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eckmLJE commented on Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts   gtaforums.com/topic/10041... · Posted by u/mrzool
worldfoodgood · 4 months ago
Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such.

They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)

They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.

eckmLJE · 4 months ago
I appreciate what you've posted here. Valve fanboyism is widespread (I'm guilty of it too) and while they are shoulders above the alternatives, it's a good reminder that no one's perfect and I'll be sure to take a closer look at the company in the future.
eckmLJE commented on This map is not upside down   maps.com/this-map-is-not-... · Posted by u/aagha
rdtsc · 6 months ago
This is a great map, they should show it alongside the typical one when teaching geography. I'll show this to my kids later, see what they think and ask them to find some countries on it.

A similar change of perspective "trick" is knowing that when we look up at the stars, it's not really "up", it can be "down", too. Imagine being suspended head down, feet stuck to the ground looking at the space below, with billions of light years worth of almost nothing out there. A bit terrifying, I suppose, so maybe don't think too much about it :-)

eckmLJE · 6 months ago
"The enemy's gate is down"!
eckmLJE commented on The Last Drops of Mexico City   mexicocitywater.longlead.... · Posted by u/anarbadalov
articlereader · a year ago
they did!

>Mexico City was built on top of what used to be a large body of water, which would make its water shortage appear ironic if it wasn’t so tragic. In the early 1300s, the Mexica (or Aztecs) settled on an island in the middle of what used to be a huge lake called Texcoco, the largest among five intertwined lakes.

But after the arrival of the Spaniards, the city started to expand, and the urban sprawl caused the lake system to dry up. By the early 20th century, the rivers feeding the once-rich lake zone were put into pipelines to make way for motor vehicles. Very little is left of the lakes, while the rivers have become practically invisible.

eckmLJE · a year ago
Thank you! I scanned the text and scrolled through all the pics, and searched for `tenoch` and didn't get any hits. "The urban sprawl caused the lake system to dry up" glosses over a super interesting sequence of decisions that led to the disaster.

More reading for anyone interested

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mexico_City#Floodin...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Texcoco#Artificial_draina...https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2022/09/mexico-citys-desage-of-160...

eckmLJE commented on The Last Drops of Mexico City   mexicocitywater.longlead.... · Posted by u/anarbadalov
eckmLJE · a year ago
I kept hoping they'd provide a reference of Tenochtitlan. Possibly the most striking thing I learned when visiting Mexico City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan

eckmLJE commented on Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?   civileats.com/2025/02/18/... · Posted by u/greenie_beans
ushiroda80 · a year ago
The concept is kind of analogous in many ways on if one should have solar power to hedge against power outages. I.e definitely can be worth it but will take up time and investment with long payback period.
eckmLJE · a year ago
To hedge against increasing electric utility prices, maybe. I installed solar recently and the cost of batteries to cover a decent power outage didn’t make sense to me. I just got a transfer switch and a portable propane generator instead. The battery tech / price is just not there yet IMO. And in case this isn’t well known, when there is a power outage and you don’t have battery backup, the solar generation shuts off — you’re not using solar AS the backup in most cases unless you have a very particular setup.
eckmLJE commented on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon   twitter.com/Free_Ross/sta... · Posted by u/Ozarkian
Deutschland314 · a year ago
Snoop you compare apples with oranges.

People don't really care about child rapists see the Christian churches.

Also you were able to buy everything on silk road including guns. The multiplication effect of this is potentially more worth.

Nonetheless it's still a straw man argument. I personally would not mind at all increasing prison sentences for child rapists.

eckmLJE · a year ago
Silk road had a policy against selling items with intent to harm like guns. While occasionally some weapon listings would slip through, they would be taken down. The focus was drugs (and a lot of legal media). There were plenty of other black market sites on the dark web that sold everything, but that's not what the silk road in particular was about.
eckmLJE commented on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon   twitter.com/Free_Ross/sta... · Posted by u/Ozarkian
Algent · a year ago
Wasn't silk road selling way more than just drugs ? Like, pornography and gun, worldwide. When you facilitate both sex trafficking, organized crime and potentially terrorism you can't exactly be surprised you get hit with everything.
eckmLJE · a year ago
No, silk road did not sell weapons. There was legal content like pornography and other media on there, but Ulbricht was an idealist and excluded material with "intent to harm".
eckmLJE commented on Automated accessibility testing at Slack   slack.engineering/automat... · Posted by u/teivah
eckmLJE · a year ago
Web accessibility describes specific requirements for people with disabilities to be able to use your website. If you don't implement these features, blind people, colorblind people, people who can't use a mouse, etc., won't be able to use your website. You can make a strategic choice not to support these users for reasons like ROI. But obviously there are plenty of situations where either we make the affirmative choice not to exclude people with disabilities, or we're required by law to accommodate them. In my personal opinion, we should always build on the web with the modern features that support assistive technologies, and that building inaccessible web experiences is synonymous with building poor quality web experiences. Many of the (mostly native) features that enable an experience accessible to people with disabilities improve the experience for all users.
eckmLJE commented on The average American spent 2.5 months on their phone in 2024   pcmag.com/articles/yikes-... · Posted by u/elorant
lolinder · a year ago
I've read dozens of these survey methodologies, and the reputable ones always tell you who they recruited to do the survey and what sampling method was used (if only in broad strokes). Given that this one does neither, we have to assume the laziest approach possible.

If they wanted us to take their survey seriously they'd have a real methodology section.

eckmLJE · a year ago
Sure, they could be lazy in a lot of ways in how they execute this survey leading to unreliable results -- indeed, fielding it through something like qualtrics could be said to be "lazier" than attempting to solicit and engage readers of your own individual site. It would be pretty hard and expensive to get enough responses yourself for even a lazy, low-quality result, vs. the at-scale offerings of a vendor.
eckmLJE commented on The average American spent 2.5 months on their phone in 2024   pcmag.com/articles/yikes-... · Posted by u/elorant
lolinder · a year ago
> Methodology

> Reviews.org surveyed 1,000 Americans 18 years and older with a +/- 4% margin of error and a confidence level of 95%. The survey results were weighted to reflect characteristics of the United States population using available data from the US census.

Absent them explicitly saying otherwise, I think we need to assume that the survey was done of reviews.org visitors. Reviews.org has reviews for exactly three categories of services: internet providers, mobile phone plans and services, and TV and streaming.

Weighting for US demographics isn't going to make this sample very representative—this survey is of people who are browsing reviews for a set of products that most people don't think too hard about, which also happens to be a set of products that is tightly related to screen time use.

eckmLJE · a year ago
> we need to assume that the survey was done of reviews.org visitors.

That's pretty unlikely. Reviews.org likely engages one of many vendors (like Qualtrics[1]) that will solicit responses online for a survey you design and provide to them through their survey building tool.

[1] https://www.qualtrics.com/research-services/online-sample/

u/eckmLJE

KarmaCake day466September 25, 2017View Original