I wanted to buy music, but a CD that I got in the 00’s had some “protection” so that I couldn’t rip it and listen to it on my MP3 player.

Now, I ripped it from a Linux computer and had no problems, but was so upset that the record companies tried this. I realized that it’s not about right or wrong, but just about power and money.

Godzilla was from 1954!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_(1954_film)

Definitely worth watching.

https://archive.org/details/BigGMovies

That was a wild ride!

DuckDuckGo-ed

In Holland we have wooncorporaties, which are non-profit companies that own apartments and rent them out. They are cheap, and usually there is a maximum income for tenants. There is a waiting list, and a lot of people add their names as soon as they turn 18.

The Dutch housing market is fucked, but these are good, and would not be possible if you restricted them to a single apartment.

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The biking culture in Amsterdam is fine. The problem is tourists standing on the seperate bicycle lanes - colored red, with pictures of bicycles on them - and thinking that they are being assaulted when a cyclist rings their bell to wake them out of their cannabis-induced stupor so they can get to work.

Fat bicycles modified to go faster than 25 km used to be a problem, but they get stolen so quickly now it’s less of an issue. 😆

Fluid ounces measure volume, so analogous to liters. As opposed to ounces which measure weight, so analogous to newtons, although everyone uses kilos to measure weight in day to day life.

There are also Troy ounces, which are for precious metals, but I honestly couldn’t say what those measure…

No. Men between 18 and 25 have to register with the government, but that’s it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_System

The federal wage for tipped workers in the USA has not changed since 1991. It remains at $2.13 per hour.

Most states have a higher minimum, but 15 states use the federal value:

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped

The population of those states is about 107 million people, so this is for about a third of the overall US population.

Most people who get a tip are paid by the hour by their employers in the US (and everywhere else that I know). Tips are a portion of the cost of the meal, usually.

Imagine in 1979 that 30% of the cost of a meal went to server salaries. Imagine that now it is 15%. Either the server takes a 15% pay cut or that money gets paid directly by the customer as extra tip.

Pick the minimum amount that you have felt.

Presumably your partner is not going to say, “You said that you would leave for a new person if they were 35% better, and Alex is clearly 70% better than me for you!” If for some reason at that time you felt your amount was 75% better so you stayed.

It’s basically an artifact of how pay is set. The USA has a system where pay for certain professions is adjusted only by a new law. Since in capitalism the capital class has power over policy and the working class does not, the tendency is to resist increasing salary.

Now for most workers this would simply be untenable, but for jobs that get part of their income through tips the workers can make up the difference by increasing the portion of their income they receive through tips.

So over time the tip rate has increased. It’s actually an interesting proxy for how fucked capitalism has become in the USA. The higher the percentage of cost that workers need to receive semi-formally through tipping, the more the imbalance between capital and labor.

It was in the 1970s.

I had a Helios that literally just started having trouble powering SATA disks a few days ago. I got it in 2019 I think, so only 5 years of life.

I use Linux LVM and either ext4 (for older volumes) or btrfs (for newer volumes, because I want the checksums across the data) so in principle I could throw the disks in a PC as a temporary solution.

I have put the disks in SATA to USB 2.0 caddies, and the Helios 4 kind of still works, but I’m ordering a couple of Orange Pi 5 and with USB 3.0 disk enclosures to replace it. It was kind of time anyway, since Nextcloud has dropped support for 32-bit CPU.

“And by the way, Earth even has at least seven different quasi moons dancing around us right now!!! The most recent one was discovered in 2023!”

Presumably this includes Cruithne.

The US government is shipping weapons to Israel, so yes, it is also participating in genocide. The laundry list of US crimes goes back to the birth of the nation and did not stop for a single moment.

China is not great, but don’t be fooled, the USA is an imperialist power built on a pile of bodies, both foreign and domestic.

Or join the EFF which already does great work in this area. They don’t always succeed, but I doubt a GoFundMe could do better.

I don’t see the word “free” anywhere in that image, do you?