“We cant promise you much other than, if you visit us, we can guarantee you’ll come back again !”

That’s a really hard guarantee to live up to. It almost sounds like an ominous threat.

No.

As much as I hate using cash, I understand that the credit card companies charge ridiculous fees to businesses and also that people with very low income don’t always have access to digital forms of payment. Maybe Sweden does better with equipping their entire society with digital tools, but in the US I don’t think we are ready for a fully digital payment society.

What’s the downside? If they move away, you haven’t lost anything because they weren’t paying taxes anyway. If they stay, you have just gained tax revenue. And it isn’t like you are going to lose a lot of sales tax money or real estate tax money, since they are not going to stop visiting Paris and buying luxury goods and are not going to sell their properties (that’s why they are so wealthy in the first place).

Also, if they move away then you have fewer billionaires fucking up politics.

My memory is hazy, but I’m pretty sure Mozilla was a package and most people just didn’t install the rest of the package. Everyone called the browser Mozilla because they didn’t use the other parts. I could definitely be wrong, though.

The US needs this kind of law. With multiple people switching from Dem to Rep after elections are done, it really undermines the will of the people. Most of them didn’t vote for that specific person because they love that specific person. They voted for someone who represents their ideal government. So when that person does a 180, it should open them up to being kicked out by the party or put up for a special election.

Trillian was definitely part of that war. I remember the daily patches to get things working again.

Trillian was not Mac only. I’ve never owned a Mac and used Trillian almost exclusively from 2002 until roughly 2009?? I can’t remember when the transition from IM to texting happened for me, but it was around then. When I was running Linux at home I would use Gaim, which was developed by a friend of the main Trillian guy.

I think the topics are relevant to people leaving their very liberal, closed world of university and going out into a world that may not embrace them like they are used to. He very vocally reminded every woman and LGBTQ+ person in the audience that they are about to go into a world where assholes like him are going to be sitting next to them in the office trying to make their lives hell.

A) But they would sell far far fewer tickets and less memorabilia. I’ve been to really nice castles that are nowhere near as many visitors and have tiny gift areas. The most famous castle in Germany (Neushwanstein), also one of the most famous in the world, only makes about $6M/year while Windsor makes $45M/year on its own. A castle I went to just outside London was really beautiful and cool, and I could freely walk around it with almost no tourists and an entrance fee about half what Windsor was… because it wasn’t connected to anyone famous. It was just a castle. I went to the main palace in Vienna, and it was basically empty.

B) Fame isn’t a zero sum game, and some things aren’t so easily replaced. It’s like saying if Jordan hadn’t been in the NBA there would have been another player of his caliber. Or if Michael Jackson hadn’t been around in the 80s there would have been another King of Pop as big as him. To be clear: I’m not saying the people in the royal family are special like Michael or Michael, but the royal family as an entity is something the world doesn’t have any more. How many people know the royal family of Spain or Denmark or Saudi Arabia outside of the people in those countries? Now how many people know the name Queen Elizabeth? Not only that, but the people who buy tabloids fucking love reading about royalty. Yeah, there will always be famous people, but the things they are famous for aren’t easily replaced.

I’m no fan of the royal family. I think they are fucking disgusting and shouldn’t exist as an entity. But there isn’t another entity out there like them, so the UK has made the financial decision to give them a stipend in exchange for the income they provide.

Then congrats on not knowing how all of it works. Buckingham is just one castle that runs tours. They also sell tours of Windsor Castle, Frogmore House, the Royal Mews, Clarence House, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and the Queen’s Gallery. Their events (coronations, funerals, weddings) also bring in tourist dollars. Windsor Castle alone brings in $50M/year, while the Louvre by itself is $100M/year.

But that is ONLY the ticketing revenue they bring in. They also sell shitloads of trinkets, memorabilia, gifts, etc. People buy sets of collectible dishes! More than that, though, is the media money they generate. They are basically influencers. News agencies and tabloids sell TONS of adspace on websites and newspapers from info about the royals. Their Christmas specials bring in tons of TV viewers.

In the end, they only cost the UK taxpayer 1.29 pounds per year per person (89M pounds total per year) and have an estimated yearly input to the UK economy of close to 1B pounds.

People are fucking ignorant and think they know how that shit works. You are 100% correct.

I don’t know UK law, but in the US once you put trash out on the sidewalk, it is fair game for anyone to take. It’s public property. Once the city takes it, it’s their property. That said, your point about the passkey for the wallet has to be true. The city probably doesn’t want to be arsed to dig up a harddrive that is 10 years old and likely not worth even $10 since it’s been in a dump outside for 10 years, so they claim it is their property so they don’t have to deal with the liability of private people digging through dangerous areas. I can’t imagine them trying to claim they own the contents of the wallet, but who knows when it comes to government workers who don’t know anything about technology.

Pravda article about Ukraine sourced from a right-wing think tank study? Yeah, I think I’ll pass on reading that.

The environmental impact of rocket launches is not good. I launch rockets for a living, including out of Vandenberg, so I’m personally invested in the ability to launch from the West Coast. It’s one thing to launch national security missions once every two months and take the hit to the environment for that, but it’s another thing to launch once a week every week to put up some disposable internet satellites so a billionaire can make more billions.

It’s only political if you think preserving the environment is political. But CA has been long-known to care about preserving the environment, so if the Coastal Commission has been able to make rulings based on environmental impact in the past then I don’t know how this lawsuit will work out. If they had asked for something reasonable like going from 6 to 12 launches, I think the commission might have been more amenable or at least open to negotiating to something like 8 or 10 launches. 50 launches is ridiculous, though.

I’ll file this under “Most Easily Predicted Outcome.”

I read some sysadmin forums about Conversation View, and most of them say users regularly ask how to turn it off. I always turn it off immediately.

I’m regretting not doing that 20 years ago.

When I left college, my university closed my email account. That sucked, but I moved on. Then the paid service I used closed down, so I had to change again. That sucked. I lost access to my Xbox Live account because they send all my “update password” emails to that old address and won’t update to my new address without confirming the change on an email that no longer exists.

Now I’ve had the same email address for 17 years and really really don’t want to move on, even though I hate that it is with Google. They went from “don’t be evil” to “be as evil as possible.”

This doesn’t really seem all that bad to me. The US spent roughly 2.7 billion per week on the Iraq war based on some estimates (2.4 trillion over 17 years), which is the annual budget of Indiana. While Indiana isn’t a powerhouse in the US economy, it is still ranked 15th. So for the Iraq war, only 14 of US’s 50 regions had budgets that exceeded the country’s weekly spending.