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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The fun part of the idiocy is that the complaints are all public. A major complaint the financial industry had was that anyone could go and just say anything about an institution and it could be found by anyone.

    So the only part they left behind is peoples ability to say bad things about financial institutions, and took away the agency’s ability to say “actually, quicken loans hasn’t been randomly adding $50 fees to mortgage payments”.


  • There’s a thread of truth to what they say. Humans are tribal, but that doesn’t mean that what we use as in group and out group signifiers is universal and lines up with western European racial boundaries.

    In some cases, existing group divisions were altered to fit with other peoples notions about how it should work: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734.amp

    In Africa, certain ethnic groups defined themselves based on language and a rough “wide or narrow” metric. Talk or short, skinny or stocky, wide nose or thin. Etc. it’s like a racial categorization from the west, but it uses features that we don’t usually use , and only became overt once it was used by colonial powers to classify people and assign social status.

    Point being that “I don’t know you so I don’t trust you” is a human tendency, but race and racism as we would recognize the terms are not, they’re just a specific instance.


  • I’m aware the historical treatment of indigenous Canadians has been “not great”, to say the least, so take that awareness into context with what I say.

    From what you describe, you have so much more to lose than so many Americans, who would be entirely ruined if something went “off” at a protest. You have a house, a car, a family and no debt. You’re in Canada so you get healthcare.

    Going to a protest, a cop can hit you in the arm with a stick, break it, charge you with resisting arrest, incitement to violence, and terroristic threats. If you fight the charges you will almost certainly lose, spend a decade in prison and lose everything. You will instead plead guilty to resisting arrest and assault, do a few months in jail and a few years on probation, and only loose your job, and possibly your house and car.
    Hopefully your injury set correctly, because you will not be able to afford to have it corrected or physical therapy. A disability claim can be rejected because there are jobs that you can do one handed.
    Even just something as simple as your employer finding out you went can lead to termination.

    All this is routine and tolerable to fight injustice if you know people have your back. If it’s bitterly cold, far away, and you don’t know that you’re not alone, it can be really hard to justify. Particularly if you have legitimate reason to believe that you might be met with particularly brutal suppression, both legal and physical, because they’ve made a point about how they should have been more brutal last time, removed the people who might say no, and encouraged their followers who have a history of violence against protestors.

    My point, for all that, is that it’s a time of uncertainty and confusion. Would you be getting shot with rubber bullets for freedom and the continuation of the country, or for the continued timely disbursement of treasury funds as congressionally dictated? Is it nationwide and halting the country, or is it you and six other people in the median of a muddy road holding up poster board and being threatened by passerby? (That’s how it was when I went to the Mueller firing protests)

    At least in my case, it’s not “it can’t be that bad”, but “how bad is it”, “can it be recovered”, and “can it be resisted”. I’ll be entirely honest: I’m quite the fan of this country, but I like my life and family more, and I’m honest enough to know the limits of my bravery and patriotism.


  • Americans loosing control in real life: it’s more than a thousand miles away and would take at least 15 hours of continuous driving to get there. I can’t afford to skip work, and they’ve gotten worse since the time they beat and shot rubber bullets at peaceful protestors in a park for a photoshoot, so they might actually just shoot us and I don’t want to die. If I’m arrested it will ruin my life: I may never be able to get a job that pays enough, or provides healthcare. Given how many voted for and presumably want this, I’ve lost faith in my fellow citizens and neighbors ability to even see the problem, to say nothing of doing anything. Nothing like this has ever happened in our countries history, so we don’t have any framework for a nationwide protest, when it should happen, how we know it’s happening or even what we do. Do I middle school dance this thing and go awkwardly throw a Molotov cocktail at a Denny’s to break the ice and get everyone out there?

    I want to say we’re scared, and we don’t know what we should do, or even what we can do. But the reality is, I don’t know how big that “we” actually is, because so very many of us are also worried that we’re deeply in the minority, and have no faith that our neighbors would stand with us if we tried to do anything.

    To add: we legitimately need a French guide to what to do in times like this. They seem to light it up every few years over stuff like “cost of college rose to $50 a semester” or “retirement age rose to still younger than the US age, and still with actual benefits”.


  • I think the most alive you could be would then be some manner of homeless drug addict. You have no power over your life, so no notion of what any day will look like.

    This quote kinda rubs me the wrong way because it treats predictability the same as banality.
    If you want a job where you never know what the day is going to look like, work for a poorly managed company. You never know what you’re going to be doing, sometimes the project you’re working on one day is cancelled without warning and now people are mad at you for not having been working on the new priority for the past month. Sometimes you go in and you work 36 hours straight without warning because someone else messed up and your boss doesn’t give a shit who’s responsible and you’re the one who knows how to fix it, so fix it or fuck off. Better hope you don’t have a family or you’re going to have to make choices.

    Knowing what you’re going to do tomorrow is just having work of any consequence. Food service knows what they’re doing tomorrow. So does a CEO, a software developer at a competent business, or a project manager. I can think of very few jobs whose scope of work is limited to a day, and is so variable that you just don’t know what you’ll be doing. Temp? Personal assistant to an eccentric actor? (Not the manager type assistant, they need to know the schedule. The one that buys coffee, six turtles and a pair of roller skates and doesn’t actually exist).

    I could just be dead inside because I know that tomorrow is going to go a particular way that I like.


  • You assume there’s a “real power” that exists to stop him.

    The president is not some underdog fighting the power. “Deep state” isn’t a shadowy cabal of people who secretly run the country, it’s the career office workers who have experience working in their departments and make tiny decisions in the implementation of authority delegated to regulatory agencies.

    They’re not in smoke filled rooms they’re in beige conference rooms on cspan looking at PowerPoints.





  • I’m not sure that’s entirely true.

    Most of their money comes from retail, either the site, subscriptions, or the seller services they provide. AWS, while massive, isn’t what’s keeping them afloat.

    You’re entirely correct though that competition with Amazon is difficult because of those additional sources of revenue. Having additional stable sources of income gives them the ability to accept lower margins in retail with less risk.

    The way they make money selling things with no profit or at a loss is to ensure that someone else is always paying the difference. “Free shipping” with a paid subscription means that rather than providing shipping for a loss, they just need to do it for less than the subscription. Turns out “guy with a van” can deliver a lot of packages for quite cheap. So many that he’ll be out delivering from 3am to 9pm, and for $5 they’ll drop your package off first and call it overnight.
    In some cases they can get the seller to pay for shipping as a promotional incentive, since Amazons conditioned people to look for free shipping as a precondition to considering a product.

    Only give away for free what you got someone else to pay for.


  • If you spend the same amount of money to get more things that you were going to buy, you’ve saved money.

    If I need bread and cheese and one store sells bread for $10 and cheese for $5, and another sells $10 bread half off if I buy $5 cheese with it, I save money going to the second store, even if I only came into the store looking for bread.

    Amazon is using dirty tricks to ensure you buy from them even if it’s at a lower margin. A smaller profit is better than no sale. It also gets consumers more accustomed to just buying stuff on Amazon, and increases the sales producers see through the Amazon platform. Some producers entirely offload their commerce to Amazon since enough of their sales come from there it makes running their own less viable.


  • It wasn’t the crypto key pair part I was referring to, it was the part where fido is geared towards interactive user auth, not non-interactive storage.
    It wouldn’t have surprised me if the ssh devs hadn’t put implementing fido support for host keys high in the development list, or that it was tricky to find documentation for. Using something like a tpm is the more typical method.

    There’s no technical reason it can’t work, and the op got it to work so clearly the implementation supports it, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most expected setup, which means it might have unexpected gaps in functionality or terrible documentation.


  • Unfortunately, I think you’re going to run into trouble because fido authenticators are geared towards working as user authenticators rather than as device authenticators.
    It certainly should be possible from a technical perspective, but implementation-wise, it’s very likely that the code focuses on making fido devices work with client keys, and using tpms for host keys, since that’s much more focused on headless server functionality.

    Oval peg in a round hole.



  • It can be, but it’s not typical. I’ve actually used the barter system more often than I’ve even heard of people actually using crypto for routine business transactions. And I live in an area where barter is not a standard arrangement.

    It’s not just the cost of the transaction, which can vary depending on demand (lack of predicability is another issue), it’s also how long the transactions can take. For any retail establishment, taking an hour to process a transaction is entirely unfit for purpose. A minute is too long.

    In your use case, you’re using Bitcoin more like a payment processor than as a currency. Something like PayPal would work just as well if your bank played ball, and would work faster and have more predictable costs.


  • Yes and no.

    It’s a collection of numbers with properties related to how they’re found that make them difficult to counterfeit, and the way they’re recorded makes it difficult to steal. This, as well as a handful of other properties, give digital currencies behavior not entirely unlike the things that make cash useful.

    Unlike money, it’s not backed by a government. This means that it’s much more volatile in terms of value. Say what you will about the state of the US, it’s unlikely that the dollar will significantly change value over the next year. It’s essentially guaranteed that the price of every cryptocurrency will be wildly different a year from today.
    Put them together and you’ve got a wonderful vehicle for laundering money or bribery, which is what this all is.
    The other key aspect of money that it’s missing is being generally useful outside of speculation. I can reliably use my dollars to pay for goods and services, and most significantly to pay taxes and satisfy debts in the eyes of the law. Cryptocurrency is inevitably either instantly converted to money once someone gets it, or it’s held onto under the assumption it’ll be worth more later.
    Money has value because it gets you “stuff”. Cryptocurrency has value because it gets you money.

    It’s fake money, but it’s a very complicated and realistic fake money.




  • Alright. It’s entirely incidental to the point I was making so I don’t feel particularly invested in defending his actions being the way he said they were.
    Replace it with one of the news stories about a politician wearing blackface if it makes you feel better, or fill in what you think would work better as a racist caricature outfit depicting someone from Puerto Rico.
    I stand by my original statement that if you think to yourself “I’m going to go to this Halloween party as a Puerto Rican (or any race)” you honestly shouldn’t do that, regardless of what comes into your mind when you picture that race, since races aren’t costumes.

    I’m not sure why you would think Boricua is related to food. It means a person from Puerto Rico. It’s like arguing that “#new-yorkers” is about food. If it was about food, or his costume wasn’t what it was, why would the picture just randomly be labeled with either this unknown food term despite no food being in the picture, or why would you go to a costume party not wearing a costume or as a generic baseball fan and post a picture of yourself labeled “Puerto Rican”? And then resign, referencing the Halloween costume amongst the list of racial insensitivities behind that choice?

    The person in the article who used the term brownface is a person who actually worked with him and would presumably be able to tell if he had put on makeup to change his skin tone.