• 9 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Well, either that or crimes, but some crimes can be seen as illegal work

    Human existence requires work. Someone has to grow the food, someone has to fix the things, someone has to build the structures and plumb them and someone has to help fix us when we get broken. The only way to never work is to freeload off of everyone who is working.

    What really sucks is that society expects us to be “specialists” in one thing for the rest of our live

    Specialization is literally how humanity shifted from being hunter-gatherers who lived to be about 30-40 before getting mauled by a bear or killed by another tribe or dying of an infection because you slipped on a rock.

    In the modern economy specialization doesn’t have to mean doing the same thing every day. Any kind of career where you fix things, you can easily find a job that varies wildly from day to day. A mechanic might be replacing an engine cylinder one day and rebalancing wheels the next and rebuilding the exhaust the next. An IT person can be troubleshooting a software error one day then tweaking network performance the next then imaging laptops the next. A project manager will have different work depending on what phase of the project it’s in, and the type of challenges and work will vary wildly by what kinds of projects they’re managing

    The trick is, find something you don’t mind doing and that can turn into finding something you kinda enjoy. As long as you don’t wake up dreading work every day (which if you do it’s probably time to shake things up, both for yourself and for your loved ones!) you can have a pretty decent life



  • I could work in a movie theater or something similar, but then I’m back to making state minimum wage instead the almost double that I’m currently making.

    You could own a theatre. You could also create a local film festival, even if that means just booking the community room at the library and screening public domain silent films to start with. Or if you want to make a job out of it, maybe you can snag the screening rights to some indie/deep backlog films and do a traveling film festival, maybe setting up in small towns where there isn’t already a ton going on where you could also get the venue for cheap.

    There’s also companies popping up that have bought the rights to reprint deep back catalogue films. Like I recently heard about one that buys the rights to reprint B movies from the 70s and 80s on VHS, so apparently there is a market for that kind of thing too!




  • Root’s home directory only works if you’re sshing in as root (not a great practice, although its certainly not as bad as on Windows thanks to key auth. You can simply revoke the keys of the admin you just let go rather than resetting a bunch of passwords). The reason its common practice in Windows Server administration is a combination of common practices: having dedicated admin accounts in AD for each administrator, Windows lacking a decent directory for content shared between users, and of course the general laziness that Windows administration attracts and fosters.


  • Its a pretty common Windows server practice to just throw random shit on the root directory of the server. I’m guilty of this at times when there isn’t a better option available to me, but I at least use a dedicated directory at the root for dumping random crap and organize the files within that directory (and delete unneeded files when done) so that it doesn’t create more work later.


  • I think the difference is historically hobbies involved making things (woodworking, model building, sewing, playing music, drawing, writing, scrapbooking, etc.) or were purely physical (hiking, playing sports, shooting things, etc.) partly out of necessity due to home media being practically nonexistent outside of books and magazines which require literacy (a high bar up to about the 20th century)

    Within about one generation we went from books and magazines being the only mass market home media to suddenly having access to more home media than we could ever consume. My grandmother has told me about her family getting their first TV and how she imagined it would be like a radio with a little screen you could walk up to and see a static image depicting what’s being described when you wanted to but would otherwise listen to like radio

    People are now by default consumers, where even just 50 years ago it was still the default for people to make stuff, fix stuff, etc. at home. Boredom drove skill building, now boredom just drives consumption. To make matters worse, mass digitization ultimately came in the form of smartphones with apps powered by addictive algorithms, so people (myself included) are addicted to the cheap dopamine that these screens of colorful lights provide us. This is the crux of the matter, and there’s a growing trend (partly driven by enshitification) of de-digitizing as people realize how bad these screens are for our mental health







  • The thing with adding lanes is induced demand. By nature of there being more space for cars on that road more drivers will choose take that road over other roads. Cars don’t magically come into existence, people drive them, and people drive them for a reason, most commonly to go to/from somewhere

    Trains (and bikes and buses) take cars off the road. Every person riding on a transit solution that isn’t a car is a individual vehicle trip saved. When every vehicle contains an average of 1.2 people in it, you’ve got very close to 1:1 vehicle reduction for every trip that’s not taken by car

    So to your point, are some number of non-drivers choosing not to drive because of traffic? Probably a small number of them. But a complete transit system that has the real world effect of fewer cars on the road will mean few people owning cars. Why would a family own 2 cars when one is parked most of the time? Why spend $20k on a new (to you) car if you’re barely using the one you have/had? Fewer cars means less cars on the road which means less traffic. This is the dream.


  • Goddamn we need so much high speed rail, and yesterday

    And so much more standard speed rail too! There’s tons of railroad lines all over the country, and even many old stations still standing. Let’s start building RDCs again (or better, a modern equivalent) and start running passenger services on all of those lines

    The challenges are several fold. For one, there’s basically no manufacturers of passenger railcars left in the country. Occasionally a network upgrade will lead to one being spun up for a few years then it’ll shut down once the order is fulfilled because there’s no consistent market for passenger railcars in North America.

    I’d propose using a mix of historic British Rail procurement practices and current military contract practices where you put up a pot of money for up for say 3 companies to develop a prototype railcar meeting a specific spec. Make the spec for a fairly basic car and be ready to update station platforms for ADA compliance rather than forcing the cars to be compatible with 20 different platform heights and designs. Then test those 3 prototypes and the winner receives a bonus as the design is purchased by the federal government, and next you license that design out for all manufacturers in the country to produce, followed by an ongoing order of say 48 railcars per year from 5 different manufacturers and you have 248 railcars per year (enough to replace Amtrak’s entire current fleet within 10 years) from 5 different companies (reducing risk of one company mucking it all up) all manufactured with local labor and you have a standard design that is already in active production for other operators to order as well. Repeat this process for more equipment and designs as needed, and suddenly you have a bunch of known standard designs that your network can be built to and you have health competition between manufacturers which will be big enough (because each will have around 50-100 million dollars a year in revenue from that one ongoing federal contract alone) to start performing their own independent R&D to make their own unique stock to try to attract more orders from rail operators

    This is what the federal government exists for, making ambitious infrastructure projects like this possible. Policians just aren’t interested in thinking big enough