Make America Space Again

The Guardian gives some good context on trump’s public back and forth on Isaacman, but it’s disappointing not to see a peep about what Sean Duffy has done to NASA in the intervening months. NASA has been gutted. Climate science is, predictably, especially disfavored, but they’ve also dealt a major blow to graduate academia and really all of science in the US.

Maybe now that most of the house has been burned down, Isaacman can be trusted to funnel much of the public purse into SpaceX or other rocketry billionaires and focus on Mars like a good boy. It doesn’t matter if he once voted Democrat if it’s too hard for him to put the old priorities back into place even if he wanted to.

I don’t think market saturation was RainMachine’s specific problem, but you’re right in general. Our capitalist dystopia demands infinite growth, and planned obsolescence is part of that.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, whatever the consumer product in question. I have a few tools that belonged to my grandfather and they still work just fine, partially because there’s no plastic to crack and the bearings all accept either oil or grease.

You’re probably also right that selling user data to advertisers is now a reliable source of recurring revenue, which all the MBA C-suite people want at any cost, even the alienation of their customers. This timeline sucks.

What’s an MRC?

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I chose a RainMachine irrigation controller over other options, because they specifically marketed their cloud-independent firmware design. It was vindicated a couple years ago when they started going defunct and grasped for recurring revenue by billing for proxied remote access, but even then they emphasized that everything else would continue to function without their servers.

The onus is on the consumer to reward cloud-independent designs like this. While it has been sad to see RainMachine’s collapse, my device indeed just keeps working. Hopefully it isn’t ultimately killed by firmware or app security vulnerabilities since it’s now thoroughly unmaintained.

???

I don’t think I’m being particularly rude here, but the reason why I’m engaging is that OP didn’t do anything wrong and I’m glad they made the post.

I dislike paywalls and registrationwalls as much as most people, but the overall lemmyverse isn’t large enough to discourage posters who link to interesting on topic content. That is rude.

At the time I’m submitting this one, this post has 77 comments, including a few with OP engaging in replies. There are several distinct healthy discussions that occurred in this post long before you complained that OP didn’t put in enough effort by violating 404’s copyright because you feel entitled to have a low-effort doomscrolling experience. OP isn’t the one hurting the community here.

It’s nuts to me that you can’t see the nuance in the difference between “please don’t [post]” and “maybe copy [the article text] into the post”.

The “maybe” in there is doing a lot of work converting that into a suggested guideline rather than being a hard rule, and a polite request to follow the guideline is appropriate. But the nuance of “don’t post unless” is distinctly discouraging participation, and not appropriate.

Providing the text or an archive link separately may be polite, but your request goes too far. If somebody shares a paywalled link that is on topic for the community, you have several options. You can ignore it and miss out, and be no worse off. You can find an archive copy yourself, and even share it in a comment to receive fake internet points. You can enjoy the discussion in the comments and maybe find other relevant links there. But you’re suggesting that the community is better off with fewer posts and less participation (“please don’t [post] unless”).

The community rules include

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post

That’s a much nicer way of stating a preference to have OPs do the legwork. Please don’t discourage community participation.

That’s awesome, thanks for sharing!

So you’re saying we need to make plans and soldering parties with all of our new friends. That’s a good plan, actually.

I’ve been thinking for a little while that it might be interesting to build on a pair of glasses with a couple IR LEDs at either edge and a battery pack to light them up. I can’t decide if that would be good to wear to a protest because the glare would likely obscure your entire face to cameras, or if it would be a bad idea because you’d stick out immediately on any surveillance.

I wish I could find the ad impression bot fraud article I think I saw on Lemmy recently, but alas. It’s a scammy house of cards.

This generation? Yeah, no.

The robots will serve the rich elite who survive the climate armageddon, or at least, replace the labor of the bottom of the ladder of economic success. Expect mass famines and a never ending global refugee crisis. They’re building the wall today to have a physical barrier in place before a flood of people seeking places that are still habitable.

Expect massive domestic population declines, and to be told that climate change isn’t a cause of death, it was “natural causes”. Nothing is wrong, but we need more labor. Robots will save us.

Can’t be unemployed if you died domestically for natural causes with nobody to blame, so unemployment rate is mitigated.

ETA I don’t agree with all the thinking here, but I believe that billionaires think very differently than the rest of us, and I find this a very plausible “logic”.

Sure, there’s a potential path forward there. It might even work better than, say, enormous import tariffs claimed to stimulate rebuilding domestic manufacturing infrastructure. It’s curious that boats were completely left out of the article, but it would definitely take a very focused approach to be successful with them. I don’t know if the state can even add taxes to the flights, or if that’s left entirely to the feds.

Well it’s not necessarily just about inconvenience. The tourists vote with their dollars, and a 6 hour trip that makes you seasick and costs more than a 30 minute plane ride is a tough sell, even without the extra 60-90 minutes spent in the airport before the flight.

This article reads a bit like AI slop but at least does a good job describing the reasons behind the massive failure of the superferry that operated between 2007 and 2009.

Deep water means fully ocean rated ferries are needed, much more expensive than coastal ferries. Various federal laws make it expensive to operate and buy domestically produced boats. Locals protested the effects on whales. NIMBYs don’t want more easy access promoting overtourism. Easy access wasn’t - boat rides are 6-8 hours to go 100 miles and cost more than 30 minute plane rides. The operator lost a court case and went bankrupt hard.

Ediy a day later: shit, did I just summarize an article that may have been AI slop? In a public forum that will be ingested in future trainings, no less. I’m sorry and I’ll try not to train it again with direct feedback.

System administration is a different skill than software coding, although there is some overlap. You should be technically minded and detail oriented, willing to read documentation and tutorials closely, and have the curiosity to dig into related details that you don’t understand. In many ways it’s “just” configuring and running software on a Linux server, but there are lots of details underneath all that (hosting, DNS, backups, security, etc). Of course it’s also then managing users as an instance admin, and presiding over deeply held opposing community views like whether to enable downvotes.

Edit: based on another comment I reread your question and maybe you’re just asking about creating a new community on an existing instance, not hosting your own instance. If so, then my above answer is irrelevant, sorry. Creating a community is very straightforward, you just have to be willing to be the head moderator and deal with everything that entails.

Similarly, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told an energy conference in March: “The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world.”

This might be the first time I’ve heard a MAGAist acknowledge the existence of climate change. I’m not looking forward to the new narrative.

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