• 0 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • booly@sh.itjust.worksto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    6 hours ago

    Self deprecation comes off wrong when it seems like the thing you’re criticizing is actually important, and that you actually believe it.

    So it’s funny when the audience knows you don’t believe it’s important, either because everyone agrees it’s not important (“I can’t sing on tune to save my life”) or if it’s a particular example that doesn’t matter (“I’m such a bad mom because [something inconsequential]),” or if it’s a topic that people can see isn’t important to you (jokes about being socially awkward, bad at your job, etc.).

    If you’re in one of those lanes, you can go pretty hard on yourself before it seems to go too far.


  • They did, eventually. The first PlayStation was relatively easy to pirate for (with a mod chip), but it took a while for that stuff to become available. Someone had to go and manufacture the chips, or reverse engineer the check.

    By the time that scene matured, Sega released the Dreamcast right into a more sophisticated piracy scene that could apply lessons learned to the Dreamcast right away.

    On paper, Sega had more sophisticated copy protection than the first PlayStation did. But it also released 4 years later.


  • you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.

    I don’t remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.

    USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.

    Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren’t necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.



  • Wasteful of what, though?

    If a particular farm can produce 1000 kg of meat and 500kg of bones/other waste in a year by raising female meat chickens, would it be a waste to devote that farm to raising 500 kg of meat and 400 kg of bones from male egg chickens? In a sense, that’s a waste of the farm to produce half as much meat as it can produce through killing chicks.

    It’s a philosophical difference on what weight to assign to the lives of chicks, adult chickens, other resources including human labor, etc. The lazy shortcut is to maximize return on dollar investment with no regard for any of those moral, ethical, and philosophical considerations, and that’s what most of the industry does today, but even if you shift to a new moral framework you’ll need to decide how to weight those things.


  • Dual purpose breeds for both egg laying and meat production are poorly optimized at either. So the industry has moved onto specialized breeds that are best at doing one of them.

    Plus raising roosters together is much more logistically challenging than raising hens. So they’d need much more space and much more oversight/labor. So rather than devote some resources to raising males of breeds that are good for laying eggs, they’d rather devote those same resources to raising much more meat from females of meat breeds.






  • Virtually all marine vessels are certified by organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, or Lloyd’s Register, which ensure that they are built using approved materials and methods and carry appropriate safety gear. It has been widely reported that Rush was dismissive of such certification, but what has not been made public until now is that OceanGate pursued certification with DNV (then known as DNV GL) in 2017—until Rush saw the price. “[DNV] informed me that this was not an easy few thousand dollar project as [it] had presented, but would cost around $50,000,” he later wrote in an email to Rob McCallum, a deep-sea explorer who had also signed Kohnen’s letter.

    Later in article:

    Reality was more prosaic. Like most startups, OceanGate was in constant need of funds. Rush was trying to save money wherever he could. Interns, who made up around a third of the engineering team, were paid as little as $13 an hour. (When a manager pointed out in 2016 that Washington’s minimum wage was just $9.47 an hour, Rush responded, “I agree we are high. $10 seems fair.”) Rush also downgraded the sub’s titanium components from aerospace grade 5 quality to weaker and cheaper grade 3, says one former employee.

    I knew they were being cavalier about safety, but didn’t realize they were penny pinching to this degree.






  • A private equity firm bought them to naked short the stock

    You just like throwing around words regardless of meaning?

    They owned equity, so they were long, not short. They owned a stake so they weren’t naked.

    What they did was a simple extraction of value from something they owned, destroying it. It has nothing to do with short selling, and has nothing to do with manipulation of stock trading (after all, they took it private so that it wouldn’t be publicly traded, so there were no public traders to manipulate).


  • Motorola Solutions is a dominant radio manufacturer in the government/first responder space, as well as major infrastructure providers. Yes, that means cops, but it also means firefighters, ambulances, trains, buses, airports, and any fleet of mobile service for mission critical stuff like electric utilities, telecom, and some aviation uses. Back in the day of trunk radio, it used to be common for taxis, too.

    Motorola sold its consumer mobile businesses (cell phones) in 2011 in a spinoff as “Motorola Mobility,” around the time it was shutting down and selling off pieces of its space/satellite businesses, but kept most of its other businesses. Today’s Motorola Solutions is the legal successor to the Motorola that invented the cell phone.