The biggest thing for me with some of the eat the rich posts I've seen lately, especially those talking about Taylor Swift, is basing judgement off of a net worth score.

(I'm no fan of Taylor Swift, I just know that she barely notched over and only on net worth... which is a junk number, basically a fancy guess how much them and everything they own would sell for, including things like song rights, likeness, etc)

I'll especially note that I don't think any artist really comes close to billionaire earnings without other businesses that are bigger than their art.

Useful reference:
* Highest Paid Actor (in a year) - Most years this floats just under $80 million, some rare extreme years see around $200 million
* Highest Paid Musician (in a year) - this jumps around alot but in 2022 it was $210 million and peaked in 2014 with Dr Dre at $620 million (next highest was Bruce Springsteen in 2021 for $435 million)

Important note not being a billionaire doesn't mean they can't be exploiting, just that billionaires are guaranteed to be intentionally exploiting.

In the case of artists, they have very little control over most of the things. Actors are contractors with little to no employees and no control over the pay of anyone else. Musicians are tied up in contracts and have a limited list of employees (ie. background dancers), and generally are just hiring venues (the venue provides almost all the workers, and they pretty much all suck of course).

Got my anti-cistamines today! One order of tit-tacs and one order of antiboyotics!

#hrt #trans #transfemme

(for those unfamiliar: Framework makes a modular upgradable open laptop design, their laptops have expansion bays that accept these cards which all use standard USB-C ports as their basis, so their USB-A expansion card can technically be used as a C-A adapter on other computers)

Framework :fedora: :ubuntu:

2023-11-22 15:48:23

Help a friend in need.

I'm as much eat the reach as the next girl, but I do get tired people applying it casually to entertainers or artists...

It's not a score thing, it's not hit this number in net worth and suddenly you're on the dinner plat. It's based on the fact specifically on the abuses it takes to get there, entertainers being one of the few exceptions on multiple fronts.

Here's the thing about entertainers:
* they're typically not the ones responsible for paying the workers, outside of a small few, actors don't pay the film crew (they're paid by the same people as the crew), and singers/musicians don't pay the majority of the crew (they're paid for by the venue, those they do pay for are probably going to be better compensated for their expertise). The stories of actors donating parts of their salary to crew... that's legit charity as it's not their responsibilities (that responsibility falls on the producers and studio execs).
* they have wildly inflated net worth, because net worth of a performer is typically about how much money they can make, but not necessarily how much money they get.
* they have inconsistent pay
* often those numbers hide other expenses, if they have their own staff or equipment or resources or such... those costs come after the number you're being quoted typically (ie. a musician makes $500 mil on the tour? Their personal crew, tour bus, etc are all paid out from that). This is because a performer is an instance of them being their own business which means they have astronomical expenses under their name.

Of course this doesn't mean they can't be awful, it's not uncommon for them to start their own side businesses (considered a good plan because their stardom likely won't last forever), and it's in those businesses where they often become "The Rich".

#EatTheRich

Oh God, I'm LOVING Scott Pilgrim: Takes Off!

It Is NOT What You Expect It Is!

Holy Shit! Hell Just Froze Over!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/britneynguyen/2023/11/16/apple-gives-in-to-google-new-iphone-messaging-system-will-make-texting-androids-easier/amp/

Absolutely the opening of an isekai...

puzzle

2023-11-10 14:56:21

Dear god can we stop with the false "this saying is actually longer", it's terrifying seeing constant historical revisionism even if it's something so minor...

We don't need to edit history to erase all the inconveniences of taking a quippy saying at face value, and this only encourages people to be awful around so very many very real social issues because the quippy line can be purposefully misread in some shitty way that's obviously incorrect... by pulling this constantly it just tells people they're in the right for their bad faith takes.

Hey, it's that time of year again where I remind you that "Happy Holidays" is *** NOT INCLUSIVE ***.

There is no special feature of this time of year that makes "happy holidays" inclusive. It's popular to cite how many holidays occur in winter/fall... but you find just as many in every season.

Happy holidays is purely a stand-in for Merry Christmas, and the whole effort of it is using a nod to minority religions (most commonly my faith) to throw Christmas in our faces while pretending to include us.

Channukah is our least important holiday, acknowledging it when you don't even know our other holidays, let alone what our most sacred holidays are... well, that tells you the whole story itself.

Let alone people don't know when it actually is and will most years be "celebrating" it weeks after it's over.

Holidays don't have to be lumped together, celebrate your holiday. Nobody is offended at you celebrating your holiday, only at it being forced on us.

And "Happy Holidays" only exists as a way to force it on us while pretending to include us.

Just a reminder:

Mastodon != ActivityPub != Fediverse

It's been driving me up the wall how often people act like Mastodon is a synonym for both AP and Fedi.

Gotta admit... I'm sold on Kagi.

The experience and quality has been fantastic using their free tier (100 free searches a month), enough that I decided to pay for it to keep using it.

Gist: it's a search engine that chose to rely on subscriptions instead of ads and data mining... and it shows in the quality of the search results. There isn't a whole page of them linking to other partner or owned services before you get any results. On top of that there's a crapload of customization and control of your experience (such as choosing what things it tries to automatically answer).

As mentioned, there's a free tier of 100 searches a month, that's actually good for most people to use for a week or two. No sensitive data needed, so I recommend giving it a try.

https://kagi.com/

Been (re-?)watching Babylon 5, and I think it holds up remarkably well with a good story.

I'm into Season 3 and it's only been really dated by the intro, CG quality, aspect ratio, and the use of CRTs.

(questionable "re" because I think I watched only a handful of episodes as a kid)

Random recommendation post:

Kagi: https://kagi.com
"Premium" Search Engine, free tier to try it out and a small monthly fee to use it regularly. Absolutely better results than Google, no ads, and more privacy. I really do recommend it. (And for my family there is a family plan as well...)

Beeper: https://beeper.com
A universal chat platform, if you long for the old days of Trillian, GAIM/Pidgin, and the like. Days when you could use your own chat program and just talk to everyone across everything... well this is it again. It's a Matrix service (think open source equivalent to Messenger/Skype/Discord/etc) and bridges to all the other services. Currently it's free, but it's planned to be free + paid extra features.

This has made a world of difference in my experience talking and chatting with people, especially the short list of people who talk primarily on Discord rather than SMS or Messenger. Plus if you're on Beeper or another Matrix service, end-to-end encryption is the default for complete security (You can even use your own client if you like without losing that)

Ugh, when your server gets DOSed by activity updates.

Well, at least I was able to fix it via tuning it seems.

This is two years old but could easily be mistaken for current news.

Also a great summary of the whole situation and still entirely relevant.

https://youtu.be/INCXqWzH5vk?si=8fUbaEpG5AhcTrku

#israel #israel-gaza #Israel-GazaWar #Palestine #palestine-israelConflict

Uncomplicating The "Complicated" Palestine/Israel Conflict - SOME MORE NEWS

For 20% off your first order, visit http://MackWeldon.com/somenews AND ENTER PROMO CODE: somenewsHi. Is The Palestine/Israel Conflict Actually Complicated? P...

^YouTube

Ooof, just watched the new episode of Dimension 20.

Dropout is genuinely super fantastic about content warnings on their content... but they fell a little short on this one, mostly because they did something new and extreme... and didn't realize that they needed stronger warnings.

And of course in the FB group there are a whole bunch of people going "It's not their fault you didn't read the content warnings" like douches.

#Dimension20

It's really wild coming into Baldur's Gate 3 after playing Solasta.

If you're not aware: Solasta is an unlicensed D&D 5e game that uses SRD content plus some of their own content to flesh it out some.

Interestingly enough, I'd absolutely say that Solasta is waaaaaay more faithful to D&D than BG3 is. And it's battle system is much better done, both between being more faithful and supporting things like proper flight and spider climb (as opposed to BG3 which doesn't have spider climb and implements flight as just a fancy long range jump basically).

It does a much better job of short rests vs long rests, let alone fast travel. Solasta doesn't have you warping back to camp mid dungeon, but instead you have to find a safe spot to camp in the dungeon if you want a long rest. And fast travel is done by accelerated movement rather than warping, so you can't use it to magically escape a dungeon.

That's not to say Solasta is outright better.

BG3 shines on drastically better story and voice acting, as well as making your dialogue choices really feel meaningful. I was never able to bond with my own characters really in Solasta like I can in BG3.

Oh, and BG3 feels like a complete package since so many races and classes in Solasta are behind DLC.

If someone told me they wanted to play BG3 specifically for the 5e combat and mechanics, I'd definitely point them to Solasta over BG.

#DungeonsAndDragons5e #DungeonsAndDragons #BaldursGate3 #BG3

@Friendica Admins I'm curious for feedback about other admin's setups. I know the default choice is apache, but how many are like me running nginx + php-fpm?

I'm curious what tips and tricks people have figured out? Has anyone settled on a good stable caching config? (Last time I set up caching I tried to limit it to just static files and images, but it somehow cached some of the regular pages it seems wondering if maybe one of those css or javascript files is actually dynamic?)

As it stands my setup is two nginx webservers behind an nginx load balancer, both running php-fpm, a shared nfs media storage directory, memcached on the database server for php sessions.

Content warning: Injury, but it's only a cop and no visible injury; laughing at someone's pain and misfortune, but again it's a cop Reveal/hide

Oh dear god, I watched Last Week Tonight and have been introduced to cop slide.

And I can't stop looping this one: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_EqrIX6J92s

Policeman injured after tumbling down children's slide

A Boston police officer in full uniform was recorded tumbling down a children’s slide at a newly renovated playground.Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said: “I will ...

^YouTube

Saw this and had to meme it.

#trauma

30 Days of US Healthcare: DIR Fees

https://youtube.com/watch?v=I61wCVh0Y1E&si=FvaY0Ci3XrHOsB0p

Day 23 of 30 Days of US Healthcare https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpMVXO0TkGpdvjujyXuvMBNy6ZgkiNb4W

Saw this and decided to share my commentary on it because it's extremely harmful:

Unfortunately nothing here is valid. They've solved the finger problem and it's pretty much only old models that show up there. People are bad at even as well (let alone the fact that real faces are asymmetrical). Purposeless or lack of intent is also common in human art (there are whole art styles around it). And lack of perspective often is because the real art it's emulating lacks perspective.

And those AI detection pages are very very inaccurate. They can't remotely tell you if it's actual AI work, just if they think there's a chance of it being AI work.

All of this, including the detection sites are causing problems for real people who get accused of their very real artwork being AI. People get shut out of communities and told that they need to entirely change their personal style if they want to be accepted because it's too "AI like".

And finally the comment about it taking an incredible amount of resources: it actually takes remarkably little. You can run these AI systems on a single desktop computer with a low to mid range graphics card. (One of the problems for these AI companies and one of the reasons they're so widespread is because it's so easy and cheap to run it yourself)

Note: I don't have the energy for an image description, if you reply with one I'll edit this post to include it.

Just giving a shout out to Fediseer.com for an interesting project (and the gui project available at https://fediseer.lemmings.world

If you're an instance admin I think it's worth checking out, setting up, and bookmarking for your moderation toolkit.

I don't endorse any sort of automated blocking off of said lists, but I do endorse having a database you can reference when deciding whether to defederate an instance, especially if people have filled in proof links.