Buy a second hand laptop or computer. Lots of companies sell off their tech shit after 3 years, and they have at least a good decade of use in them.

Look at what models are super popular second hand like ThinkPads; you’ll be able to find replacement parts pretty easily.

Absolutely, the fact that every time you interact with a person it could be on the worst day of their lives, but for you it’s just Tuesday is a massive contributor to mental health issues. Being unable to talk about it makes things much worse, and while the ethos like ‘killology’ and similar might cops less traumatized by their jobs it is definitely for the worse.

The amount of othering I hear from cops who talk about the people they interact with in their jobs… Well let’s just say I’ve never heard a cop talk about their job and go “boy am I glad that person is on the force”, and it definitely seems like at least partly a coping mechanism.

I think there are a few reasons, firstly while conservatives put many issues within society under a mental health umbrella, they simultaneously make no efforts to fix this problem and in fact actively make it worse since poor housing access, wealth inequality, healthcare access, food access etc are all major factors for pretty much all mental health issues. There are only a few explanations I can come up with for this:

1. ‘mental health’ is a smokescreen; it’s an umbrella so vague and monumental an issue that it gets put in the “I can’t affect this problem, so there is no point in worrying” basket.

2. People with mental health issues are so othered to them that their solution to people with mental health issues is “a cop with a gun”.

As for cop’s mental health, that’s a bit easier:

• I can’t speak for other countries, but where I’m from if a cop gets diagnosed with pretty much any acronym they risk getting their gun taken off them which directly restricts the jobs they can take and their career advancement. Where I’m from won’t even take on a recruit if they’ve been diagnosed with something. This means cops are terrified of taking any work provided therapy.

• pretty much all police orgs have a really bad machismo problem, which is one thing that keeps men from seeking mental healthcare in general.

• police tend not to require much formal education to start training and tend to pay better than other jobs with the same starting requirement (moral hazard pay), this can lead to the ‘golden handcuffs’ situation of not wanting to jeopardize this career because you’ll have to start at the bottom for a career which pays worse.

• it’s very common for society to see police as ‘essential workers’, which puts it under the umbrella of “we can make your work conditions terrible”; things like shift-work with really unpredictable hours tends to isolate people from their friends and family, making mental health worse and makes them more reliant on their job for their support network.

Reforming the police a tolerable institution seems impossible to me, but a decent start would be disarming them and making sure they are not the people who respond to mental health calls. Problem is that this requires a large part of the population to accept that you can’t simply shoot your problems, even if you hire a goon in blue to do it.

Regarding the US and their gun ownership: yeah, disarming cops is a lot more complicated and probably involves training them about de-escalation and the peelians. It also requires setting up some aptitude requirements, since basics like “time, distance & cover” are regularly forgone in favour of “warrior cop”, and currently there is a very strong pipeline from “that kid who tortures animals” to “corporal”.

The past is definitely not a guide for how to achieve a future society or how that society should look, but it does remind us that a society without a state can exist.

It’s not the hard part, but when we’re told that thoughts of a stateless society are fantastical it’s good to remember that it has been done before.

1. Software has bugs.
2. Bugs which interface with and execute untrusted code are high risk.
3. Browsers are obscenely large pieces of software, which connect a user’s system with random websites which execute JavaScript.

Browsers are one of the most important things to update on your computer.

We can talk about whether browsers should be as complicated as they are, but implying security updates are a intended as a vector of control is conspiricist thinking.

The reason you don’t get security updates backported to your older release of choice is simple: it is so much work.

Waterfox seems like a good choice, just don’t go around thinking that companies are making security updates in order to sneak in unwanted, they make security updates because they are terrified of being responsible for a major incident.

Makes me appreciate that my country’s typical honourific (mate) is gender neutral.

If any were it’s not like we would know, secrecy being rather important to that kind of activity.

They don’t have to care about the minority affected to be impacted; it affects readiness, which will affect them.

Laws which cause people to leave due to feeling unsafe will require others to be brought in to fill their roles, who are in-turn coming from somewhere else.

It’s not a crippling issue (for a military) by any means, but laws that fuck with the readiness of a base piss a lot of people off.

Definitely not saying any military is a font of diversity and acceptance, but their most important asset is their logistics so fucking with that will not win you a ton of friends there.

I just want a diversity of architecture styles to be common, I love areas that are an eclectic mix of styles; it makes me feel like so many different people care about the area.

Seems like the more important take is that 68.5% do not want (or at least does not prefer) the most popular candidate, that’s a level of fractured that should be prompting some introspection from the party.

I was a “ironically” racist as a young teen, it took me till my early adulthood to realise that being ironically racist is just being racist, and the edgy “humour” that is made at others expense isn’t funny or clever, and is incompatible with the kind, empathetic person I wanted to be.

Cringing at my teen self pushes me further into deprogramming myself from that shit, but I’m encouraged by the adage “if you don’t look at yourself from a decade ago and cringe, you wasted that decade”.

• Lisp is responsible for most of the parts of programming widely considered enjoyable.

• Fortran is still often used in some of our most performant libraries.

• POSIX shell was one of the most important parts of unix-like systems becoming how they are today, and it’s compatibility is still an invaluable glue for tying programs written in the 90’s to programs written today.

It feels like no matter where I move to, a communist seems to move in at the exact same time… It’s uncanny.

The specifics matter, but generally no.

When an actual fraud investigation is being done into something major like a casino laundering money, my government tends not to turn it into a media circus until after investigations are underway.

When a politician tells me they want to ‘tackle fraud’, especially welfare fraud, I hear “I want to arrest people for being poor”. It sounds like a dog-whistle to me, because every time I hear it used, it’s by people bearing a “the cruelty is the point” mindset.

I actually think this is more an attempt to exploit Trump’s worldview; he’s well-known to view inter-state relationships as purely transactional, and from that lens it seems like a good deal.

Thing is, depending on how the war goes either Russia or the US will take everything they possibly can from Ukraine; it may well be that offering Trump something the US was probably going to try to take anyway is just about the smartest way to turn somebody who was initially hostile to continued aid into someone personally invested in the outcome.

I’m concerned that the effect would be less of “having a controlling share in many companies” and more “having your fund be deeply tied to the success of these companies”.

If the size of the fund becomes a metric of success, whoever is in charge of it is going to be disinclined to force a company to make an unprofitable choice, even if it’s the right thing to do.

A wealth fund on its own doesn’t create wealth; like any other tax, it’s a redistribution mechanism. it’s the implementation details that matter.

Take three revenue sources:

1. Tariffs & VAT: extract wealth on a per purchase basis, so the primary payer is somebody who spends most of their revenue on stuff; normal people & businesses with relatively high OPEX (small business that make physical stuff rather than services) or have overseas suppliers.

2. Land value tax: a rent on owning land based on its value, primary payer are people and companies who own lots of expensive land; often rent-seekers themselves.

3. Resource revenue tax: typically large companies as they’re the only ones that can afford the scale to profitably extract resources.

And some potential expenses:

1. Retirement pension fund: tends to benefit pensioners (duh). Can also benefit workers, whos taxes tend to pay for the pensions of their (gran)parents. whether that actually will translate into less taxes, or those taxes just go elsewhere is another matter.

2. Government CAPEX: benefits are spread pretty evenly over everyone who uses govt services (depending on the purchase; a school is more useful than a cop shop). A lesser-known beneficiary are politicians; periodic infrastructure projects get more consistent positive press than e.g. a well funded pension system.

3. Recurring helicopter money: I won’t call it a UBI, because that would require a truly massive fund; but a stipend for every resident human would primarily benefit parents who’s wealth doesn’t normally grow when they have kids. Other than that, it’s hard to say how this would play out; will it put less pressure on low wage workers? Will it just be gobbled up by rent-seekers? A flat tax is considered a burden on the poor, so it makes some sense that what is basically a negative flat tax would have the primary beneficiary be the poorest among us. It may harm the transient, undocumented or otherwise unregistered workers by omission though.

4. Musk’s pocketbook: if it gets full enough surely some will trickle down, right?

One thing that it will definitely do is swell up rich people’s yacht money the stock market since that’s where it’s stored. This directly benefits capital as a means of wealth creation over labour but considering how many yachts are already there the impact wouldn’t be substantial.

Cost to manufacture is not more than wages, but cost to purchase a good is always more than the total cost of labour needed to produce it, so long as profit exists.

The money isn’t free so much as redistributed from taxation elsewhere, think of it as the same as subsidising industry except only to the workers of that industry (instead giving it to owners and expecting the savings to trickle downwards). You could also consider it an income tax rebate with more fine-grained control of who gets it.

It doesn’t seem particularly ground-breaking of a concept; I see the value in investing money into necessary but unprofitable industry though my concern is that if you subsidise wages of a business with a profit incentive, management may lower wages to compensate.

I disagree about rejecting funding from intelligence agencies. I hate the concept of their existence, as well as what orgs like the CIA have done (and proceed to do) but given the fact of their existence, they do have legitimate reasons (in this case I mean reasons that align with Signal’s current goals rather than in order to change them) to fund Signal, and if that results in funding secure software, all the better.

In addition to the downsides mentioned here about privacy regarding Google, there is a major upside to using this service: it offloads all of the authentication logic to google, so in theory it reduces your risk surface area, or it may be more accurate to say it concentrates your risk to your Google account.

You’d like to hope most websites use using common security best practices and keep on top of things but the amount of websites I had accounts on (on websites I had long forgotten) which have been pwned over the years tells me otherwise. Using google auth sets your account security to be exactly as secure as your Google account.