DocTomoe

34 ms·

571.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
> The people who are capable of doing that generally aren't on the instances that get blocked. How would you know, given that those other instances are, you know, blocked? > who really are curious Trying to guide the neutral ones
572.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
In all fairness, if I was a hotel owner (or IKEA), I would not want my venues to be recognizable in a video game (or other media). Soon, I would no longer be "that luxury resort with the great customer service" but "that plac
573.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Which would be a good argument if back in the day, when gas storages were filled cheaply in summer, that price would be given over to end customers in winter as well. But of course, that was not the way things went.
574.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
No one questions that segregated groups with tight information and communication control can result in more efficiently reached results. History has shown us several examples of such highly efficient societies where what can and cannot be s
575.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Unfortunately, that does not translate to lower customer-end prices.
576.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
> But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will. This is Robber's Cave experiment [1] all over agai
577.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
That was the comic that made me lose respect for Mr. Munroe, because he is too intelligent to miss the point so badly: Free Speech is an age-of-enlightenment concept, not a legal construct from the US constitution. Worse, while it is true t
578.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Given how discovery in Mastodon works, by following "boosted" (think: re-tweeted) content creator or reading new people in a discussion, you wouldn't even know these accounts exist - sure, you can manually enter a mastodon
579.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Also, there are instances who deliberately block such servers, because in some circles, human rights like free speech are somehow considered evil.
580.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
To come back to my NNTP example: Back in the day, servers were not banned by admins, individual users were killfiled (essentially a filter) by other individual users, meaning that if you really disliked someone, you would get rid of their o
581.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Also, instance owners can unilaterally control what you see and who may follow you (by blocking individual users and whole servers from federating with theirs). Whether or not such a block exists is transparent to you as a user (this is dif
582.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Worse: Money is an illusion. We mistake a unit of measurement (like grams, or gallons) for wealth. In a recession, workers come to a construction site - material is still there, so is electricity and power tools ... but work can't cont
583.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
They also threw food on some of the paintings - whether or not they were aware of a protective glass pane beforehand is unknown - and at least in one case glued themselves to a 16th century picture frame, itself a priceless cultural artefac
584.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
> Because you can't protest oil infrastructure in any effective way. Blow up something? That's terrorism. So is trying to destroy cultural heritage. I see no qualitative difference between trying to deface a Vermeer and blowing
585.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
For enterprise environments, where demands usually are low to non-existent, Word does fine. In academic environments, when journals are involved, when a document is being worked on by several people simultaneously (in varying meanings of th
586.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Often, this is a side-effect of tax code weirdness. In my legislative framework, branded stuff is considered "advertisement", which can be given out with any amount of value to employees. Non-branded stuff - or money - would be ta
587.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Payment/Debit cards, which work worldwide, and often are given out by the same European banks to use in supermarkets and at ATMs.
588.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
> Having a Euro bank account number only allows people to transfer to, not from that account. At least in the case of Germany, this is factually incorrect: We do have Lastschrift, which is eerily similar to "drawing money from an ac
589.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Hm, given how many of these forms are sent around, I would expect most of them getting scanned and OCRd, with a fallback should checksums no longer match.
590.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Yours may be an extreme example, but verification may be a hard to solve problem once account holder names become too long or have funky characters in it (as is often the case in the EU). For instance, my electricity provider is the EnBW En
591.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
I feel this is too little, too late. People who would use this already have started using Credit/debit cards (instead of local systems). Bank account numbers are not easy to transmit (sure, we could do this via QR code, but that's
592.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
I am currently in the process of switching banks because the old one makes it difficult for me to change the number (and device) associated with my account (to the point where I have to send in a signed letter, which they then refuse becaus
593.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
As a child of the Cold War, when human extinction was hours, not years away, I may have become a bit more conservative with doomsday forecasts.
594.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Compare that to East Asia, where wearing a mask during Flu season was a common thing to prevent your own disease to spread to others long before Covid was known (I've seen sources claiming they started doing so after the Spanish Flu).
595.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
> That's why I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. Most likely explanation: Population/unrest control. If you can randomly shut down parts of the country for the pretend reason of a plague, you can stop unrest from ris
596.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
You make it sound like that was a distinct Chinese tactic and not every country on earth, foremost one that abbreviates itself to three letters, is engaged doing industrial espionage.
597.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
> Where did you get that? All autocratic regimes - and make no mistake: ecologist politicians ultimately must be, for the common citizenry will always work towards their own goals, which are incompatible with ecological goals - want to l
598.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
So, what is your living situation? Inner city? If so: Do you expect everyone to move in with you? How do you get your food (and - you'll likely buy it from somewhere - how does it get there)? Stopping individual traffic is a pipe dream
599.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
The agenda is not to make more people drive more eco-friendly, but make less people drive at all (and use either public transport where available, but only when absolutely necessary - or preferably stay at home). Providing access to chargin
600.
by DocTomoe 4y ago
Frédéric Pierucci. There's also that Huawei woman...Meng Wanzhou? What is right for the US must be right for the EU, right?

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