I don’t think it’s a given that anyone needs monetary compensation for that.

Stop paying them and find out.

It amazes me they’re still doing them; feels like Roger has been at it for a decade now.

Why wouldn’t people do this simply for the benefit of humanity?

Because the good of humanity doesn’t heat the house or put dinner on the table. Never has and never will. If you were a human, you’d have learned that from experience.

What’s with the disgusting eugenics? Just expropriate their wealth.

Some of that is exaggeration for comedic effect. “Okay, thanos snap every rich person everywhere is gone, we’ve solved greed. Now what?” But also…have we ever tried exterminating the rich? I think I’ve got a hypothesis here worth testing.

Right, so let’s distribute the burden of this labour

Who gets to make the decisions as to how?

Again, for the benefit of humanity and let’s distribute the burden.

Well now we’re getting into some Robert Heinlein. Service Guarantees Citizenship! Would you like to know more?

I believe he once backed down a little bit on the requirement for military service, in favor of civil service in general. And I can kinda get behind that. You want to have a say in how society is run? Go spend 6 years as a mailman or a middle school janitor. Go be an NTSB accident investigator or one of those folks working in the USDA’s kitchens testing canning recipes for safety. Those are the folks who should be running the show.

I do not know what those are.

Downvotes, but no answers.

What good has ever come from people standing in a street waving a cardboard sign?

What’s the biggest building in your nation’s largest city?

Knock it down killing everyone inside.

Big deal, or nah?

But what does the G in GNU stand for?

What would “a protest” accomplish? What have they accomplished in my lifetime?

I do want to use that machine for gaming, though more demanding games will be played on my main desktop machine. One thing about that GTX-1080 is it’s a blower-style card, and the Node 202 case …kind of needs it. Not a lot of ways for hot air to escape that case especially in the GPU bay, and I haven’t seen a retail blower-style GPU since the GTX-10 series.

Docker also isn’t available in the package manager for this thing, probably for similar arbitrary reasons; unless it would need to be side loaded.

I’m not buying another commercially made NAS after this one dies/is remotely bricked by Synology.

It’s a Model DS218. I don’t see Container Manager in the software center for it. Apparently there’s some hack workaround for this but…meh.

Probably slightly more than they use “The Orient” anymore.

Maybe in some nations.

It wasn’t Cracked, it was a channel called Gaming Wildlife, last video on the channel was posted 6 years ago; I think they’re defunct. here’s the video in question.

Walk out into the wilderness and make it on your own out there, tell me how much manpower you have to spend keeping your core temperature above 90F. It takes a lot of effort keeping a human alive; by yourself you just can’t afford things like electricity, sewage treatment and antibiotics. We only have those things because of the economies of scale that society allows.

Yeah, capitalism is a bit out of control at the moment, but…let’s kill all the billionaires, kill their families, kill their heirs, kill the stockholders. Let me pull on my swastika and my toothbrush mustache for a minute and go full on Auschwitz on “greedy people.” That the Musks and Gateses and Buffets of the world must be genetically greedy, so we must genocide that out of the population. And we get it done. Every CEO, every heiress, every reality TV producer, every lobbyist, every inside trader in congress, every warden of a for-profit prison, dead to the last fetus.

Now what?

You want to live in a house? Okay. At some point someone built that house. Someone walked out into a forest and cut down the trees that made the boards. And/or dug the clay that made the bricks or whatever. Somebody mined the iron ore that someone else smelted into large gauge wire that someone else made into nails that someone else pounded into the boards to hold them together.

We’re still in the 21st century, there are people on this planet lighting their homes with kerosene lanterns. We still have coal miners, fishermen and loggers. Farming has always been a difficult, miserable thing to do, we’ve just mechanized it to the point that it’s difficult and miserable on a relatively small number of people. Those people probably aren’t going to keep farming at industrial scale for the fun of it.

Star Trek, especially in the TNG era, shows us a very optimistic idea of what life would be like if we had not only nuclear fission power, not only nuclear fusion power, but antimatter power. The technology to travel faster than the speed of light and an energy source capable of fueling it, plus such marvels as the food replicator and matter transporter. The United Federation of Planets is a post-scarcity society. We aren’t. Somewhere on this planet right now is a man hosing blended human shit off of an impeller in a stopped sewage treatment plant so he can replace the leaking shaft seal. We use a man with a hose for this because it’s the best technology we have for the job. We do the job at all because if we don’t, it’ll cause a few million cases of cholera. Who do you think should pay for the hose that guy is using?

Yes, hence I referred to them as “afterthoughts.” James Madison and company drew up the articles (he didn’t create it alone but I think it’s in his handwriting), it wouldn’t pass as-is without ten amendments, it passed, more or less the current federal government was in place, and since 17 (very nearly 18) more have been added for a modern total of 27, two of them extremely stupid.

What is this and why was I notified of it?

Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to peacefully assemble. These are pretty important, foundational personal liberties, right? In the United States, these are found in the first amendment of the Constitution. The first afterthought.

The basis of copyright, patent and trademark isn’t found in the first amendment. Or the second, or the third. It is nowhere to be found in the Bill Of Rights. No, intellectual property is not an afterthought, it’s found in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

This is a very wise compromise.

It recognizes that innovation is iterative. No one invents a steam engine by himself from nothing, cave men spent millions of years proving that. Inventors build on the knowledge that has been passed down to them, and then they add their one contribution to it. Sometimes that little contribution makes a big difference, most of the time it doesn’t. So to progress, we need intellectual work to be public. If you allow creative people to claim exclusive rights to their work in perpetuity, society grows static because no one can invent anything new, everyone makes the same old crap.

It also recognizes that life is expensive. If you want people to rise above barely subsisting and invent something, you’ve got to make it worth it to them. Why bother doing the research, spend the time tinkering in the shed, if it’s just going to be taken from you? This is how you end up with Soviet Russia, a nation that generated excellent scientists and absolutely no technology of its own.

The solution is “for limited times.” It’s yours for awhile, then it’s everyone’s. It took Big They a couple hundred years to break it, too.

“To support our commitment to reducing the number of covid cases, we have elected to discontinue counting them. We kindly ask all infected to kindly die at home.”

Managing your own AV equipment has always been a pain in the ass.