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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Do you use autocomplete? AI in some of the various ways that’s being posited is just spicy autocomplete. You can run a pretty decent local AI on SSE2 instructions alone.

    Now you don’t have to accept spicy-autocomplete just like you don’t have to accept plain jane-autocomplete. The choice is yours, Mozilla isn’t planning on spinning extra cycles in your CPU or GPU if you don’t want them spun.

    But I distinctly remember the grumbles when Firefox brought local db ops into the browser to give it memory for forms. Lots of people didn’t like the notion of filling out a bank form or something and then that popping into a sqlite db.

    So, your opinion, I don’t blame you. I don’t agree with your opinion, but I don’t blame you. Completely normal reaction. Don’t let folks tell you different. Just like we need the gas pedal for new things, we need the brake as well. I would hate to see you go and leave Firefox, BUT I would really hate you having to feel like something was forced upon you and you just had to grin and bear it.



  • Preheat and homogenization were not testing in these processes. Both are steps used in most US milk that would likely inactivate the virus. Moral of the story is still you are an idiot if you are drinking raw milk.

    Fragments of the virus that are being found in about 20% of all milk sampled. These fragments have not been shown to be enough to make anyone sick. The fact that we’re finding fragments and not intact viruses in store bought milk is a good indication that the various processes used for milk in most locations is doing the job it was intended to do.

    And most important of all: This is the current state of evidence gathered on this topic, that state could change with various factors at play and/or the addition of new evidence. Because apparently for some people they have forgotten that “things change as time progresses”.


  • Punishment for those wondering is as follows:

    • For the drug Flunitrazepam : Prison with option of hard labor for no less than one year, no more than ten years. At discretion of the Justice a fine no more than $5,000.
    • For any other controlled substance under this law : Prison with option of hard labor for no less than one year, no more than five years. At discretion of the Justice a fine no more than $5,000.

    For those wondering, Flunitrazepam is the generic name for Rohypnol, aka the date rape drug.


  • For instance, this includes minerals for battery and other components to produce EVs and wind turbines – such as iron, lithium, and zinc

    I found nothing within the IEA’s announcement that indicates a shortage of those three elements. Iron is like the fourth most abundant thing on the planet.

    In fact, this story literally reports this whole thing all wrong. It’s not that there’s a shortage, it’s that the demand for renewables is vastly larger than what we’re mining for. Which “duh” we knew this already. The thing this report does is quantify it.

    That said, the “human rights abuses” isn’t the IEA report. That comes from the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC).

    Specifically, the BHRRC has tracked these for seven key minerals: bauxite, cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, nickel and zinc. Companies and countries need these for renewable energy technology, and electrification of transport.

    These aren’t just limited to the renewable industry. Copper specifically, you’ve got a lot of it in your walls and in the device that you are reading this comment on. We have always had issues with copper and it’s whack-a-mole for solutions to this. I’m not dismissing BHRRC’s claim here, it’s completely valid, but it’s valid if we do or do not do renewables. Either way, we still have to tackle this problem. EVs or not.

    Of course, some companies were particularly complicit. Notably, BHRRC found that ten companies were associated with more than 50% of all allegations tracked since 2010

    And these are the usual suspects who routinely look the other way in human right’s abuses. China, Mexico, Canada, and Switzerland this is the list of folks who drive a lot of the human rights abuses, it’s how it has been for quite some time now. That’s not to be dismissive to the other folks out there (because I know everyone is just biting to blame the United States somehow) but these four are usually getting their hand smacked. Now to be fair, it’s really only China and Switzerland that usually does not care one way or the other. Canada and Mexico are just the folks the US convinced to take the fall for their particular appetite.

    For example, Tanzania is extracting manganese and graphite. However, he pointed out that it is producing none of the higher-value green tech items like electric cars or batteries that need these minerals

    Third Congo war incoming. But yeah, seriously, imperialism might have officially ended after World War II, but western nations routinely do this kind of economic fuckening, because “hey at least they get to self-govern”. It’s what first world nations tell themselves to sleep better for what they do.

    Avan also highlighted the IEA’s advice that companies and countries should shift emphasis to mineral recycling to meet the growing demand.

    This really should have happened yesterday. But if they would do something today, that would actually be proactive about the situation. Of course, many first world nations when they see a problem respond with “come back when it’s a catastrophe.”

    OVERALL This article is attempting to highlight that recycling is a very doable thing if governments actually invested in the infrastructure to do so and that if we actually recycled things, we could literally save ⅓ the overall cost for renewables. It’s just long term economic sense to recycle. But of course, that’s not short term economic sense. And so with shortages to meet demand on the horizon, new production is going to be demanded and that will in turn cause human rights violations.

    They really worded the whole thing oddly and used the word shortage, like we’re running out, when they meant shortage as in “we can’t keep up without new production”. They got the right idea here, I just maybe would have worded all of it a bit differently.



  • Yeah the US isn’t even close on the race for EVs with China. Heck, going price for LFP batteries is $70/kWh. The United States is still trying to figure out how to not have conflict cobalt in their batteries. China is just skipping all of that and using iron since we’ve got tons of that lying around. In fact, we’re on a giant ball of the stuff.

    The United States is so laughably behind China on tons of technologies related to solar, storage, and EV motors. China is producing sodium ion powered cars with 60 mile ranges because of the various efficiencies in motor design. You can get a nice little around town car with that. They’re using fucking SALT to power cars. SALT! You know, the shit that’s in the ocean that we’ve got a bit of that also lying around. And the end cost to consumer is around $6,000 USD, that’s the fully tricked out model. The US can’t even produce a sub $12,000 car using fuel technology from the 1800s. And you can’t even use the human slave labor argument, because the US cannot get children into factories fast enough apparently.

    There’s not a competition with China on EVs. There’s not an arms race with China. China won biggly. The tariffs are just trying to prevent US automakers being laughed out of the room. And the thing is, the cars are so damn cheap, even with the stupid tariffs, they’re cheaper than any US EV out there. That’s what is so stupid about all of this.

    The US is trying to prevent those cars coming here and even the best sacking and jacking the price tag upwards they can do, and no US car is still price competitive. Not even close. That is how amazingly bad the US auto industry has gotten. There is no fight, everyone else won, and the US auto makers are just running on fumes like the coal industry, and greasing the wheels in DC to stay relevant.

    And the reason it got so bad isn’t because pensions, or unions, or whatever they’d have you believe. It’s hardheadedness and inertia by car CEOs, oil execs, and policy makers. It’s what happens when you have decades of really bad decisions by a variety of people and the people who made those calls don’t want to admit it to themselves. They just didn’t want to believe that the oil cash was over. They thought all the automation would make them insanely rich and not actually owners of shit that would go out of date before their return on investment. They thought that keeping Congress would always keep them safe from international pressure. They were going to fight tooth and nail to keep that cash flowing in. They are dead set to sink this goddamn ship we are on before the admit they steered right towards the iceberg at full steam. And every second of hesitation, every moment of denial, every dollar to prevent the inevitable has cost the US auto industry massively.


  • I looked at that picture that they had up for that “100,000” headcount. All I know is that there’s a lot of people on Trump’s team and in Wildwood, NJ who are extremely bad at estimating headcount. That picture of the crowd at it’s largest is (being absolutely generous here) is roughly 20,000 tops. 100,000 people is a massive amount of people, like it is a lot of people. There are zero ways there’s 100,000 in that picture. When you hit 100,000 people, you know it, because it’s an ungodly amount of people.



  • Maybe if that’s the case going back to Kansas which has a better cost of living is a better choice than trying to live in a city or state with the highest cost of living?

    Not to deride your minimum wage tangent here, but there’s something to be asked here. Why does California have a high cost of living? Why does Kansas have a low cost of living? I think when you ask the question of why cost of living is so vastly different from area to area you start to get a better picture of why we have a lot of problems addressing wages matching that cost of living.

    It’s almost as if people pointed out that raising the minimum wage will result in higher costs for everything and thus raising the cost of living

    This has been a national thing. I feel like you’d might have a point if this wasn’t true literally everywhere. Even where I live in very rural Tennessee cost of living has gone up. Our county recently increased sales tax and property tax is likely to go up as well. Cost of goods like eggs have gone from 78¢ to $2.19 here from 2019 to today, with eggs at one point hitting $6.99 a dozen here.

    So there is a relationship between minimum wage and cost of living but that’s clearly not the case with California’s minimum wage increase that goes into effect next month. Everything, everywhere is increasing in cost. Which goes back to what I was saying. When you start asking questions on why cost of living is different, you get a picture of bigger factors that drive national cost of goods and services. And you see that touched upon in the article.

    “We suspect that low-wage workers’ high likelihood of living in three-earner (or more) households might be due largely to California’s high housing costs,” the legislative analyst’s office said.

    Housing is a massive thing everywhere and housing is flying through the roof. The reasons for that are complex and it’s absolutely a discussion, for perhaps elsewhere though (I cannot imagine that Lemmy comments are that great a place for such a trite diatribe). Minimum wage does indeed play a role but, and I could be reading your comment incorrectly, I believe that you are attributing a much larger weight to that factor than it deserves and forgoing the complexity of the issue by solely focusing on that sole reason.


  • Oh man! I was just about to say Texas! Oklahoma has its own version of this scheme. These oil companies, they absolutely do not want to pay decommissioning cost on this and they’ll use every trick they can find to avoid it as long as possible.

    Coal industry does roughly the same thing just different tricks. Everyone in the fossil fuel industry looking to get out of that whole “what comes next” problem.

    But can’t say much, recycling solar is nascent and hardly done at this point but the whole solar industry is brand new so hard to draw a conclusion there. Same for wind, most do eventually get landfill but there is interest at least in recycling, so we’ll have to see how that plays out.

    But the energy sector in general seems to always want to skirt the costs at the end of operation, never calculating the full cost into the revenue stream. Stop paying the execs so much and hold some of that cash back for clean up time. You know it’s coming, the responsible thing is to not act all shocked that clean up time has come and file bankruptcy. Execs that do this ought to be shot.



  • Gen X here. Mother died of cancer when 13. Father left us two weeks after that. Several years later, father penniless and died of an OD in a ditch in East Tennessee.

    Literally was trying to be left with the debt by the State of Tennessee, actually had to obtain a lawyer to show my legal declaration of becoming an orphan when I was a kid to get them to stop.

    So the only thing they left me with was a lawyer bill and about two years worth of court proceedings. So no, at least for me, we’re not getting anything from them.


  • thanks to the property assets accumulated by the generations before them.

    These people have clearly never heard of reverse mortgage. So take what they have to say with large heapings of salt.

    While they wait for their inheritances

    LOL. Yeah these people are taking the piss here. Many of the folks I know with boomer parents that have already passed have seen roughly 90% to 96% of the accumulated wealth either taken in medical expenses, obligated debt, or just straight up poor ass planning that left the parents near penniless in their final days.

    This whole story is predicated on ignoring massive costs that come at end of life that many boomers have not planned on. And one can easily objectively see then ignoring this by failing to account the massive upswing in reverse mortgages and filial responsibility cases.

    The boomers are not giving us anything when they die except headache.