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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Friend group, work group, sports groups, friends of friends met at parties etc. It’s a sample size in the hundreds, and includes dozens who used to root their phones and install third party OSes in the early days of Android. It’s not insignificant to see zero usage when OP is claiming 50%. If their numbers are to be believed there should be regions where there’s close to 100% usage.




  • A lot of the nuance is also one of threat assessment, and risk tolerance.

    We can prepare for a situation where we’re attacked by the US, but given all probabilities is that worth it compared to preparing for a situation where we get attacked by China or Russia, or is that even worth considering vs preparing for a situation where we can ramp up industrial military production as fast as possible and become a resource rich manufacturing powerhouse?

    There’s no way of knowing which path the world will go down, and preparing for everything simply isn’t possible, so every decision is going to be a matter of what risks to take for what potential benefits.


  • At the moment, no, probably not, and it’s not either / or. Drones were a surprise in Ukraine, but their effectiveness has somewhat diminished as new counter measures like jamming, and just basic stuff like netting, are starting to blunt their usefulness.

    Meanwhile they’re still getting hammered by glide bombs, modified heavy bombs that can use GPS to find their targets and are launched by traditional aircraft, far away from the front line, and some of their most effective weapons have been the Storm Shadow / Scalp cruise missiles, which are also launched from traditional fighter jets (which effectively act as a first stage).

    And again, it’s not one of the other. In an actual war, either aggressive or defensive, you’re going to want a mixture of capabilities… You can’t always zerg rush.





  • Mo Money Mo Problems doesn’t refer to money or wealth in the abstract for the community as a whole, it’s about an individual making substantially more money than their local peers.

    The situation presented by OP is one of a rising tide, that lifts all ships, where as the dynamic elicited by Biggie Smalls is fundamentally one of wealth inequality. If there was both enough wealth to go around, and wealth sharing mechanisms in place, it’s not clear that mo money would be mo problems.




  • Yeah, I started in the architecture industry and it’s wild how much every company pays Autodesk in licensing fees, every year, for extremely little improvement to Revit (their architecture software).

    For a mid sized company (~500 people), I think we were paying them like a full staff software engineer’s salary in licensing fees every year… and there are dozens of them in every country, let alone major firms, independent shop, contractors etc.

    Really felt like the industry would benefit from open source CAD software that was collectively developed, but it’s not quick or easy to build CAD software that works flawlessly at scale and no single firm has ever had enough up front capital to fund the development of something that could compete. Plus once you collaborate with other architecture and engineering and planning firma, you now need to exchange files and standards (or better yet work together real time), and now you need a solution that can work for everyone.



  • No, they wouldn’t.

    Anti-trust law exists to prevent companies from overcharging consumers, something they can do when they don’t have competition.

    Valve keeping their prices far higher than costs is something that can open them up to anti-trust scrutiny. Competitively lowering their prices while still maintaining profitability cannot, as that is the exact goal of anti-trust laws in the first place.

    It’s also fucking wild that gamers hate Tim Sweeney so much. What has he used his fortune to do? Build a reasonably priced and powerful third party game engine that makes it easy for indie developers to build games, spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to break up Apple and Google’s walled garden 30% bullshit, launched a PC store to try and do the same with Steam, and bought tens of thousands of acres of US land to preserve for nature conservation. Oh what a moustache twirling monster!




  • Everywhere does, but Canada has a post secondary education rate of ~66%, and typically votes 66% sane. America has a post secondary education rate of ~50%, and typically votes 50% sane.

    There are other differences between the countries, but I think it’s impossible to argue that a substantially more educated population hasn’t led to a stabler and more thoughtful political climate.

    How many revolutions around the world have been sparked by student protests? It honestly seems like close to half of them from the past century or two. There’s a reason that Elon and all the billionaires are trying to convince people that college is a waste.


  • You are right, all the comments replying to you are making vacuous individualist arguments like ‘it won’t work every single time’, when what’s important is that ‘on average, it will raise intelligence and the ability to critically evaluate situations’.

    The internet loves to just regurgitate what they heard before and only deal in absolutes, so right now it’s that they would have made more money in the trades, so suddenly college and higher education is meaningless and provided no value to them. It’s honestly embarassing how much they’re just buying into right wing propaganda.

    A more educated population is a more empowered population, and there’s absolutely no reason that everyone shouldn’t do some form of post secondary education, whether it’s university, college, or a trades program that includes college level courses. You’re not going to be able to understand how the world actually works or get a sense of the depth of knowledge in each field by just dropping out of high school and stopping thinking hard.