I love old man non sequiturs. My dad’s response to a toddler asking him why over and over again is “because I’m building a bicycle made of bananas,” which tends to produce a perfect koan moment and break the question cycle

you land on your front human legs shattering your ankles and breaking your feet and legs

I can’t imagine we’ve got more fragile legs than horses

I figured that would kill pacemakers, but it might not. it’ll definitely kill electric wheelchairs and insulin fridges though.

heimliches Filmen ist aktuell in Deutschland nicht per se strafbar. Besonders in öffentlichen Räumen sind Betroffene kaum geschützt.

(Roughly in English)

covert filming isn’t currently illegal in Germany per se. Those filmed are rarely protected, especially in public

Filming in public not being illegal, I get, but he’s profiting off of her likeness. Ideally that would be illegal itself, but even if not, could she not sue him for a share? Obviously, putting the burden on victims is not a great remedy, especially because it’s expensive, a huge hassle, and risks the Streisand effect, but I could see a women’s rights organization orchestrating it for her and it might be possible to keep her identity secret.

Again, I don’t think that’s ideal, but it seems better than nothing and wouldn’t preclude criminal charges from going through if the government does figure out how to prosecute this

In that case, make it wait 16 years

This would be a nicer place if everyone extended a little grace to each other. It seems unlikely that the commenter meant “the Nazis who personally, emotionally matter to me” and pretty likely that they meant “the Nazis who are unfortunately very powerful.”

Yeah, it was a totally genuine question, I don’t know what the average is. Banana bread and twinkies occurred to me (but tbh, I suspect most banana bread consumed is homemade and twinkies are probably artificially flavored), but the others didn’t, because I’m too cheap to buy most of those. No idea if I’m an outlier either.

How often do you eat something commercially produced and banana flavored with real banana compared to eating an actual banana (or even seeing the products in the store, if you’re not a banana person), though? If that were a viable use for the waste, it would be like 40:60 (because zoo populations are insignificant compared to humans). For me, it’s about 5:95, and that’s only because I like Bananenweizen.

One major point is what exactly constitutes the national flag of Japan. Especially since it’s just a red circle on a white background, I could drop some spaghetti sauce on my shirt and end up wearing the flag. So, how is it legally different from a real flag?

According to the latest revision of the bill, the flag is defined as generally made of cloth or paper, primarily displayed on poles as a sign or decoration, and usable in real society. This means the Japanese flags in the virtual world are fair game, which is great news for my upcoming smartphone game Flag Blaster 3000.

It looks like there are ways around it, but yeah, that’s massively fucked up.

It’s a tragedy for Mexico

The last time I bought a prepaid phone, I had to give them my identity to register it (not an eSIM), but you could just as easily drive three cities away and use a pay phone at a truck stop or train station (only places I see them anymore, and they’re often hidden away, but still there). Maybe take a cab from a nearby area to the truck stop to avoid linking your license plate with it? I’m honestly not sure if they’d put that much effort into solving it, but you could also probably ask to use the phone at a library and they’d let you (though it might not be private enough for you to make it a convincing call)

Yeah, I figured the prior person’s information would only be released when the new user provides the details for a valid email account. I’m (clearly) not a tech person, but that sounds relatively doable.

The problem with changing the terms is that you don’t know who’s going to join after you, so you don’t know that they want a song. You can look at that as the free market in action, but it’s also effectively a dead end for a purpose-built group.

It has also just occurred to me that people who want to commit fraud would also be interested in this, and perhaps giving them the opportunity to collect a bunch of potential blackmail ammunition is not ideal.

Yeah, I think you’re right and it’s unlikely that many people have such long friendships with people over entirely private media.

If you’re enjoying the hypotheticals, I’ve got another, but if they’re unhelpful/distracting, don’t feel obligated to indulge me. What if you had an open, anonymous community sharing a chain of emails, so each person joining the group would receive the email account made by the person before them and would make an email for the person joining after them? Obviously the feds could still infiltrate it, but they’d have a lot less data from any given user and they’d get the most data from the person who joins after they do, which they can’t control. Unless they monitor it 24/7 and get lucky, they wouldn’t be able to make sure every other user is a fed. That seems like it would also be relatively easy to detect, if every single time a new account joined, another immediately followed.

Yeah, there are a lot of potential business purposes for it falling on a Wednesday, it’s really just that I can’t imagine 4 am working as well or better than basically any other time of day for this.

Although laying a tenth of your staff off immediately before some of their benefits vest is also bound to disgruntle employees, so maybe it’s just hubris.

Oh, yeah. That’s a very real possibility. I assume trading only with trusted online friends (obviously one might trust the wrong person, but plenty of people have 20+ year old friendships with people whom they’ve never met irl, and ) would compound the problem by making your online network even more traceable?

Not coming into work I totally get, but that’s why most companies do this on a Friday during the afternoon, cut off access during the conversation, and walk the person out, if they’re on site. Doing in the middle of the week and compensating by giving the employees a WFH day is an abnormal choice, but whatever, maybe their pay periods start on Thursdays or something.

Announcing layoffs during the middle of the night and thereby ensuring that your retained employees are less productive on Wednesday (if not the rest of the week, we’re generally affected by sleep disruption a lot more and longer than we realize and having everyone a little bit affected will magnify the effects across the entire company) and the newly laid off former employees receive that news when they’re not as emotionally stable as if they had an uninterrupted night of sleep is bizarre.

Can we just perfect strangers this and I create zendayagirl67@gmail and you create shielaandstu@hotmail, then we trade?

Am I being very naive?

Meta plans to lay off about 10 percent of its nearly 80,000 employees on Wednesday, with notices going out to affected workers’ personal and corporate email addresses at 4 am in their local time zone, according to a company-wide memo sent on Monday.

What an insane way to do things. How is ensuring that the majority of your employees either stay up way too late or wake up really early (after a likely restless night’s sleep) smack in the middle of the week going to improve efficiency in any way?

Weird that they didn’t just give them access to parking lots, that would have been way faster.

No, thankfully it felt pretty normal to me. It was definitely closer to three than five on the stool scale, but no blockages.

The only reason I realized it was abnormal was because I mentioned once that I didn’t poop during a week of sleep away camp and everyone thought it was an exaggeration.