“Please, stop! I can only get so erect!”

“More than the entire world’s GDP” is just a massive understatement here.

Let’s put this number in context. The highest estimate for the number of planets in our galaxy is 8 trillion. If we terraformed, settled and developed every single one of those planets, to the point where every last one had the same total GDP as Earth today, it would still not be enough to pay this fine.

How far short would we be? Would we need to settle and develop two entire galaxies worth of planets? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?!

Nope. Twenty million. We would need to settle TWENTY. FUCKING. MILLION. GALAXIES. Each containing 8 trillion planets. Each planet containing about 8 billion humans.

That’s how comically, ludicrously, impossibly large this fine is.

Well, can’t say fairer than that.

Yeah, I did try to stress that just because I can’t envision a use for it, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. I’m totally OK with that. My question was more “Am I the idiot here for not being able to see what the use is?”

Obscurity is not the same thing as security.

You know those can be self hosted, right?

And yes, by all means just set up your own Wireguard or OpenVPN access if that’s what you prefer. You do you bud.

But that implies you do have your SSH open to the world, right?

The way I access my private web interfaces remotely is through something like Netmaker, Tailscale or Zerotier. Same thing for SSH. No way in hell am I opening 22 on my router.

I’ll admit, as neat as this is, I’m a little unclear on the use case? Are there really situations where it’s easier to get a command prompt than it is to open a webpage?

The CLI side I can see more use for since that does expose a lot of actions to bash scripting, which could be neat. But on the whole I can’t say I’ve ever really found myself thinking “Man, I really wish I had a UI for managing Radarr, a program that already includes a really good UI.”

I know it’s shitty to hate on something just because you’re not the target for it. That’s not my intent, it’s more that I’m just fascinated by the question of how anyone has a burning need for this? It feels like there must be something I’m missing here.

This is the core problem. If you want a use tax for driving, attach it to vehicle ownership (Canada does this with plate stickers, for example). If you make it specific to which roads people drive you just end up with fast roads for some and slow roads for everyone else, and a whole lot of under-utilized infrastructure capacity.

I actually read a book by a noted libertarian economist making the case for privatizing all roads (its easier to tear down a stupid argument if you start by taking it seriously).

What I expected was, y’know, just a bad argument. Like, there would be a bunch of super positive assumptions about how a bunch of stuff would work out that just don’t work in reality, that sort of thing.

What I got was quadruple decker raised glass highways with holes cut into them for rain to fall through.

No, you did not hallucinate that sentence.

That is the libertarian answer to how you solve the problems with privatizing all roads. Every road, even those in cities (especially cities) is actually four or five competing roads stacked on top of each other, owned by different companies, made of perfectly transparent glass so as not to deprive anyone living below them of their God given access to sunlight, and full of holes so as not to deprive anyone of their God given right to rain.

The author comes to this conclusion after realizing “Oh shit my libertarian homesteading fantasy doesn’t work if Jeff Bezos can just build a highway over your property, but my private roads fantasy doesn’t work if Jeff Bezos can just buy up a thin strip of land all the way around LA and then charge people a thousand dollars to cross it.”

No, Blair actually had charisma. It’s easy to forget now, but when he came in people found him genuinely charming.

Starmer is more like Gordon Brown if anything.

I’m guessing the low birth rate might be somewhat affected by HK having one of the highest population densities in the entire world. Not really sure this is much of a solution.

This is the least surprising news ever.

No one, not one single solitary person in the entire isles, actually likes Starmer. He’s a pathetic corporate ghoul who has never had a single original thought in his life. His version of Labour is just Conservative Lite, and their only redeeming value at the polls was not actually being the Conservatives.

Turns out life isn’t an MMO, and “infinite money glitches” aren’t a real thing.

Agreed. Insanely good game.

Yeah, the logical inference here is that there’s a strong correlation between being stupid enough to click on adverts and being stupid enough to vote for conservatives.

The problem is that if it appeals to a small number of people, and isn’t a dealbreaker for everyone else then it’s worth doing. In order for anything to actually change there have to be more people willing to walk away over the culture war bullshit than there are people who vote for them because of it. Otherwise it’s still a win for them.

But they’ll still vote for it anyway.

Better to say that Google claim they want to use private nuclear reactors because that will allay any fears about the climate impact of their products. In reality the SMRs they’re purporting to invest in basically don’t exist outside of a pipe dream. They’re a less viable product than genAI itself. But just like the supposed magical “good” version of genAI, Google can claim that SMRs are always just around the corner, and that will mean that they’re doing something about the problem.

If I were locked in a room with Trump, McConnell, and a gun with two bullets, I’d shoot Trump twice so that I could bludgeon McConnell to death slowly. Amazing that people are already forgetting how badly he fucked over America and the entire world as senate leader.