Musician, mechanic, writer, dreamer, techy, green thumb, emigrant, BP2, ADHD, Father, weirdo

https://www.battleforlibraries.com/

#DigitalRightsForLibraries

  • 24 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • s38b35M5@lemmy.worldtocats@lemmy.worldMy cats right now
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    13 days ago

    Lol. 😂 I hear you. I feed at 10am and 10pm (with a 90 minute variance to keep them from getting to good at timekeeping). After almost a decade, I figured out a way to sleep in! Course, they still whine at night starting at 8pm sometimes, but my vet says my cats are unusually fit and a good weight, so I know I’m not starving them like they want me to believe. Their chirps and whines have gotten more and more elaborate and detailed on the last three years.




  • I looked into these so-called “responsible” indexes a few years back. It seems that whenever I dug into them, they invested in companies that didn’t seem to fit the description. These don’t change that assessment. You don’t have to look past the second page to see the primary holdings are not “socially responsible” companies at all.

    SRI holdings:

    NVIDIA
    TESLA
    HOME DEPOT
    COCA COLA
    ASML HLDG
    NOVO NORDISK
    INTUIT
    DISNEY (WALT)
    VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS
    BOOKING HOLDINGS

    Tesla? Come on. Coca Cola? Implicated in more environmental destruction than some oil companies, not to mention their irresponsible use of local water resources, including locking up a sole source of water away from local tribes and villages. Novo Nordisk? A socially responsible pharmaceutical company? Dream on. Intuit? They lobby to make the tax code impossible to understand without professional help, and also to ensure we can never file our taxes for free. Disney? Too many issues to list here. Verizon? Known for red-lining; being complicit in gov’t domestic surveillance; making empty promises to get gov’t subsidies, pocketing the money and not bothering to do the required work: stealing taxpayer money. All of the holdings are financial backers of Trump and the GOP, and most of them happily removed all mention of diversity or equality from their public facing materials to cozy up to this administration.

    If you really want social responsibility in a stock, you’re going to have to do the research yourself and find individual stocks that meet your definition. Any day, one of those companies could change their direction, could be exposed as participating in activities you wouldn’t have expected, or simply be bought and or taken over by a non-scrupulous competitor or parent company.

    Otherwise, you just have to accept that our money will be part of the problem, and sigh, hoping that your investments at least hold up long enough for you to retire, and hopefully you don’t feel too guilty.

    I know we want to invest in funds that aren’t evil, but I’m not convinced that social responsibility and trading publicly are compatible. At the very least, of not likely you’ll find these kinds of finds are anything more than ugly companies packaging the same ugly stocks and trying to appeal to your conscience.

    ETA: the climate change one is just as bad, full of Amazon, Google, Microsoft…

    Edit2: just invest in the total market, a la Bogleheads, and spend the proceeds responsibly. That’s the best you can do. Social responsibility is defined by the individual.

    Edit3: Consider a solar panel company. Green energy is good right? What if you find that they source their materials from a country known for human rights abuses, in the backs of exploited workers? Or they pollute? Or they simply post on ex-Twitter about their favorite fascist leaders? Does that change the SR value to you?


  • I completely agree. I thought Plex would be fast in the collective rearview mirror as soon as they started forcing connections to their servers, pay-walling, etc. I also had issues with the database corrupting and causing huge slowdowns. I spent days trying and failing to preserve my ratings, watch data, etc.

    In the end, I switched to a much simpler setup of an NFS/CIFS share accessed by Kodi on my Nvidia Shield TV. If Kodi chokes (happened once since 2017), I can just wipe the app and/or reinstall and then import the local metadata (XML or NFO IIRC). That takes about five minutes. It just works. Kodi also gives me access to the IAGL, so that’s a huge plus.




  • I’m not sure what’s extenuating (maybe you meant extraordinary, which I still disagree with) about being in -20°F by herself when just barely past kitten stage. All scientific papers and opinions I’ve ever read about cats puts them at the least domesticated of human companions, able to survive without us just fine.

    The domestic cat retains a behavioural repertoire that makes some individuals very successful when living independently of people, and all cat populations show a degree of genotypic and phenotypic flexibility that enables them to move between states within a few generations, or even within a lifetime (Bradshaw et al. 1999)

    The states being referred to here are states of domestication versus true wildness.

    The very recent history of ‘true’ domestication, beginning perhaps as little as ~200 years ago, means that domestic cats effectively remain genetically ‘wild’ (Tamazian et al. 2014). Few genomic alterations in domestic cats are attributable to domestica- tion, excepting genes affecting memory, fear-conditioning and reward learning (Montague et al. 2014). Domestic cats have retained the genetic basis for effective hunting (Bradshaw 2006), including sensory traits such as a broad hearing frequency range, high visual acuity and accentuated vomeronasal capacity (Montague et al. 2014).

    ETA: links and quotes





  • s38b35M5@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    indoor cats really struggle a lot if they ever get lost outside.

    Curious by what you mean about struggling. Not trying to be simply contrary.

    My (then) 16 month old, seven pounds wet with rocks in her pockets indoor cat escaped in 2018 and lived wild in rural Maine for 18 months before being trapped and returned to us (thanks to microchipping). She was 9 miles from home and had a broken paw (something fell on it and crushed her toes), but was otherwise healthy and in good spirits.

    I tend to agree that a feral has an advantage based on common sense, but also that my tamed feral is a beast when he fights.

    Edit: wrong quoted text


  • Glad to see this becoming more public. Been brewing for years now. Too bad they’re this way with the press, but as Steve points out, gaming isn’t important to them anymore. We got them where they are, but they found a golden goose with “ai,” and they’re milking (a goose?) it for all they can.

    For all I care, Nvidia can disappear. The last/only Nvidia card I owned was the Geforce 2 GTS. I think I played Unreal Tournament or Quake 2 on it.


  • Have been using TrueNAS for 13+ years since the FreeNAS 9.x days. Can attest to its bulletproof-ness in my case.

    Would second asking in the iX forums. I’ve managed to get replication help directly from iX staff before when using the forum. You shouldn’t have this issue, and you will find answers.

    I’ve moved my disks to a completely new machine with fresh install and then import my config, reboot and everything is as it was. I’ve also done the same without my config and imported the pool with no problems, just need to recreate shares, and any jails (a feature which I no longer use) would need to be reconfigured to be 100% functional.




  • windows phone was a joke

    No. It was leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else. They just sat on their hands and didn’t do anything with it, allowing Google, RiM and Apple to steamroll them.

    And to blame Microsoft (which – don’t get me wrong – is hugely evil and truly is the cause behind many of the problems you properly identify) for all of the tech problems without a hat tip to IBM is missing some important details. IBM showed the tech world that if you use your war chest to drag out a legal battle long enough, you will eventually get a president in power (Reagan) that you own enough to dismiss all claims. That’s how Microsoft got off without even a fine for all their antitrust violations. They played the long game and George W. waved a hand, making the enforcement effort go away.





  • I agree that this needs to be out there. I’m not fully tapped into the overclockers and other enthusiast forums/communities, but I do follow tech news closely. I’ve read about a lot of scams, but this one had slipped by, if it was ever reported on where my eyeballs are reading.

    I just never considered that I had to worry about sellers on Amazon. In hindsight, it’s awfully naive of me to think they are this big and have a handle on fraud. Like put forth in Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well, and that includes managing fraud on a marketplace.