he/him. LARPer, Nerd Organizer, Web Dev.
Mastodon admin, joeterranova@leftist.network
Not the CNBC guy but I’ve got Nihilist Stock Market advice🌻

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Correct. Splitting hydrogen from water is quite energy intensive. Burning hydrogen into oxygen to make water releases energy, but not as much energy as it takes to split the hydrogen off in the first place. The reason to use hydrogen fuel cells is that the extra energy needed to generate the hydrogen is still far better than the carbon output and costly materials needed for making and charging a battery. Batteries need rare earth metals, and they lose their charging ability over time. Splitting water into hydrogen creates “potential energy” from the later creation of water again, making it a useful, clean way to store electricity.

    Same as the plans for using cranes stacking concrete bricks to store electricity. It takes more electric to stack them than is produced by unstacking them. But it’s a clean way to store potential energy, and far more efficient and sustainable than a battery.



  • That was the entire point of mortgages. You’re paying interest, and could end up paying well over the original house value, but over a long enough time period, via inflation and property values increasing, you’re still making out ahead of renting. Depending on the mortgage interest rate, you could be better off not paying it off early.

    For example, I refinanced my house at 2.6%. Afterwards I started paying extra principal payments. My mother the accountant told me to stop. The interest rate is lower than inflation, I’m better off using the money for other things or putting it into higher yield savings accounts instead of paying it off earlier than schedule.



  • Obama was a huge problem, but not because of being half black. Because he ran on a progressive platform, and then was decidedly Centrist once he actually got into office. The entire financial bailout could’ve gone way better, and moved the country in a far better direction, if he wasn’t busy placating his wall street friends. His drone program made every civilian in Afghanistan and Iraq despise us to the core, and made children afraid of the sky. He pushed through Obamacare/Affordable Care Act, which was the Republican plan, as a compromise. None of them voted for it anyway, he could’ve gotten through a much better plan instead. Hillary’s loss in 2016 was as much a denunciation of Obama’s centrism as it was about Hilary or right wing populism. And his interference in 2020 to get all the centrists to back Biden and shut down Bernie may have doomed us in 2024.






  • It’s hard to overstate the psychology behind the github profile. As a developer, your github profile shows that you’re actively developing, whether it’s for open source projects or for work projects. My previously company used a private gitlab install, which meant only my open source work showed up on github. My current company uses github, which means my profile shows green all the time.

    We’re a small company, but the github costs are a drop in the bucket. As others have said, it’d take something truly federated, or a crazy price jump from Github, for me to consider moving. It’s free for my open source projects, it’s a small amount for my company, and I have a public profile I can point to whenever I’m discussing my development.



  • Right. I have boxes full of software I bought once, and I have the license to use it forever. But it’s for Windows XP or older. I’d need emulators or WINE to run it now, and it’s not really worth it. For some of it I even paid for a “lifetime” of updates, but that stops working out when they stop updating it. I apparently live a lot longer than 90s and 2000s software companies. Just let me pay for major versions again with a guarantee of updates for X years, and price it according to those expectations.

    37Signals is the company that made Basecamp, and they talk about hosting the software yourself, so presumably they are writing web software that would often be SaaS and letting you host it. So it’s great that you’ll be able to get it for one time purchase. But it definitely needs updates, as libraries change versions, new security flaws are uncovered, obviously for bugs, etc. Buying web application software is only as useful as the length of the updates included. Them providing the source is better, but since that’s not open source exactly a community couldn’t really work together to continue updates themselves.


  • The global south is largely a terrible place because of the wealthy north. Especially the US. First they had to throw off their colonizers. Then they had to suffer the punishments of their former colonizers. Then the US took it upon themselves to attempt to overthrow every socialist leading government in the western hemisphere, elected or not, and replace them with a dictator. Then in the Western Hemisphere the US War on Drugs have made Mexico, Central, and South America a war zone run by cartels.

    So yeah, much of the world is much worse to live in than the US. Mostly because of the US. Western Europe is still a far better place to live.


  • My solution is more complicated but doesn’t require switching browsers

    1. I run a tor client on my home server in docker, the same place I keep my vpn access, torrenting, etc
    2. I run a socks proxy on my home server, that sends all requests through the tor network (and a different socks proxy for when I want to use the VPN)
    3. On my desktop and laptop, I use the FoxyProxy firefox extension (SwitchyOmega on Chrome). I setup the socks proxy (proxies) on it, using URL patterns.
    4. When I go to a .onion link, FoxyProxy uses the pattern, and sends the traffic over my tor socks proxy

  • There just isn’t. It was great in the same way the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the American Empire, were “great”. Big? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Forces of mass oppression and murder? Also yes. Praising Imperialists is going to win no favors.

    The Bolshevik revolution was a blood bath of royals, but that was because Russia was the only major power to make it out of the revolutions of 1848 without losing their absolute monarchy. Russia still had friggin peasants prior to the Bolsheviks.

    If the USSR hadn’t gone the route of “permanent revolution” (ie permanent authoritarian government), there could have been a past to look bad fondly on. But instead the boot changed color, and they decided to make their neighbors learn of their peaceful ways, by force.