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Comment This is on Abbott and Trump (Score 3, Informative) 39

For eight years Kerr County requested money to replace its aging alert system and all eight times Abbott and his cabal wouldn't pony up the money. Even after Hurrican Harvey, when federal funds would have been available, their request was denied.

"I'm not trying to put a dollar on a life or a flood, but the fact of the matter [is] floods do happen, and we need to be prepared for them," then-Kerr County Commissioner Bob Reeves noted during a series of public meetings that began in 2016. And, his former colleague Tom Moser pointed out, "We also have more summer camps than anybody else along the Guadalupe River."

This is the same situation when over 300 people died when Texas froze a few years ago. Abbott didn't want to spend the money to winterize the lines or fossil fuel plants prior to the storm and the result was Texans dying.

Mind you, Abbott and his party have no problem handing over tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize private industry, but when lives are at stake that money is nowhere to be found.

As for the russian asset, his cuts to FEMA included firing people at the NWS who would have been involved in the storm preparation and notification. But because climate change is "woke" (whatever that means) they had to go.

Comment Re: We already know what the cause (Score 1) 39

Everything is factual and easily fact checkable

Tump cut FEMA staff, including NWS staff.

Camp was built in an extremely hazardous flood zone.

Abbott is on the FEMA Review Council which is working to dismantle FEMA.

Abbott, through his press secretary has said:

âoeTexas has built the strongest emergency management operation in the nation,â said Andrew Mahaleris, the governorâ(TM)s press secretary. âoeGovernor Abbott has full confidence that the Texas Division of Emergency Management will be able to swiftly take action when disaster strikes.â

But yeah, it's not Trump's fault for cutting FEMA staff or gutting its budget. As for Texas, this is another disaster under Abbott where Texans lost their lives because he didn't want to spend the money on any "woke" climate change bullshit.

Comment We already know what the cause (Score 4, Interesting) 39

Trump slashed staff to FEMA and other emergency alert systems which delayed the response. We have also had 20 years of cuts to the data that FEMA and other federal agencies are allowed to access because they were very inconvenient to the oil companies.

So for example the kids that died at that camp eight of the 17 cabins were in a known high-risk area according to government reports but the government reports didn't include current climate change related data so 9 of the cabins that were all so at high risk weren't included in that.

of course this is all include point because if you've got 8 cabins in a high risk flood zone the other nine are probably not safe either. But the right wing is already splitting hairs to blame FEMA so they can shut it down.

Oh and the governor of Texas is currently working hard to get money from FEMA while also working hard to shut down fema. He is literally on Trump's board that was set up to disable and destroy FEMA so that the money from it could be pocketed by billionaires.

Bottom line this is Trump's fault. And the fault of the Republican party that let him do it. We all know it and we're all going to sit around here while disingenuous assholes derail the conversation in a variety of ways to deflect blame from Trump and his political party.

If you live in a place that disasters can strike just know now that you will have little or no warning and little or no help to recover.

If you're a child I am fucking so sorry that my generation fucked up so bad for you.

If you're a Democrat or even a non-voter given what I know about voter suppression you did what you could.

If you voted republican, well have the day you voted for.

Comment Re:How about the NIH ? (Score 4, Insightful) 22

So NASA is a cash cow for multiple districts. Especially ones in red States. I haven't looked in a while but they were entire cities that basically popped up and are completely dependent on there NASA jobs.

It's basically pure pork but good pork. But of course everybody else is pork is always bad pork.

We should be moving away from a competitive civilization to a cooperative one but as soon as you suggest that everyone thinks you're a big wussy. Never mind the fact that we are fundamentally a social species. Unfortunately tribalism came with that deal...

Comment Dude the only reason people have to do that (Score 1) 94

Is that every company has a expensive procedure for trying to retain the customer after they've already decided they want to cancel.

It's 2025 companies are automating like crazy everything and anything they can. I think 10 minutes is probably a little bit low given how complicated and how messy enterprise software is but you're looking at maybe one Sprint to add this.

The cost isn't in the cancellation it's in customer retention. Those are different things and customer retention doesn't get included in part of the cost of compliance. It's not the fcc's job to make your company's product not suck.

Comment Re:CEO gets free marketing and complains about it (Score 1) 28

or they develop a new future which will cost them money

Potentially a problem in the general case, but this was a trivial feature to implement compared to what the product already does. The developer was not incompetent so this story has a happy ending. Should we protect incompetence?

Comment Re:Or maybe we just donâ(TM)t care? (Score 1) 140

Did your education not include the word "cancelation". Canceling a permitted and agreed upon deal can hurt trade.

No, it can't in this case, because the deal wasn't for trade between our nations. Keystone XL was for the purpose of making it cheaper for Canada to sell oil overseas, not to the USA. Did your education not include actually examining the deal you're talking about? This pipeline existed solely to allow rich people to get richer at the expense of environmental impact. Pipelines always leak because we never make use of the extremely well-known technology we have for preventing it, namely double walled pipes. It would reduce the number of yachts the wealthy derive from raping the fucking planet, and we cannot permit that.

Comment Re:Prime isn't what it used to be... (Score 1) 140

Literally half of Amazon's items are third party sellers that buy shit elsewhere and mark it up.

And they're not even buying in bulk! I look at aliexpress all the time, and occasionally alibaba. If they would buy even 50-100 of many items from alibaba, they would be able to sell them at the same price as aliexpress. They are just individuals and cannot afford to stock in quantity, which explains their prices... and shitty service.

Comment Re: Debian Solves All the Issues (Score 1) 68

And Devuan solves all the issues of Debian!

Except old packages.

I run Devuan, but I find myself constantly having to install newer versions of software out of band because the packaged versions are unacceptably old. This includes XFCE, there are important bugs and feature improvements in just slightly newer versions which haven't been packaged for the release version. And last I looked the next release was still being indefinitely delayed for some goofy holdup, I don't even remember what it was.

Debian is also really bad at multiarch. They do support it obviously, but it's painful.

Comment Flamebait (Score 1) 140

I've noticed that lately I get modded down by people solely because I'm criticizing a business.

This can only be because they have stock in it.

Allowing anonymous moderation when scores are capped and not everyone gets points enables abuse, and there's no other reason to do it.

This of course is not the fault of the new owners. Slashdot moderation was always broken by design. Like US Government, the design depends on most of the actors being benevolent. Look at how well that works.

Comment Re:So the extreme hallucinations are still not fix (Score 1) 28

explaining how they work in lieu of discussing how to make them better seems wrongheaded.

If anyone knew how to make them better, they would be doing it. There are thousands of developers working on that right now. This is a fundamental flaw which suggests that LLMs are only going to be one small piece of a functional AI which you can actually trust. You can't do trustworthy fact checking with more hallucination, so you can only make incremental improvements by having a LLM check itself, or even using a different LLM to check output.

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