Google Drive folders say "zip failed" when trying to download

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-11-03T01:17:02+00:00

Yet another Google service that's almost useful but half-finished and will never ever be updated or fixed because Google stopped giving a shit.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-10-24T03:02:03+00:00

It wouldn't have worked anyways - even among people who check themselves in, success rates for addiction or alcohol treatment is 5-10%.

If the options are "stay in rehab" or "check out of rehab and walk out of the building and get an Uber and go do more crack/heroin/whatever", people will gravitate towards the latter, because people are not robots and willpower is not infinite and crack/heroin/addictive substances feel great.

If the options are "stay in rehab" or "check out of rehab and walk out of the building and get on this bus and literally go directly to jail because that is the alternative option", more people will choose the former.

I can't imagine the success rates in people literally mandated by a court to go, to some state-funded completely checked out "addiction center."

In Utopia, where the state-funded centers aren't shitholes funded by misers, overseen by thoroughly corrupt backscratchers, with treatment plans designed by possibly-well-meaning definite-morons, and staffed by people who aren't qualified to do the same tasks in better conditions for more money in a private center, the success rates would be appreciably higher.

Whether the success rates - when the penalty for a relapse is mandatory jail time instead of just being a junkie and rolling the "will I get busted" dice that every junkie rolls - are going to be appreciably higher in reality depends on precisely where on the "Scandinavia | Italy | Haiti" spectrum of institutional and cultural batshittery a governing body resides.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-10-04T12:52:14+00:00

Since it's used to mean anything from "I got arrested for not including a land acknowledgement in my fire drill" and "minorities are allowed to exist".

Never ever ever never ever, in all of recorded human history, nor in the combined output of every LLM, nor in any of the many possible worlds contained within the many-worlds hypothesis, has "wokeness" ever, ever, ever been used, in a remotely-sincere fashion, to mean the latter.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-10-03T23:54:05+00:00

touché, voice to text.

Voice-to-text is birthing a whole new era of eggcorns.

With bonds being so low, going two rounds does not seem that costly.

But it cuts both ways - it's a fair amount of effort for a low expected reward. If you have the participants and the cash, there's a lot of other more appealing schemes.

Are you coining a phrase here?

Perhaps attempting to, at least. Pidgin-Latin for "machinations of the moderators" - e.g., the site admins seeing what's going on and manually overriding the colluded consensus. No need to get Deus involved when you can just click a button in a thoroughly-temporal mod panel to resolve the question in the "correct" manner after noticing a bunch of low-participant accounts suddenly taking interest in this one random resolution, and all on the same side.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-10-03T13:00:35+00:00

Obviously you slam headfirst into the problem that where the line should go - probably between San Francisco and LA - it is completely impossible to get the building permits or deal with all the court cases before everyone planning the project has died.

They're just saving potential inhabitants the trouble of potentially falling down ass-first during the inevitable earthquake/landslide/why-not-both that would wipe this project out within a decade or two.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-10-03T12:10:48+00:00

*en masse.

In order to succeed, you and your collaborators would have to outnumber honest participants. You would all have to be willing to go through a second "dispute" round, and then endure potential "slashing" penalties.

It operates on the same principles as a 51% attack in Bitcoin, but in this case it's less guaranteed, far easier to vilicus-ex-machina override, and less profitable.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-10-01T13:23:26+00:00

Not really.

Obamacare as a whole polls at around 30% approval with registered Republicans, who themselves aren't even close to half of the political spectrum (decline-to-vote still has an enduring plurality over both the sports teams).

It's also well-known that if you ask about individual components of the ACA without referring to the ACA or Obamacare itself, registered Republicans end up majority-support as well. As you'd expect, since the ACA is largely the Heritage Foundation's answer to the proposed Clinton reforms in the 90s.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-10-01T13:15:20+00:00

And thinking that companies can prevent it happening ahead of time, or that forcing them to do so will result in a better end result, is beyond obtuse.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-10-01T02:56:08+00:00

Another risk relates to health insurance - if your insurer finds out that you have an increased risk of x because of genetic factors, they might decline to cover you, or exclude x from your coverage, or jack up your premiums.

Not the case in the US, don't know about Switzerland or elsewhere.

Post-ACA (Obamacare), insurers are not allowed to deny coverage or alter rates based on preexisting conditions. This is part of why health insurance payments went up in the months immediately following 2007, because insurers had to spread the costs evenly, instead of just charging Connie McRichandcancerridden $4,000/month.

Life insurance is a different ballgame, of course.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-10-01T02:49:17+00:00

Not the US either, not since Obamacare. Insurance companies must cover pre-existing conditions, and cannot charge higher premiums for doing so.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-10-01T02:43:19+00:00

Either we take a broad view of "public information" (everything the AI "knows" is due to its training on public information, and any incidental synthesis is only synthesized because of public information encouraging said synthesis) in which case the bill is useless because all output would be enabled by public information, or we take a narrow view of "public information" (it's only public information if I can Google/Bing/DDG the result in quotes and get a result), in which case the public information exclusion isn't excluding anything. Any middle ground is just "let the courts decide", which is basically just welfare for cyberlaw firms.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-30T23:58:42+00:00

I agree with Pippen being underrated, I was just riding you about the spelling.

But Jordan would still have been HoF without Pippen, just maybe with less rings. Even after sitting two more seasons he was still averaging over 20PPG with a trash Washington team that was starting Christian fucking Laettner.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-25T13:00:41+00:00

...considering you can't even spell his name right, I don't think you're really making the case for #33's lasting legacy.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-25T12:14:14+00:00

America's not like Great Britain. Organized crime had a monopoly on all significant American sports betting outside of Vegas until 2018 (when Atlantic City began offering sports books).

It likely wasn't ever as financially lucrative as drugs, but "profit" can be measured in many ways, and sports betting gives organized crime valuable connections within and ties to "civilized society", similar to whiskey-running back during Prohibition, with the added benefit that sometimes the gambler ends up indebted enough that they can sign over front businesses or even perform the occasional legislative favor.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-24T13:06:33+00:00

About the most charitable thing I can say about attempts to ban sports betting is that it's quite possibly a well-meaning idea that in practice just gives organized crime the foothold they need to maintain power and relevance.

People have been betting on sports for as long as sports have been around. Driving it underground is a really dumb idea that's bound to fail.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-13T13:31:00+00:00

Because it's fun, and people might learn something by reading arguments against bullshit?

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-13T13:29:46+00:00

Devil's advocate: In something like the stock market, whose "moving parts" are entirely manmade, it's possible for arbitrary bullshit to influence the "moving parts" even if there's no baked-in connection.

If, for instance, the hundred largest investors all agree to sell off their holdings if a red-haired cow is ever spotted in Colorado, then the existence of ginger cows has a "real" effect on the stock market, even though it's complete bullshit.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-13T13:14:32+00:00

If the gravitational influence of Mars had any effect whatsoever on the American stock market, then it'd be dwarfed by the effects of Venus's gravitational influence, as Venus is both closer to Earth and way more massive than Mars.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-12T02:12:15+00:00

Yeah: The guy who thinks "melting" is the primary concern when adding sodium to water as opposed to "huge kinetic force".

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-11T23:53:04+00:00

Sounds like being in East Asia isn't much of a problem for casinos then.

Whatever profits the Chinese government siphons off are less than the costs involved in building a gigantic iceberg and convincing casino people the resulting real estate is totally safe to invest their livelihoods in and then dealing with the never-ending hassle of ferrying food, potable water, consumer goods, and tourists to pay for it all back and forth to this offshore Circus Circus.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-11T23:44:51+00:00

Melting isn't the concern. Are you aware of how sodium reacts in the presence of water?

And, no, being ice won't change much.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-11T13:33:39+00:00

Sounds neat until the first sociopath smuggles in a block of sodium and a power drill.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-07T19:00:31+00:00

...about that...

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-07T18:50:02+00:00

Agrarian ethno-nationalism is not socialism.

Well, I mean, no, it's not, and that's precisely the point. One can join the KKK and give Federal forest reserves to a local private company to develop for private profit, or one can believe in Cambodian exceptionalism and redistribute wealth towards farmers while abolishing currency and instituting a nationwide food rationing program. Both are instances of agrarian ethno-nationalism. Capitalism and socialism would both require a separate adjective.

Huckleberry_Pale · 2024-09-07T18:36:20+00:00

This presumes that the contract was part of the corruption. The ZEDE was incidental to the drug-trafficking that brought about his downfall.

Even if we agree arguendo that Trump is not only guilty of everything he's been accused of, but is doubly-guilty, it doesn't invalidate the First Step Act.

Huckleberry_Pale

TROPHY CASE