Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

  • 35 Posts
  • 13.2K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Hey, some of us use openSUSE. There are dozens of us!

    Seriously though, Tumbleweed is a fantastic distro. If you’ve made the rounds between Arch, Fedora, and Debian distros and still aren’t satisfied, give openSUSE a try. Some things I love:

    • rolling and stable versions - I use Leap for servers and Tumbleweed on desktop
    • openQA seems to catch breakage because breakage is very rare
    • OBS - like the AUR, but it builds your packages on their servers
    • RPM - some sites still hand out debs and rpms, so that gives you an option for certain niche software

    I spent 5+ years on Arch and loved it, and I’ve been on Tumbleweed for longer now. It’s pretty decent.



  • I think hydrogen has a future, but more for long haul trucking than personal cars. The general idea is to generate a ton of solar power during the day and use the excess to produce hydrogen, and then use the hydrogen to fuel heavy equipment, trucks, and cover for low solar production days.

    This solves many of the issues with hydrogen:

    • no need to transport hydrogen, just use it locally
    • wasting energy for production is fine because it would be wasted anyway
    • only used in heavy equipment, so no need to sell the public on it

  • Disagree, they are exactly the type of EV we should be building: inexpensive, enough range for around town, pretty dependable. The first couple model years had crappy range, but the later ones were fine.

    What Nissan needed was to expand the EV product line. Ideas:

    • make the Leaf cheaper - 150 mile range, look into cheaper chemistries; should be the cheapest EV on the road; prize prioritize reliability and cost
    • make a sports car that you want to drive - this is your flagship - prioritize speed and style
    • make something in between the two (fast, but also practical) - what most people will get; compete directly with Model 3

    Don’t compete on range at all, that’s R&D you don’t want to deal with. Just make great cars for urban and suburban use.



  • the political system and the economic system are intertwined

    Sure, but that overlap should be as small as possible while still ensuring a competitive market.

    late stage capitalism

    Socialists and other related academics have been throwing this term around since WW2, and every couple decades they move the goalposts. It’s little more than a scary story they tell to convince people to go along with their authoritarian ideas. It’s really not that different from Hitler blaming Jews for all of society’s problems, just with a socialist flavor instead of a fascist one.

    The truth is that wealthy people need the working class to buy their stuff, and buying their stuff increases the workers’ standard of living. Standard of living has been rising pretty consistently in developed countries, especially those with relatively free markets.

    Yes, wealth inequality is growing (which is a problem), but that doesn’t mean the poor are getting poorer. Quite the opposite in fact, if you look at the data, people of all economic classes are better off year over year.

    A lot of the problem is self inflicted IMO. The process goes something like this:

    1. People demand change
    2. Politicians talk to big players in industry
    3. Big players propose solutions that seem to fix the problem
    4. Surprised pikachu when the changes largely entrench the big players and raise the barrier to entry for competitors

    And then we have the corrupt two party system where most representatives don’t have much actual competition for their seat, as long as they have more funding (conveniently provided by helpful lobbies from 3). The longer a rep stays in office, the more they tend to listen to the big players.

    It’s not impossible to fix the problems, we just need to stop trying to use government to solve everything. Government works best when it’s simple, special interests love complexity, so we should simplify the law so it’s easier for people to tell when they’re getting screwed.

    For example, the IRA is an incredibly simple retirement program. You open an account at a brokerage or bank for free and then buy stuff, and taxes are either up front or upon withdrawal. Some brokerages are cheaper than others, so you can shop around for the features and costs you want. The 401k is incredibly complex, and because it’s negotiated by employers, a lot end up being expensive for customers (e.g. mine has a 0.10% asset fee on top of fund fees), all because financial institutions want a cut. The plan is selected by HR, and employees don’t get a choice other than participate or not. Taxes are complex because Turbo Tax wants to keep their customers. And so on.

    Here’s a quote from the author of my favorite book:

    Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

    • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

    The problem isn’t with corporations, they’re largely a constant. The problem is with government getting bloated and losing the plot because everyone tries to use it to solve their pet problem and the net winners are the lobbies.