I'm pretty sure Minnesota imports something like 60% of our energy - i'm at least glad we're past the worst of the winter weather but holy fuck is it going to suck

Idk but your little asspats are quite enjoyable if i'm being honest

Sorry, I must have mistook the multiple posts about this as an invitation for engagement

Goodness gracious, we are having quite the day with this.

Good job i guess?

Yea, your opinion of tankies has come across just fine, it's just curious to me that sentiment is so frequently communicated with conservative cultural references

This is the second time this week someone has inadvertentlu appropriated a bit on conservative culture in an effort to lionoze 'tankies'

“I’ve come to view home ownership and healthcare as destabilizing forces in my life,” said Bernie, a 45-year-old network engineer from Minneapolis. To finance owning his and his wife’s $300,000 home and saving for the future, the couple was foregoing medical and dental treatment of any kind and cutting back on expenses everywhere, he said, despite a pre-tax household income of more than $250,000.

I have no idea where in Minneapolis this person is but this is nothing like my own experience in the metro area.

My wife and I bought our home in 2021, for about the same price as he's describing and with an income far less than theirs, and we're expending less than 30% on our mortgage payment (including our insurance premiums and taxes). Maybe they bought theirs at the interest rate peak in 2020, whereas we bought ours when the interest rates bottomed out, but I can quite confidently say that our home is not the main burden on our finances.

What is killing us is raising food and healthcare costs, as well as our student loans. Our energy utility announced last year that they would be implementing surge pricing that could almost double our energy costs, and since the utility administers the state solar incentive program themselves, they quoted us a PV system cost almost twice what you can find on the open market (they use your average monthly energy bill to determine how much you can afford to pay for the system, which ought to be criminal). We're getting fucked up down and sideways, but our mortgage payment is probably the most stable expense we have.

There are a lot of reasons things are shit and financially precarious, but owning my home has been a rare bright spot in our otherwise gloomy financial picture. If we were still renting, not only would we be in the same strained situation as we are now, but we'd be constantly anxious about our rent skyrocketing, too.

Home ownership isn't all sunshine and rainbows, but the alternative of renting is often just as expensive - on top of being at the whims of landlords. They've been publishing articles for a decade now trying to convince people that home ownership is overrated and renting is the way of the future, and I really wish I could trust them to report on it transparently.

Huh, it works great on my android os Nvidia shield

As a rule I don't announce my trackers publicly so they can continue existing as my trackers, but the one I use mostly is small-rodent themed.

I'll DM you

I get my linux distros via torrent networks, mostly

As someone who likes to have a fallback way of purchasing digital content that I can remove DRM from, this annoys me.

I can still purchase mp3 and flac files from various online retailers, and I can rip bluray for my movies and tv shows, but now I need a new place to purchase ebooks that are downloadable. Anyone have any recommendations? The first few independent retailers i've found seem to require their own apps.

It's been a while since I've heard about libgen and aa - and actually i'm not sure how they operate with direct downloads of copyrighted material? I find my ebooks through more conventional p2p means, but i've always just assumed that was necessary to avoid sudden takedowns

It might be because it is the center of US imperialism but I'm just guessing

I don't think trump is the only reason someone might want an asteroid to fall on DC

Lmao, yea I think they're kind of playing a game with language here.

After doing some reading of various explanations, what they mean when they say they aren't using electrons for computation is basically that the 'thing' they're measuring that dictates the 'state' of the transistor is a quasi-particle..... but that particle is only observed through the altered behavior of electrons (i guess in the case of the majorana particle, it appears as two electrons gathered together in synchrony?)

So the chip is still using electrons in its computation in the same say as a traditional transistor - you are still sending electrons into a circuit, and the 'state' of the bit is determined by the output signal. It's just that, in this case, they're looking for specific behavior of the electrons that indicate the presence and state of this 'qbit'

That is just my layman's understanding of it

Microsoft isn’t using electrons for the compute in this new chip; it’s using the Majorana particle that theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana described in 1937.

Ok now i'm gonna need an explain-like-i'm-not-a-quantum-scientist on what a 'topological transistor' is, and what it uses instead of electrons for its compute (and, like, what is the significance?)

My parents and school administrators' attempts at blocking unsanctioned activities is what taught me computer literacy

There was nothing quite as satisfying as getting caught opening addictinggames on a web browser through a proxy when the teacher was convinced they had blocked it completely.

Fair, but Marx wasn't a technocrat. He was primarily concerned with how the working class could overthrow capital, and the working class was primarily illiterate - transatlantic telegraphs wouldn't have been a relevant tool to them in their ceasing of capital from the bourgeoisie.

Marx specifically wrote the Communist Manifesto in easily-understood language so that the few literate members of the working class could organize and recruit those who wouldn't have been able to read it themselves. Even if he understood the telegraph to be a revolutionary technological innovation, it wouldn't have been relevant to an impoverished working class that did not have the luxury of basic education.

Not that it would have been impossible for anyone to see the potential significance of the telegraph back then, but that was never going to be a Karl Marx who optimistically thought the revolution could happen within his lifetime (and here we are almost 160 years later not even a step closer to that reality)

If Marx had predicted our current internet communication hellscape all the way back in 1870, he would be more than just an anti-capitalist boogeyman but a bonafide prophet

20% of Americans were illiterate in 1870