darthelmet

Kafka wrote stories about confusing, impersonal bureaucracies. So people will describe something as Kafkaesque to convey that sense of being lost in a system.

The institutional part of it is WHY it's difficult/impossible to get rid of the corporate politicians. You can say we should vote out x or we should support y policy, but it doesn't really matter if the entire electoral system is set up to stop that from happening.

It probably depends on the accent, but we say "Double U".

I don't think I've done anything different. I'll open it up when I get the time and take a picture.

Thanks. I'll try the chatgpt thing next time I have the crash.

As for the components, I got the PC in 2020. For some reason I can't find the exact order on their site, but this is the computer: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/alienware-aurora-r11-desktop/alienware-aurora-r11-setup-and-specifications/specifications-of-alienware-aurora-r11?guid=guid-7c9f07ce-626e-44ca-be3a-a1fb036413f9&lang=en-us

But it has different options, so that's not entirely helpful. From googling it looks like I need to open up my PC to see what the power supply is, so I'll get around to doing that soon.

Thanks for the response. For now I tried updating my BIOS and I'll work my way down the more difficult troubleshooting steps as I have time.

As for age of RAM/PSU, they all came with the PC which I got sometime in 2020. Do they tend to go bad over time if nothing else damages them? Short of swapping them out, how can I tell if they're the cause of the issues?

Also with the thermal paste, is that something I'm meant to regularly change or just if I suspect there is an overheating issue?

I don’t have a smart watch both because I don’t really see the point in them and because adding extra things to be on me bothers me, so I wouldn’t even be wearing a regular watch.

As for tablets: It’s just a convenient compromise between a phone and a laptop for basic browsing and video watching. I can comfortably lay in bed with a tablet rested against the wall or propped up on my nightstand. It’s harder to do that with a phone or laptop and obviously the phone screen is also just smaller. I don’t really take the tablet with me unless I’m going on a long trip, but when I am it’s nice to both have the bigger screen and actually have my media device be on a separate battery from the device I need for communication and navigation.

Legally you're right. But I think it sort of ignores the spirit of what that free speech should be and the reality it actually exists in. There are corporations that have reached a level of size and power comparable to governments. Plus the government in general is an arm of the capitalist class it represents. Most of the speech that happens today is on these privately owned services. To allow those large corporations to act as censors, it makes the protections on speech from government interference largely moot. Generalizing more, the way I put it is in America, you have freedom... if you can afford it. Sure, nobody is able to stop you from saying what you want to say. But you get to say it to a handful of people you know while a rich person gets to say it to millions of people through media channels and advertising. Sure everyone gets one vote, but if you're rich you can influence a lot more than one vote (and you can probably buy more than one vote of influence with whoever wins.) You may have the right to an abortion, but if you're poor you might not have the means to actually do it. People have the legal right to due process, but despite that, tons of cases end in plea deals or settlements because people don't have the means to be adequately represented in a legal case. When the US legally abolished (most) slavery, many of the freed slaves ended up as share croppers, not much better off or free than they were before because they didn't have the material means to exercise that freedom. Later, the US passed anti-discrimination laws. No more barring black people from living in some towns/neighborhoods. But despite that, the area I grew up in was still heavily segregated. Legal freedoms don't mean much if you don't have the economic freedom to exercise them.

Now, there's clearly a line. It seems obvious that say, if you had some private chat room it would be fine to kick people out of it for whatever reason. And at the extreme end we have these massive platforms acting which perform the role of a public service but in the hands of private interests. There I think there should be limits on what censorship they should be able to do. So where do you make the cutoff along that spectrum? Idk. I feel like a Lemmy instance is probably closer to a private chatroom than a social media corporation. They're small, they're not run for profit, and they're not engaged in any anti-competitive behavior. There's not that much stopping someone from moving to another instance or even making their own.

I've watched a few older original movies here and there on streaming at home, but I guess the last time I went to the theater for one was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I don't really go to the theater much in general anymore. Last time I went was for Dune 2 (mostly because I like the director more so than I'm interested in the franchise) and it was so loud I thought it was going to damage my eardrums.

That aside, if I'm gonna go see something, I want some reason that isn't just brand recognition. A director I like, some good reviews, maybe an interesting premise, etc.

Oh god. I was reading through the page and this gem was down in the section on the response from healthcare companies:

Another executive was quoted saying "What's most disturbing is the ability of people to hide behind their keyboards and lose their humanity."

Says the people who hide behind keyboards, phone calls, employees, doctors, guards, police as they hurt people they don't know. Talk about losing your humanity.

None of these people have shed a single tear for the people hurt or killed by the healthcare system and people like him.

I'm wondering if it's gonna be Trigger again. That's mostly why I bothered with it in the first place. But they tend not to do sequels, so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't.