It’s especially entertaining with a Dutch accent rather than a Flemish one, as that “g” in “wagen” is said in a very unusual way compared to pretty much all other European languages and accents.

Mind you, it’s strangely pleasant to say it that way for me as a non-native, and having picked up the local version of “God damn it” (which has a similar sounding “g”) as an expletive when I lived there, now - almost 2 decades later - it still just comes out in its own when I’m pissed at something.

“We’ve stopped selling paper due to the danger of paper-cuts for people. We will continue selling firearms and ammo.”

Damn magnets just kept slowing the rotation of the blades, so good thing you took them out!

The ultimate shitpost is the post which is posted on a shitpost community and turns out to be entirelly wholesome after reading it (ideally getting people to read it twice or thrice to make sure), hence shitting on everybody on that community who expected it to be a shitpost.

Yeah, the case with antennas is a good point - when I decided to concentrate various things in a Mini-PC in my living room (TV-Box, Router and so on) I actually looked into these router Mini-PCs as an option and the biggest problem was the lack of a proper antenna, so I ended up going with a generic Mini-PC and leaving out the router functionality which remains done by my old router (which is quite decent, just a bit outdated).

Mind you, this one also wouldn’t work for me because I’m using 4 Ethernet ports (1 for the external connection and 3 internally) whilst this one only has 2 (a weird choice for a router).

IMHO, this isn’t really better than just getting an SBC with 2 Ethernet ports and WiFi and put it in a box with an antenna), a setup which suffers from exactly the same problem as this one: not enough Ethernet ports.

The very example I provided comes with an mPCI-e slot to install a WiFi card of your choosing.

Also they have SIM card slots so you can install a data SIM card and set-up a fallback configuration that switches to it if your landline internet connection goes down.

Whilst that’s a nice slogan, in Electronics “open source” doesn’t mean anywhere as much as it does in Software because it’s generally just knowing which components go into the circuit, which is but a fraction of the work (laying out the board is a massive chunk of work, in some cases most of it, and at high enough clock speeds circuit design is an art in itself).

Mind you, I like the Orange Pi and Banana Pi guys, and the idea of an SBC designed for being an open source router is pretty appealing, though nowadays maybe pfSense would be a better choice than OpenWrt.

Finally this thing having only 2 ethernet ports + WiFi makes it little more than a regular $70+ SBC board + a box - something easy enough to put together by any technically inclined person - which isn’t exactly exciting.

So, how is this any better than the Router Mini PCs you can find in Aliexpress (random example)?

That “solution” suffers from the problem that requiring hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to get informed about and agree to do something all in the same time period (it won’t work if some do it now and others only later) is incredibly more hard than it is for a few tens of people or maybe a couple hundred to as individuals swarm the sales venues and take all the tickets to resell them for more money.

Or putting things another way, it’s a mountain to climb for large numbers of people to organise and stop scalpers (and that, only for a while, since if people stop doing it the scalpers will return), whilst in the current commercial environment scalpers appearing is a natural outcome.

This kind of thing usually requires changing the structures that make scalping so easy, rather than hoping that somehow (magic?) hundreds of thousands or miliions of people agree to do something.

PS: Yeah, a cultural change would be it, but expecting it to just happen and all at the same time (given that early adopters of that practice won’t actually see any upside until a large enough mass of people have adopted it and they’ll start giving up if too much time goes by whilst they’re refraining from buying from scalpers and yet scalpers keep going because so many others are still doing it) is highly unrealistic.

The problem is the taking beyond their need, not if it’s many doing a little bit each or a few doing a lot each.

A swarm of locusts still leaves you with nothing to eat, even if each one only takes a bit (and unlike people buying a handful of houses to profit from merely owning them, the locusts only eat what they need).

In my country, to crack down on tax evasion by small businesses people can give their tax payer number when they buy something (say food at a restaurant) and a copy of the receipt automatically gets passed on to the taxman (there’s a lottery on those and people can get some money from it, which is how the State incentivises people to do this, plus you can get some tax discounts on some kinds of expenses such as medicine).

All this to say that the idea of the taxman getting a copy of an itemized receipt for sex work services is just delicious.

PS: Around here sex work is unregulated, meaning not illegal (though profiting of other people’s sex work is illegal) but not explicitly legal and regulated.

Having moved fully to Linux some months ago, I look at this kind of thing both with with a feeling of smug satisfaction and with cold chills of somebody who only now starts to fully realise just how massive, heavy and fast the incoming train they just dodged is.

The country moved to the far-right, the Industry I was working in - Finance - lost 40,000 jobs, Britain got general Economic stagnation worse than the EU, the value of the British Pound fell significantly against the Euro after the vote (fortunatelly I moved all my savings out of Pound-denominated assets evern before the Leave vote, so I personally was alright) all of the sudden as an EU immigrant you became a second class citizen with lots of extra hassle for living there (inside the EU, EU immigrants have the same rights as the locals, so when Britain left, they lost that), significant decay and problems with their National Health Service, really bad mishandling of COVID (especially in the beginning) and so on.

In some ways the place turned into a mini Trump’s-America, only with the extra nastiness of already being very classist country with very low social mobility from the start and a heavy “know your place” mindset - which is extra hard for immigrants because Britons see themselves as superior to all foreigners but Americans, so “Immigrant” is the lowest “social class” for them - and without the upsides that American has (mainly space and scale, natural resources and at least in some places good weather).

Mind you, most of those things are trends predating Brexit which were heavilly accelerated by it.

As an EU immigrant, left the UK after the Leave vote but before Brexit and Covid.

It’s not a bullet but more like a whole lot of bullets.

Mind you, most of it was entirely predictable back then.

Had one too many succulent Chinese meals…

Maybe “travelling as a hobby” as a women’s preference with regards to men is at about it being a man’s openness and ability to deal with totally different environments, disposable income, time availability and possibly foreign language skills.

I’ve been playing Kerbal Space Program again (it’s one of those games you tend to come back to after a while without playing).

You can buy it from stores like GoG or even the maker itself.

Same thing for Factorio (jokingly called Cracktorio by many).

Both are about finding ways to create complex functional things from simpler elements to achieve goals.

Yeah, but they’re great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-“moderate” political parties.

This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won’t do anything further about it.

Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would’ve been it if, it wasn’t that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).

Well, that’s the second part of my theory but I didn’t went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:

• I think the “neutral” majority shift more to one side or the other depending on who dominates society and the main sources of culture and information in it.

So in present “Greed is good” (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the “neutral” majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.

The World would be a lot different if our “heroes” were Scientists and Environmentalists.

Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don’t know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.