herrcaptain

@herrcaptain@lemmy.ca

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herrcaptain ,

I was pleasantly surprised with M3GAN, so I'm looking forward to this. It's got a different writer/director whose work I'm not familiar with, but looking at her IMDB it seems like a good fit for her.

herrcaptain ,

Don't worry - there's a documentary about when this happened last time. We can fix it again.

The Core

herrcaptain ,

Yeah, it's a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine.

herrcaptain ,

I'd go as far as to argue that running a nation has almost nothing in common with running a business.

A business literally exists to make a profit for its shareholders. The owners can try to do good things like pay high wages or give back to their community, but at the end of the day their goal is to make more money than they spend.

A government, on the other hand, should exist to protect and provide opportunities for its citizens to thrive. Generating a profit is largely at odds with that goal. People should have the same access to opportunities regardless of where in the country they live, and that's going to sometimes mean that functions of the government are never profitable.
That should be seen as okay, but people have been brainwashed to think that taxes are inherently bad, and that businesses are somehow naturally more efficient. I can say, as someone who has worked in business all his life, that that last bit is particularly a giant crock of shit. Businesses are no more naturally streamlined than any other organization. Hell, I'm currently personally leading a task force at my work to try to reduce all the egregious inefficiencies I've uncovered when trying to figure out why we're not making nearly as much money as we should be.

The point is, providing government services doesn't need to be "efficient". If you can make that happen and save the taxpayers money, that's great and you should do it. If that means letting any member of your society slip through the cracks, then efficiency be damned. The government shouldn't be in the business of making money.

And, no, privatizing "inefficient" government services is never the answer. All you're doing there is introducing new inefficiencies - the need for the business entity to make a profit, and the corners they'll inevitably cut to make that happen.

Anyway, I hope I don't come across as jumping on your comment. It sounds like I agree with you - just wanted to tack on this wall of thoughts.

herrcaptain ,

✓ Okay, boomer.

herrcaptain ,

I can't read any of the text, but the one on the left has the vibe of something that would get someone investigated for posting on the War Thunder forums to win an argument.

herrcaptain ,

Absolute poetry:

I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.

herrcaptain ,

Throwing a dart at that poster and letting that determine your fate, right?

herrcaptain ,

I get this. I don't even actively seek that stuff out, but in the interest of staying somewhat informed I follow a lot of news/politics communities here. Negative news obviously sells (in the form of receiving clicks) so a fair majority of my feed is made up of depressing info. I only read one or two actual articles a day, but the summary and/or comments are usually enough to bum me out.

Thankfully the rest of my feed is shitposts, memes, and cute animal pics so it keeps me from actively wanting to die.

herrcaptain ,

It's really not possible unless Lemmy gets a much larger community, but the thing I miss most about Reddit are episode discussions for TV shows. For almost any show, I could be pretty confident that I'd be able to find a post-watch episode discussion. Those are great for seeing how people felt about the episode or to learn things I may have overlooked.

herrcaptain ,

Well if you do start one for The Boys I'll prioritize watching the new season asap so I can contribute to the discussions. It looks like it's already started last week, actually.

As for HotD, I can't help ya there. After the last couple seasons of GoT I lost interest in that world. A shame, as I loved it while they still had books to follow.

herrcaptain ,

Yeah, I'm sure I'll eventually get over my disappointment at what the showrunners did to the original and will be in the right headspace to watch other GoT content, but not yet. I still can't believe what they did to that formerly-beloved show. 😉

Anyway, I just saw your other comment. I'll subscribe right away and will start the new season this week a so as to contribute to the discussion. Thanks for doing that!

herrcaptain ,

I love that even after millennia of human society and culture, I still regularly run into comments that make me think, "Yeah, that's the first time anyone has ever said that."

herrcaptain ,

Buddy, it's a sand crawler - there's plenty of room to live in it. Just park it outside. Zero commute.

#hermitcrablife

herrcaptain ,

Type K looks the happiest.

herrcaptain ,

I literally have no memories of this show, but it was apparently a staple of my wife's childhood. She often sings the theme song at me. As such, I've downloaded it all in anticipation of when our incoming baby gets older.

herrcaptain ,

Half a century feels optimistic. I get the feeling you'll be lucky to keep most of the Constitution intact. (Except for the 2nd amendment, but then probably only for a certain class of people.)

I genuinely fear for y'all, and for my country as your neighbor. I'm starting to feel suspiciously like an Austrian or Czech person in the 1930s.

herrcaptain ,

Given their infamous quality issues, robot guessing at building a car sounds about right.

herrcaptain , (edited )

I got curious about the one where they're on Molly. Here's a pretty quick rundown on it if anyone else wants to learn more.

PBS Article

Edit: Fixed the link.

herrcaptain ,

Oops! Weird - the link shows fine in my app. If the other reply to your post doesn't give you the link you can easily find relevant articles by searching for "octopus Molly drug" or similar terms. It looks like there's a bunch of them out there.

herrcaptain ,

I appreciate the heads up!

herrcaptain ,

My reaction when I saw file explorer:

https://media.tenor.com/zI-884-UK9gAAAAC/wtf-blink182.gif

herrcaptain ,

Probably not in that dude's queen bed (unless y'all are into that).

herrcaptain ,

Exactly! In economics there's a concept called price elasticity (Incorporating two related principles, elasticity of supply and elasticity of demand).

Elasticity of demand is the more relevant one here. Products with elastic demand are those that consumers are quicker to change their buying habits around. For instance, luxury items. Products with inelastic demand are generally actual necessities (like groceries), where you're gonna have to buy them one way or another. You can look to alternate suppliers with better prices, but when they're all gouging you have no choice but to buy from one of them.

In the long run this can indirectly be forced to change. If it gets bad enough that people en-mass started growing their own food at home, this could cause the suppliers to reconsider their prices. (I know that's a far-fetched example. I'm just using it to broadly illustrate my point.)

herrcaptain ,

It's definitely not for everyone. My wife and I have a lot of overlap in our comedy preferences and are both big fans of SNL and everything Mitchell & Webb have done. On the other hand, I Think You Should Leave is my all-time favorite sketch show, but she couldn't even get through the first season. It's got a real sense of absurdism and weird social interactions that aren't for all tastes.

Don't feel bad if you can't get into it - there's tons of great TV out there. No need to waste your life on one show just in case you don't like it. If you weren't into the first few episodes you probably won't like the rest as it's all the same style.

herrcaptain ,

One I'm not seeing on here is The Birthday Boys, which had Bob Odenkirk with a bunch of (if I remember correctly) young UCB comedians. If you've ever seen the show Love or listened to the Doughboys podcast, it has Mike Mitchell from those.

herrcaptain ,

I think you're being given an incomplete picture here. It is a tax write off but it's balanced out by the money they collect. So if they collect 100K in donations, they report that as "income" but it's immediately written off as a charitable donation. Thus, they don't directly get anything out of it as it's functionally a net-zero transaction as far as their taxes are concerned. In fact, it probably ends up costing them a bit once you account for the hours spent by some admin or marketing team getting the program set up and administered.

Obviously they are getting something out of it: As others here have said, they get to brag about all the money they collected for charity. It's possible these big corps also have some convoluted accounting practices that make this further advantageous but on the face of things that's not how it works.

herrcaptain ,

I suppose you may indeed be correct. I always assumed not as it's not like they give you a donation receipt like when you directly donate to a charity. Now that I think of it, however, the donation itself would be itemized on the receipt and could therefore be used as proof in a personal audit. I just never really considered it as I just donate like 2 bucks here or there via this means.

I suppose this also might vary in different jurisdictions.

End of story, I'm willing to admit that I may have been misinformed (AKA wrong) myself.

herrcaptain ,

In my experience I've never received a separate receipt just for the donation portion (again, could just be a regional thing). But as we both mentioned, it'd at least be listed on the purchase receipt itself and could be used as such.

herrcaptain ,

I guess printers really might become the next "friend who has a truck."

herrcaptain ,

Yeah, this sounds like Ken M style pranking. Just playing the fool for some laughs. No one gets hurt, and some people might get a fun story out of it. This is what pranks are supposed to be.

herrcaptain ,

Yeah, I did a double-take when I got to the part about expected wage increases for 2014. I suspect it's much worse now, and was interested to see what Forbes was printing about that as at least these days they're notorious for posting stuff with an anti-labour focus. I can't imagine they'd post an article like this these days.

That said, I'm sure this article is more relevant than ever now and it's a damn travesty that this is what the labour market has come to since the 70s/80s.

I'm on the executive team for a small business that my family bought almost two years ago. Many of us had worked there for years beforehand and absolutely weren't paid what we were worth. As soon as we took over, we started to raise wages across the board (other than sales, who are our own little 1% due to the structure we inherited). Wages are still far from where we'd like them to be, but we're trying our best with the resources at hand while we navigate these first few years of ownership. Shit's not easy for a lot of small businesses and I get that many small business owners are outright taking advantage of their staff. We actively try not to (granted, in the Marxist sense we inherently are) but I realize that most of our staff deserve more than we can currently afford to pay them.

herrcaptain ,

Doctors on X? Of course they're endorsing drugs - they're currently high on MDMA.

Do you get sick of the same songs and how do you combat it?

If I find myself overplaying certain songs, I sometimes have to force myself to take a break because when I don't, I usually end up ruining/disliking the song. I hate when this happens because perfectly good songs that I love end up irritating me because I have heard it too much. Do you stop listening to those songs or just play...

herrcaptain ,

I'm old and vastly prefer to listen to albums in their entirety rather than just specific songs. I'll still sometimes listen to an album on repeat a bunch, but I think this effect is slightly dulled on me because I'm listening to 10ish tracks on repeat rather than just the one.

My wife though - she'll play the same 3 albums on repeat for a goddamn year at a time. I still can't stand The Hives because they're all I heard in our car for far too long.

herrcaptain ,

Yes! When I discover a new band I always like to listen to their stuff chronologically, as you said. At times this can be rough. Some bands start off very strong, but often bands take a few albums before they get good and I have to slog through a few before I find one I like.

I'm having the opposite problem right now. Radiohead's first two albums are some of my favorite ever, but I've never been able to get into their stuff after those two. Currently I'm making an effort to go through the rest of their discography in order to see if there's anything else I like. I'm 5 albums in and there's been a few specific tracks I like, but none of the albums thus far compare to those first two for me. As an album-based listener this is weirdly stressful to me.

herrcaptain ,

Yeah, I grew up collecting vinyl so that's probably what got me into the habit all those years ago.

herrcaptain ,

It looks like eligibility is limited to permanent residents. I can't imagine this would help that much in this case? Someone already living there already has a leg up on finding a job (especially, as the article states, the issue with enlistment is already-high employment).

I'd think they'd have better luck opening this up to non-residents in a French Foreign Legion sort of approach. It seems like a much better value-proposition to someone from an economically-disadvantaged country, especially if it opens the door to AUS citizenship. This veers pretty close to the Starship Troopers "service guarantees citizenship" and as such I'm not saying they should do this - just that I wonder if they considered it if they're having that much trouble reaching enlistment targets.

herrcaptain ,

It's nice to see a fella who cares about the fuel economy of his penis.

herrcaptain ,

It seems like the consensus of this thread is that the name isn't holding it back. That was my thinking going into it, but the article makes some very valid points such as the name (being related to a sexual and sometimes derogatory word) making it a non-starter in some organizations.

I have it installed on all our computers at work for basic image editing, but we're a small business and never gave it much thought. I can absolutely see it being problematic in a school setting, however. More to the point, Adobe has ably demonstrated: get them hooked on your software in school and you'll dominate the market. Imagine if kids had been learning GIMP instead of Photoshop all these years.

Anyway, I've got no dog in this fight. Just pointing out what I see as a valid point in the article.

Also, I like their original name possibility of IMP much better. The mascot could have been a cute little imp instead of ... whatever it is now.

herrcaptain ,

Out of context this means something very different.

herrcaptain ,

Now this is some nostalgia I can get behind. This and Homestar Runner were my go-to time wasters.

herrcaptain ,

Okay, this got me curious. From the wikipedia article on viruses:

Viruses are considered by some biologists to be a life form, because they carry genetic material, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection, although they lack the key characteristics, such as cell structure, that are generally considered necessary criteria for defining life. Because they possess some but not all such qualities, viruses have been described as "organisms at the edge of life" and as replicators.

herrcaptain ,

Thanks for posting this! While my knowledge of biology is quite limited, it's always great to get an informed person's take on an interesting topic.

herrcaptain ,

I don't know how but I do know that those are indeed some fierce eyebrows in that picture.

fathermcgruder , to Asklemmy
@fathermcgruder@jorts.horse avatar

What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I'm having a stroke?

Maybe they're used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn't explain the emails I've had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics' messages?

@asklemmy

herrcaptain ,

Yes! This is what I always associate with older folks texting or emailing. I use ellipses a fair bit for (my attempts at) comedic effect. Some older folks are using them on a whole different level, having this weird habit of ending sentences with them where most people would use a period or exclamation point. It can come off sounding very ominous.

"Bill is coming over."

Okay, cool. Have fun with Bill.

"Bill is coming over ..."

Grandpa, are you in trouble? What's Bill going to do???

herrcaptain ,

Well, I'm old-adjacent and I literally don't think either of my grandpas so much as touched a cell phone or computer in their lives, but I get your point.

herrcaptain ,

Yeah, for me (an elder millenial), I use them in the middle of a sentence in the form of a dramatic pause, or sometimes at the start of a sentence in specific cases. I'm not saying any of this is necessarily grammatically correct (or that the boomers are wrong for how they use them), but this is just what feels closest to regular speech to me.

herrcaptain ,

Yes! You've got the spirit! This other guy with the audacity to think I hadn't already considered that. And before anyone says depth charges, those only work on submarines. Surface to surface missiles? Good luck - the plane is under the surface.

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