JonEFive @ JonEFive @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

Doubtful. The money is likely considered a gift, so there's no implied contract where the donors would get anything in return.

One could argue fraud, but I think that would have to come with intent. A reasonable person could conclude that her intent when she was collecting the money was to prepare for a long and difficult legal battle which appeared to be a highly likely situation.

I don't believe the donors are given any expectation that they would receive back money that was not used. The only place that might be conveyed would be the Terms of Service on whatever site she used if she used something like gofundme. If the terms say that money must be returned under certain circumstances, then I could see legitimate legal standing. But if she set up her own website where she could put her own fine print in? They're out of luck.

The lesson is to be more judicious with your money. If you don't like what someone does with your money after you give it to them, then make better decisions about who you give your money to.

From what I've read, Edge sends way more data back to Microsoft than Chrome sends to Google which is already too much.

I like how people are downvoting this and not commenting on why they think it's a bad statement. Old message board habits die hard I guess.

There's an armorer who was completely derelict in her duties. She's been charged with involuntary manslaughter. It was specifically her job not to let this happen.

SCOTUS is only considering this because there's a chance that if they don't, congress will. And if congress sets the rules, they also determine the punishment. The court wouldn't want to permit that sort of check against their power.

It would be truly interesting to see congress write a law governing the behavior of the Supreme Court. If the legislation is written properly, I think it would be permissable, but I wonder if the Supreme Court would just strike it down.

That would have been the case had Trump faded away at all. Unfortunately, he has as much support as he ever did. Now the logic is that the person most likely to defeat Trump is the person who has already defeated him once before.

I've never had to differentiate before like I have in this conversation. I think I would say "US Americans" since it seems to adopt other languages calling us something like United Statesans without creating an odd word like Statesans.

Puedo harcerte una pregunta? si eres de mexico, te llamarias americano? Querrias hacerlo? Soy de los Estados Unidos y no me importa si te llamas americano, pero no se por que querrias. Yo diria que "soy norteamericano" o "soy latinoamericano".

(Lo siento si mi espanol es malo, estoy aprendiendo).

I don't think anyone is denying them the right to call themselves American if they so choose, but as this whole conversation illustrates, the term is incredibly ambiguous. When the argument is that "American" could mean anyone from the Americas, that effectively covers the entire western hemisphere which is a bit nonsensical to me. The point they're trying to make is exactly the problem. There are lots of Americas.

Frankly, I don't understand why this is so much of an issue. There's no continental culture and solidarity connecting the northern tips of Canada to the southernmost parts of Chile. Nobody is trying to erase a deep historical culture of America being one group of people. Why are these people trying so hard to create a continental identity that doesn't culturally exist? I honestly think the point is to take the term "American" away from US Americans just because.

I've never heard of a person from Peru or Brazil or Guatemala deeply yearning to call themselves "American" meaning somewhere in North or South America, but refraining from doing so because they feel marginalized. Feeling marginalized isn't why they don't do it, they don't do it because saying "I'm American" meaning continents is useless. You might as well say "I'm from somewhere on the west side of the Atlantic." The term "American" becomes pointless if you mean it that broadly. Imagine someone from the other side of the Atlantic saying "I'm Eurasiafrican". There's no culture that connects all of those peoples, it would just be a pointless moniker.

I think you just summoned a demon

Oh, fun - I just used Brazilians as an example in another comment. Would you ever say "I'm American" when you're talking about your continent?

While technically correct, I've never heard a Brazilian refer to themselves as "American" when they intended to mean South American. Linguistically, when you say "American" you're talking about a citizen of the United States, not just any person from the western hemisphere. And if you're talking about a specific continent (North America, Central America, South America) you're going to be specific about it. A Brazilian would say "I'm South American" when referring to their continent.

Translation: Get back to work, peasants! Won't you think of how your actions are affecting your lords?

I don't think that's actually true in this particular case. Just about every single full time job has to offer a health insurance plan because all of their competitors are doing it. You simply can't attract good labor without it. So the motivation of the company providing you with health insurance isn't necessarily to keep you there, but rather to get people in the door to begin with. If the motivation was to keep you there, they'd offer a health insurance plan so amazing that you realistically couldn't go anywhere else without taking a cut.

On a larger scale though, there are lots of reasons that people want to keep this system intact. In particular, the societal "benefit" of extracting the maximum amount of work possible out of its populace.

In this case though, I tend to agree with the previous person that it is malignant indifference. Millionaires aren't actively trying to hurt people, they just don't give a shit that they're doing it. If the same or better results could be achieved another way, they'd go the other way because it would maximize profits.

You're right that there are sadists out there who enjoy the suffering of others, but I'd wager that's a very low percentage in terms of people running companies or crafting legislation.

Had to look it up myself. I think it refers to Group Member Organizations, which would be the health insurance providers.

When you really think about it, health insurance companies are a bizarre sort of consumers' union. Your insurance company negotiates prices with providers on your (and their own) behalf leveraging their buying power based on the size of the group. That was probably a good thing at one time, but now the system is so completely broken that if you try to get the same procedure done without insurance, and it'll cost you double or triple what it would cost the insurance company.

This is part of the overall concept of the fediverse and the activitypub protocol.

Think of it this way - what is the difference between Twitter and Instagram? They're very similar. The one key difference being that Instagram requires you to include a picture. But you can include pictures in Twitter too. So wouldn't it be nice to be able to see Instagram accounts from your Twitter account? Speaking only of the technology and not the content or corporate shenanigans that is. (by the way, Pixelfed is an activitypub clone of Instagram, and it can interact with Mastodon)

What if you have an idea for a microblogging platform, but it's a little bit different from the vision that the developers of Mastodon have? You can try to submit code to Mastodon's code base but there's no guarantee they'll accept it. You can fork Mastodon, but then you have to work within the framework that they've laid.

Or you can create your own platform. The benefit is, you can implement the same set of interoperability standards that the community has agreed upon. You don't have to attract all the users to your service to the exclusion of other services.

So why is all of this a good thing? There are a few reasons. If Mastodon starts heading in a direction that users dislike, they aren't stuck with Mastodon. For example, if they started behaving like Twitter, users could just jump to a different platform, but they would be able to continue to interact with Mastodon users who choose to stay.

If someone has a much better idea for a platform and puts the time and effort in to make it truly great, there's no reason for users to be stuck on a now inferior platform.

And if one software package tries a cool new feature that Mastodon doesn't presently have, and that feature catches on, Mastodon and other services can choose to also implement the feature. It increases competition, but also increases potential for collaborative development.

That's also why McCarthy took the very first opportunity he had to slam the democrats after the bipartisan vote to get the temporary funding bill through. He was trying to prove that he still hated the dems, but that wasn't enough for his party.

I'm sure it's fine to him when the religion is Christianity, but true to pass a bill based on the Muslim faith and see what he has to say. These people are all hypocrites.

Just one more thing that comes out of the pockets of taxpayers. Think we can FOIA the pictures?