rekabis

joined 2 years ago
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[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

There has never been a communist country; only countries run by communist parties.

They were “communist” just as much as North Korea is “democratic”.

Just because a word exists in a name, doesn’t mean that the word actually applies in any fashion whatsoever. The political parties of both the USSR and China were as communist as fish are birds. Which is to say, absolutely not. They wore “communism” as a thin veneer of legitimacy over a bulwark of feudalistic authoritarianism.

And the real clue is in the name: Communism. Communal. No real leaders aside from administrative functionaries. Classless and cooperative. Everything that the USSR and China never was.

Edit: Russia became communist in 1917. By every metric with which you could possibly measure communism, it was dead by 1918.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago

Where is John Wick with diplomatic immunity when you need him?

Canada seriously needs diplomats who know significant levels of mixed martial arts and other forms of defence. And then we need to attach them to groups like this.

Officers like that desperately need to be made to eat their truncheons. Preferably sideways.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 days ago

Pretty sure it screams at us sometimes.

If there was an atmosphere to carry the sound, the sun would be screaming at us at just over 100db.

For reference, sounds at 85db can start causing hearing damage after only 8hrs of exposure.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 days ago

It’s not that we’re not allowed to look at it, it’s that we have oodles of evidence on how severely damaged our vision becomes when we do look directly at it without sufficient protection, and anyone with two functional neurons to rub together isn’t going to be doing any looking unless they are wearing the appropriate vision protection.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 days ago

For the last decade I have been using IISCrypto to neuter older and obsolete algorithms. I just apply the most recent PCI profile and restart.

Now granted, this program is unknown to many security professionals I talk to, which is why I mention it here: it works on all NT versions of Windows after Vista. Super-easy to restrict a system to the stronger and more secure algorithms.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 days ago

Abolish all patents and copyrights, everywhere, except for a creator’s ability to assert “I made this”.

Against Intellectual Monopoly

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 days ago

Don’t mind the rest of the lower left, but I’m there mainly for the antifascist bit.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Have you ever heard Scottish person speak?

Like, seriously nards-deep into full Scottish brogue? It’s like a language that bears zero resemblance to the English language.

Although TBH, have a pretty readheaded lass talk to me in Scottish, and fuck me she could read the phone book and I wouldn’t give a shit I’d just be sitting there catching flies trying to soak it all in.

Relevant example

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

50 shades of grey. The writing was so cringe that I just couldn't get further than one chapter or so.

What I find so bizarre is that the women who go hardest for this stuff tend to be either repressed housewives or hardcore feminists.

Because if Christian Grey had been an unemployed layabout in a decaying double-wide, it would be a horror novel instead of smut. The only reason why it’s smut is because Christian is filthy f**king rich and exemplifies almost every toxic masculinity trait imaginable. And that is in addition to behaving like a controlling abuser.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

In this context I see a baseline as a language that

  1. A majority of the speakers have above-trivial skills in it, say above a sixth grade level in both written and spoken.
  2. More than one-fifth of the population has this ability.
  3. said language has extreme density in certain geographical regions, leading to dominance in those regions

And for some countries, there would be several that could fit both criteria. Switzerland would likely have French, German and Italian meeting all thresholds, allowing all three to be baseline languages.

Unfortunately, French does not meet the minimum-used criteria for Canada, as only 18% of citizens can speak it with any great skill. However, the geographical concentration criteria would likely overrule the usage criteria (via Québec), thereby allowing it to remain a baseline language.

Secondary languages would have similar criteria, only relaxed somewhat.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 65 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Back in the day (mid/late 90s), any download on Internet Explorer had a “file transfer” pop-up with an animation involving a planet (the Internet) sending flying sheets of paper (the download) to a Manila folder (the computer’s file system).

I legit had one client ask me why they couldn’t make the download go faster my moving the planet closer to the folder, or vice versa.

I recall just sitting there for a number of seconds while my poor brain tried to grasp just how badly out-of-whack their interpretation of the universe was.

Spoiler alert: they were a very poor client, and refused to relinquish an entire raft of very poorly thought out or even entirely wrong concepts of computing and the Internet. They were also credulous AF, and while I could have made an arseload of money correcting what they did on a weekly or even daily basis, I just didn’t want that kind of headache.

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sooo… he works multiple part-time jobs?

Weird how a forced technique of the ultra-poor is showing up here.

 

Just throwing my balls around on the orchard…

 
 

And I’m talking about all fascists directly involved in the current coup, from Musky-boy and the DOJ appointee Ed Martin all the way down to the individual DOGE staffers.

At some point, America is going to have it’s own version of the Nuremberg trials, and there needs to be some sort of shadow archival records system that can reliably emerge out the far end with sufficient evidence to make these monsters hang.

 

Under capitalism, envisioning a shift away from fossil fuels is more difficult by the day.

 

Looks like Roblaw’s at it again… robbing the working class to keep obscene profits rolling to the Parasite Class. And I bet the farmer who raised those turkeys get only a few dollars per.

 

This happens both on a feed as well as within a thread.

Happens both on my direct instance as well as on a random instance out there.

I go to scroll, and there is a nearly one-second pause before the screen jumps to where I have scrolled. If I start very slowly, there is no pause, but I am talking about an unreasonably slow start to the scroll.

Working with an iPhone 15 Pro Max, hardware limitations should not be in play here.

Working with the latest version of Avalon.

Curious if I am the only one.

 

I have seen these before, but for the life of me I cannot seem to recall what they are called or what they’re for.

Google search - especially image search, where I’m trying to bring up similar items - is now a total potato and seemingly capped at one screen of results in a secure and sanitized browser.

 

When I bring up an image by itself, I can do a long press on the image and get the app Safari drop-down interface (see attached), which gives me (along with other tools) the option to download the image to my camera roll or to copy the image for pasting elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the Avelon app blocks this action entirely.

If there is a workaround, it gives no indication as to what it is, forcing the user to thrash around and discover the box with the out/up arrow in the lower right.

If there is a way to whitelist this behaviour, there is also no way to inform the user on what setting they need to adjust.

At any rate, this is a noticeably frustrating suboptimal UI/UX, and should be addressed.

 

This is why Galen West is a card-carrying member of the Parasite Class.

And yes, I confirmed the no-shipments, zero-stock with the store manager. 5 days and counting with no stock so far, when the sale started there was maybe 12-24 bottles for 128,000 residents in the city.

 

I particularly enjoy how Google got savaged:

Google has a similar yet slightly different story, where their core product - search - has gone from a place where you find information to an increasingly-manipulated labyrinth of SEO-optimized garbage shipped straight from the content factories.

Google no longer provides the “best” result or answer to your query - it provides the answer that it believes is most beneficial or profitable to Google. Google Search provides a “free” service, but the cost is a source of information corrupted by a profit-seeking entity looking to manipulate you into giving money to the profit-seeking entities that pay them.

The system almost 100% works as intended! But it doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t work for you. It doesn’t work for a vast majority of human beings across the globe. But yet it absolutely works as intended for the Parasite Class, the 0.01% at the very top.

And this is why it’s a cancer of our society. Until it has been excised and replaced with something more humane, human civilization is doomed to collapse. You cannot have an economic ideology that demands infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.

 

In late June 2021 a heatwave of unprecedented magnitude impacted the Pacific Northwest region of Canada and the United States. Many locations broke all-time maximum temperature records by more than 5℃, and the Canadian national temperature record was broken by 4.6℃, with a new record temperature of 49.6℃. Here, we provide a comprehensive summary of this event and its impacts. Upstream diabatic heating played a key role in the magnitude of this anomaly. Weather forecasts provided advanced notice of the event, while sub-seasonal forecasts showed an increased likelihood of a heat extreme with lead times of 10-20 days. The impacts of this event were catastrophic, including hundreds of attributable deaths across the Pacific Northwest, mass-mortalities of marine life, reduced crop and fruit yields, river flooding from rapid snow and glacier melt, and a substantial increase in wildfires—the latter contributing to landslides in the months following. These impacts provide examples we can learn from and a vivid depiction of how climate change can be so devastating.

 

There's no rhyme or reason to the way we publicly fund health services in Canada: six per cent of dental care, 40 per cent of home care in long term care, 50 of drugs, nothing for hearing aids or glasses or contraception. Where's the logic there? As a result, we have the least universal healthcare system in the world. Ponder that for a second. The least universal healthcare system in the world. Not something to be proud of. Medicare does cover everyone, but it covers everyone inadequately. Stated simply, what's wrong with Canadian health care today is that we're trying to deliver 21st-century care with a 1950s model of delivery and funding. We have an Edsel, but we need a Tesla. And my point here is that we need modernization.

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