chiliedogg
@chiliedogg@lemmy.world
- Comment on Shopping app Temu is “dangerous malware,” spying on your texts, lawsuit claims 12 hours ago:
That’s also most of what’s on Amazon these days.
- Comment on The Steam Summer Sale is live now! 13 hours ago:
Doom 2016 was just about perfect. It blended old-shool FPS fundamentals with modern aiming, collectibles, etc.
- Comment on Microsoft has gone too far: including a Game Pass ad in the Settings app ushers in a whole new age of ridiculous over-advertising 18 hours ago:
We should be able to charge them for ad time. You want to paint an advertisement on my car you have to pay me. Why should it be any different when you want to put ads on my work computer screen when I’m working with clients?
- Comment on Back in my day we used Corel WordPerfect at school. 23 hours ago:
Word perfect in 1990 was better than Word is today.
- Comment on Eat the rich? 1 day ago:
And it’s gotten much worse since then. The $185 billion number listed as the highest wealth would be around number 5 now, with Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Arnault all having more than that now I think.
My favorite statistic household net worth (includes cars, houses, retirement, everything).
Median from 2022 was 192,000 Mean from 2022 was 1,063,000
The ultra-rich are such incredible outliers that the mean is more than 5x the median.
The 10 wealthiest people in 2024 control almost 1.7 trillion dollars. That’s more than the GDP of the pooreat 100 countries combined.
- Comment on Galaxy S10 til the wheels come off 2 days ago:
The sound is higher-quality than the files we’re getting from the streams, so it’s fine.
- Comment on Arizona toddler rescued after getting trapped in a Tesla with a dead battery | The Model Y’s 12-volt battery, which powers things like the doors and windows, died 3 days ago:
Hidden manual releases that still require you to push the door through the windows trim. FFS people have already died because of this shit. Why the hell hasn’t there been a mandatory recall on all Teslas over this?
- Comment on Everything old is new again. 3 days ago:
The ndo Uber Eats a few times a week at work. It’s 100% about the time required to do anything else.
The average new house in the city I work for is about 6 million dollars, so I live about 90-minutes away in normal traffic where I can pay $750/month in rent. I work lots of hours (start at 8, usually leave between 6 and 8 with no real break between), so I’m looking at 14-16 hours between when I leave the house in the morning and when I return home. I also think ach night classes at the University on Mondays during the fall and Spring semesters, and have 3 night meetings a month between Council and Planning and Zoning. On the weekends I drive a couple hundred miles out of town to help with my parents.
If paying triple for a meal occasionally saves me 15-20 minutes it’s often absolutely worth it for the stress relief.
- Comment on Get sorted... 4 days ago:
Amen.
Felons can try to make amends. Troy just makes Jager bombs at the office and passes at the 19yo receptionist.
- Comment on The Delusion of Advanced Plastics Recycling 1 week ago:
Doesn’t matter if the plastics never make it to the recycling center. Only around 5% of plastics in the US get recycled. Sometimes that’s because it’s cheaper to not recycle or because the particular plastic is non-recyclable, but most of the time it’s because it just gets thrown out with the rest of the garbage.
Sorting and separating materials en masse is by far the most difficult part of the process.
- Comment on Students’ Leaf Blower Suppressor To Hit Retail 5 weeks ago:
Back when I used a Weber charcoal grill I’d bust out the blow dryer.
- Comment on Students’ Leaf Blower Suppressor To Hit Retail 5 weeks ago:
I also use mine when starting a fire. Way easier then using a pot lid of blowing.
- Comment on Texas power prices briefly soar 1,600% as a spring heat wave is expected to drive record demand for energy 5 weeks ago:
It’s almost like they have a financial incentive to pull this shit.
In 2000/2001 this same shit was being done in California, leading to rolling blackouts and record-high energy prices. One company was buying all the plants and shutting them down for “maintenance” specifically to increase energy prices.
There were going to be congressional hearings over it in early 2022, but that company was Enron, and at the end of 2001 they collapsed due to other bullshit they were pulling.
- Comment on Either way, I'm getting super drunk. 1 month ago:
On hand? Household sharpies disappear a day after purchase.
It’s why I stopped buying them in packs. I no longer lose 5 at a time.
- Comment on Too soon? 1 month ago:
And it was Flavor-Aid. I don’t know how they expected to spend the money they saved buying the cheap shit.
- Comment on FCC explicitly prohibits fast lanes, closing possible net neutrality loophole 1 month ago:
The FCC really started pushing for net neutrality in the Bush administration.
In 2005, the Madison River Telephone company (now Lumen/CenturyLink) blocked Vonage from using its networks and the FCC stepped in to stop them. They then established 4 principles of an Open Internet:
Consumers deserve access to the lawful Internet content of their choice.
Consumers should be allowed to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement
Consumers should be able to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.
Consumers deserve to choose their network providers, application and service providers, and content providers of choice.
In 2009, they overtly added the principle of non-discrimination, and in 2010 they made the principles official with the Open Internet Order.
Comcast sued and got the order thrown out, so they started the prices of reclassifying broadband, and the fight reached fever pitch in 2014 when it looked like the FCC was finally going to win for us.
But between 2012 and 2016, the ISPs changed their tactics. They stated colluding with the major tech and streaming services pitching net neutrality as a good thing for the established businesses that could pay the ransom or engage in partnerships. A good example was T-Mobile exempting Netflix from their 2gig data limit on cellular plans. T-Mobile was able to advertise the partnership as a good thing instead of an assault on users and the open internet.
Then the Trump administration took over and took a huge steaming dump on the FCC along with everything else, and the Biden administration just spent the better part of 4 years just trying to seat a commissioner to reinstate open internet.
I’m not optimistic we’ll have it for long.
- Comment on Microsoft Closes Redfall Developer Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush Developer Tango Gameworks, and More in Devastating Cuts at Bethesda 1 month ago:
I think they expected more casual gamers to sign up for game pass while the more dedicated among us would still be buying new products.
Honestly, if they’d probably be doing better if they put games on there day 1. Sony doesn’t put their biggest titles on PS+ at launch for a reason.
Halo and starfield had shit sales because we didn’t have to buy them. If they required people to buy the triple-A in-house titles at launch, the double-A stuff like HiFi Rush could still be released on gamepass day 1 as an incentive for people to subscribe.
As it stands, Starfield and Forza burned the money that should be used for HiFi Rush and Ori.
- Comment on Microsoft Closes Redfall Developer Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush Developer Tango Gameworks, and More in Devastating Cuts at Bethesda 1 month ago:
If they play it exclusively, sure. But people play tons of games on Gamepass. HiFi Rush and a dozen other games splitting that $15/month/account is a lot less rosy.
I’ve had Gamepass since the beginning, and since it was launched it I’ve bought maybe 1 or 2 Xbox games that weren’t on gamepass, whereas I used to average 2-3 a month. My overall spending on games has dropped massively since getting gamepass - especially on Xbox.
- Comment on "PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" 1 month ago:
Not just any old malware, but insecure rootkits that allowed ANYONE to have total control over the system with their own malware above the OS-level with no way to even know the malware was there.
- Comment on Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production 1 month ago:
The shitty thing right now is grid connection is required by pretty much any building code, and the utilities are getting wise to solar. They’re moving a lot of the fees from power use to connection and line maintenance. My family was looking at solar, but since 2/3 of their power bill is just to be connected to the grid it wouldn’t save enough to make economic sense.
- Comment on Is Boeing in big trouble? World's largest aerospace firm faces 10 more whistleblowers after sudden death of two 1 month ago:
I was talking to someone the other day who was really bent out of shape over an extremely unpleasant customer. The kind of interaction that sticks with you for years.
I told my perspective on people. We tend to remember remarkable things - stuff that really stands out from the normal. The news media does the same thing. Normal, everyday stuff isn’t “newsworthy.”
So when an asshole customer stands out that much, it’s because it’s such a rare experience. People are mostly good, so the goodness doesn’t stand out.
- Comment on The retro Nokia phone everyone owned 25 years ago will get a reboot soon – and yes, it has Snake 1 month ago:
It could always be used to level a foundation.
- Comment on Elon Musk Laid Off Supercharger Team After Taking $17 Million in Federal Charging Grants 1 month ago:
Notice how he waited until the major American vehicle manufacturers decided to move to the Tesla charging standard for future models.
Killing the charging network kills the EV market.
And on an entirely unrelated note, the Saudis financed the Twitter buyout…
- Comment on checkmate, big geology!! 1 month ago:
It’s neat seeing someone learn about Mt St Helen’s for the first time. It was such a big deal in the 80s that I can’t remember not knowing about it. It makes me excited to discover major events I know nothing about…
Anyway… The thing with it wasn’t necessarily the size of the eruption. There have been much, much bigger eruptions. It’s that it was one of the first with really good footage (since it was one of the earlier predicted eruptions), it occurred in the US, and it blew out sideways instead of the top.
- Comment on Not happening, dude 1 month ago:
Oddly enough emissions standards are one of the major reasons vehicles are getting so big.
In 2012 fuel economy standards were changed as a response to the manufacturers calling everything a truck to get around regulations (seriously - they classified the PT Cruiser as a truck in the 2000s). So now standards are weighted based on vehicle footprint instead of by class.
Notice how around 2012 was when the American auto manufacturers stopped making the old Rangers, S10s, Dakotas, etc? And now that the Ranger is back it’s as big as the older F-150s and the F-150s are the size of a small airport? And as the CAFE standards get tougher over time the vehicles keep growing?
It’s easier to just make the trucks bigger every refresh cycle than to make them more efficient, so that’s what they do.
- Comment on YouTube Tests Showing Ads When You Pause a Video, Calls it ''Pause Ads'' 1 month ago:
When it was hemorrhaging money?
We’re in a weird time where all the tech companies are being told at once that they need to start being profitable, and at the same time the EU is cracking down on lots of the shady shit they’ve been using to control the bleeding to this point.
The internet has spent the last 20 years developing an economic model that’s quickly becoming unsustainable, and none of the big web companies seem to have been prepared.
- Comment on I am the thing that goes *thump* 'Fuck!' in the night 2 months ago:
International Residential Code §R311.7.5.1
- Comment on Meta spent $4.3 billion on its VR division in three months, and made *checks figures* $440 million in return 2 months ago:
Of course it’s better than not having the write-off. But it’s not like it’s free.
Business expenses aren’t profit so they aren’t taxed because it’s money you didn’t actually make.
Since most businesses operate on a small margin, removing tax deductions would make tax burdens higher than profits.
And it’s not like that camera lens isn’t being taxed. I’m buying it from a company that pays taxes on its profits and payroll and whose employees pay taxes, and on top of that I’m paying sales tax (to a different entity of course).
- Comment on Meta spent $4.3 billion on its VR division in three months, and made *checks figures* $440 million in return 2 months ago:
Write-offs are entirely misunderstood by people. Writing off losses doesn’t magically make loss profitable.
I’ll use myself as an example. I teach underwater photography at a university as a side gig. Last year I made about $3,000 teaching the class, and I also spent about $1,000 on underwater camera gear for the class. Because of that I get to reduce my taxable income by $1,000, so it’s as if I made $2,000.
At my tax bracket a write-off reduces my income taxes by 22% of the expense. So on a thousand-dollar purchase I’m still losing nearly 800 bucks.
- Comment on TikTok's CEO is feeling the pressure and users are freaking out 2 months ago:
They aren’t attempting to solve a problem. The political right wants to buy TikTok to control a space used by millions of young voters.