partial_accumen

I think I see your problem. You don’t know what shitposting is. “Punching down” is not shitposting.

Up next is probably trump getting mad we’re ignoring his unfounded conspiracy rants and using abusing the cell phone Presidential Alert system that we’re not allowed to opt-out to shove it in our faces against our will.

That or he’s going to issue an EO for a federal poll tax to be paid directly to him, as a means of ensuring voter integrity.

So he would be checking off the 24th amendment to the Constitution as yet another amendment to violate. trump is going for the Pokemon method of fascism “Gotta violate them all”.

Can’t wait until I have to shelter ICE agents in my house under the penalty of law in violation of the 3rd amendment. /s

"The bad guys can be quicker,” Homan told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Wednesday night.

“…this is why we have to shoot innocent people dead before they do anything illegal just to be sure ICE is safe”. - Homan probably

First, I don’t claim to be a historian, but if you’re willing to indulge the exploration of the topic from my limited knowledge I’m game to do the same.

In fact, much of Subsaharan Africa lacks a Bronze Age entirely, precisely because they don’t lead to each other - the forms of furnaces (bloomeries) that spread in Subsaharan Africa were efficient enough to smelt iron from the [start.

According to this link those first Subsaharan bloomeries were from the 6th or 7th century BC placing them well after the Bronze age from about 1000 years before. In this way it doesn’t look like they had the technological insight to skip the Bronze Age discoveries, they were just recipients of the technological advances from other parts of the world. Iron bloomeries were already in use elsewhere in the world over 1000 years before Subsaharan bloomeries.

I’m also not arguing that technology or technological development is evenly distributed across the whole of humanity. An example being ancient China was well versed in gunpowder hundreds of years before other areas and Europe was the recipient of this technology from China later.

Theory does a lot of lifting that we often don’t appreciate.

No argument to that statement. I would argue that materials science is even more underappreciated.

In my uninformed view I came to a different conclusion. Lack of technical development until recent history is more of a problem of materials science first and easily accessible/cheap energy second.

We classify ages of humanity by advances in material science. Prehistory is noting advances in humanity using ceramics as signs of advancement. “The Bronze Age” when humanity figured out that combining copper and tin produced a metal stronger than either alone. This lead to “The Iron age” where mining and refining metal produced even stronger tools and allowed humanity to access/create even stronger/lighter/cheapers materials. Refined Aluminum was more valuable that gold (I think) when it was first discovered and isolated.

Humanity advances with better materials unlocking yet more better material.

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Thanks for spelling HIPAA correctly, so many people get it wrong.

I always confuse what the HIP stands for, but always remember the last two are “Accountability Act” so “AA” at the end is easy to remember.

Do HIPAA protections still exist after the person is dead?

We already have instructions to follow after the President dies. Its all laid out in the US Constitution. trump doesn’t get to decide what the nation does once he’s no longer President.

it’s already enshittified with many customers reporting consistently double the ping and half the download speeds from their original experience.

I don’t think that is an example of enshitification in this case. In the technical world there are measurements for this call SLAs (Service Level Agreements). This means that if you pay for a specific service with contractually delivered performance. The service needs to deliver at least that level of performance, or you are entitled to refunds/credits/resitution for the service provider not meeting their obligations.

Now, just because a service provider is required to deliver a minimum of service, they can (and frequently do) provide even better service than they are obligated to. This is pretty typical of technology services where a new platform is being built out and there is lots of spare capacity as users are just being onboarded. I have no doubt that there were Starlink users that got fantastic performance when only a fraction of the network was in use by others. If this is their baseline, then from their perspective, they are getting less than they did before. If the performance still meets what was sold to them contractually, then they’re still getting what they paid for they’re just not getting a whole bunch more they never paid for.

It’s not the idea of a truly globally accessible internet that makes it worthless, it is the fact it is being done by a for-profit publicly-traded company owned by a trillionaire. Any one of those three things would mean the product is guaranteed to get worse eventually, all three mean it is guaranteed to get worse as quickly as possible.

That’s … a pretty questionable definition of “objectively worthless” then. By that definition all products or services from non-government owned companies would meet that definition of “objectively worthless”. I’m confident that moves the definition from “objectively worthless” to “subjectively worthless”.

You’re very welcome to hold that opinion, but I think the majority of its subscribers would disagree with you.

objectively worthless pet project

Regardless that Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole, lots of folks in working class rural regions around the world would disagree with calling it worthless. As an example, I visited southern Alaska recently and Starlink is very much in use there on working class small homes.

It depends on what you mean by robotic mowers. If you mean motors that drive the wheels and you don’t have to walk behind them (or sit on them), yes, these exist without any cloud service. However, if you mean autonomous, then I don’t think those are here yet. The non-cloud robot mowers use human held remote controls.

I can think of one that is autonomous and doesn’t require the cloud for operation, but does require the cloud for the inital setup and mapping. Once it has the map loaded in, it doesn’t need an internet connection.

That pretty well describes 1st generation robo mowers: lawn roombas.

Thankfully they’ve evolved significantly since then and are on 4th generation tech now.

I’m not optimistic enough to assume that Trump didn’t get what he wanted out of this

I know its yet another flip flop on a trump campaign promise which in itself should cause him to lose favor with his supporters, but we’ve all been around long enough to know how much they forgive him for screwing all of us. I will say that I live in a fairly red area and for months after the election many people around here left up their trump campaign garbage (flags, posters, yard signs, etc). However since the Iran war began almost off of that is gone now.

I’m hoping this will be costly to trump in the midterm elections and that we can get a congress that actually acts as a check on executive power instead of a “blank check” for anything on trump’s horrible xmas list.

“Green technologies” won’t solve it when a lot of them aren’t green,

Sure, I’m not talking about greenwashing products though.

the profit motive still rules humanity.

This is perfect example supporting my argument. Solar power is cheaper than any fossil fuel. The profit motive, in this case, is for the green tech.

You’re free to hold your own model, but I’d question some of yours.

I’d say we haven’t so much turned around as veered off to skirt along the edge until we’re about to hit the next one. There is a real chance we’re going to end up not being able to diverge and actually go over the edge.

That’s a different edge in a different direction. There’s certainly an element of inertia to large, extinction level events, but not all extinction level events share that same inertia. As an example, nuclear war and climate change don’t share the same path of humanities destruction.

If it when that will happen is impossible to predict before it’s too late though.

Humanity is pretty good and being able to predict things which will negatively effect us. We’re just not great at stopping doing those things that cause those negative things.

As a child in the 70s, I was sure we were going to wipe ourselves out in global thermal nuclear war. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty instead took the nuclear cores from thousands of American and Russian missiles and consumed it in civilian nuclear power plants for electricity. If you had told my 10 year old self my game console would be running on decommissioned Russian nukes, I wouldn’t have believed you.

The rapid technological advancement of green technologies (especially them being financially cheaper than fossil fuels) gives me hope humanity (and most of the species of Earth) will survive climate change.

So, yes, we might indeed still wipe ourselves out, but we have on many occasions, as a species, stopped at the brink and turned around to go back to safety.

Compared to trump? Absolutely.

But picking one specific even to try to define an administration isn’t very helpful. By your same measure you could define Carter as a right wing extremist for overthrowing the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1979.

I’m not following you. Are you saying Bill Clinton was a left extremist?