If the job didn’t pay a salary, the only people who could do the job would be the rich who don’t need a salary, or those willing to accept bribes.

If you make the salary too low, it will discourage anybody who can make a better living doing something else. And, if the people doing it don’t think they’re being paid what they’re really worth, they’re more likely to take bribes or “donations” to boost their salary back up to what it should be.

Really, the salary should be high. It should be a job that people who are really qualified will want to do. It should be one where you have no need to take a bribe because you’re already doing so well, and you’d be afraid of throwing away such a well compensated job.

If it’s like a lot of other devices, it will realize that it can’t get to “The Internet” through that network, and might disconnect. It’s possible it will then look for another option, and might see an open network and use it.

Because if you want a screen of a certain size, there are no other reasonable options.

The same reason you might buy a phone that will spy on you and show you ads. You can’t buy a phone that doesn’t do that.

my wife and kids needed something they can mute remotely

But… why?

SO SAY WE ALL!

Unless you’re buying a commercial screen of some kind, you can’t really buy dumb TVs anymore, at least not from the major brands.

My TVs don’t get connected to the network because TV companies have started showing ads, and that was bad enough. Then came the fact that a lot of TV apps were making your TV into a residential proxy, making your TV into part of a botnet. And now, on top of all that, they’re spying on you.

The ads were bad enough.

In any reasonable world you would have control over devices in your house that contained computers and would be able to remove bad software and install your own stuff. But, these devices are all covered by section 1201 of the DMCA which makes it a crime to bypass any access control software. This is how Apple is able to block alternate app stores. It’s why printer ink is the most expensive liquid on the planet. It’s why John Deere is able to remotely brick a tractor anywhere in the world, and prevent farmers from fixing their own farm equipment.

What’s especially galling about this is that, the US forced the rest of the world to adopt this bullshit as a part of trade treaties, threatening that any country that didn’t do it might lose tariff-free access to the US economy. And now what happened? Trump just ripped up those treaties anyhow and imposed the tariffs anyhow.

I just wish there was a country brave enough to rip up the IP agreements the US forced on them and allow us to actually own our own stuff again.

Apparently the original phrase dates back to at least Latin times, and was about the fertility and harvest of someone else’s crops.

It’s funny that some time in the 1900s it became about the greenness of grass, something I personally couldn’t care less about.

The bigger threat is that they have no idea how to run a game company. EA was already hated for the various things they were doing to try to squeeze more of a profit out of gamers. Have a private equity company run it and that’s only going to get worse.

The last time there was an unfettered free market in housing was when pioneers were driving wagons west and just claiming land and building a log cabin by hand. And the natives nearby might have had some opinions on whether that was OK to do.

In the modern world, there are lots of housing-related taxes, tons of regulations on how the house is built, the house needs to be attached to a government-controlled sewer system, electrical system, water system, sometimes a gas system too.

To some extent that regulation is a burden, but developers also see it as an opportunity, because they can pass costs on to home buyers. They choose when, where and how to built in order to make as big a profit as possible. The government sets the rules of the game, and the property developers play that game to get the maximum score possible.

If the government pretends that it’s a free market, they’re letting the property developers play the game unopposed. It’s even worse when the government creates incentives to build new housing and the property developers just find some way to pocket that subsidy and then keep playing the game the same way.

Hell, the house my dad got when he was a train driver with a wife that didn’t work and with 2 kids is a house I can’t buy as a senior software developer with 3 cats.

My dad bought a house when he was mid 30s and the solo bread winner for the house a couple of years after I was born. I loved that neighbourhood. It wasn’t anything too special. The houses there are 50s-90s builds, 2-3 bedrooms, maybe 2 bathrooms (our second bathroom in that house was almost an outhouse in the basement – concrete floor, exposed pipes, door that looked like it belonged on a shed, etc. My dad and a friend built a back deck which was really nice. There is a park nearby. There’s access to a nice bike path. It’s not on a through-route at all, so the only cars entering the neighbourhood are residents or guests. It’s not near shopping, not near public transit, not really near any schools. It was just a quiet, modest, neighbourhood.

I’m significantly older, don’t have any kids to support, have been saving for ages, had better, and higher paying jobs (inflation adjusted) than him. I can’t really afford any house in that neighbourhood. The only people buying there now are multi-millionaires, but they’re moving in next to families who have been there for 30ish years and know enough not to give up a good thing.

It just seems to me that a rule of thumb with housing is that in general you should be able to afford to buy in the neighbourhood where you grew up. I know sometimes that isn’t possible. Cities get denser, areas become highly sought after, etc. But, if the neighbourhood really is basically the same, and you earn what your parents did (or better), you should be able to stay nearby.

Except this digital bouncer can memorize every ID it sees. It can reproduce them perfectly for someone else to see. In fact, there’s no realistic way for this bouncer to ever forget an ID it has seen.

I was using the Internet at a time when people took it being non-commercial completely seriously. You never saw ads because, as a community, we had decided that ads were not allowed. It was completely decentralized, so you might be running your own server, but if you put an ad on your server other people would get mad at you for it. This was pre-WWW and then a bit of the early days of the WWW.

Then there was a period where ads, commerce, shopping, etc. were possible and permitted. But, that was still the minority of things. There were thousands of web pages full of mythology and folklore for example, that people had just put up because that was something they were interested in. Running a web page cost you next to nothing, so there was no need to put ads on it. You could use Yahoo to find those sites, and I guess Yahoo was commercial by that point, but if it had ads they were small and unobtrusive.

Over time, things got more and more commercial. You saw ads more and more often. But, at least then it was ads on static content, or ads on a forum or something. It wasn’t an infinite algorithmically-generated feed optimized to keep you engaged.

There was a lot to like about that super early non-commercial Internet. But, I don’t think that was the peak moment though. Some ads and early for-profit services made it better. I think the thing that really wrecked it was the lack of competition. When there are 100 commercial services fighting over your attention, they can’t collude, you can boycott one, etc. When there are 5, you basically have to accept whatever they give you.

Carding as in credit card theft? Or carding as in a bouncer checking someone’s ID at the door?

Maybe, but that doesn’t matter since automated age verification doesn’t work. Kids always figure out ways to bypass it, and it snares unlucky adults all the time.

Nineteen brazillian? Wow, that’s a lot.

I don’t know why kids are allowed to have cell phones anywhere near them when they’re at school.

They should be in a locker by the time school starts, and not seen again until they’re done for the day.

There are really 2 problems:

1. Flour is essentially dust. It’s really hard to find a good way to package dust.
2. Flour is really, really cheap. The packaging needs to remain a small fraction of the overall cost.

A couple I know moved from Canada to the UK. Even at 6ish years old, despite being raised by them, including one as a stay-at-home mom, the kid had a strong British accent.

Luckily, they’re mostly immune, although my friend does now say “gareridge” instead of “gahraje”.

“The bottom 60%” gives more detail than merely saying “the majority”.