Catzilla. Truly a loaf incarnate.

You’re right. I’m sorry for taking my frustration with the forum out on you.

Yes, if you throw democracy in the trash, ignore the rights of the unpopular, and pass any law that appeals to today’s public morality, then you’ll have lots of options. I just don’t want to hear you guys complain after this idealism gets spun to fuck you over by corporate lawyers more skillful than your populist politicians. But fuck me for pointing out the logical inconsistencies in the useless seething groupthink machine, I guess. Apparently I only have rights if the public likes me.

We’re talking about criminal law. Can you clearly, objectively, without arbitrary valuation of goods or services, define a legal principle which identifies the point at which a health plan cut becomes a crime?

What’s your point? That people organize themselves to commit crimes? That risky behavior is more dangerous when it’s amplified by concentrated capital? None of this justifies the phenomenal leap you made to say that an employer is responsible for the lives of their employees. None of this is precedent for the further corruption of the justice system into subjectivity and emotional bias.

Can’t you see that you’re actually making it worse? You go after organizations whose bread and butter is legal entanglement, using legal entanglement as your only weapon. You make the regulatory environment more difficult for startups and SMBs to compete in, and you do nothing but give your (supposed) worst enemies more political tokens with which to negotiate advantageous positions in that environment. Why do you think these corporate elites flush hundreds of millions of dollars sponsoring progressive media outlets? Do you think they’re stupid?

I’m going to ignore the insane part of your point where you equated layoffs with murder.

Greed, like hate, is subjective. It is therefore, like hate, a terrible prerequisite for the activation of the criminal justice system. The idea that motivations for crimes should change the definition and/or penalty of those crimes has fostered popular corruption of the justice system since its inception. Industrialization has accelerated the adoption of human fears into that justice system, to the point where we can no longer even count the number of infractions under the law.

Adding more subjective emotional consideration to a punitive system which is already weighed down beyond the ability to enact swift justice is the opposite of helpful.

Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.

He cannot protec
Nor can he attac
But he is a little hat

>we’ve been no contact with my family on and off
>why doesn’t my family want to connect with me

“Going no contact” ends relationships. I’ve noticed a lot of people will defend “going no contact” as a normal and healthy relationship tool because they’ve done it, erected massive walls of pain and mistrust in core relationships, and need the support of others with similar blockades to defend the disastrous results. I’ve seen it recommended as a response to bad table manners. The problem is you’re inflicting a death on someone while refusing them permission to grieve. There is a void in their life where a person used to be, but they can’t even come to terms with that and move on because the person might come back. It is the strongest possible ultimatum. Now, boundaries are healthy, and if a relationship is giving you more pain than support, it’s your prerogative to end it; that’s what “going no contact” usually does. If someone lets you back into their life after you’ve done that, you shouldn’t assume that they’ve forgotten what it was like to live without you.

Hell yes. Sic semper pingues porcos.

Relatable. Obviously completely unacceptable behavior. Yet relatable.

My pet theory is that NGINX was designed by a pen-tester who realized that all they needed to do to make the majority of SMBs expose their web servers to the internet was outperform Apache

That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.

If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.

All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.
~ Henry George, Social Problems

Home slice I respect the grind but I gotta be real with you I haven’t bought a GPU since the Obama administration

Oh my God! That’s awful! Which ones?! Which sites, specifically, though?! You know, so I can call for bans.

Avocado oil is great for popcorn. It doesn’t add any flavor but I love the resulting texture: very crisp and clean. I like using red or blue corn because the contrast is visually appealing. You want long, skinny kernels to get the butterfly popcorn. Personally I’m crazy for cheesy popcorn, and the secret there is to find cheese powder with some savory herbs like oregano. I also love to do it with Kashmiri (floral hot Indian chili) powder.

Important edit: Do NOT under any circumstance use chili popcorn to spice up Netflix & Chill. This is a snack for lonely degenerates who don’t even masturbate daily any more. It’s for watching war documentaries and French New Wave, not pervy cartoons and superhero throwdowns with a plot designed to be ignored while you finger your frenemies. You won’t look worldly and sophisticated while you’re driving somebody to the fucking hospital. Be responsible.

This might be effective in institutions wherein expression is already strictly restrained and your opponent doesn’t have the option of ignoring your request for information, but when people pull this shit on me I just say “comedy’s subjective.” It happens to be true. The list of topics that are “inappropriate” is also extremely subjective. I make jokes to cope with stress and add value. If you don’t like my joke, you can say so, but when you try to use social structures to manipulate others’ capacity for expression, you out yourself as a Machiavellian control freak which, in fairness, puts you on good terms with all the other manipulative, power hungry, institution worshiping demagogues that create stressful situations in the first place.

People have been getting mad at me for making jokes for literally as long as I can remember. One of my oldest memories is about getting in trouble for joking about a teacher’s contradiction. She didn’t like how it made her feel, so she made me sit in the corner in front of the class. She used her leverage in the social structure to try to prevent herself from feeling that way again. I remember it for two reasons: first, because I think it was the first time I felt humiliation, and second, because my friends turned on her. The girl beside me, who I now realize I was trying to impress, didn’t like my joke. She hit me. Then, after the teacher overreacted, she switched teams. After class, we went and peed on the teacher’s flowers together. We were 6, by the way. Yeah, sorry Rachel, I’m going public with the scandal. DM me if you read this, I’m way funnier now.

Free speech is not hip or trendy at the moment, and that’s fine. That’s actually how it’s been for most of history as far as I can tell. The reason we should defend it is the subjectivity I mentioned earlier. The basic idea is that different things make different people upset. To make rules about what you’re allowed to say is to defend a subset of emotional responses ─ to put some people above others ─ to deny the universal fraternity and equality of people. You may have the best of intentions, but you won’t get any feedback when those people decide to pee on your stuff.

The issue isn’t the composition of the object but rather property and contract. The prosthetic limb comparison isn’t bad in my opinion, except this would be an experimental prosthetic limb that patients agreed to test with full knowledge and consent that it could be removed without their permission.

Again, I would hate to be in that position, but if I agreed to it, I understand my legal options would be limited. Again, this isn’t a company ruining someone’s life over a little money, this is a corporation unable to continue operating. Again, please consider the fact that a corporation which can treat epilepsy went backrupt because it couldn’t afford to do business in the regulatory environment of the health industry. I don’t understand how adding more subjective laws with hand-waved economic foundations is supposed to help this situation.