My city finally got a court order against a billionaire for unpermitted building that allows us to bulldoze his house. Just took 7 years in court to get the ruling…

And instead of bulldozing the house, we were able to use the court order to strongarm them into fixing their site so it no longer damages the environment, their neighbors, or city infrastructure.

The upside for the city there (aside from having to bid out and manage a major project in-house) is that we get a lot more tax revenue from a house that is brought into compliance than a scarred, demolished site.

If you write enough laws in a manner that makes it easy to violate them accidentally, then anyone can be prosecuted at any time and civil liberties can be removed via technicalities.

There’s scraping data, which should be considered stealing, and then there’s asking people to steal company data as part of an interview process.

This is actual industrial espionage. If true, it could be a big deal.

That’s how they’ve been operating for years. They’ll go public soon enough though, so your 401k will take the hit instead of the parasites on top.

That’s what the SpaceX IPO was about. They were listed on the NASDAQ way earlier than companies are normally allowed to be so the assholes up top could raid your retirement fund despite there being no path to profitability.

The US has a weird mix of big emplty spaces, really fucking expensive existing underground utilities and roadways, and private property (easements ain’t free) that makes new underground utilities stupidly expensive to run.

You have to buy big easements, negotiate utility contracts with local and state governments (to use the public right-of-way), dodge existing infrastructure while repairing what you break, and lay a fuckton of cable.

I work on the municipal side, and despite Google Fiber having a utility agreement with us for years they still have yet to lay a single foot of underground fiber because we won’t allow them to cut across roads that we just replaced in the last year, require their microtrenches to follow engineering standards, and they need to show existing underground water, gas, wastewater, and electrical services on their plans because they’re famous for just running a trench and making it the water district’s problem when they cut 7 public lines in an hour.

They probably have a stronger claim and higher-ceiling on their portion of any judgment suing individually.

Don’t throw it away. Give it away for free to someone who was going to buy one.

Work Product and Attorney Client privilege are broken by AI use, making anything shared with an AI discoverable.

Defaulting AI on is how you get the corporate lawyers to make us drop Microsoft.

People don’t understand just how difficult it is to cool stuff in space. Half of the shit sticking out of the ISS that people think are solar panels are actually radiant cooling systems, and the ISS will generate WAY less heat per volume than a data center.

Honestly, Lemmy has been good for me in some ways because it isn’t as popular and doesn’t have the deep niche communities reddit has that I was super active in.

I get more accomplished now because I essentially “finish” my Lemmy browsing and move on, whereas reddit always had something else for me to dive into.

Why spend all that money and resources cultivating actual intelligence?

Maybe there’s more than one problem, and none of the governments involved in this are the good guys.

Yes, America and Israel are responsible for the current clusterfuck, but Iran’s government is still pretty fucking evil.

The fact that they’re making companies sign 5-year contracts for the current prices before selling anything at all says that they’re expecting the demand to collapse soon, and they want to lock in the high prices before that happens.

When industries pull this bullshit, they should be nationalized.

You should watch his videos on solar panels if you like a rant, though it gets increasingly political as it goes.

The video may be primarily about solar, but he goes nuclear by the end.

Sony sold the PS3 at a pretty significant loss and had an “OtherOS” feature that allowed people to install Linux on it.

Between that and ots cell architecture, it turned out to be a super affordable way to build supercomputers. Sony eventually disabled the OtherOS feature to combat people buying them en masse and costing Sony their lunch, and they got a LOT of flack for it.

Valve is doing the opposite. They’re keeping the openness, but charging enough money it’s not financially viable to buy a bunch of Steam Machines to build cheap AI clusters.

It was basing standards on vehicle footprints. Starting in 2012, a Toyota Corolla had less-strict emissions and fuel economy standards than a compact truck, so they stopped making the compact trucks after 2011.

They brought back the Ranger, but it’s larger than some of the older F150s.

And as standards got tighter, it impacted more an more vehicles. All the compact cargo vans (Transit Connect, ProMaster City, and NV200) were discontinued in 2022 because they no longer meet standards at that size.

The th8ng about this administration is that they’re drumming constantly about everyone. Yeah - they attacked Iran, but the also threatened to attack Canada and Mexico and Greenland and China and everyone else. They’ve overwhelmed us with so much bullshit we’re too busy being shocked by the new attrocity to give a proper response to the last one.

Maybe we understand that the US is the greater of 2 evils in this specific war, while also feeling like the Iranian government is evil.

I dropped a word there. “It doesn’t have to cost…”

I’d prefer he commit suicide rather than have his clients murder him.