qjkxbmwvz

joined 1 year ago
[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 3 points 9 hours ago

Unity centered around what?

Participation. Making things a tiny bit better when possible, and if not that, then minimizing damage.

Making things better nationally is hard. But locally, change can be efffected


my city (San Francisco) has ranked choice voting for local offices. It's awesome, and I vote for who I want first. It's small, but it's a start.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 12 points 10 hours ago

Depends on the person


when the pandemic hit I was a grad student, we didn't have kids, and our living situation was nice (tiny studio but it had a wonderful, if small, outdoor space). Scary times for sure, but life


at least the day to day


was...pretty good!

Now we have kids, and my god, I can't imagine.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Jobs created toxic work environments.

...and so did Linus Torvalds*


he's certainly not the embodiment of capitalism. But I absolutely have a huge amount of respect for Torvalds, even if I don't approve of his way of interpersonal/professional style.

(I used to run Arch btw [but I run Debian now].)

*He's supposedly taken steps in the right direction here and has made improvements.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 6 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Not sure if trolling or not, but googling around and it sounds like Sensory Processing Disorders can cause this level of passionate hatred towards bananas...

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 11 points 2 days ago

On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

That's not true at all. You generally can't use your distribution's package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you ./configure'd it properly make install will put it under your home.

Standard Linux distributions don't place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you'll need to sort that out.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only apply to primary residence


investment real estate would be subject to a "wealth tax," but folks wouldn't get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 4 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Right, that's a huge downside for sure.

Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it's a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate


which often means middle class homeowners.

So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as "good" in that folks don't get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.

It's...complicated.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 8 points 3 days ago (5 children)

California disagrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Property tax is assessed when there's a sale, and otherwise changes very slowly. It's a controversial measure.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

But this is a weird thing to lie about


the only reason to implement toner DRM is to get people to buy your cartridges. But if your public statement is, "it's ok to buy off brand cartridges," then...well... that's kinda weird.

Not saying you're wrong, and they could be trying to have their cake and eat it too (court the anti-DRM crowd but also scare people into sticking with their toner). I'm just saying your snarky/sarcastic response seems unwarranted here.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I can only remember this because I initially didn't learn about xargs


so any time I need to loop over something I tend to use for var in $(cmd) instead of cmd | xargs. It's more verbose but somewhat more flexible IMHO.

So I run loops a lot on the command line, not just in shell scripts.

 

People often complain about San Francisco's public transit


and to be sure, it's not perfect by any means (multiple separate agencies doesn't help). But the historic streetcars are pretty neat!

They're painted with the livery of various historic streetcars from all over the country (and a few international, I think). Best of all, they run alongside the modern fleet


same route, same fare.

 

Noticed a few days ago that Sutro Tower's red blinking lights are now white. Just asked them on their website form, but wondered if anyone else knows the story with this.

Personally, I miss the red ones!

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