anon49124

It might be a dirty truism: utopian promises are for children and the slow, reality requires messy, pragmatic nuances that often break and contradict simplistic, academic "wouldn't it be nice if" or wishes for a perfect, simple solution that is designed and pushed into policy.

One of the most pragmatic, matter-of-fact Marxist economists, R. Wolff, acknowledges the foibles, workarounds and tendencies... how people behave in reality, rather than how some people should like to make them, or would like, them to behave, or that libertarian, unregulated, utopian capitalist economics is some meritocratic magic wand that solves all externalities and inequalities in "the market," usually with "trickle down" economics that never happens. Reality is most definitely none of those things, even though people still try to pretend otherwise, likely for their own benefit.

One country, two systems, where two varies in value.

The politburo seems to play favorites with capitalism when there is rapid economic and military expansion. It'd be interesting to see how that sentiment changes/changed in a recession.

Vesting schedule, eg, golden handcuffs, that are part of the terms of the m&a deal. They (usually) don't just hand you only a pile of stock, they want the tech founders to keep working on this thing as long as possible, so that they're a) not building something else cool that someone else will buy and b) keep any other corp from hiring them (talent m&a play).

Put up with random crap at gigacorp until you can walk away with another X deci/centimillion$.

Yes, the "free-for-all" sucks. Shkreli-style and worse profiteering on illness, misery and bankrupting people.

And this reminds me: there are long off-patent generics costing $10 USD/pill ($300/mo). Isn't this crazy, even considering regulatory and medium-overhead operations?

Doesn't this seem like a reasonable social-enterprise opportunity for non-hospital-/non-insurance-owned, employee- & customer-owned co-op generic pharmaceuticals for the US market at a minimum? Fixed margins on products based on production costs and overhead... but with enough investment so it can't get "DRAM price war"ed butt-kicked.

There is this guy I know in Los Altos Hills who does this in his driveway. He always has 2 gas->diesel conversions going at any one time either GMC/Caddy, VW or Merc. I'm sure the guy could convert the used petrol Cayenne my stepfather just bought, but there's really no point unless you're biodiesel-ing / out in the country / carry your own fuel / use lots of generators.

Universities and industry groups, esp. security folks, get full source copies of Windows and more... with big bear-trap, PMITAP NDA's. I have/had a NT5/Win2k source CD somewhere in my empire of junk.

Add AI, automation and thought UIs... thoughtcrime is upon us.

Moreover, imagine illicit drones that have weapons or explosives that operate with AI and thought-control... you think about killing your boss, but you forgot to think "you didn't mean it" that the drone shouldn't do it. Whoops.

    [ ] Yes, I am a psychopathic axe murderer looking for my next victim.

    [ ] Yes, I am avoiding taxes that would make the Panama Papers blush.

    [ ] Yes, I am a going to Bermuda to marry my underage girlfriend.

    [ ] Yes, I am a terrorist, the bombs are at home.

I dunno which to pick, maybe all but the girlfriend one. Which did you choose, deary?

Yes, yes! @FrenchGuyCooking. Jacques Pépin and him had some back-and-forth YT response videos.

Most old-school shutdown init scripts called the following at some point before shutting down or rebooting:

   kill -TERM -1 # sending all processes the TERM signal...
   # ...
   sleep $SOME_SECS
   # ...
   kill -9 -1 # sending all processes the KILL signal...
   # ...
   sleep $SOME_MORE_SECS

Also old-school local DoS from root:

   # used to be very bad
   rm -rf / ; kill -9 -1

Another classic:

   # bash fork bomb
   :(){ :|:& };:
   # creates a function : and calls it
   # spawns a background process that pipes to itself, which creates another process... effectively two recursive calls per call.

Yup, basically the movie plot of Awakenings. Also, a family member of mine, whom was not catatonic, tried it for post-stroke fatigue/pain/neuropathy/brain fog to get away from gabapentin&pregabalin.

So carrying crappy weed might be good if you think you're gonna get Maxwell's Silver Hammer. Good to know.

Mozilla would cease to be without a viable revenue stream. Either users need to pay or they're going to have to trade most of their privacy for a tiny bit of money for the same goal. Which is the better deal?

Not going to buy anything from HP until they boycott and divest from Israeli apartheid military and government contracts.

PS: I'm half-Jewish, atheist.