Somehow, I feel a sudden and uncontrollable urge to toss my credit card into that pool.

If we say that the SSN database internally only stores numbers today, but could also store hexadecimal values without significant redesigns, I would assume that SSNs are stored as text already. So no matter if you put numbers, hex or text, 9 places will always use 9 bytes (assuming it’s ASCII only and doesn’t support UTF-8 etc.).

Furthermore, the post implied that the current technical limit is 999,999,999. That very much sounds like a character data type to me. Otherwise, the limit is usually something like 2^x.

If SSNs are stored as numbers today, then hex and text would lead to quite some change. If you go for a re-design, you can as well just increase the length of the field.

Why stop at hex? You could use the entire alphabet. Even if you take only uppercase letters and numbers, we are at 36^9 possible numbers. If we include lowercase and special characters from ASCII, we can go much further.

Is there an info on how many tests he gave away? As it’s said to be for personal use, I would expect it to be a two digit number. Let’s assume 50. What difference do 50 tests make for the survival of the nation? How many lives would have been saved if there would have been 50 additional tests? Hard to quantify. Could be none at all but also thousands. If you’re very lucky you might test just the right person at the right point in time. And by putting that one person into quarantaine, you avoid a huge superspreader event. Or all 50 tests are negative. Maybe you even have some false negatives that cause a super spreader event.

Of course, the more tests a nation has and performs during a pandemic, the better. Fully agree. But it’s hard to quantify the effect of such a small amount.

Similarly, it’s very hard to quantify the effect of diplomacy. Maybe (most likely!) the gift had no effect at all. Maybe Putin didn’t even use them in fear of contact poison on the swabs. But maybe, they also had some effect. Maybe the gesture subconciously influenced Putin to not do something stupid, do it a little later, or slightly less stupid. We’ll never know. Not even Putin himself knows.

Independent of the diplomacy part, let’s try to deconstruct the scandal into two parts.

1. Completely ignore the “Putin” part of this scandal. Let’s assume Trump had a stash with Covid tests for his personal use. Let’s assume someone finds out now that Trump hoarded 50 tests in his drawer all the time that he never used. The effect on the US pandemic would have been the same as giving the same number of tests away. Maybe even worse: If Putin used the tests and broke some infection chain, that might have saved people in Russia from catching Covid that might have travelled to the US later.

2. Now ignore the “Covid tests” part. If we assume a value of $5 per test, that leads to a total value of $250. So Trump gifted Putin a rare cigar or a nice pen whatever. This is completely normal diplomacy and global leaders exchange such things all the time. Also with nations that aren’t your allies. So from my perspective, the Putin part of the scandal is not relevant and can be ignored.

What stays is “Trump reduced the number of available Covid tests in the US by 50”. You can call that whataboutism but is this a scandal that deserves our attention in comparison to all the traitorous, imorral and illegal things he did?

You don’t have to convince me that Trump is a jerk. There are many scandals around Trump that deserve our attention but this one from my perspective is really not a big deal.

If Harris gifts Putin a nice pencil next week and there’s a 0.001% chance for a positive impact, why not try it? Putin is a narcisstic dictator with tons of money. I doubt you can bribe him with money. A small gesture that’s well thought out on the other hand, might reach him possibly if it comes at the right point in time.

Also during the pandemic, Putin was the leader of a relatively important country. If giving a few cheap tests to a global leader improves the relationship with the country by just 0.0001%, then I still think it’s worth it. Even though these tests were rare at times, they were never really expensive. If you can bribe Putin a little bit with a tiny amount of money, I’d say go for it.

Deal, maybe if we show 'em the meme, we can go on a double date.

Just learned that I’m gay. Any fellow dudes who want to hook up? Any tips on how to tell my GF?

Amazing present for insert your own name here

I’m sure a decent amount of people would still vote for him despite him being in jail. If there’s box for him on the ballot, they’d probably even vote him after he died.

Is there a credible source for the costs of hosting? Wikipedia is listing similar ad revenues as you did but no info on the costs. YouTube has 2.7 billion users that watch in average around 11 hours of videos a month. If 2 billion USD/y would be sufficient to host all that that’d be just 0,74 USD/user*year or 0,06 USD per month. That sounds really cheap considering that you have to pay for storage, traffic, backups and redundancies (at least I never heard of significant outages or data loss on YT).

Does anyone have a credible source on the number of employees YouTube has? If you search for that you fine vastly different number from just 2k to 189k employees.

TBH I’m not sure if a platform like YouTube will ever exist in a non-commercial way. Many creators that I follow reached a level of professionalism that comes with significant costs. You need expensive cameras, microphones, lights, high-end computers, drones, personnel costs for cutters and people that help with research. They have travel costs, sometimes rent for offices etc. All that just to produce the content.

On top, there are significant costs for hosting. I mean YouTube is hosted on multiple data centers rather than a bunch of servers or even home computers. Already Lemmy, which is mostly text and pictures, is a decent financial burden to instance owners. Not to mention the time for moderation and administration. And even here, in a place full of hardcore FOSS supporters, it’s not like admins are drowned in donations.

If YouTube ads and product placements are the only source of income for content creators, then the only alternative would be that consumers directly pay for the content and the platform. Or that such a platform would be paid by some state / taxes. Both of which don’t sound very realistic to me.

I have no clue if there’s indeed any proof for such a claim, but the theory that I read elsewhere is that it’s a way to obfuscate money flows.

If a foreign nation (Russia, China, North Korea, whoever) would like to engage in the election, they can’t just donate to the campaign officially. But instead, they could buy a couple thousands of these coins in smaller transactions.

TBH I’m rather with you. I think the majority of these coins is just bought by some MAGAs. For foreign nations there’d be probably more efficient ways to transfer money like shares etc.

How the hell can one have patent of ‘catching a creature through aiming’ or even more crazy to me ‘riding a creature’ in games? Both concepts exist in so many games and even in real life. I mean did Nintendo never hear of horses?

If you miss being named after the bird now, you might be interested in this petition: https://www.change.org/p/change-the-name-of-this-bird-to-türkiye

I like this definition the best. If someone is making a super complex sandwich with many ingredients and passion, then I’m fine to call that cooking. Same with a cold soup, a cous-cous salad or a fancy appetizer. Many dishes in top notch cuisine are served cold. In molecular kitchen, there’s even stuff served below freezing. Still all cooking to me.

If someone just warms up a can of Ravioli, microwaves convinience food, etc. I’d consider that rather food prep. If using the microwave is just one step of multiple in a recipe, than that’s fine again.

For me cooking requires a minimum level of effort rather than a minimum level of heat.

Personally, I don’t like noticeable make-up. If it’s barely visible, it’s fine as well but in general I like ‘no make up’ the best.

It’s also not only about looks:

• If you wear make-up, you have to be careful with rain, touching the face, kissing etc.
• It may take a lot of time to apply.
• It’s expensive.
• It’s rather bad than good for your skin.
• It’s bad for the environment (more trash, animal testing, contimination of water etc.).

No make-up = Win-Win-Win-[…]

What is CSAM? It is an abbreviation for many things apparantly. Are you referring to ‘Child sexual abuse material’? Did you encounter such things on Lemmy?

So far I luckily didn’t come across anything like that but I also blocked all porn-related instances that I saw so far.

As sudo applies only for a single command, removing the cover is more like su, no?

sudo would be more if above every covered button there was a tiny hole through which you could push it with a needle or so.

I have ‘night mode’ and ‘extra dark’ in my quick settings right below the slider. If I can get rid of one or both with an updated slider that’d be a great improvement. Never understood why smartphones are so super bright by default.