What a prime example of how climate disasters will not be equal or evenly distributed.

A nation that puts out less than 3 tonnes of CO2 emissions per capita gets devastated while the powers that be in a nation outputting five times the emissions per capita sit and twiddle their thumbs, parroting whataboutisms.

Based on your other comments, I’m going to wish you well and hope tomorrow you have a better day. Cheers.

I don’t see that norimee’s initial comment was edited. I do see that your reply to them has been.

I’ve read the root comment a few times and cannot see what you’re huffing about. They didn’t say anything about the creation of the weapons.

The entire comment revolved around the country’s capability of keeping one in functional condition without an accident occurring, as seems to so often happen.

So long as executives have a fiduciary responsibility to generate returns for the shareholders, they can dust their hands of making decisions that kill customers so long as a profit is made.

Agreed. The whole idea of these huge payouts could be eliminated and replaced with what exists for everyone else - severance pay. Calculated off a regulated minimum formula, based primarily on how long the person served the company.

I also agree with you that the top and bottom salaries should have a correlation. The C suite making the salary of a shelf stocker in one day should not happen. I think I could accept that the top gets somewhere around 10 or 20 times higher salary. Even 100x would be an improvement to the way it is now.

Like you point out, between stock options and whatever else, an executive salary could be a few hundred thousand, even if their total compensation is tens of millions. In fantasy land it would be nice if, once a company grows to a certain point, say a billion dollars in value, if it were required to convert to an employee owned cooperative entity.

It’s a shame things are the way they are. Maybe one day we won’t have politicians that can be bought. That’s a different discussion altogether.

In an ideal world, the penalties you describe are suitable. Though, gaming industry aside, for the executive level of most any corporation, being a scapegoat and handed a golden parachute is the worst case scenario for them leaving. In many cases floating across the street right into another executive position.

Jail time isn’t a likely outcome. It just isn’t the world we live in, unfortunately.

I see what you’re getting at but this would be difficult for a publisher to stick with in the event the game does horribly. Requiring them to keep their word to the date advertised would end up with them only guaranteeing a week, or send ramifications through all industries requiring truth in advertising.

A middle ground would be simply to legislate that when games require online connectivity for any reason, the appropriate software is released to allow a locally run server to enable online function at the time the company decides to decommission their servers. Then require them to hold these files in an accessible manner for at least as long as the servers had been active for.

That would be difficult in the event the company goes out of business, but I’m sure this would be a difficult thing to explain to most politicians so maybe not so simple after all.

I think I explained what I was talking about rather well. Trying to view a piece of media in its highest release format isn’t something that’s always feasible. Anything even a few years old can to difficult to source. Ask anyone rebuilding a library after a drive failure. It’s even worse if what you’re trying to get had low viewership - it means an even smaller pool of people bothering to host the data.

While I’m sure this is a niche situation within a niche situation, hosting your own media library locally allows offline playback. Quite nice in during a thunderstorm. Not an option with what you’ve described as your methods, but again, definitely an uncommon use case.

Time and time again, media will be removed from public viewing for nearly any reason. Online streaming services have what you want to watch only so long as their license to it is valid. Once it expires, it’s gone off that platform - and not always to another one. Or the media gets edited to remove or alter something the owners don’t want to promote.

This is even true for the varying methods of sailing. Not everything will be available indefinitely. Certainly not at zero effort. While not being as simple as signing up for a service and watching a low bitrate copy of something within thirty seconds, it’s not rocket science. You can get Jellyfin running with a small library in half an hour.

Ultimately, do what suits you. A local media server works for some. Others will have everything in a single folder and view it through VLC. It’s pretty irrelevant though when the vast majority just pay a subscription to one or multiple of the streaming companies that continue to serve watered down libraries at ever increasing prices.

I gave xManager a go, and while it doesn’t have ads interrupting your listening, it does still have all the Spotify pop up ads trying to get you to upgrade to premium. It’s fine when listening, but selecting what you’re listening to is still irritating.

When shirts are worn less than a dozen times on average before they get tossed in the landfill, those branded shirt companies should be paying you.

Convenient video from today about this exact topic.

Sounds like my usage is just different to yours. I can’t remember why but I got accustomed to listening to audio at increased speed around a decade ago and slowly cranked it up to the point that now I can follow certain people’s conversations slightly higher than 2x. Only with voices and cadence I’m familiar with though. Any guests on a show can really throw me off.

The silence trimming aspect is a bit absurd honestly. It makes laughter sound almost all the same and robotic; you have to infer where comedic, dramatic, or thoughtful pauses in the speech are; and if there’s a more rapid fire back and forth in the conversation it can be tricky to follow. Although that last point doesn’t happen with podcasts where all the speakers record separately and it’s edited together to be coherent.

If you listen to a lot of shows, with hundreds of hours of episodes, it’s worth dialing up as much as you can stand. Then again, if I didn’t have two dozen podcasts with decades of backlog, I sure wouldn’t be listening at auctioneer pace.

After reading your comment, I checked my Pocket Casts stats page and it looks like between the skipping, variable speed (1.5-2x), and trimmed silence (mad max), I save nearly 20% of listening time with the majority of that being the silence trimming.

Might be an outlier, but with daily podcast listening, trimming is important enough to keep me on Pocket Casts, even though AntennaPod is attractive given it’s open source nature.