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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Good essay. I don’t know if you remember after Obama won in 2008 a bunch of democratic party apparatchiks came up with this idea of “the coalition of the ascendant” and that they pretty much had the government locked in for a generation, due to support that would never waver for them amongst immigrants, yuppies, tech bros, etc. They didn’t need the working class anymore and the Republicans would be the minority party for many years.

    Two years later the democrats were wiped out in the midterms.









  • The problem with this is that if billionaires just sat on their fortunes like a dragon sitting on treasure it would be much better than the way it is now, where they pump their billions into “nonprofits” that try to manipulate society to make it even better for them and worse for normal people.


  • The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own.

    That is not what the lawsuit is about, and that was not what the plaintiffs or the judge argued. Their argument is that if you can not take a physical copy and digitize it.

    If you want a digital copy to lend, you must beg the publisher to allow you to have a digital copy to lend and you must accept their terms. If they don’t want to provide you with a digital lending option as a library, then you can not lend it. If they want to make you use their DRM software you must use it even if it spies on your patrons and charges you per-lending fees, or even “expires” the book after so many loans, or “blacks out” or “embargoes” lending of titles you are supposed to have in your catalog (these are all features of publisher-backed digital lending schemes).





  • And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive.

    As opposed to now…

    With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components

    Nobody had done that before? Wasn’t the promise that they would do few quick checks, refuel, and send it back up same day?

    Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia’s soyuz to get us to and from the space station.

    Nasa had do use Soyuz because crew dragon was late. SpaceX won the contract then underdelivered a late product. Basically exactly what ULA or Boeing would have done.

    Wanna talk about Artemis?