Yup. Either eliminating a competitor, or getting ahold of some obscure patent that they don’t want to be stuck leasing indefinitely. Or they want to be the ones to lease the patent for exorbitant amounts, and they’re willing to write off a short term loss for longer term profits.
It’s worth noting that illiteracy isn’t simply a pass/fail test that depends on if you can read individual words. Literacy is largely determined by critical thinking skills and the ability to intuit things that aren’t directly stated.
For a good example, a large part of higher literacy is based on being able to see a piece of work, (a news article, video, book, song, etc.), and identify who the intended target audience is. Usually, the answer is not “me”. But I mention this specific example because people have become accustomed to laser-focused algorithms that only show content that is directly relevant to themselves. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, etc all have finely crafted algorithms that are designed to keep you engaged. And they do so by serving content that is directly aimed at you.
As algorithmic media feeds have become more common, people have literally lost the ability to identify when something is not meant for them. People used to see an irrelevant piece of media, and they would just go “oh it’s not for me” and move on. But now they tend to be surprised that they’re seeing the media, and they tend to get angry when something doesn’t directly confirm their lived experience. And they tend to take it out on the creators. We have literally seen content creators start changing the way they make their media, to avoid people getting angry when something isn’t directly relevant to themselves.
For instance, maybe I make a TikTok about the proper way to throw a football. Pretty basic stuff, right? Previously, if I left it at that, anyone who wasn’t interested in throwing a football would just move on. But now, I’d inevitably get angry comments about “but I’m in a wheelchair, what about me”, “why is this on my feed, I hate football”, “I have a torn rotator cuff, why are you excluding me” types of comments.
Now, content creators literally add disclaimers in their content, to directly state who the intended audience is. To go back to that same example, I’d probably have step 0 of the tutorial be something along the lines of “okay so this is obviously just for the people looking to check their throwing form. If you don’t like football, can’t throw a ball, or have some sort of disability that stops you from doing so, you can obviously move on.” Because if I don’t have that disclaimer somewhere near the start, I’ll inevitably get some angry comments. And those comments are being left by functionally illiterate people, who have lost (or never had) the ability to determine an intended audience.
That disclaimer was actually a result of the lawsuit. It didn’t always say that. Google was sued for intentionally misleading users, by tacitly encouraging their misheld beliefs that it made them invisible. Basically, Google wanted to track users. And Google knew that some users trusted incognito mode way too much. And instead of correcting that, they actively misled users into believing that incognito mode was more secure. Because if users believed they were invisible, Google could continue to track them when they thought they weren’t being watched.
They got sued for those misleading statements, and lost. And now the splash screen specifically says that Incognito Mode doesn’t make you invisible.
Well yeah, that’s all it ever was. The lawsuit was because of misleading/deceptive statements made by Google, which led some (intentionally misinformed) users to believe that Incognito Mode was more private than reality.
Basically, the company knew some users believed Incognito Mode hid their browsing activity. Not just from their local machine (via no logged site history, clearing cookies, etc), but also by hiding it from prying eyes like Google. Some users genuinely believed Incognito Mode was basically some sort of combination of Tor, degoogling, VPN, tracker-blocker, etc… And Google actively encouraged this incorrect belief, because they could continue to siphon off users’ data when they thought they weren’t being watched. The active encouragement of incorrect beliefs is what the lawsuit was about, not the data collection.
Mine does nothing when the video is full screened. I had to open the post and hit it while it was playing above the comments.
It can be both server and DNS provider. For instance, Cloudflare allows you to set rules for what traffic is allowed. And you can set it to automatically drop traffic for everything except your specific subdomains. I also have mine set to ban a IP after 5 failed subdomain attempts. That alone will do a lot of heavy lifting, because it ensures your server is only getting hit with the requests that have already figured out a working subdomain.
Personally, I see a lot of hacking attempts aimed at my main www. subdomain, for Wordpress. Luckily, I don’t run Wordpress. But the bots are 100% out there, just casually scanning for Wordpress vulnerabilities.
+1 for dropped connections on invalid domains. Or hell, redirect them to something stupid like ooo.eeeee.ooo just so you can check your redirect logs and see what kind of BS the bots are up to.
Modern society is designed from the ground up to favor the high-functioning sociopaths who only care about themselves but blend in well enough to seek powerful positions. Because those people are the ones who will strive to get those positions of power, while also simultaneously being willing to step on others to accomplish it. An old saying went along the lines of “anyone who would actually be elected president should be barred from the office.” But this also goes for smaller spheres of influence too. CEOs, church leaders, etc… It’s possible for a good person to get that position, but it’s more likely that they’ll be shoved out of the way by someone with fewer principles.
The single largest determining factor for your future earning potential is which ZIP code you were born in. We can predict, with an extremely high degree of accuracy, how much a child will make when they grow up… Simply by looking at where they were born and raised. Because wealthy parents raise wealthy children. Your parents’ income is a glass ceiling that eclipses all others.
The real concern is whether taking Courage will also invite all of the weird stuff that seems to follow him. You get a dog, and then suddenly your house is besieged by alien cats who want to steal your eyes.
Yup. Landed here during the APIcolypse and haven’t looked back. The only time I visit Reddit now is when I have obscure tech issues, and the only search results are people asking about it on Reddit.
Are you a registered republican, or live in a conservative area? I’m registered R so I can vote for the least crazy candidate in their primaries. Because a democrat has basically zero chance of winning the general election in my district. And I get the MAGA bait too.
Yup, exactly. They want to keep it federal (and avoid state charges), because Trump specifically can’t pardon state charges.
I mean, I’m not mad about why they removed so many videos. They had a massive CSAM and revenge porn problem, to the point that you could often find it on the front page. They also had really ineffectual methods for victims to report offending content, to get it taken down. There was also the whole “victim can only begin the takedown process (which likely won’t even get the video taken down) if they know it has been posted” problem. And their fix was to only allow uploads by verified users.
Only with cold water. Semen has a lot of protein in it, which means it will curdle and harden like scrambled eggs when it gets hot. Lots of women make the mistake of trying to use hot water, (because hot water cleans better, right?) but that has it immediately gumming up and getting sticky before they can even get the shampoo lathered.
Tired of those annoying cookie banners? They’re not just frustrating—they’re a lazy response to GDPR.
They’re not lazy, they’re maliciously compliant. The sites know how to comply with GDPR, but wanted to throw a fit instead. So they came up with the annoying cookie banners, to make users hate GDPR instead of hating the sites that were stealing and selling all of their data. And the worst part is that it worked. Many people wholly equate GDPR with the cookie banners, instead of the massive leap in privacy rights that it represented when it was passed.
You caught downvotes for what seemed to be a genuine question. No, it’s not technically illegal. It’s a weird loophole that exists because of the way the laws are written. The jurors cannot be prosecuted for passing the “wrong” sentence, so it is not illegal.
Sitting on a jury while intending to nullify could be illegal, because it would require perjury; They make jurors swear under oath to uphold the law, and ask if there is anything that would prevent them from doing so. If you intend to nullify and answer “no”, it is technically a lie under oath. But they can’t prove that you intended to nullify when you were answering, so prosecuting jurors for it would be a fool’s errand.
I pledge allegiance/
To the brand/
Of the Corporate States of America,/
And to the conglomerate/
For which it pays/
One market, under profit,/
Credit-driven/
With liberty and justice/
For shareholders
I was a freelancer for about a decade, and only ever walked off of one job site. It was because of safety concerns and one asshole. I was a stagehand, setting up lighting, decking, and audio gear for a musical in a local megachurch. I was in charge of a crew for this job, through a local labor company; Church hired the company to provide labor, who hired me as a subcontractor to make sure things went well, track workers’ time, etc… The load in was set to last three days, with them rehearsing in the evenings. Then they’d open that weekend.
I ended up attaching myself to the lighting crew for the first day, because decking and audio crews already had people who knew what they were doing. Plus if I’m in the catwalk, I can usually keep a pretty good eye on what is going on around the room. Some catwalks are easy to get to. They’re designed thoughtfully, with the expectation that crews will need to access them regularly. Other catwalks are… Not so easy. Maybe it was designed to be easy at one point, but then engineers added more structural beams, HVAC installers added air ducts, electricians added panels and conduit across doorways and walkways, architectural lighting got added in walkways, etc… Basically, the construction was a bunch of different crews, and none of them talked to each other to keep the catwalks accessible.
This church’s catwalk was unfortunately in the latter group. Getting to it involved a combination of a six-story-tall spiral staircase, army-crawling under an air duct, climbing over some electrical conduit, and squat-walking on a steel mesh grid to avoid some overhead beams. Needless to say, we made the trek up there once, and immediately decided that we weren’t going to be carrying our lights the same way we got up. Hell, lots of our lights wouldn’t even fit the same way we came up, due to the army-crawling section.
So we throw a rope down from the catwalk. Our lights are heavy, and it’s about a 7-story-tall lift to get from the audience to the catwalk. But many hands makes for light work, right? I ask who knows their knots, because we need someone on the ground to tie the lights onto the rope. One of the newbies (who I had never worked with before) raises his hand, so I send him down to act as ground support. His job is simple. We send the rope down from the catwalk, he ties the light to it, and then we haul the light up while he watches from the ground, making sure we don’t knock into anything or scratch the ceiling of the theater. Lather, rinse, repeat. This dude has the easiest job in the entire goddamned building, because all he has to do is tie a knot every few minutes, then watch the rest of us work.
So we send the rope down. A minute or so later, he calls back up that we’re good to lift. So we haul this light up. It’s heavy. It sucks. Many hands makes for light work, but we can only get a few hands on the rope due to the way we’re positioned in the catwalk. But we muscle this light up. One down, only 90 more to go.
But then as we set the light down on the catwalk, we realize that the “knot” we had lifted it with was basically just a bunch of loops with the tail pulled through. It fell apart as soon as the tension on the rope was released. Apparently our knot-tying ground support lied about being able to tie knots, and just went with the “if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot” method. Except his “tie a lot” part wasn’t even safe, because he ended up just making a tension knot that completely fell apart as soon as the tension was gone. So I send someone else (who I have worked with before, and actually trust) down to the ground, and they send him back up.
All of this was simply to say that we were already a little bit on edge regarding this lighting install, because if that “knot” had come undone midway through our lift, we would have dropped a thousand dollar ~120lb light onto the audience seats, from about 90 feet in the air. So I want you to keep that part in mind when I bring up this next part…
After we get thirty or forty lights lifted, we’re feeling the strain. These lights are heavy, and my guys are smoked. The catwalk is hot (because hot air rises, this is in Texas in the summertime on a sunny day, and we’re basically pressed against the roof,) and we’ve all soaked through our shirts with sweat. For every light, once we get to the edge of the catwalk, we basically have to manhandle it up and over the railing to avoid scratching the decorative ceiling panels that are below us.
In the meantime, the church’s audio guy has shown up. He is sitting in the audience, chatting with another church employee. He apparently brought his son to work today. His son was like 5 or 6, and was suddenly running around in the audience, directly underneath us as we’re lifting these damned lights. Again, we’re already worried about dropping one of these lights. Even if we have the best knots in the world, accidents happen. I have seen clamps, handles, and hard points break off of lights before. I have seen ropes break. I have seen steel cables break. So there’s always some measure of “this could all go wrong and there’s nothing we can do but watch it fall” in the back of your mind with every single hoist. We already watched a knot fall apart that morning. And now there’s a fucking child playing underneath us.
So I call down, something along the lines of “Hey, can someone get that kid out of the way? We’re working up here!”
The sound guy almost immediately shouts back “how about you parent your kids, and let me parent mine!”
Like I said, my guys were already needing a break. We had already told ourselves that we were going to take a water break soon. As soon as that dude’s response had stopped reverberating around the (now dead silent) auditorium, I called out “Okay {company name}! Make it safe, then tools down! Take 20, then meet me on the dock!” Simultaneously, all ~40 crew members got the exact same glint in their eyes as they realized what was going on, finished whatever they were doing, then walked away for a smoke break.
In that 20 minutes, I called the company owner (who I play board games with nearly every week), and let him know what was going on. This was ~90 minutes into an 8 hour day. But notably, the crew had a 5 hour minimum. Meaning they’d get paid for at least 5 hours regardless of how long they worked. The intent is to ensure every job is worth the drive; without a minimum, nobody would take a 30 minute job if they had to drive 45 minutes to get there. And he said I could give the crew a choice. They can stay for the full 8 hours, or they can take the minimum and walk away right now. Next, I talked to the church’s main point of contact, to let them know what had happened, and what I was about to tell the crew. And when my crew came back after their break, I gave them all that choice. Every single person on the ~40 man crew took the minimum and walked away for the day.
The show’s load in was delayed by a day, and the church’s sound guy wasn’t present for the rest of the week’s load in and setup.