Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v.Tumblr

Professional higher education IT Geek. Internet addict. Bookworm. Athens, GA resident. https://linktree.com/ezrafreelove Memes: @sneezypb

[sugarforsalt]

Photo credit: Joyce Vance.

[historium]

“Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity.” Anti-Vietnam war protest, 1969

[ezrasf]

What are the odds someone in Trump's hearing guesstimated the cost of naval operations a day to protect Strait of Hormuz traffic to be some amount someone else pegged at about 5% value of goods moving through making Trump say he wanted the US to charge 20%, aka 4x the ops cost.

[hungwy]

letting family members sit in for dead senators is just monarchy logic im appalled that this has even happened before

[sugoiney-weaver]

Each state gets to decide how their state is represented in Congress

This has been a common method for a long time in some states

The idea is that a Senator's sibling/spouse/parent/child knows their intentions and policies better than a political rival or a random person would. It's a pretty good way to prevent political assassinations tbh

[prizedpesto]

An unelected individual getting grandfathered into a real political position due to their blood or legal relationship with a deceased elected official is not pretty good actually

[porterdavis]

[mariacallous]

[ezrasf]

Ossoff had less votes than Perdue but the incumbent fell short of 50%. Trump's whining about losing suppressed the vote to allow Ossoff and Warnock win. Trump helped Ossoff win.

[ezrasf]

Ontario police: Do not bring grenades to police stations - UPI.com

Police in Ontario are reminding residents not to bring explosives to police stations after an unexploded World War II grenade was turned in

Reminds me of the time my friend and I found a mortar and took it to his father. He carefully took it from me and made both of us go to my house for an hour. He got the nearby base to send someone. He questioned how we found it.

[ezrasf]

Trump notifies Congress of new war against Iran

President Donald Trump's notification that the U.S. is again at war with Iran gives the administration another 60-day clock for military act

Le sigh

[berkeleygirl3]

[ezrasf]

I work on computers. We have a data center in my office building. It's small. We peaked at 20 full racks, but Moore's law and moving much of it to other data centers (vendors moving to cloud only offerings), we we have under a quarter of physical space. To the point we "private cloud" for others.

All that said, I agree.

[teaboot]

what annoys me about explaining evolution to people who don’t think it’s real is that everyone’s idea of how it works seems to be from this

Whereas the reality is far more like

[teaboot]

Was not expecting this many of you to resonate with Millennium Death Plinko

[sufficientlylargen]

One of these days the horse is gonna come out of pinko with opposable thumbs, and then we're all in trouble.

[robertreich]

Abolish ICE.

[ezrasf]

ICE wasn't wearing body cameras because Chuck Schumer caved. One of the things Democrats demanded for DHS funding were body cameras for exactly situations were ICE killed someone to see what they saw.

Even if they had them, my guess is that they would only release favorable video.

[myjetpack]

My latest New Scientist cartoon. Many more here: https://www.newscientist.com/author/tom-gauld/

[ezrasf]

Bogged down with ads

My Google Chrome web browser of late bogged down my work computer to the point of such slowness I could not use it. Chrome created a nice Task Manager tool to see what uses the computer resources. Stuff that I normally look at for servers like CPU, memory, network, etc. All the last couple weeks, I just closed some tabs or restarted it to refreshen it. Today was a slower morning, so I could take…

[aropride]

why is there an upgrade button on gmail. why does twitter want me to scan my palm to get into my account. why is google a chatbot. why does the transit app make a transit app wrapped for me. why does youtube keep shoving its infinitely scrollable shortform content down my throat. why do my doctor and psychiatrist and therapist want to use an ai notetaker during our appointments. why do free trials want my credit card number. why are most scholarship websites just data brokers. how do i make capitalone stop sending me mail. why is my school making its own special chat gpt powered chatbot. why is every third video on instagram an undisclosed ad. why is nothing online real anymore. why is everything so FUCKING STUPID

[ezrasf]

Read: Enshittification

Enshittification: It’s not just you— the internet sucks now. It’s been enshittified. That was no accident, and it’s not gonna fix itself. Here’s how we’ll disenshittify it so we can have a new, good internet. We are all living through the Enshittocene—the Great Enshittening—a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are being turned into gi- ant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying. The once-glorious internet has degenerated into “platforms” that rose to dominance because they delivered convenient and delightful services efficiently and reliably. But once we were locked in, the tech bosses turned on us, relying on our dependency even as their services got worse and worse. The platform bosses did the same to the companies that had flocked to their services to sell stuff to us. Once we were all locked in—businesses and users—the tech companies stripped out all utility, save the bare minimum needed to stave off total collapse. In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow shows us where the problem comes from: not the iron laws of economics, or the great forces of history, but specific policy choices made by powerful people. These are choices that can be undone. Enshittification is a diagnosis, and it is a cure.

[socialmaya]

Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old

[sylestial]

One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism

[scallioncreamcheesebagel]

reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century

[tayefeth]

That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.

[antique-scarecrow]

Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years

[downtroddendeity]

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.

Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.

[ezrasf]

A Little-Known Microsoft Program Could Expose the Defense Department to Chinese Hackers

The Pentagon bans foreign citizens from accessing highly sensitive data, but Microsoft bypasses this by using engineers in China and elsewhe

We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious, but we really can’t tell.

Whoever approved this assumed people without the skills to do this work could supervise more skilled staff located in China known to develop threat actors who infiltrate.

[ezrasf]

Accurate