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That’s fucking dumb. How long ago was that? The antidepressants thing is particularly upsetting. We shouldn’t be turning people away if they’ve ever been on antidepressants (or are currently on antidepressants); I mean, it’s not like we get free government healthcare or anything. I’m sorry you had to deal with that. That sucks.
This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).
Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.
The 6-3 ruling penned by Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett in Department of State v. Muñoz held that a citizen has no “fundamental liberty interest in her noncitizen spouse being admitted to the country,” denying a couple’s plea after a U.S. citizen’s husband was denied a visa.
Hold the fuck up, I thought visas were basically guaranteed to those married to US citizens. This seems like a pretty big deal, so why haven’t I heard more about it?
'member when conspiracies were relatively harmless like flat earthers and ufologists?
'member when the main source of Christian extremism (in the US) was the Westboro Baptist Church, and most people just laughed at them because no one really took them seriously?
What the fuck happened?
I’m actually very confused because the US 10yrs ago was radically different than the US now. How did everyone completely lose their minds? This is a semi-rhetorical question because I’m aware of some of the contributing factors, it’s just… I feel like somewhere in the past 10-15yrs I slipped sideways into some kind of an alternate reality.
The most extreme Christians I knew didn’t approve of homosexuality, but also weren’t yelling “god hates f*gs” at people for being gay. They believed in a 7-day creation, but didn’t lose their minds and thirst for blood at the sight of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
The worst racists I’d met believed in white supremacy, but weren’t cruising around looking for POC to lynch (with the exception of cops, that is). They hated Hispanic people, but mostly kept it to themselves.
Maybe I was just really sheltered, but while it seems like our level of tolerance has grown, the extremes have gotten worse. Like, the graph of tolerance is still going up, but the data point distribution is getting worse.
Edit: to put it another way, my experience growing up in Texas’ suburbs was that people were “tolerant” in a “I don’t like you but I won’t bother you so long as you don’t bother me” kinda way. Not ideal, but not terrible either. Now though, it’s more “I don’t like you and that bothers me, so I’m gonna bother you”.
The alternative explanation is that the employers have investments in corporate real estate and don’t want their investments to lose value. Personally, I think that the the people at the top probably have investments in corporate real estate, while middle managers are the way you describe.
I don’t think the people at the top usually care what the employees are doing so long as they’re making money, and being in the office means they’re keeping corporate real estate prices afloat. As such, being in office makes money for the executives, even if that money isn’t made directly through the company.
Middle managers on the other hand, likely don’t have any significant corporate real estate investments, nor are they as likely get significant bonuses for company productivity. As such, it makes more sense for their motive to be more about control than it is money.
That said, I do know some executives do indeed see employees the way you’ve described them; an infamous example comes to mind about the Australian real estate executive talking about how they needed to bring workers to heel and crash the economy to remind workers that they work for the company and not the other way around. I’m just not sure that many executives actually think about their workers in that much depth. I think if they did then we’d see a stark contrast of very ethical companies and highly abusive companies instead of the mix of workplace cultures we have now; because some ceos would come to the conclusion that a happy worker is a good worker, while others would become complete control freaks.
Oh my god, wallet chains are going to make a comeback, but for phones this time.
I’m really hoping valve does a public steamdeck OS release. I’d like to replace windows on my PC with Linux and have windows as a backup, but the Linux distro I’m the most familiar with is the steam deck’s distro, and that’s not available outside of steam decks yet.
Imo expecting someone who’s done drugs to quit and never do it again, is one of the dumbest, most bone-headed things anyone has ever come up with. Like, shit man, drugs are awesome. Yeah, they can seriously fuck you up if you get addicted, and some drugs are extremely addictive. However, expecting someone to toss all those crazy experiences, the good and the bad, into the trash and never, ever even be tempted to pick up drugs again is… stupid. It assumes that drugs only create bad experiences, but that obviously isn’t true because even the most non-physically-addictive drugs can become addictive with the right environmental factors. So obviously people aren’t doing drugs just because they’re addictive, they’re doing them because they’re fun, or because they give you an escape. As such, imo, it’s better to teach people how to use drugs in moderation than to try and attempt total abstinence. Unless their body is so fucked up from drug use that they literally can’t do drugs without risking death, you should be teaching them how to use them in moderation; like as a reward for getting a promotion. That sorta thing.
Ooohh, I misunderstood. I thought it was like, “20 free call-votes then your votes stop counting” kinda thing.
What would happen if someone were to, say, use free phone numbers from Google voice or something like that to spam thousands of votes?
After reading the article, this might be an exception.
I thought that was Qobuz. At least I can actually buy music through Qobuz I guess.
Yeah, I don’t get it. No one says, “fuck Alphabet for how they’re handling YouTube”. No one says, “fuck Alphabet for baking spyware into Android and Chrome”. No, they criticize Google for that stuff. Why is Facebook different?
I don’t think the people doing it now are bots, but I swear the Facebook-Meta separation had to have been started by astroturfing. People seemed way too eager to accept the rebranding and act like Meta was somehow different from Facebook.
Hey, whatever you can divide Americans with. That way they stay busy fighting about immigrants vs xenophobia, straights vs gays, etc instead of demanding changes that would hurt their corporate overlords.
Dude, maybe it was meant to be a joke, but that doom picture is so fake. C’mon.
Tl;Dr: US officials are shitting themselves because arrest warrants could undermine any attempts to negotiate a cease-fire, but more importantly, because if the ICC issues arrest warrants for Israeli politicians, they might turn around and do the same to US politicians. No, seriously. Straight from the article:
US House Speaker Mike Johnson slammed as “disgraceful” the ICC’s reported intention of issuing “baseless and illegitimate arrest warrants” for alleged war crimes against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi.
“Such a lawless action by the ICC would directly undermine US national security interests,” Johnson said Monday. “If unchallenged by the Biden administration, the ICC could create and assume unprecedented power to issue arrest warrants against American political leaders, American diplomats, and American military personnel, thereby endangering our country’s sovereign authority.”
The fact that quantum dots are already being successfully applied to LCD-LED and OLED screens is encouraging for future QDEL products. QDEL stakeholders claim that the tech could bring efficiencies like lower power consumption and higher brightness than OLED. (Research using a prototype device has recorded quantum dot light-emitting diodes reaching 614,000 nits. Of course, those aren’t the type of results you should expect to see in a real-life consumer product.)
614,000 nits
That’s fucking insane. HDR 1400 displays are at least 1,400 nits. 614,000 nits seems like you’d be staring at the fucking sun.
There’s also hope that QDEL could eventually last longer than OLED, especially since QDEL doesn’t rely on organic materials that can cause burn-in.
Tbh the burn-in issue is the reason why I don’t like OLEDs as computer monitors. I know phones and TVs don’t tend to have major burn-in issues, but the fact that it exists sucks. TVs have a variable-enough image that long-term use isn’t an issue imo, and even the most thrifty person will probably end up replacing their phone every 4~6 yrs. However, I’m used to having computer monitors be long-term things. My last monitor lasted about 10yrs before it died.
As it stands, QDEL displays would become noticeably dimmer more quickly than today’s OLED displays.
Aw, that’s disappointing. At the same time though, if they’re able to get even 10% of the 614,000 nits on commercial units, then they’d have to lose a significant amount of brightness to dim to current display levels.
But optimists believe QDEL display lifetimes could one day be on par with LCD-LEDs and outlast OLEDs.
Yeah, I hope so too.
Yeah, I’m not surprised. I’m currently not working (living with parents), and personally, if I had a guaranteed $500 a month in my bank account I’d be much more willing to go out and get a job, regardless of how good or bad it is.
That $500 a month is a form of financial security; so I know that even if I get fired, I’ll still have something to fall back on. It would ease the anxiety of having to deal with shitty managers, being potentially overworked, underpaid, etc, because it’d mean that if one job sucks, I can go find a different one without worrying that the rug was being completely pulled out from under my feet.
It also means that, if I am getting underpaid, I still potentially have some spending money that’ll allow me some luxuries despite the low wage/salary being given to me by company I’m working for. That increases my flexibility for bullshit and allows me to be more tolerant of shitty managers.
The fact that you have to roll the dice and hope the company you’re going to work for won’t have shitty managers, low wages, overwork, etc is a real disincentive when you have family you can live with. That $500 a month makes the dice roll more tolerable.
My biggest concern is that if Universal Basic Income becomes, well, universal, then the cost of everything will likely spike in proportion to whatever UBI is. It’s greedy, but logical that if all your tenants are getting $500 a month from the government, then that means you can raise their rent. Companies would also look at it and one department would say, “we can lower wages because of UBI” while another department says, “we can raise prices because people have more money via UBI”. As such, the government would need to implement protections against such actions.
How do you do that though?
Do you peg the cost of rent to a formula based on land value, income, etc?
Do you peg the price of a product to the product’s cost + X%?
Do you try and mandate wages based on performance, seniority, and job type?
At what point do you look at the tangle of laws and formulas and say, “this is insane; maybe instead of giving cash, we should give housing, food, water, electricity and other modern necessities.”
Ultimately, I’m not sure any of the protections required for UBI to be successfull will be implemented. I’m not against the idea of UBI, but I don’t trust the government (well, the US government anyway) to have the foresight to successfully pull it off.
Edit: At the end of the day, I don’t want to live with my parents. I don’t want to be unemployed, I don’t want to feel like a drain on society, and I don’t want to feel like I have nothing to offer to the world. I like to believe everyone has the potential to change the world for the better, either in a small way, or a big way. Right now I feel like I’m not doing anything, and I don’t like it. However, I’ve had some very bad experiences with “”“unskilled”“” jobs and the industry I’ve spent time training for (video games) is a fucking mess and is getting worse.
I… Kinda want one of those. Not to drink it, but to put it on my shelf and be like, “yeah, that’s my Windows soda. I hear if you drink it you’ll turn blue and die.”
Tbh it might actually do that considering it’s probably almost 30yrs old.
I’d assume they’d be required to pay taxes once they’re old enough to, but I’d be willing to bet that most of them don’t unless they plan to ever actually move to the US.
I wonder how often the IRS actually goes after American citizens who don’t live in the US, especially ones that haven’t traveled to the US in more than 5+ years.
Edit: they might also be completely unaware that they need to pay taxes. If I’m not mistaken, the US is literally the only country in the world that requires you to pay taxes when living abroad. Logically speaking, it makes sense that you wouldn’t have to pay taxes to a country you don’t live in.