D61 [any]

50gbps down and 10gbps up

holy shitballs…

Obligatory FF7…

There’s an old PS 1 game called Legend of Dragoon… not too bad of a game but probably gameplay wise doesn’t hold up. BUT… its basically you getting a team of heroes from several the surviving races after another race (the only one who could naturally use magic) decided to do a genocide against everybody (and lost badly).

There is a scene later in the game, where you’re in the ruins of a floating city that (I think) was the capital of the genociders. It is a barren husk of a place, devoid of all sentient life, there are no survivors of this race. However, some of the their machines were made with magic and are running on autopilot. There is a room where you can just hang out and watch these little flying robot things zip around and have scripted NPC dialogue where rules/laws are submitted and passed.

It was this weird example of the banality of evil that I don’t think I’ve come across in a game before or since.

Yeah, and the older I get the more I notice it.

It hits when its really cloudy for a few days in a row, even.

Only ever had two services, Netflix and Hulu. It worked out that a VPN’s yearly subscription was cheaper than the base plan of Netflix so I just canceled that and what I can’t find on Hulu.

I’ve never posted asks for help that exploded, so that helps.

Simple comments that don’t really add anything to the thread I’ll upvote just cause unless they’re shitty.

I’ll reply with an emoji or or a short “thanks for the help” if anything that was offered was legitimately helpful.

Half assed ideas.

Option 1) % of hourly pay rate, capped at an two hours for a total round trip (but flexible) + a stipend depending on mode of transportation. Could try to get receipts from workers and have a purser issue cash/credit on their next paycheck or issue re loadable debit cards that get filled at regular intervals. (So a card for paid public transit and fuel for combustion vehicles) If we’re working in a place that taxes employee wages, the more taxes the employer can carry the better on the workers.

Option 2) Everybody gets a debit card and a list of approved places/items to be purchased for the purposes of “commuting to work compensation”. Workers could be expected to keep as many receipts as possible to turn in weekly just to verify stuff.

Option 3) Some subcommittee tracks worker commute times and how they commute and every quarter or something a stipend is paid in a lump sum like a bonus or it is used to give a paycheck by paycheck payout.

Easiest idea would be like JohanSkullcrusher said, full hourly pay rate the second I get into my car to start driving. Though workers would wind up paying more in income taxes and there’d probably be some issues with workers getting different compensation, like somebody walking 10 minutes to work and somebody driving 1 hour to get to work are going to have significantly different income levels at the end of the year.

There’s no easy way to make this into an actual business proposal… probably to the point that it isn’t possible at all.

The tactic I could think of, if I were to NEED to do this… would be to try to find some way to argue on the grounds of some of the Ethical Altrusim stuff (I’m not a proponent of this stuff but… devil’s advocate time).

You’d get a bunch of rich EA’s to invest a shit ton of money on the regular, you take this money to pay the licensing fees or fees for use on other copyrighted research and technical manuals and then charge as close to zero as you can get away with for the individual users accessing the licensed/copyrighted work. The argument being, “more people having access to quality research and technical documentation will be a net positive for humanity and the return on investment will be measured in thousands of years in the future.”

Do some research into long term storage media. (Probably Terrabyte size USB drives) Read reviews and specs to see if anybody mentions how many read/writes the things can go through before failures start and if they’ve got anything that slows bit loss. I’ve got a cheap 1TB thumb drive for like 20 bucks that I just use for moving large files around between ancient computers and occassionally trying to figure out how to get a Linux OS to work on something old I have in the house. So, you know, 20 ~30 bucks US a month and you will have 12TB of long term storage that can fit into a small jewelry box with space to spare. Just don’t forget which sticks have what stuff so that you can find it when you need it.

Other than that, you should be able to find some services that just run servers that do nothing but store stuff in “the cloud” in encrypted drives that you can access in various ways. If you’ve got the extra cash, its probably way more affordable than you think it is.

My self justifications are thusly…

I typically don’t try to “keep up with the latest or greatest” of things. So I feel zero guilt at finding ROMs of all the video games from my childhood and emulators. Neither do I feel bad about hunting down old PC games that are abandonware instead of trying to find some Steam version (which will stop working soon with my ancient computer anyways soon so… pppfffttttt).

Most of the books (comic, fiction, nonfiction) are of old stuff that has been out for years so whomever was going to make money off the sales has already made their money. The only people who are being denied any potential income are the resellers.

Most streaming services, whether I pay for them or not, run adds that had about a 90% chance of freezing my old entertainment computer to the point of requiring a restart. This dropped to practically zero after moving from windows to linux. Also, most of my devices are so old that the services I had been paying for wouldn’t work on them anyways… so… :shrug: … fuckem.

I’ve never felt that something “wasn’t worth it” because I got it for free as far as media. Usually when I go on a download spree of video games its because I’ve gone a bit manic and decided that I want to try to play every Final Fantasy game up to FF9 or all the MegaMan games or something and I’ll just burn myself out after playing the crap out of them.

I have, however, purchased books because I kept reading/hearing them referenced as being worthwhile or interesting and found myself thinking… “wow… that’s 25 bucks and a week’s worth of reading I can’t get back.” I also, have had a bad habit in the past of just purchasing books because they looked halfway interesting on impulse, tossing them into one of several trunks full of books, and they’ll sit there for 10 years before I even realize that I had the book.

Another thing that I have considered after years of thinking about it. These items were never going to be purchased by me, so me reading a scanned copy of a comic book from 20 years ago or me not reading it effectively results in the same amount of money leaving my pockets to go… somewhere. I say “somewhere” because I’m not paying the comic book writer/artists/inkers or the actual development teams of video games, I would be paying some other intermediary who pays their intermediary who pays their intermediary who might be required to pay some sliver of their revenue to the people who actually made the thing I’m playing/reading.

It also doesn’t hurt that I’m middle aged and barely make enough money to make ends meet on a good month even though I live a pretty frugal life. I’ve come to accept that its not worth beating myself up too much about.

I was a part of the chapo exodus and found myself just going to the hexbear instead of the reddit to the point that I just pop into reddit like once or twice a year.

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit, if it turned out that the most common gender ID is actually non-binary.

Like, my spouse and I pretty much consider ourselves “cis” but … but not for any particular reason other than, “well, its good enough to get the point across.” We don’t really “feel” any particularly strong emotions about it.

:Bill-Oreilly-shining:

“Highlander” rules.

There can be ONLY one!

To piggy back on your “bizarre fact”, the same type of iron can be found added to cereal.

I remember several times in school we’d do a science demonstration where we’d smash up Cheerio (or a knock off) brand ceral, mix the powder with water and slowly drag a magnet through the slurry. Every time the magnet would be pulled out of the mix, there’d be more and more tiny iron bits.

I fell away from watching Star Trek many MANY years ago, and am overwhelmed by all the Star Treks to the point that after watching the series with Scott Baccula I checked out.

The Orville, having way less … history… was much easier for me to get in to. Also, I was expecting it to be hot garbage and wound up really REALLY liking it.

Everybody deserves a papa Bortus.

A lack of basic level manuals and work flows for basic job duties.

Holy shit folks, where is my picture book that lets me know how this 15 year old point of sale system out in a rural post office is supposed to do the things that I need it to do?