I mean, the Newton hadn’t done well. The Pippin hadn’t done well. The eMate hadn’t done well. What were the odds of Apple doing a really successful new consumer electronics product?

I wouldn’t.

Depressions aren’t a zombie invasion or a nuclear war. They’re a reduction in economic activity. Some percentage of people get laid off, are out of work for a time.

If you get laid off, you’re probably going to want a financial buffer, and buying stuff ahead of time is most likely not a great idea. Better to have the buffer.

If you don’t get laid off, not likely a lot you can do to prepare.

I’d also add that while depressions affect a large area, it’s entirely possible for particular areas to see economic decline even if the country as a whole is seeing rising growth. Like, say a major employer in a small town goes out of business.

If you think that the post shouldn’t be up, contact the moderators or admins — they are the ones to make a call on that. It’s not the role of individual users to play moderator.

No, it’s not illegal. However, an assault rifle — which will have a select-fire toggle that permits more than one round to be fired per trigger pull — is not, under current case law, protected by the Second Amendment, and you are required to get a federal firearms license; the government is permitted to restrict your purchasing of them by requiring you to qualify for this license. They are also not inexpensive.

You can get semiautomatic rifles that do not have such a select-fire toggle that are otherwise identical to assault rifles. These are protected by the Second Amendment.

You can also, in most states, legally own rifles with bump stocks. These are functionally somewhat-similar to automatic weapons in that they can fire multiple times after a trigger pull, albeit via a different mechanism. These do not require a federal firearms license.

EDIT: You’re also probably going to get better answers on firearms in [email protected] than [email protected], as the people there will be people more-interested in the topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A

Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 BC to 1450 BC. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It evolved into Linear B, which was used by the Mycenaeans to write an early form of Greek. It was discovered by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. No texts in Linear A have yet been deciphered.

I asked a simple question

Heh. So, there’s this Saturday Night Live skit from 1997:

https://youtu.be/OMNaTApbo8E?t=130

Harry Caray: “Hey, if you were a hotdog, and you were starving, would you eat yourself?”

Host: “What?”

Harry Caray: “I know I would. First I’d smother myself in brown mustard and relish. I’d be so delicious. So would you?”

Host: “I don’t know.”

Harry Caray: “Don’t jerk me around, Norm. It’s a simple question. A baby could answer it. If you were a hotdog and you were starving, would you eat yourself?”

All frontpage is filled with memes and shitpost, again are you saying that this is what most people want to see?

I mean, I don’t know how I can be clearer than I was in the above comment:

The All feed will reflect what people want to post, as it all shows up there (well, all the stuff in communities that at least one user on your home instance subscribes to).

It will have everything that people are posting on any communities that any single user on your home instance subscribes to. This means that the proportion of traffic on All will generally reflect what people want to post.

There are some social media websites that try to profile you based on your viewing or commenting habits or other such things and then do recommendations of content. Some of these, like Twitter, have caught flak for recommending content that someone is likely to engage with, which causes them to tend to recommend ragebait material.

But regardless of the merits of one recommendation system or another, mander.xyz is running Lemmy. Lemmy doesn’t, in 2026, have some sort of system to profile you, try to predict what posts you want to see, and then show you only that. Maybe it should and someone should write that, but today, it gives you three choices:

• You can view All, which is all of the posts in any community that anyone on your home instance has subscribed to.

• You can view Local, which is all of the posts in communities on your home instance alone. Unless you are only interested in using the Threadiverse for highly-specialized content and on a home instance dedicated to that content, this probably isn’t what you want.

• You can view Subscribed, which is all of the posts in any community that you personally have subscribed to.

What I’m saying is that it is very likely that the third option is going to very probably provide you with a higher proportion of content that you want to see. “All” will probably never reflect what you in particular are most-interested in. It’s maybe a way to help expose new users to a sampling of what’s out there, reduce the barrier to start them using the Threadiverse, but you’re probably going to want a Subscribed list tailored to your interests.

But what I can say with utter certainty is that people who are posting memes will not stop posting memes because you don’t want to see as many memes in your feed, and All is going to reflect what people post. Getting upset about what people are posting and then complaining about that won’t solve your problem. Writing a recommendation system to profile users and provide recommended feeds for Threadiverse servers might, if you can code, but I’m guessing that the most-practical solution is going to be just doing a set of communities tailored to your interests, and then browsing Subscribed.

It’s easier to create a meme than writing a title?

It’s easier to create a meme than it is many other sorts of content.

I’m asking why is it filled with this content, are you saying that this is what most people want to see here?

The All feed will reflect what people want to post, as it all shows up there (well, all the stuff in communities that at least one user on your home instance subscribes to).

That’s why I’m saying that you’re probably going to be happier whitelisting the content that you are interested in, rather than complaining that people on the Threadiverse as a whole aren’t posting what you want. There are many different takes on what people want to see, so no one person is going to be happy with traffic as an aggregate. There are a bunch of furries here, who are happy with furry content. One of the first threads I ran into when I first joined — Kbin sent people to random posts to try to help them discover new communities — was a post talking about technology issues. Another user there, who also appeared to be a new user sent there randomly by Kbin, was upset that there was so many furries there and complaining about the fact. It was in a community on pawb.social, which is a furry instance. There’s no reasonable way to make the guy who didn’t want to see furry content and the people who do want to see furry content simultaneously happy with any one single collection of content. Gotta produce user-specific feeds for that.

EDIT: There are also some people who prefer to blacklist rather than whitelist. Like, browse All, but then just keep blocking every community that they don’t want to see. I think that this doesn’t scale well — I mean, there are tens of thousands of communities out there. Some people can create shit-tons of communities, and I suspect that sooner or later someone is very probably going to set up an instance that has auto-generated communities for one reason or another. Maybe to mirror RSS feeds somewhere or something, who knows. There’s already one that mirrors Reddit subreddits, lemmit.online. Then it’s going to flood the feeds of the blacklisters. But, well, that’s another way to curate content.

Probably because they’re easy to make, so there’s a lot of traffic there.

I think the real question is “why does the content I see not reflect what I want to see”, and I’d guess that that’s most-likely because you’re browsing “All”, which combines all traffic from all communities on any instances that anyone on your home instance, mander.xyz, subscribes to. This is, for any given person, unlikely to be specifically what they are interested in.

I’d generally suggest finding a list of communities that you are interested in, subscribing to them, and then having your webpage/client/whatever set to show “Subscribed” rather than “All”.

If you want a convenient way to browse a list of communities on all instances (even ones that nobody on your home instance has subscribed to yet — you can be the first one!), I recommend https://lemmyverse.net/ and clicking on “Communities”. If you see one you like, say, [email protected], then just search for it on your home instance (like, the text !strategy_games@piefed.world), and if your home instance doesn’t know about it yet, it’ll tell your home instance about it. Then subscribe to it, and traffic there will show up when you browse “Subscribed”.

EDIT: Note that Mbin and PieFed communities are, somewhat-unintuitively, shown in their own lists, probably because the three software packages don’t provide the same pieces of information about communities and lemmyverse.net wants to let you be able to search using all available search criteria, rather than just the least-common-denominator stuff. If you want to search for communities on Mbin or PieFed, select those from the menu in the upper left.

I only made an account to bitch about the Knicks

Of course also starting/contributing to your niche community speeds things along.

helpfully

[email protected]

Not quite what you’re asking, but up until about the 1870s, the US had effectively unrestricted immigration.

Some economist at the Cato Institute, Alex Newrath or something like that, did some interview with NPR Planet Money a few years back and estimated what potential immigration would be if restrictions were dropped.

searches

Alex Nowrasteh.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/172501563

ALEX NOWRASTEH: My dream setup would be a system whereby only criminals, suspected terrorists and those with serious communicable diseases - like, you know, drug-resistant tuberculosis - are barred from coming to the United States to live and work.

KESTENBAUM: This, he says, it’s not as crazy as it sounds.

NOWRASTEH: The United States had a system like that from roughly 1790 to about 1882.

KESTENBAUM: It was the law of the land for almost 100 years of American history. Open borders would be great for the economy, he says, and you wouldn’t have to worry about people risking their lives crossing the border. If you are wondering how many people would come, Nowrasteh says there are some polls, asking people around the world, would you like to move to the U.S.

There were a lot of yeses.

NOWRASTEH: About five to 700 million.

KESTENBAUM: So that would more than double, triple the population.

NOWRASTEH: That would, but, you know, you have to take a big grain of salt with that.

KESTENBAUM: Nowrasteh figures more like 50 million and 100 million people would actually want to move here and stay. And thought that would be fine. Compared with Europe, he says, we have a relatively big and empty country. What chances do you give this passing in Congress?

NOWRASTEH: About zero. Of, you know, the type of thing I want right now, somewhere near to zero.

US states don’t have inter-state border controls beyond some weight checking for semis

California does have agricultural border checkpoints, though that doesn’t really change things from the topic of whether population movement could be viably limited.

searches

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/plant/PE/ExteriorExclusion/borders.html

Apparently the term is “California Border Protection Stations (BPS)”.

Yeah, if they wanted to do so, in theory they could. However, even if that were the case, it’d be unlikely to happen until 2029. The President has a veto on legislation, and Congress requires a two-thirds supermajority in both legislative houses to override that veto on a given piece of legislation.

Congress can play hardball with the budget, refuse to fund the Executive, but outside of that, generally, there’s a strong bias towards the status quo in the US system of government: lots of ability to block other entities from changing from the status quo.

IIRC, despite wildly-conflicting statements on the matter to different audiences, Trump hasn’t been particularly opposed to skilled immigration, so maybe he might not veto an increase there.

If you’re thinking about, like, the high-school-diploma-only green card lottery being greatly expanded to crank up unskilled legal immigration, it’s theoretically possible, but I would bet against it happening for political and economic reasons. For unskilled labor, illegal immigration is probably more-advantageous to to the US than legal immigration; you can get labor, and thus economic production for the country, without needing to pay out a variety of government benefits that one otherwise would need to pay out. Milton Friedman (Nobel-prize winning economist, was involved with designing the income tax system in the US) has some old video where he’s giving a talk at some university and was happily saying something like “immigration is only good because it’s illegal”. I mean, he’s intentionally being provoking there for the effect, but he’s got a point.

goes looking for said video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eyJIbSgdSE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfU9Fqah-f4

Like, the people who are gonna get citizenship are gonna be the kids of illegal immigrants born in the US, not the illegal immigrants themselves. Those kids are gonna go through the education system and ideally acquire a skillset there.

In practice, would probably be better to do all this legally, have some kind of unskilled work visa that doesn’t provide benefits, but I can’t imagine that there’s any way that a “two-tiered citizenship” would stand muster politically.

I’d been using Reddit for quite some time. I wasn’t willing to use it if they weren’t going to allow third party clients.

So Democrats could still waive sovereign immunity in the future?

Well, hypothetically, I expect so.

Are there any limits to the amount of money on class action lawsuits?

So, I don’t think that there are limits to class action suits as such, but in…I think the 1990s or so, can’t recall the exact timeframe, there was a wave of tort reform, and a lot of states placed limits on punitive damages on lawsuits in general as some kind of multiple of compensatory damages. I don’t know if federal torts have such limits or if so, what they are off-the-cuff.

searches

It sounds like there is such a limit on punitive damages in case law implied by the US Constitution according to BMW of North America, Inc v. Gore, but I don’t think that it’s spelled out precisely what that limit is.

I mean, if you suffer $1 in damages and then try to sue for $1 in compensatory damage and $1 trillion in punitive damages, I’d imagine that it’d probably run afoul of that.

Actually…I’m not totally sure whether punitive damages can be applied to the government at all. I mean, the idea behind them is to deter and the idea is that elections are supposed to do that if the party involved is the government.

goes looking

https://legalclarity.org/are-eeoc-punitive-damages-available-against-the-federal-government/

Punitive Damages and the Federal Government

Punitive damages are penalties intended solely to punish an employer and deter future intentional misconduct. While generally available in private sector Title VII claims where the employer acted with malice or reckless indifference, the law explicitly prohibits their award against the federal government, or any state or local government entity. This prohibition is rooted in the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which protects the government from being sued for money damages unless Congress has clearly waived that immunity.

When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which authorized compensatory and punitive damages, it included a specific exception. The statute states that punitive damages cannot be recovered against a government agency or political subdivision. Therefore, a federal employee cannot receive punitive damages in an EEOC administrative claim or a subsequent civil lawsuit against the federal agency. The focus of recovery against a federal agency remains on restoring the employee to the position they would have occupied without the discrimination.

So I’d guess probably punitive damages are available in the general case of the US waiving sovereign immunity, because otherwise the CRA wouldn’t have had that exception prohibiting punitive damages present. So I suppose probably one can go for punitive damages, as long as there isn’t some similar exception restricting punitive damages in whatever waiver on whatever you’re thinking of suing over.

EDIT: Honestly, though, if you think that the Trump administration has caused some general harm and you’re hoping that the Democrats explicitly want to pay for it, my bet, without knowing the specifics of what you’re concerned about, is that a more-likely outcome would be the Democrats explicitly budgeting funds for it, not arranging to send it to court with the idea of losing a lawsuit and then being ordered to pay out funds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity

The federal government of the United States has sovereign immunity and may not be sued anywhere in the United States unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit. The United States has waived sovereign immunity to a limited extent, mainly through the Federal Tort Claims Act, which waives the immunity if a tortious act of a federal employee causes damage, and the Tucker Act, which waives the immunity over claims arising out of contracts to which the federal government is a party.[55] As a sovereign, the United States is immune from suit unless it unequivocally consents to being sued.[56] The United States Supreme Court in Price v. United States and Osage Indians observed: “It is an axiom of our jurisprudence. The government is not liable to suit unless it consents thereto, and its liability in suit cannot be extended beyond the plain language of the statute authorizing it.”[57]

It looks like I was wrong about it being the default journaling mode for ext3; the default is apparently to journal only metadata. However, if you’re journaling data, it gets pushed out to the disk in a new location rather than on top of where the previous data existed.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/shred

CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the file system overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this assumption. The following are examples of file systems on which shred is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all file system modes:

• log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)

• file systems that write redundant data and carry on even if some writes fail, such as RAID-based file systems

• file systems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance’s NFS server

• file systems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS version 3 clients

• compressed file systems

In the case of ext3 file systems, the above disclaimer applies (and shred is thus of limited effectiveness) only in data=journal mode, which journals file data in addition to just metadata. In both the data=ordered (default) and data=writeback modes, shred works as usual. Ext3 journaling modes can be changed by adding the data=something option to the mount options for a particular file system in the /etc/fstab file, as documented in the mount man page (man mount).

open-sources

To repeat my comment over on [email protected], “open-sources” isn’t really the right term here, as the source code that runs the speakers isn’t being released. This is just releasing API documentation to let software interact with the speakers.

Cryptographic signature.