[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 42 points 1 year ago

Much has been said about the idea of 'signal leaving UK or EU'. Little has been said about how exactly that would happen.

AFAIK, Signal has no business presence in the UK or EU. IE, no offices, no registered corporate entities. Thus, they (arguably) have no more requirement to comply with UK's or EU's regulations than, say, Iran's or China's or any other jurisdiction where they do not do business and have no presence.

Signal's leadership has a record of giving any regional restrictions the middle finger, so I doubt Signal would voluntarily block EU countries. So that means the EU would either pressure Google and Apple to delist Signal (easily worked around, at least on Android, and soon on Apple too as EU is trying to force sideloading) or they'd pressure ISPs to block connections to Signal (more or less impossible).

If EU tried to do that, it'd just create a giant game of whack-a-mole. And people doing real CSAM shit would just move to even more private distributed systems.

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 50 points 1 year ago

I came here thinking this sounds like she might be getting woke-cancelled for suggesting Israel is pure as driven snow...

Khalifa even urged Hamas fighters to "flip their phones and film" executions horizontally in one of her posts.

Nevermind, she can go fuck herself with a cactus.

If you think military fighters executing civilians is an acceptable strategy, you probably deserve to be among those civilians and see how you like it.

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 54 points 1 year ago

I only know some basics of the whole situation, but I really don't get this attack. Israel is a modern Westernized nation and enjoys STRONG support, financial and military, from many/most other Western developed nations. They have modern weapons of just about all types.
Israel is accused of some awful shit and stealing peoples homes. From what I can see they're probably guilty of this.

But I don't understand how killing a bunch of civilians at a rave is going to overall help the cause. It seems to me like a. it'd give your better-armed adversary an excuse to smack you down once and for all, and b. a good way to make the rest of the world feel like they shouldn't be stopped in doing so (and if anything, helped in their efforts).

So what is the goal? Is this just an expression of pent up anger? Because it seems a poor strategy to me.

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 42 points 1 year ago

For some people the right to keep and bear arms is a good thing not a bad thing.

I think the bigger problem is not that armed people are everywhere, but that violent crime is common...

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 35 points 1 year ago

Of course it is.

We have more energy consuming stuff than ever. But do you ever see NEW substations being built? NEW long range power lines? I don't.

Around here, the utility has a deal- they will sell you a top of the line $400 color touchscreen WiFi thermostat that talks to Alexa and displays the weather report and does a bunch of other shit, for $10 (not a typo). In exchange, you let them remotely shut off your AC if the grid gets overloaded.

Why do they do this? Because a few truckloads of thermostats (with a bulk discount) are a fuckton cheaper than actually upgrading the grid.

And so we hear about grid overload days and possible brownouts and incentives to shut stuff off as if this is the way it's supposed to be. But the reality is these problems only exist because utilities don't keep ahead of necessary upgrades. After all, why spend the money when there's shareholders to answer to?

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 35 points 1 year ago

This is harder than it looks.

See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don't mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that's working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there's big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can't be used.
Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that's not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it'll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.

What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It's huge.
The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.

As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it'll keep the cars cooler in summer.

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 55 points 1 year ago

TL;DR that everyone seems to have missed:

Poland isn't sending weapons to Ukraine because they are arming up themselves instead.

“We no longer transfer weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 49 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Um... no fucking shit.

Transporting millions of people dozens of miles twice a day OF COURSE has resource costs, in carbon and pollution and energy consumption. This shouldn't be rocket science. Sadly it is for people who are afraid of change.

It also saves the workers money (as they don't have to pay for fuel or public transit), it saves the company money (as they don't have to pay for office space), it saves the environment (as you don't have pollution from commutes), it reduces traffic (as you don't have as many commuters at rush hour), and it's generally good for just about everybody except commercial real estate developers renting out overpriced office buildings and Starbucks that's paying absurd rents to be in the bottom floor of those overpriced office buildings. And of course middle managers who think that hounding their employees in person somehow accomplishes something.

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 102 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is bullshit. There is no confusion. Their new policy was very clear and easy to understand. If the word confusion applied at all, it would be to how/why Unity is doing such a brain dead move that alienates their entire user base. This is a weasel word announcement that doesn't say what it should, namely 'we fucked up and we're sorry'.

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 46 points 1 year ago

So what the fuck do you all want? It's a phone. All the innovations that could be crammed into a candybar-style phone have pretty much been done.

If you want real innovation that means a return to the early 2000s when there were tons of different form factors in the market. Sliders, flips, phones with full keyboards, etc. But that means you either need The Only Phone Manufacturer to produce more than one product line of phones, or it means you need to consider other options.

There's a LITTLE innovation happening- Samsung and Google are both using the new flexible OLED panels to make flipbook-style phones that look pretty cool. Motorola has one too that's a flip phone style gadget, kinda square when closed but flips open to be a standard phone size. Sadly I don't see any real contenders with a physical keyboard.

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 84 points 1 year ago

This exactly.
A year or two back there was an article about companies trying to return to office- the CEO of some upstart engineering company had a quote like 'every time one of our competitors announces return to office we kick our recruitment into overdrive. We get all the best people that way'.

The companies that push return to office aren't going to keep their most productive and intelligent workers. They're going to keep the ones who can't find anything better.

It's really kind of funny... this is a combination of short-sighted management who think that being able to physically see their employees working somehow makes them more productive, and real estate- lot of dollars invested in commercial real estate and CEOs don't want to admit their flashy new HQ in Silicon Valley was wasted money.

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 55 points 1 year ago

Interesting.

Ukraine is known for thorough corruption at many levels of government. Zelenskyy first got elected for that reason- he was originally an actor who starred in a movie about a politician who decided to end corruption. He then ran for office on that platform and won. But when the system is thoroughly corrupt through and through, fixing it is not an overnight process.

My initial thought is perhaps this anti-corruption unit is itself corrupt, so it's making up an excuse to justify its own existence.

As for high profile corruption being swept under the rug- what I know of Zelenskyy suggests he would be less likely to turn a blind eye to that. I could of course be wrong though. And I suspect if he brings a high profile treason corruption case against a few well known people and has them jailed or shot for treason, that will send a very strong message to the rest that this isn't tolerated anymore.
That will of course put a target on Zelenskyy's back, but that's always been the case (especially since Russia invaded).

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SirEDCaLot

joined 1 year ago