Senal

It could be the loom or it could be laserdisc

i thought the religious cult was the government, or did they seize power later ?

They were arresting people for talking walks by themselves in the woods in 2020-2022

Citation ?

That seems like it'd be right in the region of lockdown and curfews.

The Switzerland part is verifiable, somewhat.

The British part is dubious in its subject, you can see many arrests for protesting and other things the government doesn't like. But preaching? Like, religion? Thats a stretch.

You can probably find a couple over the years but not much more.

The beatings in Europe part seems anecdotal and vague.

The small town America part has strong "trust me bro" vibes and a long history of anecdotes and news stories to the contrary.

The native reservation part is verifiable in numbers but lacking in context.

North Alaska I've no idea.

Areas with high levels of organised crime (not the governmental or ruling class kind) being potentially dangerous isn't exactly high detective work, but sure.

Experiences do very wildly though, so points for that.

Overall a solid 4/10.

i was talking more of the prosumer and close to prosumer units that could theoretically be retrofitted or housed in homelabs.

If datacentres went down en-masse i'd assume there'd be mix of hardware generations there.

Damn though, i didn't know anything about the stuff you just mentioned, so my estimates of what could be available/usable are probably way off.

Now i have to go and do a deep dive, thanks.

Not strictly, there are usualy hurdles to overcome for home usage of datacentre tech, but it's possible.

An easy example that comes to mind is that the datacentre GPU's might have cooling configurations that rely on a large amount of airflow from the surrounding cabinet, which you'll get in a datacentre, but not so much in a personal tower.

Also, noise, in a datacentre, noise is much less of an issue than in a personal computer, so they can eschew noise reduction in favour of performance.

Many people that live near data-centres would disagree, but i mean strictly from a usage point of view, not a broader community perspective.

What do you mean instead? why is what they are doing now insufficient ?

At this point i doubt they give a fuck what the general populace thinks, unless it affects their bottom line.

But you seem to want an answer, so let's work through the "options"

This would depend on what their goals are.

Assuming they want to continue with their track record of maximum capitalism, their best option is to eat shit, and by that i mean do whatever the fuck they want and ignore anything that isn't inline with profit/control.

Complaints from the populace, sure. Maximum profits, also yes.

If they really want to stop people complaining about them their best best would be to stop doing sketchy, illegal and unpopular things.

That wouldn't stop all complaints, this is the internet, but it would probably bring it down quite a bit.

if they wanted partially rehabilitate their image over this specific instance of terrible PR, they could:

• Release the data of the scanned books directly.
  • if they can afford the lobbying and legal costs to ignore copyright for their environment destroying slop-machines^*1^, they can probably afford the same for straight up releasing the scans.
• Use any of the myriad of non-destructive means of scanning books + release the books in to the wild after
  • More expensive, requires you to do something with the intact books after
  • See the previous comment about the affordability of lobbying/legal fees
• Not do this at all

*1,

"Environment destroying slop-machine"

&

"Useful tool in some circumstances, as long as you can personally square away the ethical and moral concerns"

aren't mutually exclusive, if this is the hill you choose to die on you're going to die mad about it.

That's true, but sitting in a warehouse is costing someone money and I'm sure they were more than happy to sell the books even if they knew they'd eventually get destroyed.

Sure, thats a possibility, I wasnt arguing otherwise.

But the other thing is, what should these companies do instead? They scraped the internet and got skewered for that. They pirated books and got in trouble for that. Now they are legally purchasing books to scan.

For me, them doing sketchy and illegal shit, mostly getting away with it and then charging you for access to said ill-gotten gains is a valid reason for people to be upset at them, rage inducing, even.

That aside the equivalent of mass book burning isn't a good look regardless of legality, even less so when its the same people that did the sketchy shit before.

There is no benefit of the doubt left.

I can see how someone could get to:

"all they do is sketchy shit so even though this might look legit, let's vocally show our disdain for them and anything they are doing"

They aren't in current circulation, not the same thing.

Not arguing that they are useful, just that sitting in a warehouse and physical destruction aren't equivalent in terms of potential use.

Iirc affordable housing isn't unavailable because of the cost of construction.

I could be wrong though

I've been in a car that lightly shook the steering wheel and pedals when you approached the speed limit.

That was super disconcerting because I didn't know it existed until my steering wheel started moving on it's own.

I meant the banking industry over leveraging themselves into extinction and then walking it off because if subsidies and bailouts

** The banking industry, hiding in the corner looking sheepish **