FBXL Social

They can't retroactively change DRM-Free install files sitting on your hard drive -- which is why it's important that you have control over your own shit rather than hoping for software stores to continue being benevolent. If you can't have the install media and use it any time you want, you're just renting.

It's also the reason why everyone should want local DRM-Free copies of their favorite songs and movies, because there's no guarantee that will continue being available. It's only a matter of time until the commissars start to realize that nobody is eating their slop and they start trying to pressure stores to stop providing the stuff people have already purchased, or to pressure streaming services to stop providing old movies or TV shows entirely since that's also going on.

But do you think steam doesn't let publishers change the games they publish? Because I got news for you... They can and they do.

I feel like the worst part about Manhua is that you could read like 1200 chapters and then it's like "ok, you're caught up but absolutely nothing is even close to be resolved, see you next week!"

There's something to be said for stories with a complete narrative arc that tell you a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The dummies who think they can take over our culture by sneaking into our video games don't realize that we don't buy the latest games because we have to, we buy them because we want to, and if they stop making games we want to buy, we'll just stop buying and play what we have instead.

I feel like this is one big reason we need to be fighting for DRM-Free games like on GOG, because if we don't control our games, we're effectively renting them and if the companies running the game stores decide it isn't profitable to keep letting us play them, they can very easily take that from us. Gaben probably wouldn't do that, but what about after he dies of old age and a bunch of idiots infiltrate valve? We'll get Half Life 3 starring Alyx Vance (sorry Gordon Freeman got killed in the intro) and steam will stop serving games with too low of a DEI score.

[Admin Mode] Looks like we may have been having some connectivity issues for the past 12 hours or so. I'm not at home right now so I assumed it was due to my connection here being bad in general, so I didn't address it right away. This morning I still wasn't connecting so I was able to get it back up happily again.

I had a revelation a few years ago. "How do we know the materials we use are safe?" And the answer is we don't really. We assume they're safe because we've been generally ok, but We rely a lot of random shit we extract out of nasty black ooze we find in the ground.

Lol "everyone on earth will block you!"

Reminds me of the people who think defederation on the fediverse means someone they don't like will be stuck in a sensory deprivation chamber when the reality is the opposite.

Just another reason to never go to NYC even once.

There's a lot of paths to success both traditional and non-traditional, but a lot of people think they'll get rich doing what everyone is doing to the letter.

Even right now, there are houses that a millennial working pretty much any job can afford. My mom bought a property with two houses for $30k CAD (1 cad is about .70 USD, so $21,000). With good looking houses? Absolutely not. They looked exactly like a meth lab. It was a run down shitty asset. But then she did what you do with an undervalued asset and started fixing it up. Tore out everything down to bare studs, sealed it up, insulated, rewired, put up new gyprock, built new walls, all the assorted stuff you need in a home, and sold the house for 110k, which is another price most millennials could afford.

So there's a few things here: it's a house in a second or third tier city. Most people want to live in New York or Los Angeles, well that isn't happening, get over it. It's a house that didn't start off showroom ready. Most people don't want to put work into a fixer upper, they want something they can just move into, and you're gonna pay for a well kept house.

But this wasn't the 1970s, this whole situation started for my mom in the late 2010s (2018ish she bought the place) and ended during the pandemic. She moved and lives in a other lower tier city in another cheap house.

"kill all the landlords!"

Nobody rents anything anymore

"Haaalp why aren't there any landlords?"

Yes, I started with Plex as my media server solution a couple years ago since my Nas supports Plex out of the box.

There are some big differences between Plex and jellyfin.

Plex:
is closed source
Is an entire ecosystem including their own streaming services
Seems to be generally focused on video
Hides some features such as multiple account management behind a paywall

Jellyfin:
Is open source
Is a focused project about displaying your media from your server
Has decent support for video, music, books, and photos
Doesnt have any paywall

If the Plex server went down, there was still lots to do on Plex and your own server seemed like somewhat of an afterthought. If my jellyfin server goes down, the service is down.

Another big difference between the two is how each tries to show the files. Plex tries to figure out what files you have and show everything more or less using its own methods. Jellyfin seems to generally respect the directory structure in each library and display based on that so where your data is matters quite a lot. That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how organized your data already is and how much you'd like to organize your data.

Plex seemed to get metadata more correct than jellyfin, the latter got a few videos totally wrong.

Within 48 hours of setting up jellyfin, I think it might be a serious blockbuster, and it's already changed how I look at the media we have. It seems extremely versatile doing music, movies, books, audiobooks, and photos, and it's smart enough to find metadata for much of your stuff and create good thumbnails. It's the first solution that let us drop the Facebook and Google checkouts I had in and have it be remotely playable, which is interesting for me but a killer app for someone who is constantly filling up their Google photos.

The android TV app is also great, the first time I've been able to so seamlessly watch all the videos on my Nas on my living room TV.

I'll keep using it for a few weeks and let everyone know if my opinion changes, but so far I'm very impressed.

>Savings aren’t as bad since interest rates have gone up along with inflation. At least here in the US.

That may be true in some specific cases, but overall it's not true at all.

I checked a few big US banks -- US bank, Citi, and bank of America, and they look a lot like Canadian banks -- paying a fraction of a percent in most savings accounts.

The problem is the nature of bonds. When you buy a bond, you buy it at a certain price with the understanding that it will pay out a certain yield at the end of its life. So for most of the blast 10 years, most bonds have been making basically nothing, since one of the goals of qualitative easing is to help keep interest rates of bonds lower by buying up whatever bonds are needed to keep those rates low. Then you also have low Central Bank interest rates and so the banks themselves can also borrow money extremely cheap from the central bank, which doesn't directly affect bond rates but does inform buyers who tend to be big banks.

So you might be asking yourself "what does that matter we're not talking about bonds a couple years ago"? Well the problem is that just because new bonds are coming onto the market at a higher interest rate does not mean that the existing bonds are at that higher interest rate. And so what happens is the price of the existing bonds on the market goes down because there are now bonds on the market which are making a pretty good return. The bond ETFs that I invested in did terribly during this about of inflation because the assets inside those ETFs were all garbage, paying out virtually nothing. It's only the new bonds that are actually worth investing. Well, just like my bonds ETFs still have all those old bonds, so do banks. And so while Banks would like nothing more than to get their reserves up by borrowing more money from the customer through their savings accounts, they can't do that because the money that they have locked up in assets which would be the bonds is actually losing money right now, and so they can't pay more for their debts which would be the money in the savings accounts. Therefore, interest rates in savings accounts at large banks are remaining extremely low, and we're also facing lots of bank failures because other than the two big to fail banks, a lot of banks are now sitting there with extremely safe portfolios of the same bonds as my bond ETF, and they're losing money like crazy because who would buy these old bonds at any kind of price like what you paid for them before when you can get new bonds that are going to pay you four or five percent?

In spite of the fact that it hasn't really increased savings accounts anywhere, it's still a good thing for interest rates to be rising and for the central bank to be pushing that. Inflationary spending is attacks on the poor and middle class and to the rich, and that's not unique to today. If you look at the collapse of the Spanish empire, or the final days before the French revolution, and the nadir of the Weimar republic, these nations thought that they had stumbled on a cheat code by just printing more money which ultimately led to horrific outcomes, and even though it's good for the rich and powerful in the short term, it has sent them to the gallows and concentration camps ultimately. Often we make the same mistakes here because the story tends to play out over multiple generations, and when things are moving so slowly it looks like pure winning for decades until the party stops.

"I have the best eyes, everyone agrees"

Inflation is great if you're invested. Lots of broad investments have been doing 10% or 20% in the past year (often beating not just headline inflation but the actual inflation rate they're lying about). Meanwhile, anyone who gets a certain amount of currency has significantly less year over year. Wage earners who have savings make less this year than they did last year and forevermore from here on and lost some percentage of the wealth in their savings account.

You can call them "future taxpayers", but that sounds awfully euphemistic to me. A bunch of people get free goods and services and sometimes cash payments without having to pay for it by forcing people who havent even been born yet to work to pay for it. What is slavery if not forcing people to work for you who don't have any choice in the matter and they are not getting anything in return?

Every single one of the people in government who later go on to openly admit that they lied to the chief executive to ensure they got the decisions they personally wanted should probably be lined up in a gallows.

I've actually spoken at length about this before, that it's one of the biggest weaknesses of the Lemmy ecosystem -- everything is centralized. As long as your instance in my instance connect and you and I as users consent, we can have a conversation here. If mastodon.world doesn't like that, there's nothing that it can do about it. By contrast, on Lemmy each community is an atomized thing on the server that it resides on. It gets to decide who moderates, even if nobody from that particular server is having a conversation because their server is the one hosting the community.

The other big negative of that is exactly what you said, that you could have a thousand of the exact same community because every server has to have their own, meaning that a relatively small user base ends up getting split up, and people who might like to talk to each other maybe can't talk to each other.

My view a more correct answer would be to figure out a way to have a fully decentralized community that can be somewhat locally administered. That way everyone has a copy of the same list of posts, but maybe every server maintains its own list of posts and users it doesn't find acceptable, like a curated usenet. Then a smaller group could have more discussion.

Funny how it's only people who are inconvenient to the regime that keep on committing crimes.

The post is half right.

There's no such thing as government funded, it's either taxpayer funded, inflation funded, or debt-funded.

Taxpayer funding is the most honest of them, you take money away from people to spend it.

Inflation funding is the least honest of them, you take money away from the poor and middle classes and hand it to the rich.

Debt funding is the most evil of them, you spend money and sell your kids into slavery. Fuck them, I want my $2500 skinny check!

It's a little bit hard to even comprehend at this point because the US federal government has become such a leviathan, but the US started off as something a lot more like the EU. The idea was that you would have a very weak federal government that would basically just make sure that all the states were playing relatively nicely with each other and would work together in the case of an invasion or something, and then the state governments would be able to run themselves however they like. In the same way that England and Germany are not the same country, North Dakota and South Dakota would not be the same country, which is why it's called the United States rather than the United provinces or United prefectures.

It wasn't until much later on that the US Constitution's Bill of Rights even applied to the states, so a state could abridge freedom of speech as long as it was allowed within its own constitution.

So at that point, the Federal Constitution would have only been for granting powers to the extremely limited Federal government, and then the state constitutions would end up granting powers to the extremely limited or not state governments.

"It isn't about the fact that you're a woman. It's about the fact that you obviously think you're a woman first and a pilot third and you're supposed to be a pilot first right now!"

I've known a lot of extremely competent women in male-dominated industries, and they get respect because they're competent at what they do.