So you need to buy a phone, a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. And you need a desk where to put the stuff, which is not a given if you are part of a poor family with several kids.
A cheap android phone and a cheap chinese laptop with 16GB of ram is about 300 EUR where I live, and you can use it wherever you want.
(Western) Internet was mostly censorship free, unlike places like Iran, China and the like. Things were removed only if outright illegan, and then just because of a court order.
Then about ten years ago things changed.
ISIS videos about the Syrian revolution removed from Youtube because they were radicalizing people.
Conspiracy theories about COVID purged because they were dangerous.
Posts against Woke ideals down-ranked, purged or the people posting themselves canceled.
"Be careful, once the tables turn, it will be your turn" some people said.
Guess what, the tables turned, and the result is ugly.
We had McCarthy in the 50s. We had Focus on the Family and the Catholic League getting shows canceled. The Simpsons had a public feud with George Bush Sr.
Cancel culture long predates the internet. Hell, it predates humans; plenty of other species kick antisocial members out of group gatherings.
It used to be that anybody could post anything on the Internet.
If it was something illegal sooner or later the state FBI/a Judge/Whatever would come for you, but it was a matter between you and the law. Your Internet provider, your hosting provider, etc. couldn't care less because they were not involved in your activity, in the same way that the post office is not to blame if you send an explosive letter using their service.
That's Section 230. While it's an USA-specific law it was in the spirit followed also in most of the other Western countries.
> It used to be that anybody could post anything on the Internet.
This was never the case. We had occasional law enforcement contact back in the 90s when I ran a gaming vBulletin board in high school. Your IP was trivially traced to a physical landline location and VPNs were in their infancy, and Facebook.com didn't get HTTPS by default until well into the 2000s (after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep).
Section 230 protects the ISPs and websites from liability, not the posters. It made it safer to host potentially actionable user-generated speech at scale, not harder.
> Section 230 protects the ISPs and websites from liability, not the posters.
I know. That's not what I am complaining about.
I am not an anarchist. I am fine with enforcement asking an ISP, a website, a forum, whatever to remove content because it breaks some law.
What I am complaining about is: it used to be that a platform would let you use it as you saw fit. If you were doing something illegal sooner or later law enforcement would come after you but then the platform wouldn't care much because it was YOUR fault not theirs.
The exception to this was very high level. e.g. phpBB forums with moderators. But those where not platform. They were quite small in size. I consided something like Youtube closer to an ISP or a Registar than a bulletin board. You cannot really escape them.
It used to be that those would only act after the fact (as you said). Only recently (past 10 years) they started to proactively censor their content. It is not completely their fault, they have been pressured to do so, but still they have.
You need to be able to afford it as it it is more expensive, but yes it is.
I have the luck to live in a well served area: I have a Carrefour supermarket at about 200m from home yet I have 3 small markets closer than that. If I have to buy one or two things it doesn't matter if the supermarket is cheaper, in my mind spending 10 euros instead of 9 or 8 is worth it if it takes 5 minutes instead of 15. Moreover instead of having to interact with a bored cashier or an automated checkout machine, I will have a chat with a real person (yes, a cashier is a real person too, but most of the time doesn't act like one) . He will ask me how I am doing, put my stuff in the shopping bag and gasp smile at me. I think we lost sight of how those small things makes our life better.
The interesting part is, I always have to buy just 2-3 things because if it takes 5 minutes, whenever I need I just go out and buy it, so half of my shopping is not at the "big" supermarket.
I have to add though: I work from home, so for me shopping means having to go out just for that. Maybe if I was working at an office the dynamics would be different as I could just stop at a supermarket one the way home.
> Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk,
Once you get used to have everything at a walking distance, you wonder how you could put up with having to drive to a supermarket.
Two are the main advantages.
The first is that you don't need to plan much in advance. Want to make hamburger tonight ? Cross the street, get meat from the butcher, get a couple of tomatoes and salad from the grocery store and the bread, and you are ready to go. I used to shop once a week and I had to have an idea of what I wanted to cook every day for the whole week.
The second is that this way you regularly eat really fresh food. My shopping list is always stuff like "two tomatoes", "three apples", "fish for tonight", "a loaf of bread". My fridge is mostly empty.
It's a 4-minute drive for me to get from my present house to the nearest grocery store (a Kroger of decent size).
I don't plan much for this journey. I don't bundle up on clothes or lace on a pair of stout boots first. I just kind of set forth (in my loafers) and drive over there -- even as everything is covered in snow, muck, and it it is 2 degrees (F) outside.
I went there last night for two tomatoes, a head of lettuce, and some cheese because those were the ingredients I was missing to make some tacos last night. While I was there, I remembered that I was running out of green tea at home and picked some of that up. I also grabbed a box of Barilla pasta because I walked by a display of it where it was on sale for 99 cents (oh noes they successfully upsold me on pantry supplies!).
There was no great investment of time or planning needed to accomplish this. I just went to the store for some odds and ends, and that was that. I might go back (or hit some other store) on my way home from work this evening -- since you mentioned apples, I kind of want one. (And I might buy exactly 1 apple. I can do that. It's Kroger, not Costco.)
I need to have the car anyway because it is necessary for me to own one in order to make money to stay alive in my environment. As long as this necessity remains, I might as well also use it for other things.
(I looked at some other addresses I've lived at, and their drive time to the local grocery store, on Google Maps. Despite "distance to grocery store" having not ever been on my radar at all when selecting a place to live, most of the places I've lived were a reported 2 minute drive to the local supermarket. The furthest was just 5 minutes out. I was pretty surprised by this at first, but looking back: That's actually a pretty fair estimate.)
just to let you know you're not alone, i'm in the same situation. I have a Tom Thumb 5-7min away depending on if i get caught in the one stop light. It has everything I need, capers to tampons, and i have the store memorized. There's also a pharmacy inside which is convenient. This is just SW of downtown Dallas TX ( maybe 3 miles ).
And can taxes from the community actually pay for the infrastructure to support this, or do they need subsidies because taxes per sqft are abysmally low and car infrastructure costs astronomically high?
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023-7-6-stop-subsidizin...
No. We don't have roads like that here where I am. At all.
But when I've lived in larger cities that did feature such expansive roadways, the supermarket was also less than a ~5 minute drive away.
In one instance, it was close enough that I'd walk there instead of drive -- even for a couple of tomatoes, just to stretch my legs. That was a fairly opulent store as such places go, but there was a Kroghetto just a block further out if I felt like being cheap today.
(And I refuse to be baited into a discussion about how cars are, or are not, evil. I am powerlesss to change that, or to change anyone's views. That's a complete non-starter of a conversation that is absolutely devoid of merit.
I'm a Costco booster, and I have storage space. One of the greatest feelings for me is returning from a Costco and knowing I have enough in the house to last a month for a family of four.
But your second point is spot-on: this strategy has to be augmented by weekly (or more) runs to get fresh food. I like to make fried rice with vegetables, so having a local market is essential.
> There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.
Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things. Using the fact that the former is seen as rude by some to avoid the second is in my opinion just an example of the level of extremism of the pro-trans activists.
But if in fact it made sense, shouldn't we completely remove any reference of the previous name also from the pages of people like Yusuf Islam [1] or Muhammad Ali [2] ?
Many married women are known under their husbands last names, from Maria Salomea Skłodowska, Betty Marion Ludden to Melanija Knavs. Some celebrities even use stage names, such as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.
Many of these women are not really known under those names, but somehow, they're still listed on their wiki pages.
Most of the married women on Wikipedia didn't get the choice of keeping their own name, so we cannot really compare it to someone who changed their name.
Same for stage names, people don't use stage name because they want to escape their former name, they use stage names because it's cool.
And when people use a pseudonym and want to keep their real identity secret for personal reasons, their name doesn't appear on Wikipedia, and nobody is ever complaining about that! It's as if people were obsessed by trans people in particular…
But it's not a secret, the name has been mentioned in mainsteam media on multiple occasions, and even here, in this thread on HN.
> It's as if people were obsessed by trans people in particular…
Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia, especially if we're talking about peoples legal names, except if the person was trans for some reason. Wikipedia is the one making exceptions here for one group in particular.
Nope. When it's an unknown transgender person who died for being themselves, perhaps it's stupid to put the older name there. World renown Ellen Page is deadnamed right there at the top. Because they were known for decades worldwide under that name.
The goal of an encyclopedia is to have a high signal/noise ratio. If you put literally everything on a subject on its page there, it becomes fundamentally useless.
And in that particular case, the only people you satisfy by putting the info there, are the bullies who caused their suicide.
> But it's not a secret, the name has been mentioned in mainsteam media on multiple occasions, and even here, in this thread on HN.
Most pseudonyms aren't real secrets either, plenty of people knew the real name or face of people posting under a pseudonym but that doesn't make it OK to post it on Wikipedia.
> Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia, especially if we're talking about peoples legal names
Ah yes, “every other” except for the ones they don't. We've already talked about people with pseudonyms right here!
> Wikipedia is the one making exceptions here for one group in particular.
One group that happened to be harassed (and, unfortunately often, assaulted) for having changed their name in the first place, hence the “exception”: the group is exceptionally vulnerable.
In the Universe, yes. In the closed system of Wikipedia, no, it's a well defined term with clearly established criteria, tested over the years on thousands of Talk pages on controversial pages, of how to achieve consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
> Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things
Except when people keep vandalizing Wikipedia renaming people there with their dead name. And yes it happens over and over and over again.
Because the most active extremists on the topic are by far the anti-trans crowd. (And it's not even close, there are trans people assaulted every week, sometimes going as far as murder this is extremism).
And again, Wikipedia keeps mentioning the former name when it's necessary (look for Bradley Manning on Wikipedia, the page redirects to Chelsea Manning but the old name is state because it's important).
According to MOS:GENDERID [1], a person's former name can be used when they were notable under that name. You're trying to make it out as if there's some nefarious double standard when there's not, editors just want Wikipedia to be clear and encyclopedic.
It's incredible that in a discussion about brutal violence against a child, the child victim is being painted as the "extremist"!
The use of the masculine pronoun here when we're referring to someone who transitioned from male kind of gives away that you're probably less concerned with searchability and preservation of history, and more concerned with promoting a transphobic agenda. I suppose it's possible you were using it as a generic pronoun, but in that case I would have expected "they." Am I wrong?
If someone uses "he" word it does not means antitransism. My point is that trying to euphemize "he" word is anistraightism. And I am even not an antigayist.
If your words can be reversed so easily it means that you have no idea but a pure propaganda instead. Famous anti-white-straight-man-ism seems as a dangerous thing to me, so I oppose this unfamous Davos-protracted diversity woke ideology.
We're talking about the male pronoun used in the context of a discussion of a trans woman, not some kind of men's rights thing. Did you think I was arguing that saying "he" is bad because all men are evil or something? That's how faithless your interpretation of the arguments of non transphobic people has become?
> Woke is essentually anti-nationalism and anti-white-suppremacism.
Then, depending on your definition of nationalism, it sounds like it's an unimpeachably good thing to be Woke, so I'm super confused where you're coming from here.
To be clear: I was saying that the OP was purposefully misgendering Nex Benedict in order express their transphobia.
Wake up, please. Noone else except of white suprematist will support your protransism, think about it. Analyze what nations typically are against it and who will protect you in the special place where you have written that comment when the yellows will come. It is OK to be transgender, but only while you are protected. White suprematists may protect transgender values but they need a freedom to be free from that kind of euphemization you are spreading.
Italian here, and I never heard of the term either.
Everybody always used the term floppy also for the 3.5 disks
I guess that since it was a foreign word the physical connotation of the term was simply lost, and "a floppy" was just the disk that your computer used.
Although the trope is hilarious I think most people just don't bother since it doesn't matter to them. I never had a problem setting the time on my VCR and using it to automatically record shows while I was at work.
I remember having trouble with mine, often mixing up the various hours (clock time, start time, end time, recording duration). Yes it was not rocket science, but it was used not enough to remember how to do it, and the manual was never ad hand when needed.
Yes it was no more difficult than setting any other digital clock. Even today, my microwave, kitchen radio, and several other devices all read "12:00" because I just don't bother to reset them every time there is a power glitch.
It seems strange now how often the power goes out. I remember back in the '90s I could leave my PlayStation running for two weeks because I didn't have a memory card to save my progress in Syphon Filter or NASCAR Thunder '98. Nowadays I have to set up autosave on everything and make checkpoint safeguards or scheduled backups because the power flickers off and back on at least once a week. This, with much more power efficient devices than that old PlayStation and Panasonic CRT.
This can vary greatly across locations, even within the same city and the same power distribution organization.
Different neighbors, being on different circuits, being on a line that's more likely to have storm damages, can make a lot of difference in quality of power delivery.
I've lived in places where the power practically never went out, never experienced undervolt situations, etc. I've then lived less than a mile away from the same place and experienced seemingly monthly issues of all the clocks being reset at random times when I come home. Living closer to things like hospitals, fire stations, emergency operations centers, etc. seem to give the best indication of power reliability, at least from my personal experiences.
It tends to happen in the area in general where I live. My house, neighbour's house, a house a mile away, all have the same trouble. I live within about six hundred yards of a volunteer fire department and about seven hundred yards from an elementary school, and even they've complained about how often the power goes out. The worst part is it's not like it's off for a few minutes and then it's back on. It's a momentary tenths of a second thing, like someone flicking a light switch down and up once to get people's attention.
Programming a VCR was pretty trivial for me as a kid, but a bit annoying.
But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I felt like I was living in the future.
I was so happy when we got a VCR+ enabled VCR. Stupid simple to program. Just punch in a few digit code in the TV guide magazine and it would schedule it automatically.
The last short lived generation of VCR we owned had an on screen menu/UI driven by the remote control for setting time and programming a scheduled recording rather than arcane and tedious sequences of button presses.
I was surprised that kind of thing wasn't much more common earlier - it wasn't really any new tech breakthroughs so much as someone just going to the effort of building it.
Sure, but uncle (who drove a truck for a job) sat down with the manual for several hours one night and figured it out. He was probably the only person in the entire town he lived in. Most people could have as well - but it would mean spending several hours of study and most people won't do that unless forced (and rarely even then - see all the tropes about homework...)
I mean that's exaggerating. I did it, it took maybe 10 minutes following the examples in the manual. It was not very intuitive though, so if it wasn't something you set up often you'd always have to go back and read the instructions again the next time.
I'm going from memory (i was a kid and he is dead so no wap to verify) but hours stands out. Remember he was a truck driver not someone used to reading technical documents. We also don't know which vcr's - yours might have been easier than his, or your program simpler).
who is right - no way to know, everyone can make their own judgement.
My grandmother figured it out enough to make sure her favorite soap was always taped. It was a "set it up once and mostly forget it" thing, with the real hard part forcing grandkids to stop using the TV during the hour it taped to avoid accidentally taping the wrong channel. (VCRs at the time had their own tuner for OTA and that shouldn't happen, but her stories were important enough to her she didn't want to risk it, and had risked it in a brief period of having a cable box passed through the VCR.)
In case of attack by the US, their troops would be effectively stranded in enemy territory, in particular their nukes.
I doubt that the US would invade Greenland without first pulling out of Europe (unless they do an all-out attack with also the troops in continental Europe, but that is something i doubt even Trump would do)
> People who are thinking of a Wayland replacement at this stage, mostly because they don't like it, will waste their time reinventing the mature parts instead of thinking about how to solve the remaining problems.
Now, if only people deciding to replace X11 with Wayland heeded your suggestion...
Lower GDP doesn't mean to lower standard of living, if it is due to lower population. Similarly, more foreigners doesn't mean better standard of living. There is no point in increasing the GDP if this doesn't translate.
Check the EU: millions of foreigner have arrived in the past 20 years, yet EU's GDP has been growing very little during the same time
A cheap android phone and a cheap chinese laptop with 16GB of ram is about 300 EUR where I live, and you can use it wherever you want.
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