Exactly this. Any kind of settlement does a massive disservice to the people whose wages were stolen.

When people complain about white collar crime going unpunished, this is exactly what they’re referring to. Wage theft is larger than every other form of theft combined. It literally accounts for more than 51% of all theft. But it largely goes unpunished, and is treated like a civil issue instead of criminal.

If a cashier steals $100 from the cash register, they’ll be leaving their shift in handcuffs. But if that same company routinely and systematically steals $100 from every single employee by rounding their timesheets down, netting them millions of dollars in excess profits by the end of the fiscal year… It’s treated as a civil issue, the business gets fined 10% of the profits they made, and the individual employees see virtually none of it after the lawyers get their take. The company treats it as a cost of doing business, and changes nothing in the future.

Should also go back and check to see if you were unbanned. I was banned during the API purge, for mass editing+deleting my comments. First automod banned me from various pro-Spez subs when I started editing my old comments. Then when I repeated the edit+delete with my second/third/etc accounts, it “permanently” banned them site wide for ban evasion.

Went back a little while later, and all of my accounts were magically unbanned and all of the edits+deletes were undone. The benign explanation is likely that the ban(s) prevented any of the edits from actually committing. But the more tinfoil-hat explanation is that the admins want the site to look more active, so they rolled back bans so old content was still available and their user count appeared higher than reality.

My only complaint about Ground News (and most media bias meters in general) is that factual papers will almost always be listed as left-leaning. Because the Overton window has shifted so far to the right that cold hard facts presented exactly as they happened with zero spin now has a left-wing bias.

Chaotic Good: Donate it to food pantries and soup kitchens.

Chaotic evil: Dump it on the steps of the capitol building and build a giant ground beef Mitch McTurtle.

Yes, it was a clusterfuck, but not on the level even larger than it was made out.

FTFY. Uvalde was a complete capitulation in regards to training, leadership decisions, and execution.

I already had you tagged as “Okay boomer” for some reason, and I guess that tracks with someone who would downplay how fucking atrocious the Uvalde police response was. Every single cop on the Uvalde police force deserved prison time for their outright complicity in the shooter’s murders.

Yeah, the military has to hold regular “you’re not as attractive as you think you are. Know your fucking number” meetings with the people who have security clearance. Basically, they have to be blunt, and straight up tell the people with clearance “you’re a grey and wrinkly old man who smells like wet beef. At the bar after work, you’re a 3. Maybe a 3.5 if you bothered to shower before getting to the bar. If a solid California 10 strikes up a conversation with you at the bar and seems really interested in your work, it’s because she’s a spy.”

They have to hold these meetings because honeypotting is so fucking effective on the sad sacks who have clearance.

Torture has proven effective, but only before the torture actually starts. Basically, the victim is more likely to divulge good information when they’re anticipating the torture, as an attempt to get out of it. Basically, before the torture, there is still some level of rapport between the victim and the torturer. But once the torture starts, the rapport is gone and the victim will harden themselves and refuse, or intentionally give bad info. Or they will simply say whatever they think the torturer wants to hear to attempt to stop the torture, regardless of whether or not it’s accurate.

Basically, the only time the torturer has any actual trust in the info is when the victim is trying to delay/avoid the torture. Once it starts, the torturer can’t actually trust anything the victim says. If getting info was actually the goal, the torturer could simply start prepping for the torture and never actually start it. Essentially, keep the victim in that initial “if I keep talking I can avoid the torture” phase.

It’s all so random and spread out.

Until you consider the fact that he’s taking orders from Russia. When you consider all of his actions under the filter of “would a Russian asset do these things” they all make perfect sense.

To be fair, the entire region was a powder keg that was simply waiting for a spark. The assassination ended up being that spark, but it’s likely that something else would have kicked it off even if he was never assassinated. It’s not like the assassination was the only thing that caused the war; It simply happened at the height of political tensions, and provided convenient propaganda.

So yeah, there would be a whole hell of a lot of parallels if Luigi gets offed. But even then, it will likely happen even without his death.

1. This hasn’t been a notable issue in a while. That’s why Plex’s https-by-default was such a big deal. With https, even your ISP can’t see what you’re streaming. They can see that something is being streamed, but not what specifically.

Also, you totally glossed over the fact that Plex is simply easier for non-savvy people to set up. Plex provides a unified login experience similar to major streaming services, which Jellyfin simply can’t provide; If your mother-in-law can figure out how to log into Netflix on her TV, she can figure out how to log into Plex too.

And the unfortunate truth is that Plex’s remote access is much easier for 90% of users to figure out. It doesn’t require VPNs or reverse proxies at all. You just forward a port and anyone with access can easily see your server. But my MIL’s TV doesn’t even have access to a Jellyfin app without sideloading. Not to mention the fact that I’d need to walk her through actually setting the app up once it is installed, because there is no unified system for logging in. And if I’m not using a reverse proxy for my Jellyfin server, then I also need to walk her through setting up Tailscale, assuming her TV is even capable of using it at all.

Any single one of those hurdles would make Jellyfin a non-starter if I want to walk my MIL through the setup over the phone, and they’re all currently present. And some of them will never be fixed, by design. For instance, the lack of a unified login page is by design, because a unified login would require a centralized server for the app to phone home too. That centralization is exactly what Jellyfin was made to rebel against, so it’s a problem that will never be “solved”; It is seen by the devs and FOSS enthusiasts as a feature, not an issue.

From a FOSS perspective, Jellyfin is a modern marvel. But it’s definitely not at the same level as Plex when you compare ease of setup or remote access. Jellyfin is fine if you’re just using it locally, or are willing to run Tailscale to connect back to your home network. But if you’re looking for true seamless remote access and need to consider the mother-in-law factor, then Plex is hard to beat.

Egg prices aren’t even being driven by a shortage. Every local market near me has thousands of eggs that are about to expire. Which means they have sat there long enough to expire, because nobody is buying them. People are seeing the increased egg prices, and simply eating fewer eggs.

Studies have found that the recent issues should only affect egg prices by ~10-15%. But instead, we have seen increases as high as 200-500%. The real issue is greedflation; Egg producers did the math on supply and demand, and realized selling less eggs could be more profitable. Imagine they can sell 5 egg cartons at $2 each, or 2 cartons at $6 each. The latter nets them more profit and they don’t have to produce+package+ship as many eggs, which lowers their overhead costs.

The only thing foreign eggs would solve is that it would introduce competition. But even then, why would other countries’ egg producers have any incentive to compete on price? They can simply match existing prices, blame the cost on higher international shipping, and make more profit too.

That’s actually exactly what they did to fix it. They now allow you to flag sinks as bathroom or kitchen sinks, which simply controls whether or not the dish washing function can be accessed.

The way The Sims does it is actually pretty interesting. The individual sims have very little behavioral coding involved. They’re basically just monitoring their individual needs. The vast majority of the objects contain “advertisements” that they broadcast, and the sims can simply look for nearby advertisements to decide on what to do.

Basically, you have a sim. They are simply listening to advertisements that are being broadcasted by the objects around them. Maybe the kitchen sink says “Clean +3” while the shower says “Clean +7”. If the sim’s cleanliness meter is low, they’ll check for local “clean” advertisements and choose one. As their needs get lower and lower, they’ll be more likely to pick stronger advertisements. So a slightly dirty sim will be likely to choose the sink, but a very dirty sim will choose the shower.

Then once they get to the chosen object, the object basically goes “okay, here’s how to interact with me”. The sim simply pulls from that pool of interactions for the specific object. There may be flags for specific interactions based on certain conditions, or certain traits that make a sim more likely to choose one object over another. For instance, if your sim is a witch, they may have specific magical interactions available. Or if a sim has the Active trait, they may be more likely to choose fitness-based advertisements.

This makes adding expansions very easy. You don’t need to do a ton of coding for individual sims, to “teach” them how to use new objects. You simply add new advertisements to the objects you’re adding to the game, and make sure your interactions are properly flagged for the various conditions that can exist. And now those objects can be dropped directly into existing save files without any fuss.

Worth noting that this advertisement system is what caused the infamous “my sim is using the bathroom sink to wash dishes” complaint that plagued the series for so long; the bathroom sink was nicer than the kitchen sink, so it had a better advertisement. The sim wasn’t looking at advertisements based on why they needed a sink. They just knew they needed a sink to wash dishes, and picked the one with the strongest advertisement.

Honestly, the most effective thing would be a general strike from everyone except the federal workers. Just grind everything to a halt until the oligarchs get Trump back in line.

And yet you know damned well what they meant, otherwise you wouldn’t have responded with the “well akshually” type of comment.

It’s an extremely common misconception, and why I bothered pointing it out at all. People will get a scratch from rust, and immediately panic about tetanus. In reality, tetanus is basically everywhere. Rust is simply a good carrier because it has lots of rough surface area and is good at poking people.

But also, people will inevitably get affected by AI as well and people will drift towards sounding more like AI too.

The “AI checkers” that schools/unis use has found a strong correlation between neurodiversity and sounding like AI. Basically, AI sounds autistic, so autistic people get flagged as AI.

But also, tetanus is commonly misunderstood. Scapes and scratches are extremely unlikely to result in tetanus, regardless of what causes it. Rust isn’t any more likely to transmit tetanus.

Tetanus is an anaerobic microbe that can only really survive in deep cuts and punctures where air isn’t able to reach the wound. The spores are basically everywhere… But the spores only bloom and become dangerous when they come into contact with blood. Once they bloom, oxygen will kill them. So you don’t need to worry about it for surface-level scratches and scrapes, because the air will kill off any blooms. The only reason it is commonly associated with rust is because one of the more common puncture wounds is from stepping on rusty things.

.ml tends to moderate things before they get outrageous. The biggest issue is simply the censorship that happens quietly. It’s less “extremists screaming at each other/into the heavens” and more “Big Brother is ensuring you don’t accidentally post anything that goes against the officially approved narrative.” The heavy censorship ensures the echo chamber remains polite (because they leave very little room for disagreement) but very echo-y.

So as an outsider looking in, you tend to see a bunch of polite discussion. It isn’t until you dig deeper (and see a bunch of the removed comments, and users who got banned for totally mundane things) that you actually begin to see the whole picture.

Yeah, exactly. First world was allied with the US. Second world was allied with the soviets. Third world was basically everyone else, and was largely considered irrelevant to the Cold War. That’s why “third world” became a signifier of undeveloped countries; If a country wasn’t part of the Cold War, it was likely because they didn’t have enough developed resources or manpower to be considered a war asset. If they were developed enough to contribute, one of the two sides would have already been working on recruiting them to the war.