Our economy increasingly is consumed to serve the rich. They are eating the world. Grocery stores increasingly cater to the wealthy. So do the automakers. Billionaires are buying up whole city blocks for themselves. And now we won’t be able to buy electronics because they’ve taken the resources for their speculative investments, and if they crash the economy our tax dollars will be appropriated to bail them out. It’s almost like we’re barreling towards a violent confrontation between the classes…

The secret is that being evil makes life pretty easy, compared to actually trying to contribute to the world. Being a ruthless and shameless thief, plus a lot of luck, has allowed him to gather absurd quantities of wealth. There’s no talent needed in this screwed up system

Unlike Coca-cola, these traffickers reuse their containers

I wonder if normally, such a light outage would trigger a remote operator to intervene and drive the car through the intersection, but the sheer number of disrupted lights, combined with the spotty connection due to parts of cell network going down caused the remote operator system to not be able to keep up across the city.

One day, literally every Gsuite product immediately and incessantly started nagging us to use Gemini. Fortunately our tech staff quickly switched it all off. We have slowly been re-enabling features that are useful like meeting transcriptions. I just wish these corporations could have more restraint. In previous waves of improvement in tech, usage dictated investment in new products. These days, they seem to feel the need to coerce us to use their products as they insist we should. I think users are getting fatigued by this dynamic. I used to be the first to install every update and try new apps and products. These days, I’m excited when I can stop using a product, and I don’t think it’s just due to age. It means I can stop having to be vigilant about some company I know is searching for ways to exploit me.

Popular doesn’t mean just.

Dynamic DNS does cost money. But not $8 a month. Development also costs money which falls under the $8 a month, but really not my problem, which is why I use Jellyfin. I used to run Plex off of my Nvidia shield, which was a cool gateway drug to self hosting and I’m grateful to them for that, but I like handling the technical stuff myself.

They’ve been bought out and gutted a couple times over. It’s very sad

They needed a safe space for their ideas. Less scary stuff like pronouns that make their brains hurt

But the cleaning lady had some guts!

Corporations are only people when it benefits them. Speech is only free when it benefits them. The market is only free when it benefits them. Congress only holds power of the purse when it benefits them. Hypocrisy is a tool the oligarchs use to express their power. Hypocrisy is the point.

You are making a common mistake of being too literal with headlines! What you described is quite difficult and laborious. Nothing prevents you from doing that. Please try in the future to read headlines knowing the editor has written them to attract your attention, using a provocative word like “impossible”, while the piece itself might still provide useful information. This is an important aspect of media literacy.

I am honestly surprised it took this long! Kindle has been around a long time and it’s not like Amazon was any less evil back then. It makes me wonder if the competition has been starting to make them nervous!

You might try one of the larger Kobos to be able to read PDFs comfortably. The little ones might be a bit cramped with most PDFs. For html I’ve never tried that with Kobo, but a lot of people swear by the Android e-ink tablets from Onyx and Boox, though those are sometimes pricey!

I used this guide from a thread on Reddit. It relies on Calibre and a set of plugins https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1c2ryfz/2024_guide_to_dedrm_kindle_books/

I think this explains why Amazon is locking down their books and making libraries non-portable. There is more competition

It is remarkable how many books available for free on Gutenberg are sold in the same format on Amazon (it’d be one thing if they were special editions, new translations etc, but they’re the same!)

Yep, I had a Kindle library of a few dozen books, when they started their shenanigans locking down the desktop client earlier this year I downloaded all of them, de-drmed and converted to epub with Calibre. Hosting them on Calibre-web and accessing with KOreader on a Kobo. I continue to buy books on Kobo and Google Books, which let me download copies (albeit with DRM).

Makes me wonder after all these years why Amazon is locking down ability to move books around. I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened! The market of cheap e-ink Android ereaders seems to be growing more and more

I think the ability to metabolize ethanol with alcohol dehydrogenase is a separate, more recent thing. But a lot of the tree of life gets buzzed in various ways! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_drug_use_in_animals

Maybe in the area of Montana they were limited in choices, thought this place would do, but did not do a test run to ensure ventilation, leading to terrible results. Perhaps the unit was seldom used and poorly maintained (the fact that there were kittens in the same room as the incinerator seems crazy to me)