Victim of Communism

  • 30 Posts
  • 2.52K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Hey, while we’re sucking off Linux Mint, can anymore explain why my box basically bricked itself with

    /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1 isn’t setuid root

    Off a routine update? I’ve found conflicting guidance online, the AI prompts are (predictably) not very helpful, and since I’ve lost Internet everything has to be done by juggling a Windows laptop with a dozen help guides open on one hand and Linux on the other.

    I swear to God, this is what makes me regret using a Linux system. One bad update and it’s a weekend running down obscure errors.


  • AT&T was effectively a government-supported monopoly

    It was certainly a monopoly. But hardly government supported. The government has issued major sanction against the company no less than three times.

    • The Kingsbury Commitment, which forced AT&T to divest its stake in Western Union, stop acquiring competing independent local phone companies, and allow other companies to connect to its long-distance network
    • The 1956 Consent Decree, requiring AT&T to stay out of the emerging computer/data processing market and license its transistor patents royalty-free
    • The 1984 Bell System Breakup, which formally split the comment company eight ways.

    Solar R&D was hardly private. You’re completely excluding things like the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advanced Solar Energy Research and Development Division.

    The NSF has always languished in funding and has historically failed to deliver major breakthroughs, much less any kind of physical rollout, of a public solar/wind energy grid.

    If anything, it has operated as an echo chamber of the fossil fuel industry, downplaying the efficiency and ultimate profitability of a renewable grid.

    Hardly a subsidy.

    And yet, my point is, even they’re still subsidizing solar orders of magnitude more than nuclear!

    Show me the solar powered submarine.

    Show me the solar powered aircraft carrier.

    Show me any meaningful federally contracted project to implement solar power for domestic or international consumption.

    At the very least, I can point you towards Georgia’s Vogtle 3 and 4. Nothing like that exists in the renewable space.















  • You seem to be implying that solar cells weren’t. I don’t believe that is true

    Tell it to Bell Labs. Tell it to the the Solar Energy Industries Association. Idk why Americans couldn’t get on the ball publicly. But solar was squarely in the private domain for generations.

    Photovoltaics were brought about by US the government for satellites.

    They were brought about by the industrialization of satellites, certainly. But the R&D was all heavily privatized by and for the private telecommunications sector.

    When the US began rolling out large scale solar power plants in earnest, Walmart became the nation’s largest installer and purchaser. No state or federal department came close to it.

    The largest investors in new build construction are NRG Energy and Google. Even the state regulated utilities lag behind.

    Solar only became the knockout winner it is today after 70 years of intense research.

    Largely overseas and financed by foreign governments or private firms. The US efforts at subsidizing solar are regularly stymied and gutted by conservative governments.