• 6 Posts
  • 192 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle


  • For anyone on this thread who doesn’t know who Ken Klip is, please check out his free Substack (and subscribe if you can). I wasn’t on Twitter very long (maybe 1.5 years before Elmong took over) but one of the people I value that I ran into on that platform is Ken Klippenstein and I’ve been following him since. He’s amazing at filing thousands of FOIA requests and doing the digging into them that no mainstream journalist does anymore. He also recently quit The Intercept because they were enshittifying far more than he was comfortable with, which for a writer is a huge thing to leave the umbrella of a company like that and a paycheck behind. Writers going out on their own in this climate is the only way we’ll stay even remotely unfucked in the post-information (or misinformation) age.

    Klip fuckin rules. Please give him some due.





  • Adderall is basically chemically identical to meth. The Sacklers are fuckin billionaires for pushing Oxy onto tens of millions of people (who later had to go to the streets for fent and smack to avoid becoming dope sick if they couldn’t ween off successfully). It’s time to stop leaning into this bullshit drug-war rhetoric that was already de-humanizing long before benzo-dope and fentanyl etc hit the market.

    Anyone who opposes medically supervised safer-supply is de facto pro leaving things the way they are, which are illicit drugs being distributed by cartels and gangs at extremely elevated costs to the user, which creates an economic situation that the addicts need to come up with the money to stay unsick by any means necessary.

    In most cases the legitimate cost to produce a dose of a given drug is pennies. Street prices reflect all of the greed and logistics of smuggling them across several borders to get them into the hands of users. And those costs don’t take into account all of the violence and corruption and murder which come into play when cartels and gangs are responsible for those supply routes.

    At the very least safer-supply would bring the cost down for end-users and those drugs would be taxed which could be put back into the system, instead of those profits being taken by assholes with zero concern for who lives or dies. I’m saying this with no love for the government but I would way rather go to a doctor than a street dealer (even while I’ve met lots of dealers who have more empathy than the medical system as a whole). I think that’s pretty fucking easy to parse.





  • Well yeah… you wouldn’t have to use foreign services if a domestic alternative existed. One doesn’t for northern residents, yet. So here we are like many times in the past (like for getting northern people online, or getting them clean water to drink) talking about future, possible, great idea measures that will take place at some point instead of just doing the fucking thing.

    I don’t love Starlink or Musk. However, I do own a Starlink dish and I have used it for the past couple of years for work. I know lots of other people who live in very remote areas who have been using it since it became available to them. Starlink took off in central and northern areas of Canada very quickly because it was the only (good) option for highspeed internet, and still is. And while it would be dope if a canadian competitor came along and made good on their potential, we’re still falling back into the fact that at best a canadian LEO internet company would have to launch their sats in the north for a total of 120k customers. Starlink has the Alaskan market which is upwards of 750k people, already. The canadian customers are just a bonus for them in that region, at that scale.

    Why can’t we get northern people online now as well as develop a domestic solution? I don’t think it’s a stretch to say Telesat looks like another XPlore-net type solution (i.e. half-assed, at best, and maybe will never happen at this point). I’ve worked in tech for 4 years now. Currently for a fully private company, zero public or private/VC funding. But the first company I worked for took an obscene amount of public funding (lockdown subsidies which in fact is how I got hired) and a fuckton of tax breaks before and since. Sadly, they’ve also done a lot of screaming about the suggestion that they should pay their fair share of corporate tax. Not super relevant to this convo, but I do understand in some ways what’s at stake when a company takes public money (and still treats locals like shit). There are lots of examples of this going wrong, so I wouldn’t wanna see it be the only option on the table for any reason.

    At any rate I think we agree that folks should probably have clean drinking water first anyhow.



  • NP! It’s a great app, the dev updates it really frequently and I’ve never had any functional issue with it. I keep meaning to drop onto their git issues board and make a couple of small quality of life suggestions for the UI/UX as I use it dozens of times per day for work (there are some processes that currently take 5 clicks/per that could be reduced to 1 or 2 max) but that is a very small and nice problem to have.




  • It’s an easy reaction to have when you only read the headline. But if you do the math, Starlink already provides service to most of the north at less than $200/mo per person. There are less than 120k people in the northern territories. That 2.2bn works out to something like 85 years of Starlink service per person in the north (assuming everyone there needs an individual dish, which isn’t the case). Myself and a couple of other commentors have done some looking into Telesat as a company and they launched one (1) LEO “test sat” in 2018 and haven’t done a fucking thing since to get northern people online in a timely fashion.

    If you actually talk to people who live in the north most of them who can afford to already have Starlink, because it works far better than Xplore which was the only option previously, for many years. Most northern mining, logging, and oil camps are also getting their workers online with Starlink and have been for a few years already.

    I’ve not a fan of Elon, or the canadian libs, or the conservative party. But this whole discussion is kinda bullshit. As far as I’m concerned Elon Musk is guillotine lube, top of the list. The day after he is beheaded, Starlink as a company will continue operating. Which, frankly, is best-case scenario. idk what else to say about that.


  • There are quite a few high profile (in the media anyhow) cases where nutjobs get off on starting fires, yeah. But the really dark shit starts to happen when (ahem) alternative media sources start to imply that all arsonists are paid state actors and/or sexually aroused political players doing all the arson.

    It’s usually insurance-related. Or accidental. Nothing that sexy in the vast majority of them.

    My favorite was last year during the very real wildfire issues affecting western canada where the flat-earthers kept posting video of actual forestry worker helicopters torching brush piles (something they actually do, during the off-season, to clean up tinder piles) and conflating it with “treaudeauh-paid ANTIFA super-soldiers out to bring in 15 minute cities and permanent state control by burning society to the ground” or whatever the hell. The absurdity of it all kinda turned me on in the other direction, ngl.




  • That was the same issue I had with SyncThing, it just seemed to conk out at weird times and I gave up on it (for that purpose). It’s great for centralizing a directory of files from one machine to another but I didn’t love it for keeping a single file up-to-date with changes coming from more than one point on the network.