On eve of bankruptcy, U.S. firms shower execs with bonuses – Reuters

Posted on July 17, 2020 by David K.

Source: On eve of bankruptcy, U.S. firms shower execs with bonuses – Reuters

Every time there’s a hiccup now, the government slathers a bunch of money all over all the current-crony companies, when the entire point of a corporation was to bear the risk of the market to reap the rewards of the profit. (Which they then hide in offshored shell companies.) Companies are running this country. We have a corporatocracy. Or maybe just a plain old plutocracy. The older I get, the more this sort of thing makes me nauseous. Let these companies fail, and give smaller companies a chance to get their foot in the door to take up the slack. No matter how much of a fan you may be of capitalism, you have to admit that the “market” is completely broken. Whatever it is we have at this point, it is NOT capitalism.
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Twitter DMs of Obama, Musk and Biden Could Have Been Stolen in Hack, Experts Warn

Posted on July 16, 2020 by David K.

“Absolutely, 100 percent that the DMs could have been compromised,” Jackie Singh, founder of Spyglass Security, told Newsweek. “I mean it looks like they had ‘god mode’ with seemingly few limitations and we don’t know how long they had it for.”

Source: Twitter DMs of Obama, Musk and Biden Could Have Been Stolen in Hack, Experts Warn

So Twitter has an internal backdoor system, which has been exploited by “the bad guys,” including access to people’s private messages. Since politicians are all over the platform, there are now national security concerns in play. Apple should bring this story up the next time the FBI/CIA/NSA demands that they implement a backdoor system that only “they” can use, in the name of the “war on terror.”

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My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire

Posted on July 15, 2020 by David K.

The black market for Amazon reviews makes some sense if you consider how valuable positive reviews can be to sellers on the platform. With more than 2.5 million sellers on the platform, getting seen by customers who might make a purchase is no easy feat. As one friend who has been selling on Amazon Marketplace since 2016 explained to me, on Amazon, “the more reviews you have on an item, the more likely for the item to come up in an algorithmic search. The more customers like the item, with reviews, the more Amazon likes it.”

Source: My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire

For many years, I’ve been complaining that you cannot trust ANY system of review on the internet. Always to deaf ears, of course.

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U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation – Reuters

Posted on July 15, 2020 by David K.

McGirt, 71, has served more than two decades in prison after being convicted in 1997 in Wagoner County in eastern Oklahoma of rape, lewd molestation and forcible sodomy of a 4-year-old girl. McGirt, who did not contest his guilt in the case before the justices, had appealed a 2019 ruling by a state appeals court in favor of Oklahoma.

Source: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation – Reuters

Who continues to argue a 20-year-old case, at 71 years old, with a 1,000-year sentence, for raping a toddler, when you plead guilty to the charge?! A puppet, that’s who. People behind the scenes are using this case to wrest control of a large chunk of land away from the state of Oklahoma, and the power that will come with it. That is the real story. Who are the protagonists here? What’s their agenda? What have they been doing for the past 20 years?

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PhRMA sues to stop state’s new insulin affordability program – StarTribune.com

Posted on July 5, 2020 by David K.

“A state cannot simply commandeer private property to achieve its public policy goals,” said PhRMA’s complaint, filed Tuesday in district court. “The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from attempting to solve societal problems in this draconian manner.”

Source: PhRMA sues to stop state’s new insulin affordability program – StarTribune.com

If their “alternatives” were working, people wouldn’t be dying from rationing insulin. The only thing “draconian” about this situation is the feudalistic caste system we seem to have recreated in modern America.

This country was started so that we wouldn’t have to live under the regime of a bunch of wealthy landowners who controlled the lives of those who worked their land. The large corporations — who don’t just control the means of production — but use the courts to prevent competition — get to unilaterally dictate their will to us serfs. This move is a complete abrogation of the implied social contract of a corporation. We wouldn’t even be in this position if they hadn’t been so greedy, and extracted so much from society for the past 5 decades.

Go ahead, I dare you to read up on how much money pharmaceutical companies have taken from the US government to develop all those medicines they advertise constantly on television, how much it costs to make them, and then how much they charge for them. The insurance companies have allowed this situation to develop, and get so bad that society cannot bear the weight of it any longer.

When the US finally adopts socialized medicine, the capitalism-lovers who wring their hands and call it communism will have nothing to blame except the corporatocracy that made it inevitable, and no one to blame except themselves for continuing to support a system that is leaving more and more people to fall through the cracks, and fend for themselves when they are the most vulnerable, until they become the majority, and vote with their pocketbooks to rebalance the equation.

Don’t tell me horror stories about health care systems in Canada or England. I hear horror stories from our own stupid system every single week, from rich and poor alike, and you do too, even if you ignore them.

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Crafting in Elder Scrolls Online

Posted on June 22, 2020 by David K.

Naturally, crafting in ESO is a very MMO-grindy type of thing. Since the start, I had been intending that my main character would be able to craft all the gear that I’d want to use on him. The best set of craftable gear for a light-gear magicka user seems to be the New Moon Acolyte equipment. It requires knowing all 9 traits to craft, and the 9th trait — nirnhoned — is a rabbit hole in and of itself, which I won’t even bother going into here.

Even after solving the nirnhoned rabbit hole problem, there’s the simple issue of time. Researching the 9th trait on any single piece of light gear takes 64 days. Sixty-four in-real-life days, though you can do 3 pieces at a time.

Now, you only need 5 pieces to make a set, so the natural thing to do is to create shoes, pants, chest, belt, and gloves, and finish your armor with a head-and-shoulders monster set. So, at a minimum, there’s something like 8 months required to research enough traits to break into this end-game build-out.

So, for grins, I just searched around on Tamriel Trade Center, and found New Moon Acolyte gear in a guild store. Turns out some master crafter had the same idea. I found all 5 pieces, with the divines trait, and magicka enchantment, just like I intend to create. It costs, like, $6K per item. So it only cost me like 30,000 gold to just buy the stuff, and anyone can afford that.

I guess I’m going to be playing the game, and time will be passing, so I can keep researching, and eventually be able to do this myself, but this experience has really slowed my roll on bothering with the whole thing. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of upside to solving the nirnhoned puzzle to get to the point of being able to create 9-trait gear.

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Shoutout to Chiptunes

Posted on June 16, 2020 by David K.
Chipzel on Bandcamp

I just wanted to post about how much I love chiptunes, and the whole scene. Especially Chipzel, who is my favorite in the genre. I bought Dicey Dungeons and The Crypt of the Necrodancer, based in large part on the music. Turns out, she was the force of nature behind both. Per my previous post on video gaming as I’ve gotten older, I’m terrible at Necrodancer, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to master Dicey. But the music for both is just terrific.

I also like this chiptune station: http://hyperadio.ru:8000/live, but I can’t seem to find where I found it to begin with. I think it was an Apple Music radio station, from it’s internal listings, that I put in a playlist, but Apple took the listings out of the application. You can still add manual entries, and I guess I can see where they’re coming from, but I sure hope they don’t remove the ability to stream an internet station entirely!

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Twitter? In my Imgur? It’s More Likely Than You Think

Posted on June 1, 2020 by David K.

I was just trying to get away from the political trash fire that consumes every. single. post. on Twitter now, and this is the front page of Imgur’s user sub. Come on, internet. Is there nowhere you cannot give it a rest? #SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety #TimeToReadABookAnyBook

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Why Don’t I “Consult?”

Posted on June 1, 2020 by David K.

I get asked this question fairly often, and I usually just mumble something to move the conversation to something else, but I was thinking about my experience with it this morning, and wanted to write about it.

About… 25 years ago, I was working very heavily with Linux at my home, my church, and work. A good friend told me that his company wanted to get an email sever, and a file-sharing server. Aha! I was an expert at doing those things! I would indeed love to help!

In those days, there was a prominent local business-to-business consulting company which was charging $100/hr for their services. I quoted my friend’s boss at $50/hr. He balked initially, but eventually agreed. I bought them a server, installed Linux, configured postfix with spam rejection, and set up their computers with Outlook using IMAP. I bought a domain, setup a web site, and created a shared directory for internal file sharing. Except for the occasional new user I had to provision (which I could do remotely), everything ran fine for many months. I didn’t even charge them for less than 15 minutes of maintenance work like that.

Then the owner started making noises about paying too much for changes. I wasn’t doing much, so I agreed to cut my rate to $25/hr. Then he started making noises about how that was still too much, and my buddy told me that he was planing on bringing in a kid who was making local-business IT consulting his main gig. This guy was saying he could set them up with a wiz-bang Windows server for only $10/hr! I told him I wasn’t going to cut my rate any further, and they were welcome to replace me and my server.

Through my buddy, I heard how the kid bought the new computer, but couldn’t get mail to it. For days, he struggled, blaming my computer, which was turned off and sitting on the floor. Then he started blaming me, personally. So I wrote a nice, long letter, explaining that he needed to change the MX records in DNS, sent them the password to GoDaddy, told them what to do, and said that if they needed any more help, I would be glad to, without charge. None of this kept my name from being dragged through the mud by the owner.

Months went by, and I would occasionally ask my buddy how it was going with the new IT setup. Turned out that it was more down than up. About a year later, my buddy tells me that the owner was open to using my services again, if I would come back, and basically grovel for the work again. The whole process had been pretty dismal, but that’s when I decided, once and for all, that I didn’t have the patience or the temperament for doing consulting work.

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The Reports of the End of an Era Were Greatly Exaggerated

Posted on June 1, 2020 by David K.

I’m still working through the issues of getting respectable DPS numbers in ESO, because — of course — I can’t leave it alone. It’s impossible to dictate a single approach to any build, because there are so many factors involved, and so many ways of going about it, and most of it seems to be interchangeable. Is it better to have higher base damage, for every hit? Or it better to have higher critical damage, which fires by chance? Or is it better to have a higher chance of hitting critically? Or is it better to have higher damage on elemental effects? Or… on and on it goes. Videos like this help, but the numbers are also affected by the way you play the game, and are not always absolute.

I bought a better secondary set of gear through a guild store (which turned out to be much less expensive than I thought). I re-enchanted my main weapon with a different glyph, and changed the trait with transmute gems. I re-spec’d my CP. I obtained the “monster set” that everyone recommends for my build (which is really cool, when it proc’s). I’ve changed my rotation to what I want to do, with the understanding of exactly why I have each item on my action bar, and when to use it.

I’m getting 13K without trying. If I really concentrate, and apply all the buffs I can, I can get into the high teens. I’m hitting groups for over 30K, sometimes 40K. While this isn’t winning any awards, I no longer have to feel like I’m effectively shut out of running trials. Most importantly, the game is just fun now. I don’t have to dread walking around the over world. If I pull aggro from a random encounter, I can kill it in a second. It no longer feels like everything is a slog. I solo’d a public dungeon with 7 bosses in it last night. I only died a couple of times, and that’s because I was talking to people while doing it.

Now the situation changes. Now I’m going to start working with one guild to sell stuff to make the money I need to buy nirncrux and work with another guild to get the nirnhoned-trait gear I need to research so that I can unlock crafting my own set of high-end, end-game gear. Maybe by the time I can create that, I can also max out enchanting and jewelry to make the best glyphs and jewelry, and collect the improvement mats to upgrade everything to legendary, and the transmute gems to correctly trait everything (whatever that means).

I’ve maxed out the fighter and mage guild lines. I continue to work on the psijic guild line. I’m still trying to collect all the sky shards in the game. If you really work at it, I’m thinking there really are enough skill points in the game to max out all the crafting stuff, and still have all the skills you would want for fighting. I’ve managed to collect all the crafting except metalworking, and I have more skills than I know what to do with, and I still have, like, half the sky shards to collect, and that’s not even counting all the questing I haven’t done, or half the group dungeons I’ve not done for the first time.

The point is that there are still several more passives — and about 600 more CP — I can throw on this build, and I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I feel like I can lighten up a bit now, and just get on with collecting while I wait for researching to finish. Something tells me that I’m going to wind up buying research scrolls, if I’m going to really see this through…

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