modified, that's a jailin'.
Wanna live on the wrong planet? That's a jailin'.
Wanna stop a pre-warp civilization from being destroyed? that's a jailin'.
Wanna be a pre-warp indigenous civilization and not be destroyed if the Federation wants your planet? that's a jailin'.
Wanna get trained at star fleet academy without being part of the top 0.1%? You know that's a jailin'.
wanna be a hologram and get too uppity? That's a deletin'.
Wanna be a combination of two of the captains pet crew members and you don't want to be separated again? That's a murderin'.
Wanna be inconvenient to the fleet? That's a section 31...in'.
Some utopia. Some socialist utopia.
But look on the bright side! If the shiny headed captain wants to bang your mom, maybe you'll get made a member of the bridge crew anyway! Hope you have a hot mom!
But uh oh! Sorry Wesley, you got kicked out of the academy, you have to go off with space pedo now or no space for you! Maybe if your mom was seven of nine instead? "Your mom is seven? Never mind then, no space pedos for you because I want to get in that skintight catsuit!"
It's actually a technocratic aristocracy where we get to see the aristocratic few and only occasionally see the earth tone bedecked underclass in establishing shots.
Oh, we do get to see a space autist in Barclay -- oh, and he's mocked and ridiculed and belittled, and they're looking for any chance to get rid of him. Utopia, ladies and gentlemen! (Let's not talk about the fact that he's not allowed to be a space autist, but anyone is allowed to use the holodeck to create bangable versions of real people you've met or are likely to meet. Turns out the hierarchy can't enter yellow gridlines, go ahead and bang the ship's doctor, or the hot lady who's real good and making the space ships go fast good!)
"We're so advanced because we don't use money" great but who needs money when the highest ranking aristocrats get to choose exactly how all the capital gets used and the lowest ranking proleteriat can just die because there's no star ships available to deliver supplies this week?
"You don't understand! We're morally superior! We've ended want! We've elevated the common man to a new level!"
Yeah, that's exactly the logic by which the natives in America were subjugated. "Good news! We're bringing you Jesus and freeing you from your heathen ways!"
To be honest, Voyager is really great because it lays bare the fascist undertones. The young, attractive crew in nice uniforms walk around the pristine ship and live under the thumb of the God-King Janeway who will kill you if she can get 2 crew members out of it, and will destroy entire civilizations if she deems it acceptable.
But don't worry, she got her comeuppance by.... being promoted to Admiral (and that's not in Picard, that's during the movie timeline)! But don't worry, our good pal Picard, he.... was kicked out of Star Fleet for having political opinions the people higher on the hierarchy (I guess Janeway?) didn't like. How embarrassing. I guess he just didn't murder enough crew members to get them to multiply like firing neutrons at an atom until it splits.
While we're talking about Picard, let's talk a bit about holograms and synths. Why does star trek need EMH mark 1s cleaning plasma conduits in a socialist utopia? Why does star trek need mass produced worker-synths in a socialist utopia? Is it because they need slaves and they're not allowed to use black people anymore in their space aristocracy? Sounds a bit like a Greek or Roman socialist utopia.
But all joking aside? It's the space military-industrial complex. It's Space America minus the capitalism and the democracy. Far from a socialist utopia, unless joining space Raytheon is socialist utopia.
Maybe Q was right and humanity is just lucky he picked the francophone shakespearian hawk-tua who bamboozled him with bullshit into thinking humanity wasn't still a savage child-race?
- Comment on Do you have any “headcanons” (so to speak) about the Star Trek TNG characters? 8 hours ago:
I like to think that after his episode in TNG, Scotty went on to have all kinds of adventures in his little shuttlecraft.
When I was a kid, I'd draw his little shuttle craft showing up in battles against the borg and the like.
- Comment on Really Who watch it? 20 hours ago:
Ironic. That same starter pack means I'm probably gonna read it. And the light novels.
- Comment on Beelink ME mini is a NAS with an Intel N200 processor and support for up to 6 SSDs 1 day ago:
Depends on the SSD. I've only ever had one SSD become read only, and I've seen a lot of failed SSDs.
- Comment on Beelink ME mini is a NAS with an Intel N200 processor and support for up to 6 SSDs 1 day ago:
SSDs dominant failure modes of catastrophic failure?
- Comment on i frankly don’t care what your excuse is. 1 day ago:
Everyone has a choice to take the bad parts of their life and reject them or to choose to make them a lesson on what you don't want to see moving forward.
Doesn't mean you don't have empathy or sympathy for people who have hard lives, but it's a dangerous road assuming people aren't capable of choosing for themselves how to behave. We had better have a choice, or nothing can ever get better and we can't really give people freedom since they aren't able to choose for themselves.
Epictitus was a physically disabled slave in ancient Rome, and he said a lot about this sort of thing: people could control his body, but they couldn't control his mind. Now, over a millennium later, that lame slave has his name remembered alongside the philosopher king Marcus Aurelius as people of great virtue.
- Comment on Solar Panel Waste is Tiny—Coal & Gas Emit Hundreds Of Times Mass Per MWh - CleanTechnica 1 day ago:
Interesting. It doesn't take any energy to produce solar panels, and no part of the process of building one produces any waste. Til!
- Comment on US bank regulator lays out plans for 20% staff reduction, emails says 1 day ago:
It's gonna be tough with 20% fewer people pinging back and forth between the banks and the regulator. Some of the banks demands might not get met.
- Comment on How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh 3 days ago:
From where I'm standing, everyone on Earth should be running a yacy node. It isn't perfect or even great, but it's the only truly free search option, and it only gets better the more people use it.
There are presently 8 times more people seeding a single torrent of the Minecraft movie than were running yacy nodes at any point in the past month. If people really care about the danger Google poses, they ought to be participating in a solution. Even with its flaws, if there were to be a sudden boom in the use of the software, that alone could end up encouraging individuals and organizations to put more resources into it.
- Comment on Wendy’s Declines to Apologize for Mocking Katy Perry’s Blue Origin Space Flight 5 days ago:
I don't have any love for megacorps who try to be funny on social media....
....but those were pretty funny.
- Comment on Ubuntu 25.04 upgrades halted due to Kubuntu users getting a broken desktop 5 days ago:
No lies detected...
I'm brave. I'll run anything on the bleeding edge. I main Debian sid.
But that thing, it scares me.
- Comment on Need help getting domain to resolve over LAN 5 days ago:
I've got a similar problem at home, and I use a really straightforward solution: since the problem manifests on my pcs, I just add my services to the hosts file. It's particularly good when I'm working on my next cloud, because sometimes you end up with a lot of data moving back and forth, and you don't really want to hit your router to hit the outside world to hit your internal server when you don't need it. I just sent it to resolve my main services to the internal IP address, and the best part is that even when the internet is down and DNS isn't available, my services keep on humming away. I might not even realize.
- Comment on Ideas for Hosting on a 2009 Netbook? 1 week ago:
The n280 is specifically limited since it's 32-bit, but low powered machines can be useful regardless. Two of the servers in my empire of dirt are atom d2550s, and I'm even able to run proxmox on them (since that model is 64-bit), but in terms of bare metal, they were able to run Matrix conduit, ejabbered, a nostr relay, and for a while my searx and yacy instances. (Though as I recall the cpus lack of instructions eventually stopped me from running searx on that hardware) I think I was even able to run invidious.
If it's just for you, it would surprise you how much you can do with a very small amount of CPU power.
Another thing that a machine like that might be useful for is a jump box. You can just put a very light distribution on it, and make it accessible to the outside world and one way or the other (secured of course) so you can hop into it if you need to do any remote administration.
The one thing that I found when I was using stuff that was particularly low powered is drive latency matters a lot. If you are using an SSD for storage, even much faster processors end up spending a lot of time sitting there waiting for the spinning hard drive to get to where it needs to be so you can be a lot more efficient with less CPU power.
- Comment on Classic post-nuclear shooter Metro 2033 Redux is now free to keep on Steam and GOG 1 week ago:
"classic"
Nnnooooooo! That's not true! That's impossible!
- Comment on Hedge fund billionaire says US may face ‘worse than a recession’ from Trump tariffs 1 week ago:
There was a lot more in that interview than "tariffs bad".
“Right now we are at a decision-making point and very close to a recession,” Dalio said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “And I’m worried about something worse than a recession if this isn’t handled well.”
The hedge fund billionaire said he’s more concerned about trade disruptions, mounting U.S. debt, and emerging world powers bringing down the international economic and geopolitical structure that has been in place since the end of World War II.
“We are going from multilateralism, which is largely an American world order type of thing, to a unilateral world order in which there’s great conflict,” he said.
Dalio said five forces drive history: the economy, internal political conflict, the international order, technology, and acts of nature such as floods and pandemics. Trump’s tariffs have understandable goals, Dalio said, but they are being implemented in a “very disruptive” way that creates global conflict.
The thing is, Dalio has been warning about this for years now. Here's a link from 2023 where he was talking about disruptions:
Here's a link from 2021 where he was warning about the same thing:
Here's a link talking about him sounding alarms in 2019:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/ray-dalio-burning-man
What he's warning about is something more like Peter turchins secular cycles. A perfect storm is approaching that could lead to a revolution or war or the end of the American empire. The tariffs are a concern, but a tactical one where the whole board is in play.
- Comment on Geothermal developer Baseload Capital and Google announced the signing of the first corporate power purchase agreement (CPPA) for carbon-free geothermal energy in Taiwan 1 week ago:
Seems like a good region for geothermal.
- Comment on Conduwuit is dead, long live Tuwunnel! 1 week ago:
Runs on hardware that isn't a supercomputer.
I'm using what it's forked from, conduit, and I've hosted my matrix homeserver on an Intel atom D2550 that's also doing like 3 other things. When I tried the same with synapse or dendrite, opening a big chat room took a few days.
- Submitted 1 week ago to economics@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Fund managers worry about Trump’s mental state amid tariff debacle 1 week ago:
To be honest, I am so sick and tired of all these articles...
If you're too stupid to understand the guys way of thinking don't advertise it like you're proud of it. It isn't because it is impossible to understand what he's doing, it's because you just haven't wrapped your head around it.
You don't even have to agree with what he's doing. It's perfectly reasonable to take a look at what someone is trying to do and decide that you don't like it even if it has an internal logic to it, but it isn't some big own on the guy that you don't understand what he's doing.
And to preempt anyone going "well then what's he doing"? The same thing he's been doing since the '80s! It's called the big ask. Start off by asking for something that no one is going to agree to, then when everyone freaks out you pull back a little bit and everyone breathes aside relief not realizing that you just took more territory than they would have originally agreed to. Again, you can disagree with the strategy, but it's perfectly rational to do.
I mean that's even what he was doing with the 51st state nonsense. He asked for the entire country to be annexed, and then he's eventually going to settle for some favorable trade terms. Same with annexing the panama canal. It becomes so routine that the only reason that people aren't realizing what it is is that it is politically expedient to pretend that you don't understand the very basic tactics that he's using. If you can't figure it out by now, that's not something to brag about, that's something to be ashamed of. You've seen this movie so many times and you don't know that the guy with the knife is going to stab the pretty girl who just had sex, it means you're stupid!
- Comment on Trump's ongoing 25% auto tariffs expected to cut sales by millions, cost $100 billion 1 week ago:
I know between Canada and the US, usmca compliant vehicles are exempt. It's one of the earliest items not to have tariffs.
- Comment on Alternatives to Roku/AppleTV for Jellyfin Client 1 week ago:
I use Chromecast with android TV, it's about perfect with jellyfin, and if I were to domit again I'd probably spend the little extra for the 4k model even though my TV is 1080p (more horsepower). You can run a different homescreen to somewhat degoogle it.
Probably not what you're looking for given what you've lined up here, but I live and breathe with it every day and it's great, and as an added benefit you can cast from a lot of services or websites as well.
- Comment on Trump's triple-digit tariff essentially cuts off most trade with China, says economist 1 week ago:
Oh no now we will need to find another country to not have environmental regulations or labor law whatever will we do
- Comment on Trump cuts funding to FOSS projects. 2 weeks ago:
Have you donated to your favorite foss projects this week?
- Comment on Retirees 'stunned' as market turmoil over tariffs shrinks their 401(k)s 2 weeks ago:
Actually, boomers are mostly leftist. It's the young who are really flocking to the right these days.
The boomers voted Republican for more tax cuts during their prime earning years, but now they're all collecting government benefits so they're Democrats again. It was their biggest voting bloc in the last election.
It's actually the case around the world that the youth, and particularly young men, are shifting hard right.
- Comment on Trump's first 50 days mark one of the worst starts for the S&P 500 under any presidency 2 weeks ago:
Whoever won the election everyone should have been positioned as if something catastrophic would happen. Figures such as Jamie Dimon have been sounding alarm bells for a while now, and Berkshire Hathaway had been selling off securities at an unprecedented rate, having more cash in the bank than ever before.
Most indexes are double what they were in 2019. Does anyone seriously think businesses are twice as healthy as they were pre-pandemic?
Obviously Trump implementing global tariffs was the match that set the field on fire, but it is burning because it's filled with dead dry grass.
We've already seen something similar during a Trump presidency: in 2018, Trump implemented high tariffs on China amount many other things and it led the markets down 20% for the year, but the year after that saw markets rise nearly 30%. Now that's not going to happen this time because that was the largest stock market rise in history, but it shows that volatility in the short term doesn't mean low growth in the long term.
So two truths that contradict each other are about the effect of a market crash. On one hand, a shrinking stock market is generally good for inequality. The rent collectors in the stock market are affected more by a stock market drop than people who sell their labor. On the other hand, people who aligned themselves properly probably haven't seen a huge loss in wealth over this -- The Federal Reserve has given us a once in a lifetime opportunity to just park money at the fed and get 5-6% returns with absolutely 0 risk because the fed is the money printer, so if you want to sit out a fairly high risk moment in the market, you're still able to roughly match or beat inflation. Anyone holding such assets when things hit bottom can become immediately liquid and pick up some bargains.
As for why Trump set the field on fire, it should be obvious: he's a mercantilist who thinks America can't succeed without having a current account surplus. In the short term he's totally wrong about that, but in the longer term he's correct, and the increasing overwhelming debt both the American state and the American people find themselves in are evidence of that. You can't keep borrowing money to buy stuff from the third world forever.
The left and the right both are of two minds on the outcomes of merchantilism. On one hand, the left has become pretty anti-borders and pro-free trade, and the business right obviously wants a nice calm environment where they can export their businesses to low cost jurisdictions. On the other hand, they recognize the potential exploitation from rich countries outsourcing work to other countries including not paying workers domestic rates despite domestic profits and avoiding things like environmental regulations by jurisdiction shopping, and the populist right obviously wants the jobs to be in the country because it isn't some 1950s distant memory that America used to have lots of factories.
Agree or disagree with his mercantilist attitude (and most establishment economists would consider it outdated and wrong), he's acting more like a Chinese emperor than an American president -- instead of thinking in terms of quarters or even terms, he's positioning the US over decades. A drop in the short term probably isn't that important through that view, because it's looking at a longer term future.
Consider this parallel. JC Penney is considered a textbook failure for something they did: They stopped lying about "sales" that were always going on and just focused on low prices every day. When they did that, business dropped massively, and quickly they switched back. That was considered evidence that companies shouldn't change strategies like that -- but the rest of the story is that JC Penney went bankrupt after changing back to their own business model. Changing strategies like that was going to hurt in the short term, but low prices every day is how companies much bigger and more successful operate so if they stuck with it they may have survived. Instead they returned to business as usual and had short term success at the expense of long term success.
- Comment on I mean......if you really think about it..... 3 weeks ago:
"A Connecticut Yankee in king Arthurs court" by Mark Twain is a true isekai.
- Comment on Tesla lost more than one-third of its value in first quarter 3 weeks ago:
Yes, one thing people are ignoring in terms of the political stuff is that Tesla is just plain overwhelmingly overvalued. It still has a greater market cap than most other car companies combined, but it's a barely profitable fairly low volume manufacturer. It has just a couple models, and other manufacturers have just one model of many which sell as many and then they also have entire business lines Tesla doesn't. Even Tesla's core auto business is only "profitable" due to government incentives such as green credits, and it isn't obvious they're guaranteed to continue.
I saw a video this week suggesting that stocks have 2 modes: "voting machine" and "weighing machine", and while Tesla has been winning the irrational "voting machine" game for a long time, it's probable the game will change at some point and it'll mean a huge reduction in market cap because the company isn't sanely valued.
Unlike a lot of people who flipped because the media told them to (or because they like or don't like his current politics), I've been telling the same story for years, because it was true, is true, and likely will continue to be true in the near future.
- Comment on 'An Insult To Life Itself': Hayao Miyazaki’s AI Criticism Resurfaces As OpenAI’s Ghibli-Style Image Trend Takes Over Social Media 3 weeks ago:
A perfectly modernist take.
The problem is that modernism is wrong. The universe cannot be explained through that outdated mode of thinking, it just leads to totalitarianism and human suffering.
- Comment on Raymond Chen on connecting USB to PS/2 3 weeks ago:
That is probably the coolest thing I've read today. Thanks for posting it.
I sort of wondered how they did that, and it makes sense from that point of view -- the mouse could do both. Also explains why those adapters probably wouldn't work on other mice today.
- Comment on That Pac-Man, but what if he was a little bit evil, Metroidvania now has a summer release date 3 weeks ago:
"Remember Secret Level, that Amazon show that came out last December? I wouldn't blame you if you already forgot about it"
Imagine assuming people are still watching streaming services.