Orcocracy [comrade/them]

Fahrenheit is what Americans feel, Celsius is what everyone else feels, and Kelvin is just Celsius +273.

Th DRM is the real issue, especially when viewing habits are taken into account. The most watched shows on Netflix for years have been repeat viewings of old sitcoms. The re-watching of shows like Friends, The Office, Seinfeld, etc is especially energy intensive because of DRM. Viewers download the same episode again and again and again, only for the DRM to automatically delete the downloaded file every time. If Netflix was just a folder on a server of DRM-free .mp4 files it would be very efficient.

But it isn’t. Instead, capitalism demands an inefficient over-engineered mess of a system, with a confusing algorithmically reshuffled interface of self-destructing video files so that people can be charged money every month forever and ever.

This article from a Washington DC-based publication is doing its very best to frame as bad some extremely mild examples of the EU standing up to these largely unaccountable American megacorporations. It’s not like the EU is doing to Meta & Apple what the Americans are doing to Huawei & Bytedance/TikTok — but perhaps the EU should.

You, when you’re looking at Google Maps or whatever other mapping software you use. They’ve all been compatible with Galileo, Glossnas, Beidou, and GPS for many years. But a mapping app tends to not tell the user which brand of satellite they’re using at any given time.

I think we can all broadly sympathize with the complaints about politicking, but this rant also includes a lot of red flags. For example, saying that you have “never had any interest” in things like “being agreeable when you disagree” suggests that this person is just another one of the big ego assholes in the department, a full-of-themselves “rockstar academic” who can’t even be bothered with basic human kindness.

You’ve heard of the slow food movement? Sarcasm aside, I am advocating for the slow dishwashing movement. I am 100% serious about this. Well, maybe 75%. Or 45%. I am somewhat serious about this.

My god you’re right. I’ve been wasting years of my life by leaving that one bowl with a bit of juice from some tomatoes at the bottom until later when I did the rest of the dishes. Think of how much I could have achieved in that time!

Hang on, if you’re washing dishes before you are done cooking and long before you even set the table or start eating anything, what exactly is it that you are washing? One big knife and a chopping board? How did this become the standard advice?

A train that has a stop somewhere in my neighbourhood.

Yeah, and telling people to just pay for a VPN isn’t a great answer either - that’s just another fucking pay-forever subscription with the price rises of Netflix plus the added jank and nonsense that comes with being a copyright infringement hobbyist.

Maybe I’ll just cancel everything and do totally offline ripping of borrowed physical media from the public library, like some kind of pirate hermit.

I have no idea if that’s bullshit or not, but this is definitely turning into a tragic bodycount measuring contest. I’m outta here.

Yes coal is indeed very bad and needs go away immediately. But I’m not so sure if coal being bad makes radiation cancers from Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Sellafield, etc etc etc not worth caring about.

I really don’t want to play top trumps over which tragic disaster is worse by measuring bodycounts, as this is all way too grim and I think we can agree that the worst case scenarios for all of these things are awful in their own distinct ways. But that number you put for nuclear is difficult to believe. Where did you find it?

Yeah a dam will wreck a valley. But a nuclear station can irradiate a whole region and coal ruins the planet.

Every modern law of economics?

Tidal, hydroelectric dams, and geothermal should all together be able to cover a pretty significant part of the Earth, shouldn’t they?

Yeah, I remember thinking all of these terms were strange and creepy back when I first learnt them as a kid for goodness’ sake. They’ve always been bad and I’m very glad they’re finally going away.

Yeah the consumerist rhetoric in game reviews (and the entire technology press more broadly) dooms all of their attempts at analysis to be extremely shallow. Maybe one day a journalist will pay attention in one of their media studies classes and read the fucking Adorno reading that one of their teachers assigned, but that day has not yet come.

Hold on to that leverage over your employer with a union

Yikes, that’s an ugly looking turn of phrase. I guess I’m blocking another racist.