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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023





  • Windows 10 users, I’ve been using kill-update.exe for years now to only update Windows when I damn well want to.

    Disclaimer: before the inevitable dogpile, yes, this is bad practice. Yes there are many reasons why you might not want to do this. Yes, allowing your software to update itself whenever it wants is safer. No, I don’t care. If you don’t care either, this software might be for you.


  • Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.





  • Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

    Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.




  • Le Coq suggested that when simply considering the 10 biggest fortunes in France, the tax would bring in no less than €13bn for the state.

    A 2% tax on billionaires. Give me a break.

    The point isn’t to bring in money, the point is to eliminate these blights on society by any means necessary. How bad will the world have to get before something that looks like this happens? When the world was more civilized - the world conservatives constantly pine for - the ultra-wealthy were taxed over 90%, because we knew that too much power in the hands of a single person was immensely dangerous. We knew this intrinsically from generations of being ruled by kings, but we got firsthand experience with it from them constantly fucking up the economy.

    There was shame in being wealthy. Hell, there was shame in being rich when I was growing up - it was understood that you couldn’t get mega-rich without stepping on the necks of the working class and being horrible people. It’s nearly Christmas - go rewatch It’s a Wonderful Life for crying out loud. 1946!