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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I pay to avoid ads on Amazon Prime… Now i have to endure unskippable ads every 10 minutes, and my annual fee is up over 50% since i started.

    Fuck them. No matter what, these mercantilists will extract everything they can, and they will break any promise or contract they sign as soon as it bemefits them. We, however, cannot do the same.




  • The problem with these tariffs, implemented in this way, is that the less wealthy has to shoulder the shock and most of the loss of wealth, while the most wealthy solidify their place in society on several levels. The social balance of power further shifts toward the billionaires.

    Tarriffs are better applied for protecting existing small and mid-size businesses in danger of being wiped out by huge foreign operations, and protecting industries that have national security roles.

    The key here is they would be applied before we lose the capacity - not decades after we already adjusted to the loss.

    On this side of the curve it is more productive to subsidize operations that can (re)build the capacity we seek. Biden’s work with TSMC was a prime example. This approach is less disruptive. Even then, targeted tarriffs can be productive.

    We could have saved our solar industry. We decided to let China sell priduct at a loss until their competition went out of business or left because no profit could be achieved. This is where tariffs make sense.








  • He said Capitalism, not Corporate Capitalism. Pure, unfettered Capitalism leads to the same place facism, communism, and feudalism go.

    The issue is “unfettered”. Regulations enforced upon the operation of the markets, maintained by rule of law, enables achievement of greater agency and success upon much larger parts of society.

    People understand they can prosper from creating real value, which pushes society toward greater advancements to quality of life and enable more individual freedom than any prior economic and political system.

    Kill the illness, not the patient.





  • I had the 500 and 3000. I finally got rid of the 3000 3 years ago. I saw no reason to install linux at the time because it was already almost the same from my perspective, except the Amiga also had sterio sound 4096 color output, and pull-down screens. The console commands were substantially similar and several enthusiasts ported linux comands to AmigaOS.

    Plus, we now can run more modern versions of AmigaOS on Linux though I have never done it myself.

    Amiga still exists as a reasonably modern OS and hardware as of a few years ago. It was bought by small businesses and updated a few times.


  • Well, I was an Amiga user. That was already unix-like, preemptive multitasking, etc. It was fading fast in the early nineties, and while i was already working in I.T., I was not interrsted in using Windows 3.11 and 95, so I began playing with Slackware Linux. I figured it was a good way to get comfortable with “real” I.T…

    I learned Bash and had to compile most of the software i wanted to try. Since, like all programmers, I’m lazy, I wrote some simple scripts to build the code and make them into packages (tgz) for Slackware. This took tedium out of the work, and i could use the packkage manager to install and remove them.

    Those were rough days for desktop users, though. I really had to use windows when i needed to pass output to “normies”. I tried several window manager and desktops, and eventually landed on Ubuntu.