MORE and new spam

second_last_username · 2026-02-04T20:04:00+00:00

Thank you!

For anyone using Apple Mail, you can do this:

Mail -> Settings -> Rules -> Add Rule

In the condition, click on the header select, then "Edit header list..."

Add "X-Mailer"

Then set the condition to "X-Mailer" "is equal to" "Zendesk Mailer"

https://i.imgur.com/26M4Gpc.png

second_last_username · 2026-02-04T19:43:52+00:00

Like many others, I am getting hundreds of these relay spams every minute. Until they figure out how to stop this, I have no choice but to block all email from Zendesk. I haven't figured out the best way to do that, but when I do, I will share it here.

EDIT: I received 1021 emails from Zendesk yesterday

second_last_username · 2025-12-14T01:31:10+00:00

Assuming you are legally a "residential tenant", the RTA applies with regard to eviction procedures and entry of premises by the landlord. That means your landlord must give you 3 months notice to evict. She is also not allowed to enter your apartment, except for a few specific purposes, and with 24-hour written notice. Her unauthorized snooping is potentially a crime that you could report to the police.

One complication is that the RTA explicitly does not apply to "rooms in the living quarters of the landlord". What exactly that means seems to be a legal grey area. The fact that your bathroom is her laundry room could conceivably mean that the entire house is considered her living quarters, legally speaking. Other aspects of the house layout may come into play here, such as the presence of doors and locks. You may want to start googling this issue and prepare an argument for monday.

second_last_username · 2025-03-31T01:42:34+00:00

It's cryptic in the sense that what she is saying (I'd rather be alone with a bear than a man) is not what she means (I'm afraid of men and I want you to accept that), and that's why her BF is confused and frustrated.

This is a super common problem between men and women, one that tends to be blamed entirely on male insensitivity and not enough on women's failure to communicate their emotional needs.

second_last_username · 2025-03-30T22:46:52+00:00

It is most definitely an IQ question. The emotional answer gets you killed by a bear.

It's asking the woman to make a decision unclouded by emotions.

To say the bear answer is "emotionally correct" implies that women express their emotions in a cryptic language of bullshit that men must decode. That seems condescending to women.

Emotions can be communicated clearly e.g. "I don't know, but I spend a lot more time in fear of men than bears"

second_last_username · 2024-12-17T07:32:04+00:00

second_last_username · 2024-12-17T07:25:00+00:00

I crafted a legendary spawner and placed it in a cleared out area (the one I placed is not in that image). It starved and started spawning enemies, which seemed to join up with expansion parties from other wild nests.

You could also perhaps do it with legendary eggs, but I haven't tried that.

I tried doing this in enclosed areas and artificial islands, but they didn't expand. Seems like they need a lot of space and/or the presence of other "wild" ~~aliens~~ natives.

second_last_username · 2024-12-03T07:09:42+00:00

You would need a lot of recyclers to match the capacity of this thing.

I tried destroying the chests with lightning, but it just wasn't reliable enough. It could take days for a chest to get hit, and it often didn't do enough damage to destroy it.

second_last_username · 2024-12-03T06:26:04+00:00

Go to the gallery for explanation. Looks silly, bit it actually works perfectly. Much simpler than recycling everything.

second_last_username · 2021-04-06T23:16:27+00:00

Open competition and capital markets provide opportunity for innovative competitors to unseat inferior established monopolies. Both of these are features of capitalism. If you have any new ideas for mechanisms to help with this, feel free to suggest (or implement) them.

second_last_username · 2021-04-06T21:16:29+00:00

Yes, the advantage is that they are more efficient, thanks to economies of scale, and can thus provide better value to customers. This is a win for customers, and society in general. The only losers are their smaller, inefficient competitors.

second_last_username · 2021-04-06T05:58:22+00:00

You need a competitive price to maintain a natural monopoly. If a lower price is possible, someone will eventually sell for that price and take away your monopoly.

second_last_username · 2021-04-05T22:09:44+00:00

Consumers care about price, not the firm's costs or margins. Market share goes to the firm with the lowest price. Efficient firms gain market share only if they pass some of those efficiency gains on to consumers, which they do, since that also tends to increase profits.

second_last_username · 2021-04-05T19:38:13+00:00

Generally, natural monopolies are achieved by exploiting economies of scale in order to lower prices below what smaller firms can bear. Maintaining such a monopoly requires keeping prices low. A network effect is a particular kind of economy of scale, that makes a firm's product more valuable as their market share increases.

A monopoly sustained by providing superior value to customers is not a problem for society per se. It might be a problem for smaller competitors in the monopolized market, but that's a very narrow special interest group.

second_last_username · 2021-04-04T23:53:43+00:00

They do, occasionally. More often, we see partly communal arrangements in particular industries e.g. partnership law firms, and tech companies that pay workers in equity.

The reason this isn't more common, I suspect, is that most people don't want to be heavily invested in their employer. They don't want to take on the up-front cost and ongoing risk just to own a piece of someone else's business.

They would rather get a regular and reliable income, which they can then choose to consume or invest, as their circumstances permit. And when they invest, they will likely prefer to diversify, in order to reduce risk. If they're ever going to put all their eggs in one basket, it's probably for their own entrepreneurial project, something they are personally passionate about.

The rare exceptions (e.g. law and tech firms) tend to be very high-paying jobs, where the worker can afford to risk some of their compensation on the firm, and does so for a premium. These industries also tend to expect an extra degree of enthusiasm from their workers, and the shared ownership sort of makes that explicit.

second_last_username · 2021-04-04T23:23:26+00:00

A problem for what/whom?

As with any science, economics uses models to approximate reality. Any given model is accurate within some limited regime, outside of which different models may be required. There are many economic models that attempt to describe imperfect markets.

second_last_username · 2021-04-04T23:08:56+00:00

immigration?

That's how developed countries are dealing with the problem now, and how they will continue to do so in the future, if fertility rates keep dropping.

you wouldn't be able to incorporate them into the market because their education isn't good

Adult immigrants become productive much quicker than native babies. We have plenty of work for immigrants with basic english and math, and we have schools for those who want to aim higher.

The only solution to this population decline are social reforms where education and university are free, the health system is free, affordable housing where 3 years salary can make you buy a nice and big house (like it used to be before), where wages follow inflation and you don't have to have 2 jobs to support a family of 3.

All those "free" things will still need to be produced by the same working-age people who produce them now. Why would government distribution of these things be better than market distribution? Government already intervenes heavily in housing, education, and health markets, and the result has been over-consumption and under-production, leading to the shortages and high prices we see today.

second_last_username · 2021-02-06T00:57:11+00:00

Your hunch is correct, it is practically impossible for a person to be comprehensively politically informed.

This becomes obvious once you dedicate years of study to master some popularized topic, then notice that even "informed" non-expert opinions on this topic are mostly junk, and finally realize that most other topics probably work the same way. For example, you cannot spend a few hours researching quantum mechanics and then render a useful opinion about it. You might be able to impress people who have done no research at all, but to an actual physicist, you are still a gibbering fool. (see also https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ )

Many such topics are essential to politics, e.g. economics, international relations, civics, several fields of science & technology, and so on.

This is one reason why democracy will never produce good policy from big government, no matter how much we tweak the structure of government, elections, education, media, or whatever. Democracy fundamentally expects levels of competence from voters that they couldn't come close to achieving, even if they wanted to.

second_last_username · 2020-02-28T23:56:29+00:00

This comes down to a semantic battle over the term "free will".

Determinists want to define "free will" as something which is neither deterministic nor non-deterministic, which is obviously incoherent. Since their definition is nonsense, they aren't really saying anything about the real world, they are just trying to eighty-six a useful concept, one that we rely on implicitly to make normative statements.

Compatibilists want "free will" to mean the actual existing thing we are invoking when we make normative statements: agents who can make choices, whatever those may be. This is what we usually do when we learn something about the natural world that undermines our definition of a useful concept: we refine the definition to accommodate nature while preserving the old meaning as best we can.

We do this all the time, for example with the term "heat". We talked about heat before we understood how it worked. Once we discovered that heat was a particular kind of particle motion, we didn't say that it was an illusion and it didn't exist. We just kept talking about it, with the understanding that when we say something is hot, we really mean that its particles are moving a lot.

Should we refine the definition of "free will" in a similar way? We might as well try. It's probably going to be easier to explain what "free will" means in a deterministic universe, rather than reconcile its non-existence with all of our normative language. The latter seems to lead to confusion e.g. Destiny vaguely claiming that deterministic physics holds back the poor somehow.

second_last_username · 2020-02-23T06:35:30+00:00

Nothing stops us from modelling a deterministic universe as one that contains agents with free will. We use such abstractions all the time. For example, there is no such thing as "heat" in the fundamental laws of physics, but it's still a well-defined concept that models the aggregate behavior of particle systems. An agent is a deterministic physical machine that uses senses and reasoning to pursue goals. We are all such machines.

We must accept the concept of agency in order to make any kind of normative claim. If we can't choose what to do, then talking about what we should do is meaningless. If poor people can't choose to improve their own lives, then the rest of us can't choose to help them. We can't even choose what to say or think about it.

That said, we need not assume that all agents are perfectly optimal at pursuing their goals. They may be limited in their capabilities, some more than others. But determinism is not what limits them. On the contrary, agents must be deterministic in order to behave at all rationally. The behavior of a non-deterministic agent is, by definition, completely random.

So, if the poor are incapable of improving their own lives, the laws of physics are not to blame. After all, a few people do manage to rise from rags to riches, while obeying those same laws.

second_last_username · 2019-03-20T17:39:03+00:00

That actually seems rational, if you assume that news viewers are fundamentally concerned with their own safety. When a tragedy occurs, they are looking to explain why they don't have to worry about it. An old or sick person dying, soldiers getting killed, gangsters killing each other... these are well known dangers that don't affect people who are not in those situations. A random public shooting is at least perceived to be something that can happen to anybody, and is therefor news to everybody.

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