In the game, you have to improve your properties to charge more rent. In reality, the monopoly can reduce quality and raise price at the same time.

People don’t use free & open source alternatives because their advertising is shit, and most people have never heard of the alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify.

Labor may be the source of your power, but consumption is how you fritter it away. Trade your labor for subscription plans, little conveniences that prop up the oligarchs, big luxuries like fancy car or home, and you lose your ability to withhold your labor in safety.

Withholding your labor only works if you can recruit a lot of like-minded people, each with their own safe ability to withhold labor. We can get there eventually, but you have to start with yourself.

She is still a true believer - she loves the racism, the sexism, the LGBT-phobia, the tax breaks for rich, the church-instead-of-school, the two-tiered justice system… She’s just also still on the Q-anon anti-pedophile train, where the rest of MAGA leadership is willing to overlook a few rapes if they get all the other stuff.

You can start by experimenting on your current computer. Install docker, get some service that sounds interesting, and just access it on localhost. You’ll miss out on anything the service does overnight or downtime, and you won’t be able to access it from off-site, but it’s a fine way to wet your toes and see how it goes.

Docker: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/setup/install/windows-install/

Photo library: https://docs.immich.app/install/docker-compose/

Some maintainers even provide handy windows installers

Media library: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/windows

My nephew has a new baby. Her parents are constantly waving their phones in her face; sending pics back and forth; generally doing ‘millenial things’ with their phones when not actively attending the baby. Then proceed to get all freaked out when the baby expresses interest or curiosity in the phone.

Kids mimic their parents behavior and interests. If you want kids with healthy internet use, you have to have parents model healthy internet use.

I guess you have to make a mastodon post of your thought, then screenshot it to /c/political_memes

From @[email protected] source, the 10%/90% ratio went from 1.55 in 1989 to 2.14 in 2025.

Consistent with their criticism of choosing the top 10% vs the top 1-or-fewer %, the 1%/99% ratio went from 30% to 46%. The 1%/90% ratio went from 58% to 99, and the (10-1)%/90% from 97% to 114%.

ed: Initially did this without noticing that the default view of the Fed data only showed 2010-2025. Over that range, the (10-1)% have actually lost wealth to the 1%. Over the 1989-2025 window, the (10-1)% have gained, but not nearly the pace of the 1%

The ‘mostly safe 4% rule’ actually includes inflation. It’s based on the assumption that assets are invested in a mix of broad stock market and treasury bonds, and allows the retireee to increase their annual spending by inflation, It usually results in the retiree dying with substantially more wealth (inflation adjusted) than they started out with. The stock market is a natural inflation hedge and, in this day of multinational conglomerates, a currency hedge.

The trouble with living in a panopticon is that becomes suspicious to not be on a list.

I have a n ESP32 with a thermocouple stuffed down my (gas) oven chimney, so I can tell what temperature it actually is (about 40°F/20°C cooler than the dial).

I have one plugged into an addressable LED matrix, which has yet to get mounted, but will eventually be a closet/dressing light. There’s a few places where I’d like a ‘normal’ warm white light, with the option to switch to a blinding daylight for chores, and maybe a low-light, colorful animated nightlight.

I have a Pi-0w reading temp/humidity/CO2 in a grow tent that’s a good candidate for ESP32-ification. I have an air quality sensor plugged directly into a Home Assistant server that could go on ESP32 if I wanted it in a different location. Humidity in the bathroom, with a controller for the bathroom fan is another good candidate.

If I can come up with a good way to put them on battery, with a 6-12 month lifetime, then temperature in the attic, and on the input/output sides of the HVAC would be useful.

I only one I know about https://socprime.com/blog/cve-2025-27840-vulnerability-in-esp32-bluetooth-chips/ which is a bluetooth thing, presumably meaning that you’d have to be in bluetooth range to exploit it.

My paranoid concern is that I’m going to buy these $2 ESP32 boards from some unknowable Chinese company, and how could I know if there’s an extra, malicious supervisor element added. So, my ESP32 devices live in the ‘untrusted’ VLAN. They could, theoretically, discover each other and send their sensor data to some nefarious broker, but they don’t have microphones or cameras. I don’t even see how they could get enough information to discover my physical address, without cooperation from my ISP.

I was really intimidated by ESP32. Liked RPi, back in the 3b days, because I could comfortably sit in the python interpreter, play with sensor interfaces, and get immediate feedback of what & where I screwed up. Familiarity led me to RPi4 for libreelec and 0w for more sensors.

Recently took the plunge on some ESP32s, though, and, just…wow. I mean, I’m going through esphome, but every sensor and control I’ve checked is just a couple of lines of YAML away. And low enough power that I’m starting to think about batteries. ESP32 is still pretty intimidating for noobs, but the ecosystem that’s grown up around it is fantastic once you get over that hump.

Treat LLMs like “boss’s idiot nephew,” both in terms of whether the business should give them a privilege and whether the business should be liable for their inevitable screwups.

So I should tell my fitness watch I’m doing cardio before I light up? Move those heartbeats from ‘stress’ to ‘healthy.’

If I write a crappy email, I get reprimanded by the boss, or I lose a contract, or people just stop emailing me.

If a billionaire writes a crappy email, their correspondent still wants their money.

The problem isn’t necessarily corporate services - the problem is corporate services with no practical competition. If there’s an actual marketplace, then enshittification is limited, because you can just hop providers when service degrades. If there’s an actual marketplace, then you can hop providers when some government takes control your provider.

Putting fun services behind the wall of ‘you must be this technically competent to participate’ isn’t going to fix the broken system.

I suspect that some of the ‘lazy union worker’ stereotype is workers following their contract and refusing to do non-contracted work, which is, of course, essential to maintaining the value of that contract. Pride in your own work/trade doesn’t mean cleaning up after the other trades; professionalism in your own work doesn’t mean unpaid overtime to fix someone else’s fuckup.

Hateful branding is always easier than inclusive branding. Just think about how many different words Americans have historically used for black people: all “they” have to do to turn a positive term into a slur is to say it with a sneer.

This is what frustrates me about the people saying that posting memes on social media is bullshit and waving signs won’t change anything. Waving signs and parades were fundamental tactics of the Civil Rights movement. Those iconic photos from the Edmund Pettis Bridge? Just a bunch of people marching to the voter registration office. The Freedom Riders? Just people, including a bunch of privileged, white college students on a bus tour. Most of the marches, protests, etc we never even hear about formed the foundation, and it’s only when those boring, “useless” protests met ridiculous opposition that stirred MLK’s “white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice” to attention.

That doesn’t mean that going to peaceful protests & remaining peaceful while the fascists fash is the only valid action. But it is the most accessible to the most people, and it is the one easiest to scale as more of those moderates get motivated. Resistance looks boring, until it suddenly isn’t.