• 34 Posts
  • 99 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • It basically is saying that if you have more money then you have more “votes”.

    That’s simply true. It doesn’t do anyone any good to disregard the facts.

    Or to put it in another way: If you have more money you matter more.

    That abstraction doesn’t help much. And first of all, it’s more accurate to derive the statement “If you have more money then you have more influence”.

    It’s still a shitty status quo, but it is what it is. The worse thing you can do is tell people not to boycott shit products on the basis of rejecting reality. It’d be like telling people not to vote in elections because their vote is a drop in the ocean.

    Some people vote for democrats, then they cancel their own vote by getting their internet service from Spectrum, buying fuel from Chevron for their car, shipping their packages using FedEx, getting their phone service from AT&T, banking at PNC Bank, flying on Boeing planes, shopping on Amazon, doing their web searches on a Microsoft syndicate’s site (e.g. DDG), buying Sony devices… etc. They either have no clue that most of their voting is actually for the republicans, or they think that drop-in-the-ocean vote that comes once in 4 years somehow carries more weight than the daily votes they cast with reckless disregard.

    Greg Abbott’s war chest is mostly fed by oil companies. If you buy fuel for a car, you help Greg Abbott and other republicans. And if you buy from Chevron, you give the greatest support to republicans (Chevron is an ALEC member).




  • Ending capitalism is not the /only/ way. Within a capitalistic system, you can boycott shit. Most consumers are pushovers but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m boycotting hundreds of shitty companies. Off the top of my head:

    • Amazon
    • Cloudflare
    • Microsoft
    • Facebook
    • Google
    • Apple
    • (surveillance advertisers in general)
    • (all closed-source s/w)
    • HP
    • Proctor & Gamble
    • Unilever
    • all ALEC members (American Express, Anheuser Busch, Boeing, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, Chevron, FedEx, Motorola, PNC bank, Sony, TimeWarner)
    • many shitty banks
    • Paypal
    • AT&T
    • GMA members (Coke, Pepsi, Kraft - Heinz, Kellogg’s, General Mills, McCormick, Hormel, Smucker)
    • BetterThanCashAlliance.org members (visa, mastercard, unilever) – war on cash
    • Bayar-Monsanto
    • Dupont
    • Hershey
    • Nestlé
    • Exxon/Mobil
    • Comcast
    • Koch
    • Home Depot
    • Lowes
    • …etc

    Those are all shitty companies that significantly worsen the world. Giving money or data to any of them contributes to enshitification of the world.

    Of course it’s an option to stop supporting assholes. Become ethical. Be the change you want to see.













  • Both… functional art.

    The original problem is that there was a water shut-off valve for the whole floor in the shower. Very ugly to have a valve in the corner on the floor and somewhat in the path of the water if someone were to point the showerhead slightly outside the pan. The valve handle was rusting. It was embedded in a solid block of concrete with the handle sticking out. The valve started to fail (did not completely shut off the water). And it was the kind of valve where the whole valve needed to be replaced. Terrible work by the builders. I had to demolish the concrete to reach the valve.

    So I replaced the valve with the kind of valve that has a replaceable cartridge. But I also refused to embed it in concrete again. I will build a removable sealed box around it. But the box could not be both waterproof and also easily removable on the fly whenever the valve needs to be accessed. So I put a hole in the wall (shower to bedroom). Then I attached a 90° gearbox drill accessory and a shaft to that goes through the wall. On the bedroom side, I could have just put a handle. But I found a wood helm to a ship (miniaturized). I thought that would be the perfect steampunkish valve handle. But it did not clear the wall (in a corner). So i got carried away and put a bicycle sprocket on the shaft, and mounted the helm to another sprocket, which i attached to the wall higher up. And wrapped a chain between them.


  • I could not pull it out with my hands after tapping it in. But to be clear, there’s only a sheer force to deal with, and it’s light.

    I cut a bicycle axle bolt in half, and embedded it in the brick so there is a bicycle sprocket on the wall. Then a chain wraps another sprocket, which turns a shaft that goes all the way though the wall to the other side, where it connects to a right-angle gearbox, which attaches to a water valve. It’s lightweight overall… just the weight of a sprocket, chain, and a small decorative wood thing out of wood to serve as a handle.

    This might come a bit too late but why didn’t you just get threaded rod and use one of these instead?

    I did not know anchors like that existed for machine bolts. That’s good to know! However, it would not have helped in this situation. The bicycle axle has non-standard threading (~9mm bolt with a thread pitch that’s 2 steps away from the norm). Since it had a special nut that interfaced to ball bearings, I could not bring in a standard bolt or threaded rod. And the threaded portion of the axle was short enough that no threads could have gone into the wall. I could have added threads to the bare portion, but my die set skips the ø=9mm size.

    I was asking more for future reference – whether or not I should ever repeat this. And I think you answered that. Even if I get lucky in the future on getting a perfect fit at that moment, temp changes could blow it. I guess I’ll assume anchors (chemical and mechanical) are designed to handle the temp changes.






  • All law compliance is voluntary on the threat of consequences, that is a bad point, because since all compliance is voluntary, then you are saying that all laws are largely useless.

    Yes, but this only muddies the waters to mention. You’ve forgotten what I said previously. I’m not saying it’s voluntary on the trivial basis that all actions are voluntary. I’m saying compliance is voluntary because (as I have established and you failed to counter) the GDPR is not being enforced for the most part. You have ONE fine every THREE WEEKS by each DPA. How is your math not sorting that out? I will lay it out here:

    52 weeks/yr ÷ 3 weeks × 23 DPAs × 5 years = 1993 + ⅓

    That’s absurdly deadbeat on the DPA’s part. As one individual I am personally encountering violations at nearly that rate just on my own as one person. On average the DPA in one country is doing enough workload for one single victim. Scale that to a nation of people and the result is they’re doing fuck all.

    My anecdotal experience reflects that of others and in fact mirrors the big picture. But you need not take my word for it. Read about it (“Fines are few and far between…Enforcement is, at best, patchy and inconsistent.”). Though I must say your lack of awareness makes your background questionable. You should know about the lack of enforcement problem if your career is tied to it. After all, your own numbers reflects this you’re just neglecting to do the math.

    You’ve tried shifting the focus onto the revenue from the fines, which is irrelevant to the probability of getting a fine. The absurdity of that attempt is that “Meta…. accounted for 80% [of last year’s total fines], with its largest fine reaching €405 million.”

    Outliers don’t make the law moot,

    They do when the statistical outliers actually reflect cases of fines, as opposed to the cases of inaction. Again, 1 fine every 3 weeks for a whole country. That’s what makes the law moot from an enforcement perspective. You throw out the outliers and you’re left with no enforcement in the remaining dataset.

    What you are saying is that due to the fact that corruption exists, your govs are not taking the law seriously.

    I didn’t exactly assert corruption. That’d be slightly overstated. There is certainly a conflict of interest when gov agencies are accountable to DPAs of the same country. You can use your own judgement as to whether to outright assert “corruption”. Either way, that’s only a factor when the GDPR offender is a gov agency. Lack of enforcement is bigger than that. As I said, the law itself is the problem because it’s not motivational. Again, there is no enforcement clause to force DPAs to honor article 77 reports. That’s the problem which you continue to ignore. It also doesn’t help that “DPAs complain about a lack of budget and personnel. While German DPAs employ around 1200 staff, Belgian, Croatian, and Romanian DPAs average only 50.” (from the same article) So the other problem is that the GDPR does not require member states to allocate sufficient resources for the workload – though that problem would take care of itself if there were a penalty for member states who fail to uphold art.77.


  • You’re still talking about voluntary compliance. The GDPR is not entirely useless for this reason - some orgs will comply despite the unlikeliness that any action results. Great! My long history of art.77 reports show GDPR-hostile orgs getting away with it.

    Here’s how the math works: your expectation of a fine (cost of noncompliance) is compared to the cost of compliance (e.g. hiring subject matter experts for consultation and making adaptations as needed). The expectation of a fine is the fine amount multiplied by the probability. The fine amount is negligible (if anything) for gov agencies and the probability a fine is levied by a state against itself is even much smaller than the probability of a fine against a commercial corp. So gov offices laugh at the GDPR. Commercial orgs can get a huge fine but they tend to get warnings, not to mention the chance a DPA even bothers to engage the offender is infintesmal as it is. The cost of compliance is generally higher, which is why they don’t bother. Hence why I’m up to my neck in violations. Luckily the good samaritans orgs that comply are the ones who haven’t done the math.

    The GDPR would only become an effective force if they were to amend it so that article 77 were itself enforceable against the deadbeat DPAs.



  • product 1:

    • maintenance: 2 caps/week (a cap is big, looks like ~100ml if i eyeball it)
    • clog clearing: 500ml (½ bottle)

    product 2:

    • maintenance: 25ml/2 weeks
    • clog clearing: 300ml (⅓ bottle)

    product 3:

    • maintenance: 25ml/week
    • clog clearing: not mentioned for this purpose

    Going from memory I rotated between the products and I think I poured in about ⅓ of the clog clearing doses on the first two every few days… because I was a cheap bastard and just wanted to constantly have the enzymes in there. But yeah, probably a mistake. I think I tried a 300ml dose of product 2 just once. But I probably should have tried a full dose more often.


  • over 1900 fines so far

    My point exactly. That’s nothing. That covers the past 5 years in 23 countries. They enforce just a enough cases to be able to suggest to the public that they are not doing absolutely nothing (because they want the public to accept the forced #digitalTransformation without resisting). GDPR violations are rampant and getting actual GDPR protection is like winning the lottery.

    Adherence is taken seriously.

    Bullshit. I have filed reports on well over 20 #GDPR violations citing law and evidence going ~4 years back in some cases. One of the reports was refused instantly by an incompetent desk clerk who gave a bogus rationale. The rest were accepted into litigation. Then every single one of them was silently and non-transparently mothballed. Not a single enforcement action resulted. Why? Because the GDPR does not have any teeth to force article 77 protection. If you think otherwise, please cite the text you think makes article 77 enforceable.

    I’ve got 3 more art.77 reports to write as as we speak, and I struggle to get the motivation because I know they will just be mothballed as well.

    clients are quite interested in learning how to keep their sites compliant.

    That’s how the GDPR works. It’s voluntary, effectively. Some orgs opt to comply for optics and a bit of risk aversion (not wanting to be one of the few selected for enforcement like an inverse lottery). Orgs know enforcement is sparse and they abuse it. And when they abuse it, victims cannot get a remedy.

    Also worth noting that gov agencies violate the GDPR with reckless disregard because the cognizant DPA represents the same country. There is no profit to speak of, so a fine would be moot.