And either way, eventually someone from the city would probably show up to ask why you’re using 40 tons of water every day.

lol

Assuming you are in the US, your wife’s fears are totally baseless because lawsuits against people for consumer level piracy pretty much have not been happening at all since like 2010 (with the exception of porn video piracy copyright trolls, which still doesn’t happen that much and maybe your wife would be unhappy with regardless). Even when they were, due to industry group backed lawsuit campaigns, it’s civil law not criminal so nobody went to prison, and the few people who actually got stuck with massive fines eventually just declared bankruptcy to get out of paying them.

This is because said industry groups switched to trying to enforce copyright via ISP, getting ISPs to voluntarily forward people threatening letters, which are mostly empty threats with no associated legal action, so the ISPs are getting sued to try to obligate them to cut off people’s internet access. They want a way of doing it where they don’t have to take consumer level pirates to court, I’d guess because it looks really bad for them and is terrible PR to have regular people who obviously don’t deserve punishment sued for huge amounts of money because they torrented some media.

You are totally safe if you have a VPN and bind it to your torrent client (which prevents torrents from working if the VPN is off or drops connection), but even if you get such emails from your ISP (I got a few myself) likely nothing will happen for now.

Yeah but I sympathize, the way money rules your life and how you’re allowed to live it is brutal and it’s only natural to dream of overcoming that through financial success.

clapping with both hands works too

Things like subscriptions don’t seem like they should take up too much space, so it seems like a flaw that there isn’t more redundancy

I think most of that is just because it’s really tricky to get right though and there’s a lot of medical complications, not because it’s impossible for philosophical reasons.

For the money ones, I think it works because there are many people who just really want to feel some hope financially

If Mastodon is federated, why isn’t this recoverable somehow? I thought federation involved making copies of content on other servers, does that just not happen often enough for it to work as a backup?

So are you saying it’s literally impossible even with future technology to put a medically preserved brain in a new body and have that be a person that can do stuff and you could talk to, or just that it wouldn’t be the same person or consciousness somehow?

The former seems pretty out there as an idea. There are people whose brains are cut off from the rest of their nervous system and are still alive. The other connection the brain has to the body is the bloodstream, but blood transfusions are a thing and doesn’t kill you.

I overall like AI, but it’s not great for making this type of argument because it doesn’t offer anyone anything they can really use to update their beliefs about what’s true. Any of the factual claims there could be hallucinated, and most are only tangentially relevant to the question of how strong the parallels between the attitude towards computers 50 years ago are to attitudes towards AI now. If someone wants to seriously consider the question, it isn’t useful.

A better way to do it is to use it like a search engine to find relevant citeable information and then make your own case for its relevance. Or maybe in this case just some personal anecdotes would work pretty well, you’re claiming personal experience as your main source here and I kind of wanted to hear more about it, having not been there.

Why would you flush before you stand up

So the main complaint is that Pixelfed clients don’t display posts without images even if one has followed the poster? And thinks it incentivizes creation of using multiple accounts/apps when a single one to interact with ActivityPub would be better? That seems like a fair thing to criticize but it seems a little dramatic to paint it as entertainment killing communication.

So then we would tell the alien we use base 21?

I don’t want to make accounts on lots of sites and search all of them every time I buy something, so I think of it like a convenience fee if the way an ebay package is wrapped implies the seller arbitraged it from elsewhere.

I don’t know how much has changed since I was doing it, but the main trick was to get the tasks associated with academic studies that were typically higher paid, by using a sniping bot to grab it before others could. So that way you get paid around minimum wage instead of a small fraction of that (if you also cheat by doing multiple tasks simultaneously and hiding it). Though tbh the situation is probably worse now since there have been all those funding cuts to academia.

I looked up some stuff about Argentina’s financial crisis since you mentioned it before, and it looks like they actually did something a bit like what I’m talking about, directly appropriating the valuable assets they could in an effort to keep being able to function:

In addition to the corralito, the Ministry of Economy dictated the pesificación; all bank accounts denominated in dollars would be converted to pesos at an official rate. Deposits would be converted at 1.40 ARS per dollar and debt was converted on 1 to 1 basis.[69]

There’s some indication that this also applied to financial products:

As noted above, a number of U.S. investors have filed ICSID arbitration claims against the government of Argentina. Most of these investors consider the January 2002 pesification of dollar-denominated contracts, and/or the ex post facto prohibition on contracts linked to foreign inflation indices, to be an effective expropriation of their investments

I can’t specifically confirm this included gold held on paper, but I think it probably would have.

As for the plausibility of this sort of thing happening in the US, in addition to the actions of Roosevelt mentioned by @diablexical@sh.itjust.works, the main trigger for Nixon abandoning the gold convertibility of US dollars was France attempting to physically withdraw the gold they had stored in US banks, which they didn’t want to allow.

I think what they’re saying is that in a hyperinflation scenario, it is an option for the government to seize the physical gold backing the financial products people hold in order to continue paying to run the government now that fiat is worthless and they are having trouble with that.

Gold you have buried in your basement, they will have to work a little harder to get.

There’s at least some difference between “have been” and “this is currently likely to happen”, since if it’s known then it would have been fixed. I’ve gotten viruses before from just visiting websites but it was decades ago and there’s no way the same method would work now.

Ramble about something for long enough that people should be able to tell is how I do it.

Sounds like an additional reason to be doing it in a way where participants can’t be debanked by payments middlemen