MrVilliam

@MrVilliam@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I feel you, green guy.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sharply agreed. My wife and I both work a lot and don’t have kids or even any pets (yet) and it’s insane to think that there was a time just a short while ago that one person with a high school diploma could work 40 hour weeks and it would cover a mortgage, two cars, multiple kids, and still have money for savings and modest vacations. DINK couples in their 30s like us are finally catching up to the average 20 somethings with a few kids of 40 years ago.

  Shit has changed. And as a result, I think that pro-choice should mean much more than just access to contraception and abortion. Pro-choice should mean that it’s possible to choose to have children too, as in childcare and diapers and everything shouldn’t be so prohibitively expensive that only the top 10% earners should have the flexibility for a pregnancy to be a blessing and not a life-shattering burden. If conservatives want babies to be born, they’re going about it all wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FBI finds hundreds of weapons at home of suspect in Arizona Democratic Party office shooting⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The cops didn’t approach somebody that they suspected of having shot up a building, citing safety concerns. The cops allowed a potentially violent domestic terrorist to continue to have the ability to carry out more attacks because that person was deemed to be too much of a threat to engage with. So if you crime violently enough in Phoenix, there are no consequences due to police cowardice? I mean, the only other way to read that is that the police are complicit if not downright supportive of attacks on the DNC office.

  So which is it, police cowardice or police endorsement of domestic terrorism?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla issues 5th recall for the new Cybertruck within a year, the latest due to rearview camera⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Just dropping a link to the relevant, most recent upload from Some More News aka Cody’s Showdy. TL;DW: the cyber truck is an oversized, overpriced, unreliable, terrible design that’s dangerous to everybody in and around it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The litmus test for whether something is a lawful order is to ask what will happen if you refuse. If the penalty for refusal is your arrest, say that you would prefer not to but will comply under threat of arrest. If it actually wasn’t a lawful order but you complied to avoid arrest, you’ll learn from a lawyer and get to sue over that.

  As somebody else noted, driving is a privilege, not a right; if you’re pulled over for a traffic offense, you’re obligated to hand over your license and other related documents as requested depending on the state, probably registration and proof of insurance. If you don’t, then in many states it’s assumed that you were driving without being licensed to do so, and you’re probably going to jail.

  On the flip side, if the cop asks to search your vehicle, you can tell him no. Don’t stop him from doing it anyway, just reiterate that you don’t consent to it and fight in court. There are some situations (like you’re under arrest and your car is being inventoried and impounded) in which they don’t need your consent to get in your car. Probable cause also gets them access to your car without your consent.

  If you’re asked to do a field sobriety test, just refuse. Same for a breathalyzer. They’ll probably take you in and have you use a lab machine at the station, but that’s preferable to their bullshit games if you know you’re not doing anything wrong. Make quantitative science be the only evidence. Don’t drink and drive in the first place and you’ll be fine on that front.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This. You have rights, but the police will lie, cheat, and steal their way into getting whatever they want, especially when what they want is for you to waive your rights.

  When stopped by the police (in America), you say “I invoke my fifth amendment right to not answer questions and I don’t consent to any searches and seizures. Am I being detained or am I free to go?” That question starts a clock for what is a reasonable amount of time to detain you for their investigation because you’ve made it clear that you’d like to leave as soon as you’re legally allowed to.

  As for any kind of force, just stay silent and unthreatening. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, and anything you do can be used as rationalization for escalation, which they really seem to fucking love. Be polite when you do choose to speak. Obey lawful commands and let them arrest you if that’s what they’re gonna do. You don’t fight armed thugs in the street, you fight them in court. File complaints and sue when they violate your rights and cause undue harm. Swinging at them or shouting in their face is how you get shot. Let their ego win the moment and then administratively destroy their career and life later on.

  I’m also not a lawyer, but this is what any half decent lawyer would tell you to do. Just shut the fuck up (but invoke your right to shut the fuck up or your silence can actually be used against you) and be as passive as possible so your lawyer has a slam dunk case getting your charges dropped and/or suing the everloving fuck out of them, hopefully nullifying their qualified immunity in the process. Nothing you do or say to the police can help you, but it sure as shit will be used against you. Even things you think are innocuous can corroborate that you’re who they’re looking for, so just shut the fuck up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US grid adds batteries at 10x the rate of natural gas in first half of 2024⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dirty production initiates based on demand. So-called “peaker plants” start up under high demand when cost per megawatt rises. They typically start early in the day as most people wake up and cook breakfast and get ready for work and then shut down after people get home and wind down for bed. More extreme versions of this only fire up for more extreme weather events or when other plants trip offline unexpectedly. If demand is normalized, so too is production, which would phase out dirtier power production like coal and natural gas. As an operator at a combined cycle natural gas power plant, this would force me to find a new job. Which is fine by me. The system needs to be changed to be fixed, even if it causes a little pain for me.

  Think of the grid as a pressurized system. To maintain consistent pressure, demand and supply need to be approximately equivalent. When use is high, the pressure drops so demand goes up to maintain that pressure, so prices per megawatt rise to incentivize power plants to step on the gas pedal to produce more. When use drops off, that production needs to reduce to prevent over pressurization of the grid. With battery storage, that pressure swing diminishes. It’s effectively a pressure regulator.

  Additionally, the home power management system via UPS and inverters does exactly what you’re saying in terms of using it when it’s available. At times of high demand and high cost and low supply, your home could seamlessly switch over to your home battery supply for your energy needs to remove strain on the grid, and this would be attractive to set up through things like proposed tax credits and generally reducing your home energy bill. So at 3pm in an August heat wave, your AC could be battery powered from when you charged while you slept the night before. And you’ll recharge tonight when everybody’s AC has switched off for the most part. All this to say: you’re absolutely right and we already agree, but also we can use emerging tech and legislation to vastly expedite this badly-needed transition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US grid adds batteries at 10x the rate of natural gas in first half of 2024⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  there’s not enough lithium

  I am hopeful that developments in sodium ion battery tech will yield different strategies. The weight and energy densities vs cost and abundance mean that it makes more sense (at this time at least) to reserve lithium ion battery tech for more mobile use cases like handheld devices and EVs, but use sodium ion battery tech for things like grid storage or home energy management solutions. I dream of a day in the next decade or two in which virtually nobody bothers to have a generator for emergency home power and instead opts for a UPS with inverters and chargers hooked up to a home battery, allowing not only emergency power, but a “smart” system to power the home via battery during high grid demand and charge during low demand, normalizing grid supply curves and making power bills cheaper for all. The path to this starts with big scale early adopters like hotels and apartment buildings, which could easily supplement energy needs through solar panels on their large roofs at the same time.

  For all the enshittification we’re seeing across most industries, I am cautiously optimistic that we might be living at the edge of an energy revolution. We may see fucking huge fundamental changes to our energy infrastructure within our lifetimes, and that’s one of the few things I’m excited about for the near future. It’s unfortunate that it’s taking a crisis to force these changes, but it would be a great pivot nonetheless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That only happens if you click “I don’t like this video.” Click “I’ve already watched this video” and it knows that you didn’t dislike it. Trust me, I’ve been doing this for a while now and it still properly recommends videos. It just cleans up your recommended queue because it knows that you’ve already watched those ones in particular. I’ve watched a lot of music deep dive content this way because the ads stupidly will interrupt at the worst moments and ruin the flow, but that kind of content still shows up on my feed all the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not tempted to sign up for something if I don’t even know what the features are. Maybe some of their dumbass ads should be for their own fucking product lol. I assumed that it was free from ads, and I think you can download videos and play with your screen off on your phone? Idk, Vanced has been great for me on my phone. And I wouldn’t have bothered to get that set up in the first place if the ads and lack of features weren’t so disruptively intrusive. If they find a way to shut down every way of getting around their overreaching bullshit, I’ll opt to fund a few respectable creators directly rather than pay for the platform.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  After watching, click do not recommend and say that it’s because you’ve already watched it. Problem solved.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pro tip: open YouTube in Chrome, signed into your YouTube account. Allow the algorithm and your subs to continue recommending videos. Find one you wanna see. Copy link address. Paste it into Firefox with adblock, not signed into Google/YouTube. Prosper.

  Just watched a YouTube video on my PS5 earlier today while cooking a food and saw for the first time that they will shoot an ad with a “next” button that skips to another ad, and then there’s a “skip” button countdown. Ridiculous. I wouldn’t bother with adblock if the ads were reasonable.

  Here’s a free idea, YouTube: build in the ability to add videos to a simple temporary queue and then only put ads in at the very start or very end of videos so they aren’t intrusive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People are using ChatGPT for therapy—but is it a good idea?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Betteridge’s law of headlines strikes again. If the headline is a question, then the answer is almost always “no.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Disney Seeking Dismissal of Raglan Road Death Lawsuit Because Victim Was Disney+ Subscriber⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if it weren’t an expired trial for Disney+ though. I think it’s incredibly unreasonable that an agreement to arbitration related to your streaming service should apply to restaurant liability. No reasonable person would believe that they should check the clauses of their Paramount+ contract before eating a Sonic the Hedgehog chili dog from the spot in the park next to the aaahh real monsters log flume ride. If we decide that that’s how we should legally be living, then it’s absolutely time to rip subsidiaries out of the hands of parent companies. When there are only like 6 companies in the world, there is no legitimate competition. I reject the logical conclusion to this strategy, which is that we are cash cow consumers, paying a subscription for company membership to continue being alive and waiving all personal freedoms and choices.

  It’s way past time to break up these gigantic conglomerates. But better late than never.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The retirement savings crisis: Why more Americans can’t afford to stop working⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And all these “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” keep on voting to keep it that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A key part of America’s economy has shifted into reverse⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When wages stagnate and necessary expenses like rent and groceries skyrocket, people stop having extra money to blow on “films and high-profile concerts.” Runaway corporate greed did this. As for unemployment, if you weren’t gonna afford rent whether you worked your shitty job or not, wouldn’t it make more sense to just not go to work?

  A lot of top American companies have drastically inflated value based on stocks rather than actual profitability; eventually that will become too obvious to ignore and there will be a feedback loop bank run that crashes the market. Once that finally happens, then we can maybe see something like a 21st century New Deal. Since we’re apparently not gonna reform our economy, it’s doomed to fail and then it’s either reset or it’s the fall of the empire. And because economies have become so interconnected, it won’t just be America that feels the crash, and probably not just the western world either. We’re all pretty well fucked because we’re all in this together.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube stopped working for me today when using uBlock Origin in Firefox or Vivaldi with anti-ad enabled.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m okay with seeing an acceptable level of advertisement. Content creators have ad reads within their videos which are skippable, and they’ve resorted to that because YouTube doesn’t pay very well. It used to be that you’d get a short ad at the start of every video or two, and maybe another short ad per 7 minutes or so. Now, it’s pretty common for every video to have at least 20 seconds of ad before starting and another 10-30 seconds of ad every 3-5 minutes or so. I like watching on my PS5 while doing chores, so I’m subject to all of these ads. I actually have fully abandoned videos halfway in because of ads that were 60 seconds before I would have the option to “skip” the ad.

  I pay for enough things in my life that I was okay with the trade-off of the ads on YouTube. Now, it’s (no joke) about 5 minutes of ads interrupting a 20 minute video, and there’s usually a 2 minute ad read within that 20 minute video, so really 7 minutes of ads per 18 minutes of content. But it’s not really 18 minutes of content because there’s an intro, an outro, and a “remember to like, comment, subscribe, and smash that bell” bullshit too. It’s roughly 2:1 ratio of actual content to ads and fluff. I’m not fucking paying to take it from 2:1 to 3:1 and they can eat my entire asshole for even suggesting such a thing. Maybe instead of trying to hold eyeballs ransom with the choice of either subscription payments or and overabundance of ads, they should charge for uploading videos to their servers. Sound like a terrible idea? Then I’m sure they’ll do it within 5 years. Because fuck everybody, that’s why.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  PSA: On PS5, after launching your game, hit the PS button. If there are activities, you can probably hit square to resume. This speeds through all the startup wankery and the main menu straight to loading your save. It rarely saves time, but it means you can launch your game and walk away to get a glass of water or whatever. I enjoy it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I was reminded of this after my phone autocorrected "honestly" into Throckmorton.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But he wasn’t a throck.

  He was a Throck_morton._

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Maybe those 20 seconds were because of the lack of getting raises?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Punishing all of your employees because someone is doing nitrous in the walk-in?

  Collective punishment is a war crime. Send Miranda to The Hague. /s

  But really, Miranda fucking sucks and I hope everybody quits that shitty boss and gets a better job with a boss who doesn’t try to gaslight them into infighting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut - Launch Trailer | PC Games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For any confused time travelers, no, Sony doesn’t own countries yet. Disney isn’t even there yet. We’re still a couple of years away from that, I’m guessing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hearing is be-leafing: Students invent quieter leaf blower⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, they’ve moved on to “DEI” as their racist dogwhistle now. Keep up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I never thought about it til now, but is it possible to just use a baby penguin to mips clip through? Or is mips (or that specific door) functionally different somehow? What happens if you try?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The cost-of-living crisis is so bleak that some Gen Zers genuinely fear becoming homeless⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. I don’t think she’s psychologically capable of caring for herself. I think there was some serious trauma because she graduated summa cum laude to get her ME degree, so to go from that to barely holding low level jobs like cart pusher has been pretty jarring to watch. But yeah, at the end of the day, everybody deserves food and shelter and healthcare.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The cost-of-living crisis is so bleak that some Gen Zers genuinely fear becoming homeless⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m 35. I was homeless for a short time when I was 23. My sister who is 4 years older than me has been homeless a few times, but she has her own issues. I know a few people around my age who were homeless for short times. It’s becoming a rite of passage in this country to experience becoming unhoused, and it’s really fucking sad how normalized it’s becoming.

  Interest rates are through the roof right now at the same time that rent is through the roof and people wonder why homelessness is on the rise. Meanwhile, wages haven’t budged but grocery trips have gone up 100-200% in the past 5 years. Companies claim “supply chain” but the reality is that they raised prices when they had believable temporary reasons and never saw any reason to reduce them back down. Hence record profits. We’re being fucked to the limit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at Twitter⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  he has a highschool masturbation related injury that causes one of his arms to constantly ache

  Source? I’ve never heard of this (never cared much about him or Twitter) and tried to look it up, but I’m not seeing it anywhere.

  I don’t understand how anybody can do something for a while, make millions or even billions off of doing that thing, and then they try to do other things to make more money and stay in the public eye. Just buy an island and fuck off for your remaining decades of retired decadence. What more could you want?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Y'all want a shitpost?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  ARRROOOOOOOOO, MFERS!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨54% of young Americans say food costs are the biggest strain on their finances⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Idk where you get off being so insulting and accusatory and then when I validate others’ concerns you think it’s fine to be rude and dismissive to me. Take your own advice and chill out. You engaged in a discussion. You don’t get to tell others to not participate when you’ve invited discussion through your own participation.

  Generally speaking, people are being objectively correct when we say that costs are high and wages have stagnated. You’re right that budgets can be tightened for most people, but I have no reason to believe that people’s irresponsible spending habits are anywhere near as extreme as you are claiming, at least not outside of some rare outliers. And if I’m wrong about that, how does that change anything about how you are choosing to live your life? It really doesn’t. It kinda just sounds like you’re whining about welfare queens or whatever Tucker Carlson’s replacement on Fox is disingenuously getting people riled up about this week. If your finances are fine and others’ aren’t, then good for you. It’s possible that you’re luckier or better at planning or older than the people complaining. Your status doesn’t invalidate the experience of other people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨54% of young Americans say food costs are the biggest strain on their finances⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Idk where your numbers are coming from. I know my rent is higher than average, but I’d like to know where you think you can find an apartment/house where rent is under $1k. My wife and I (DINK because everything’s expensive) have a 2 bed, 1 + 3/4 bath apartment for $3k. Utilities (no cable) add up to about $200. We pay for HBO and Paramount but are cancelling Paramount because it fucking sucks. Groceries are ballpark $50/week because we go to Aldi and don’t buy much processed crap. Giant would be easily over $100 for the same shit. We’re on Google Fi for about $60/month but we’re looking to switch to Mint because it’s about the same cost but for unlimited data.

  Starbucks and McDonald’s are overpriced, but idk why you think it’s impossible to step into either without spending $50+. Maybe that was a voice to text mistake and you meant $15+. My wife and I literally the other day went to a pretty nice sit down restaurant right by the mall and had a delicious lunch plus an alcoholic drink apiece and the bill was about $32, $40 after tip. If somebody finds a way to spend $50 for just themselves at Starbucks or McDonald’s, then that’s obviously an outlier.

  We can only really swing this exorbitant rent because our cars are already paid off and I make us over $100k. Rent is only gonna go up, so we’re actively looking to move, hopefully to own, but everything in our area under like $400k needs serious renovations. The housing market is fucked because of landlording. We will likely be buying a townhouse in a worse location and still pay like $2500/month.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, they’re just doing what they’re being paid to do by special interest groups aka big business. It’s not a bug and it’s not a feature; it’s the point. Optimal profits this quarter. Every quarter is a new quasi generation of executives who want a good quarter before moving on after x quarters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk reveals Tesla software-locked cheapest Model Y, offers 40-60 more miles of range⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Has anybody jail broken these things yet? It can’t be that hard to do, but I’m not tech savvy enough to know where to begin. There has to be a way to circumvent that lock and still be able to manually grab software updates that the user deems necessary (e.g. recalls). Would it be legal? Idk, if I buy a battery, I think I have the right to use the battery. If I buy a seat warmer, I think I have the right to use the seat warmer. If it’s part of the car I bought, I don’t see why I wouldn’t be allowed to use it. Otherwise, what the fuck does ownership even mean?