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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • i gave up on gentoo when the updates started making my laptop so hot that i had to point my bedroom fan at it in college. i was thinking of doing LFS but by that point gentoo was turning into such a headache and i wanted something simpler. i switched to arch afterwards, but now i mainly just use macos and let tim handle all that stuff for me. although i’m tempted to try arch again when im done with grad school and have more time






  • i’m not yet sold on this “old vs new” thing. while i do agree that it would be better if people were more engaged/active about boycotting things and pulling out the pitchforks, my understanding is that hasn’t been the historical precedent in situations like this. the pitchfork stuff certainly did happen quite a lot in the past, but my understanding is that it was for more extreme problems than a social media company shutting down third party apps (which many people didn’t even know about). but then again, it might be hard to compare this to the company transgressions of the past.

    my understanding is that frustration is building, and if things continue in this direction, they will reach a tipping point where people do actually stop using the website all together and switch to alternatives. and, this ban on protests will give the reddit executives much less information on how close things are to that tipping point. (not to mention that the ban itself will probably accelerate things.)

    but i could be mistaken about this, and i’m open to changing my mind on it.








  • that’s not the full story though. according to the NIH, the US government spent over 30 billion dollars on the covid vaccines.

    and this is not unique to the covid vaccine. here’s a source with two particularly damning quotes:

    “Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.”

    and

    A 2018 study on the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) financial contributions to new drug approvals found that the agency “contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016.” More than $100 billion in NIH funding went toward research that contributed directly or indirectly to the 210 drugs approved during that six-year period.