rekabis

@rekabis@lemmy.ca

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Poisoned trees gave a wealthy couple in Maine a killer ocean view. Residents wonder, at what cost? ( apnews.com )

Wealth and hubris fuel the tale of a politically connected Missouri couple who allegedly poisoned their neighbor’s trees to secure their million-dollar view of Camden Harbor. The incident that was unearthed by the victim herself — the philanthropic wife of L.L. Bean’s late president — has united local residents in...

rekabis ,

If the punishment for a crime is a set fine, then it is a law that targets only the poor; the wealthy will just pay that fine with the spare pennies at the bottom of their pocket as “a cost of doing business” and move on like nothing ever happened.

rekabis ,

And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.

I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.

rekabis ,

In most western countries any unintentional mistake made by the employee is considered a cost of doing business… after all, if such a mistake is doable, there is a problem in the business processes that needs correction.

Now don’t get me wrong, many shady business owners will still try to pin things on employees and take it out of their pay. But that is illegal here.

rekabis ,

Antibiotics.

Their discovery and development is what has directly enabled our sudden rise from 2B to 8B humans in only about a century. Without antibiotics, we would likely still be under 3B humans world-wide. Yes, disease really did kill off a lot of humans back in the day.

Graph out the human population over the last two centuries, and you can even see the very decade when Penicillin use became widespread, along with doctors washing their hands and other basic hygiene tasks.

How to make an old USB brother laser printer wireless?

I have an old Brother laser printer that's been doing fine and doesn't need to be replaced, but it only supports USB. Is there a device besides an old computer/laptop that would make it a shared wireless printer that supports windows machines well? I'm pretty sure i could come up with something myself, but i would prefer an...

rekabis ,

Many modern routers have this exact capability - to take a USB-only printer and serve it up over the network. Even some ISP modem/router combo units are set up to do this. Check to see if your router has any USB ports on the back.

rekabis ,

Any drug made with even a penny of taxpayer money (grants, funding, etc.) should be priced to taxpayer-affordability levels, with any corporation making it beholden to production SLA’s that severely ding them (far more than they could ever make off of the drug) if they cannot meet 100% of market demand.

Plus, set up a government company whose sole purpose is to serve the public by producing drugs at cost for anything that isn’t meeting market demand. As in, massively undercut the Parasites.

Then make this retroactive to all drugs, all the way back, no matter when they were developed.

If a drug company wants to suckle at any teat other than 100% self-funded, they would have to put 100% of their own money towards developing that drug. As it is, there are ZERO DRUGS that haven’t been developed on the taxpayer dime, either in part or in whole.

rekabis , (edited )

Implying that we have a future at all is inherently hopeful

Over the last year I have done a deep dive into climate science, the capitalistic and political responses to it, the collapsing Return on Research, and how modern agriculture at scale is going to be impacted.

If humanity is either not already extinct by 2100, or at the very least caught in an unavoidable terminal decline leading towards it, I would be very, very surprised.

There is a reason why climate scientists have begun to - very grimly - start calling themselves “climate pathologists” and - for the younger ones, at least - avoiding having any children at all.

The vast majority of people have absolutely no clue how apocalyptically bad things are out there, and how on the one side capitalism is whitewashing the problem under the rug, while on the other side right-wing politics are trying to make everyone think it’s all fake.

rekabis ,

Crime is a result of desperation and lack of economic opportunities.

Chronic addictions are a result of untreated/untreatable trauma.

Homelessness arises from poverty and precarious economic conditions, and can trigger both of the prior two.

And yet, these people are voting for the parties that would seek to implement and perpetuate poverty, precariousness, trauma and economic inequality.

…the fuq?

rekabis ,

The Right wants forced intervention

Forced intervention has a near-100% failure rate. All it does is waste taxpayer’s money while making the wealthy (the owners of these “rehabilitation sites”) even wealthier.

It is quite literally another implementation of “trickle-up economics”, explicitly designed to make the rich richer by punishing the poor for their poverty and parasitizing off the incomes of hard-working working-class Americans.

And since forced intervention is no different than forced incarceration without any sort of a trial, I would argue that it is materially worse than doing nothing at all.

rekabis ,

What is the difference between forced intervention and whatever Portugal did when it decriminalized hard drugs?

Portugal treats it as a mental illness health issue, and provides counselling. Only large non-personal amounts are treated as distribution, and therefore, criminal.

Only mental heath professionals can assign intervention, and typically only in cases where the user is a viable threat to themselves or others (imminent danger of harm through violence). This means that the vast majority of users are not coerced at all - they enter into counselling willingly, and with an intent to come clean.

The reason why things have backslid in the last little while has been due to funding cuts, and nothing else. Which is the same as any public service -- funding determines effectiveness.

rekabis ,

Meanwhile in Western society, 40% don’t believe in evolution, flat-earthism and “birds are drones” have moved from silly jokes into serious movements, and a significant minority of people think that COVID was a hoax and the vaccines were made to implant mind-control chips.

No wonder China has surged ahead… even an authoritarian state can easily leapfrog a society crippled by anti-intellectualism, alternative facts, and cultivated ignorance.

rekabis ,

NCS is a company that offers information communication and technology services.

Wait…

he used his laptop to gain unauthorised access to the system using the administrator login credentials.

Okay, what the guy did was immature and shitty, but holy hell this company is incompetent. How did their own internal IT not lock him out of anything even remotely sensitive the moment he was fired?

rekabis , (edited )

I have a different take: I try to not be an unpleasant person.

I suffer from a particularly nasty Voltron of ADD and Asperger’s. High-functioning, yes. But it’s still a non-trivial level of neurological fuckery. This means that my social actions and reactions are… different. Sometimes they deviate significantly from the socially accepted baseline. So to be “nice”? What is nice? How to categorize that, measure that, evaluate that? “Nice” could be different for each person I come across.

So to avoid driving myself crazy, I have flipped things and simply concentrated on not being an unpleasant person. To not be rude, not disrespectful, not frightening or combative or creepy. It ends up being a little easier to categorize, define, and measure in that regard, because it involves not doing something instead of doing something. It is avoiding a baseline instead of trying to meet it.

rekabis ,

cigarette butt fire

What an odd way of describing a bog-standard minuscule-scale forest fire.

I mean, only thousands of trees? How is that news? That sounds like only a few hectares burnt… something that might hit the local/neighbourhood-level news over here in Canada, where we have seen individual conflagrations consume many billions of trees in 2023 alone, even in regions that are classified as temperate rainforests.

And a “short hot spell” lasting only a few days? This is enough to raise alarm, and/or cause dangerous conditions? Wow.

Honestly, this article reads very, very oddly. As if it happened in a place which has never seen a forest fire before. The breathless reporting of such exceedingly minor “devastation” sounds more like something that had come out of the Amazon or the Congo during the monsoon season, where any forest fire at all during a torrential deluge would be equivalently notable.

rekabis ,

Came here to say exactly this, only I wasn’t expecting to be anywhere as concise and erudite as you have been.

rekabis ,

I would break out my violin, but my electron microscope is out for repairs.

rekabis ,

Landlords say this would push them to sell.

Yay? Maybe then it could be sold to people who are desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round.

As in, these homes will be owned by people who actually live in them; non-parasites who aren’t going to be sucking the lifeblood out of hard-working, working-class Americans.

And maybe instead of being landlords, these parasites could actually go out and get a job?

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    rekabis ,

    trying to get him to upgrade to Windows 11?

    If it’s currently running Win7, it likely doesn’t have TPM 2.0, and in extreme circumstances may not even have the SSE 4.2 that 23H2 requires (Win11 will then fail to boot).

    And while a RUFUS-modded installer can remove the TPM 2.0 requirement, the SSE 4.2 requirement is kinda baked into the pie; there is no avoiding that.

    rekabis ,

    This is what you get when Attourney Generals are elected. They need to be seen as “tough on crime” no matter what the circumstances, in order to not tick off their pearl-clutching electorate.

    rekabis ,

    The system is what allows this evil SOB to not only exist, but thrive.

    Canada has a (decently) meritocratic system. While our version of bad AG’s can still find their ways into positions of power, they need to have a clear track record of good performance - including exonerating the innocent - in order to be promoted into those positions. Someone with a terrible attitude has much greater difficulty getting into such a position up here than with any popular-vote election that depends on a hoodwinked or biased electorate.

    rekabis ,

    I have no sense of direction. None.

    Sounds like you are a real-life Ryoga Hibiki.

    Just curious: do you also lack the ability to visualize things in your mind? For example, I am able to bring up a road map of my city in my mind, figure out the most effective route between two points, and rotate that map in all three dimensions to “look” at it from all angles. My familiarity with the city layout and geography is the determining factor on how easily I can visualize that map. I can also do the same thing with large buildings and their internal layouts.

    My wife, on the other hand, has a somewhat similar (but nowhere near as bad) sense of direction as you, and a commensurate inability to visualize objects in her mind. So while she can mentally visualize a soccer ball as a spherical object, she cannot even visualize the hexagonal pattern of pieces, much less (on a traditional soccer ball) how some are white and others black. She doesn’t technically have aphantasia, as she is still able to visualize to a small degree, but I have always suspected her inability to visualize effectively was directly connected to her inability to navigate effectively. She also relies heavily on GPS and maps when navigating anywhere else other than the town she was born in.

    rekabis ,

    Historically, before agriculture it was about two to three women having offspring for every man who did.

    During the Agricultural era (12,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE) that ratio hit a high of 9 women reproducing for every man who did so, and stayed around that for most of that time.

    From there it slowly declined back down to the current world-wide average of two women reproducing for every man who manages to do so.

    rekabis ,

    So maybe it is not related, then. Or maybe only causally related, or under certain more specific visualization deficits.

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    rekabis , (edited )

    Love the smell of petrichor, the smell of the world after a good rain, especially if the temperatures are cool and crisp. Bonus if it’s deep in the temperate rainforests of the Canadian PNW, with no civilization near.

    Love the smell of fresh-cut grass, reminds me of my youth even if it’s one of the only things that makes me sneeze uncontrollably (my only known allergy).

    Marigolds bring me all the way back to childhood, as my mother had them planted around the entire house. I take one whiff, and for the briefest of moments I am a five year old without a care in the world. To this day I collect and re-sow their seeds everywhere I can. I particularly like the small ones with the dark orange and deep crimson flowers.

    Hate the smell of tar with every fibre of my being. I could never be a roofer or a road worker or a street resurfacer for that reason. It makes me gag uncontrollably with even the faintest whiff.

    Can I refuse MS Authenticator?

    So my company decided to migrate office suite and email etc to Microsoft365. Whatever. But for 2FA login they decided to disable the option to choose "any authenticator" and force Microsoft Authenticator on the (private) phones of both employees and volunteers. Is there any valid reason why they would do this, like it's...

    rekabis ,

    I put the stupid app on my phone.

    Never use your own personal phone for work related stuff.

    If they want you to use a phone-based app, ask them to help you install it, then bring in an early-2000s feature phone that boots straight from ROM, no Android or KaiOS under the hood.

    As in, force the company to get you a company phone.

    rekabis ,

    Just say you don't have a smartphone....you have a flip phone...

    Recently looked into this, pretty much 100% of currently-available flip phones are still smartphones under the hood, running either Android or KaiOS. And you can still install apps on these phones.

    The only truly “dumb phone” appears to be the Rotary Un-Phone, or a vintage feature phone from the early 2000s that boots straight from ROM - instant-on, no visible boot process whatsoever.

    rekabis ,

    reasons why restricting users to MS Authenticator would be preferable

    As a security professional:

    1. Under most situations, it is equally as good as any other 2FA app.
    2. Within the Microsoft ecosystem, it provides additional security features above and beyond simple 2FA.

    If your workplace is leaning heavily on the Microsoft ecosystem, especially their cloud offerings like Azure, then restricting employees to the Microsoft app is a no-brainer, and actually quite reasonable.

    For example, if they happen to have a hybrid domain with an on-prem domain controller syncing with Azure (forgive me for using obsolete terms, I’m a greybeard), then they can control all access to all company assets, including 2FA. If an employee leaves the company, they can also disable the Microsoft app at a moment’s notice by disabling the employee’s Microsoft account. Because everything is hooked into Azure, it sends push notifications down to all company assets - like the Microsoft 2FA app - to unhook all of the company’s credentials and prevent employee access after the fact.

    You cannot do this with other 2FA apps.

    rekabis ,

    You work in cybersecurity, yet you have company-controlled assets on your personal phone?

    X DOUBT

    Either you don’t give a single sh*t about your personal privacy, or…

    And no, this isn’t “Microsoft bad”, this is “your company is inherently and fundamentally untrustworthy”. The app is, IMHO, one of the best ones out there, I would just never trust any company I worked for to keep their nose out of my personal life. A lot of the software that companies use to lock down mobile devices are hella invasive, and any company asset on a phone typically includes a demand to install the security software as well. Any of that shit should ALWAYS be on a company-provided phone, bro.

    rekabis ,

    This is the way.

    rekabis , (edited )

    What am I going to do, quit over using an app?

    Why quit?

    Ask them for help installing the app.

    Then bring in an early-2000s flip phone with your SIM already in it, so you can prove that you are using it.

    An employer cannot demand that you buy your own work tools unless it is written into the employment contract (auto mechanics, etc.). Provide them with a phone that they themselves cannot install the app on. Any early-2000s feature phone will not have an operating system with app functionality. An older but still smartphone-like BlackBerry running BBOS10 will also work in this regard, especially if you have uninstalled the Amazon App Store.

    Even an Android phone whose newest possible version of Android pre-dates the oldest version that this app will install on can also work. For example, any Android phone which cannot be upgraded past Android 7 would be perfect with respect to MS Authenticator, as the current version will only install on Android 8 or newer. If you bring in a phone that has no ability to have Android 8 or later installed, your place of work will either have to exempt you or provide you with a work phone for that app.

    You have solutions to keep work apps off of your personal devices, and few employers will have the legal ability to force you to buy a modern phone just for an app of their choosing. Moreover, it is your right to not have to suffer unreasonable employer demands just to have a job. That’s why worker protections exist in places where conservatives haven’t eviscerated those protections.

    Act like you are a smartphone-phobe, and let them figure things out.

    rekabis ,

    You do what you think you need to do, buuuuuut…

    I'm in a senior level engineering position.

    You are already exceedingly difficult to trivially replace. It’s entry-level devs which are a dime a dozen. Senior level engineering positions are frequently open for many months because candidates in general are difficult to find, much less good candidates.

    Colour me biased, but I strongly think you are significantly underselling your own power and influence. Any company worth working for isn’t going to turf a senior engineer over a $40 stipend unless their middle manglement positions are staffed with morons.

    Well, it’s your calculus to make, not mine.

    rekabis ,

    Q: Why are conservatives obsessed with children and calling other groups, like cross-dressers, pedophiles?

    A: For the purposes of lmisdirection and obfuscation - conservatives are the pedophiles. Why else would they want to burrow into strange children’s lives, if not to abuse them?

    rekabis ,

    There are actions that can be taken that are far more effective than shit like that.

    1795 France has some very intriguing tools that could be used to cut the Parasite Class down to size, and to loosen their grip on civilization’s reins.

    rekabis ,

    Years later, I was finally able to accurately describe jobs I didn’t want to do as a child - such as homework - as grey lumps of goo piled up as a supremely undesirable blob on my desk, while everything else was a technicolour kaleidoscope of distractions.

    At the time, however, I just didn’t have any way to pass on this impression to others, so they could understand.

    rekabis ,

    they just have a really hard time absorbing information in traditional ways taught at schools

    Poke virtually any subject that tends to make the rounds in Western society, and I will be able to provide at least a layman’s understanding of it, if not deeper.

    But aside from a really small amount of math, physics, chemistry and history, almost none of that came from formal education. I’m like a Hoover when it comes to random factoids… but only on my own terms. Try to intentionally cram data into me, and it’ll impotently leak out all over the floor.

    rekabis ,

    Oh, this sh*tfest is hilarious.

    We’ve known about gay penguins since 1912, and regressives are just now cottoning on?

    rekabis ,

    Most dumb phones aren’t.

    Dumb, that is. Virtually all of them have some version of Android or KaiOS or some other full-fat OS cosplaying as something “simple”. Litmus test: does your “dumb phone” come with a map app? A Facebook app? Can you install apps from an external source? If so, you don’t have a dumb phone.

    The hallmark of a dumb phone is the lack of an OS that boots. You turn it on, and everything should be instantly and immediately available, loaded from ROM. No boot sequence, no waiting for anything to load.

    The only truly “dumb phone” out there - as something “new” and not actually vintage - is the Rotary Un-Phone.

    rekabis ,

    “Faster than predicted”

    Sounds like a laugh track to a black comedy, only it’s a guillotine blade hanging over humanity’s neck.

    rekabis ,

    If I wanted a truly minimal phone, I would go for the Rotary Un-Phone.

    Qualified experts of Lemmy, do people believe you when you answer questions in your field?

    The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge....

    rekabis ,

    We are fucked. We are so incredibly fucked.

    Very interested in hearing your best-case and worst-case outcomes for humanity over the next 30 or so years. Worst-case being, of course, the “business as usual” path that we have not deviated from at all.

    rekabis ,

    “This is AI-generated content” seems to be the new slur seeking to shame people into silence. Better than “Incel”, I suppose, but certainly more insidious and less dismissively hyperbolic.

    rekabis ,

    I recall hearing about this one informal conference between climate scientists, ethnographers, and collapse-aware economists. About two dozen ppl in total, IIRC.

    Their exceedingly conservative estimate of the BAU path had humanity experience a 40-60% collapse (3.2B to 4.8B dead) by some point in the 2050s. And you don’t see that without a whole hell of a lot of secondary civilizational/technological collapse and loss of knowledge.

    And they concluded that humanity existing past 2150 or 2200 was vanishingly unlikely due to polar restriction due to lethal wet bulb temperatures making the rest of the planet uninhabitable for year-round occupation, and the sheer lack of arable land in the polar region.

    The problem is that we have been accelerating past 1.5℃ of warming in terms of CO2 production. We haven’t even begun to slow down, much less reverse to net zero. And since climate change has an inertia to it that is thousands of times stronger with our current change than in prior changes, there is now a non-zero possibility that - even if we go extinct - the planet itself could end up in a Venus scenario. Things are moving just far too fast for any ecosystem - much less the entire planetary ecosystem - to adapt and migrate in order to remain maximally productive in natural CO2 sequestration.

    rekabis ,

    Good cannot flourish while greed does.

    Capitalism cannot exist without extensive, institutionalized greed.

    rekabis ,

    Except… wide swaths of feminism still hate him for what he/she is. Because instead of being just a man, he/she is now a man refusing to adhere to the imposed rules of what women expect a man to be. So he/she is hated by them twice as virulently.

    It’s why the term TERF - trans-exclusionary radical feminism - exists. Scratch the thin veneer of most feminists hard enough, and this can be found underneath in some capacity.

    I really hope he/she has a strong support network in their friends and family members. They are going to need it.

    rekabis ,

    Except what we are actually doing to combat climate change is far too little, far too late, and the media is doing nothing but peddling hopium.

    What stands in humanity’s way is the wealthiest 1%, who are obsessed with “business as usual” because that’s where the fattest profit margins are. And because this Parasite Class has all the money, they have purchased nearly all of the politicians who could put into law anything that would effect anything approaching a material change.

    And then there is the issue of the rank evil of having a Parasite Class in the first place, where they parasitically suppress the earnings of average people to well beneath what it could be, siphoning that value away for themselves and thereby denying average people the financial headroom to become activists themselves.

    Fast-food workers, for example, get only 2% of the value of their labour back in their paycheque, and nearly everyone out there is under the 50% threshold. With that level of crushing parasitism, vanishingly few of them have the ability to think of any larger picture at all, much less climate change -- they are just too focused on where their next dollar is going to come from in order to survive another day. The working class is being robbed on an epic scale by the Parasite Class in order to keep them controlled and compliant - just look how medical insurance shackles Americans to toxic jobs - and vanishingly few people even realize that.

    rekabis ,

    And EVs will be much harder on tyres due to being double to triple the weight, and so will require either much more expensive tyres or more frequent replacement.

    The fact remains that 12 years in, I am still financially ahead of any brand-new vehicle, ICE or EV.

    rekabis ,

    Normal people win lotteries, too. Some even beat the house at the gambling casino.

    You just can’t expect to build an effective financial portfolio doing so. Such things tend to be lightning strikes that affect a minuscule number of people.

    You got stupendously lucky. That’s it. You’re the odd one out, with another 500,000 guys having zero such luck.

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