admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

But like, what's your point?

Setting aside all the practical ways this suit could be handled affordably (e.g., her actual damages were a much smaller monetary sum compared to that invoiced amount and probably eligible for small claims)...

Having a policy around cancellations in the invoices would not materially effect anything here. While it might be helpful to ensure a good-faith customer behaves in a professional and appropriate way, such policies have little effect on a bad-faith customer.

Even without an explicit policy, this is fairly straightforward promissory estoppel, or at least something very much like it. If she had a policy, she would have a very strong case. Without, I still reckon she has a very strong case -- pretty much just as strong. Either way, the recourse is the courts.

Eh, if she really wanted to take it to court I'm relatively sure her case is sound. A reasonable man knows you cannot cancel such a large order of perishable goods on short notice. She probably had her own reasons, whether lack of savvy, a belief the media campaign would serve her better, or maybe even just that she doesn't want to go to court.

Jokes aside, that is not how nearly any abortions work these days.

Nearly universally, abortions are medical -- a pair of pills -- that can be very roughly described as causing a miscarriage.

It also will not be hard at all to avoid creating any loopholes, especially when the courts are clearly on the anti-choice side.

Highly recommend Volts to everyone interested.

David Roberts is EXTREMELY practical, politically. He's very no-nonsense, but gives clear and simple reasons for why he categorizes stuff as nonsense when he does. He's not some techno-wizard optimist, but he's also clear about how much tech we DO have and how much is achievable on realistic timelines if we just commit. He's also clear about what the obstacles are, and even sometimes gives useful calls to action.

His most recent episode on nuclear is an almost perfect example of this. A lot of people are VERY enthusiastic about nuclear. He had Jigar Shah from the DOE on to talk about the field extensively -- the upsides and downsides, what technologies work and make sense, what technologies are just mis-advertised, what technologies are total vaporware, why it's so hard to build nuclear in the US (hint: it's not the anti-nuke environmental lobby), and all that. Fabulous interview.

I definitely trend towards doomerism on all this stuff, but it's good to be reminder the tech really is there decarbonize a LOT and VERY FAST, and probably even achieve planetary net zero or even net negative within my lifetime. Just have to convince people the juice is worth the squeeze -- which it undeniably is when the entire ecosystem is at stake.

Parents rights so long as it is not a parent's right to have their child recognized by their child's chosen pronouns, a parent's right to have the child fed a free school lunch, or a parent's right to have their child taught state-of-the-art science and not religious/political nonsense. We don't want those kinds of parents' rights.

I'll believe it when I see a Florida loot box ban.

Absent clear signals they ACTUALLY care about stopping predatory business behavior directed at minors (you know, like directly targeting kids with advertisements) and protecting anyone's privacy (much less that of youths), I'll assume this is part of an agenda at building Good Christian Soldiers.

The Alabama legislature is going to fix the issue. Probably won't even take them that long, because banning IVF is not what anyone wanted and the law SCOAL cited was from the goddamn 1800s. No one really believes that fertilized embryos in a cooler are indistinguishable from Steve in accounting.

Then conservatives will claim this as a victory, and say that the law is doing its job to "protect life" (force pregnancy and birth on unwilling and uncompensated citizens) and that they're so amazing at compromise and everyone should love them.

In this case, they aren't even that hard.

The changes Hoboken had to make to eliminate traffic fatalities were fairly minor. Replace lighted intersections with stop signs and restrict lane widths and reduce line-of-sight-blocking parking at crosswalks using bumpouts, bollards, etc.. That basically did 99% of the job.

Pretty much ANY urban-context streets could do this. And moreover the move is fairly unlikely to affect total trip times (because urban lighted intersections actually fucking suck at reducing congestion and even all way stops can work better). Bonus points: eliminating traffic lights saves money because those fucks are expensive even just to maintain.

It goes to show how extraordinarily negligent US civil engineers are, that such small design shifts can have such a significant effect. These people will ALWAYS prioritize vehicle speed over safety because that's what their bible tells them to do. Absolutely uncritical profession.

So really, the question is how many people should die for 4 extra parking spaces per block. My answer you can probably guess.

Sounds to me like there is a total glut of software engineers.

Which makes it really difficult to fathom why they are paid so goddamn much.

Hell man, Biden is already very different on his rhetoric with Gaza, and the language coming out of his administration is clearly evolving. I would be unsurprised to see some direct condemnations in the coming months.

I WILL, however, be surprised to see the US severing its defense agreements with Israel. There's too much seen as at-stake in the region. Hence my prior phrasing -- it's cynical and cowardly.

And it's hardly like Israel is the only unpalatable regime we formalize and prop up to serve what are estimated to be greater foreign police interests.

I agree that we shouldn't shame someone in that situation.

But the counterfactual still exists -- if Biden loses, that means Trump wins. And under Trump, things will be far worse. If we're calling Biden genocidal for taking a cynical and cowardly approach to the conflict, then I am not even sure what word can possibly be extreme enough to describe the guy who actively wants all Muslims and Arabs dead.

I fundamentally disagree with the view that your vote is some signal of deep personal convictions. Voting should always be strategic. The more strategic, the better. That's also why how you vote in the presidential election as a resident of California can be VERY different from how you vote as a resident of Georgia. I'd love to see a significant number of people in places like New York and Colorado voting third party in protest -- because it's not going to be enough to influence outcomes in that race, but may have a real and positive effect on future politics.

I just want everyone to think very, very carefully about what the counterfactuals are. In all things.

What a fucking disappointment this guy is turning out to be compared to all the love he got on his campaign. Not that I'd prefer Oz by any means, but it's still pretty crushing.

I'm increasingly sure that the rising tide of never-Biden-ers is going to send Trump back into the White House. People need to be pragmatic and strategic about their voting and encourage others to do the same. So I understand WHY he felt a need to say stupid shit like this.

But if you're not allowed to criticize Biden without being banished to Siberia, then he's actually insufficiently different from Trump.

I'd bet Biden would not agree with Fetterman's message. He's not a whiny little thin-skinned gremlin the way Trump is. Based on his political career, he can even update platforms and change policy based on that feedback. So yeah, lay down the criticism to him re: Israel, he deserves it, and enough voices might actually change the foreign policy here. Do not tell the critics their votes aren't welcome. Their votes are still needed. And hopefully they're smart enough to know that NOT voting for Biden will create even worse outcomes, even while they continue clearly and loudly speaking up.

Specifically, the point is to create so much dysfunction in the public school system that it eventually collapses. Then, they can instead fund Christian Madrasas instead.

The most charitable read is that it's an attempt to build hype among powerusers by letting them own a piece of it.

In a vacuum, that's actually kind of nice.

A less charitable reading is that they're targeting the users who have flukes and blowholes to try and get even more money from them as part of a media campaign to make it seem like they truly value those users.

They believe in an inviolable right to life for every person.

Unless that would require offering social services. Or unless that person is probably a bad boy they want executed. Or unless the person scared them in which case it's fine to shoot them dead. Or unless the person isn't straight and cisgendered. Or unless the person has done anything at all to offend the sensibilities of the tribe.

Or unless the pregnancy is their own.

As a rule, the only single statistic that is clearly correlated with homelessness is the delta between the prevailing wage and the prevailing rent in a geographic area. You can basically predict a city's homelessness rate by the affordability of housing. Sure, people try and cite all kinds of other things. They'll say it has to do with weather, with mental health, with drug use, with available social services. But there's also statistics that basically confound these kinds of measures so badly you can reasonably claim them to be falsified. Homelessness is, above all else, an effect of housing unaffordability. Anyone who talks about the issue who tries to pretend ANY other issue matters more than lack of affordable housing is suspect. You may or may not think this sounds insightful, but the truth is that the gulf between prevailing wages and prevailing rent is really just a measure of how painful it is to get a residence in an area -- so of COURSE homelessness increases with it.

Meanwhile, MOST US cities have laws, rules, and processes set up that reduce housing supply, either intentionally or as an obvious consequence. Policies that objectively make no sense.

Labyrinthine and unreasonable permitting processes. The slow death squeeze of the local builder by national firms that churn out giant, expensive, ticky-tacky homes. Redlining-era restrictive zoning rules that prevent sensible infill. Mandatory parking minimums based on voodoo 'science' that can make it flatly impossible to build dense housing (even in bikeped or transit-connected neighborhoods). The gradual death of the local bank, forcing ALL projects to fit standard national finance paper products that may not work or make sense in your city. Lack of regulation on the rental market or incentivization of owner-occupancy. Lack of said bikeped and transit connections, which de facto increases costs by forcing residents to own, maintain, and use cars for all their trips.

I absolutely think labor organization is a big way to fight back against homelessness because improving bottom-line prevailing wages is going to be a way to fight back against homelessness -- but no single solution will do the job on its own. And most of the best solutions for this can actually start super local -- they don't need national or even state elections to go a certain way, they just need local politicians to listen. You, as an individual, can email, call, or show up to MPO/council meetings and move the needle on a lot of these.

If you want to, you can start with something like the Strong Towns action lab to view guides, advice, and script-like documents for what to actually do and say at these meetings.

Nah bro, you are.

It's ALSO possible to generate virtual phone numbers for a small cost.

Using a cryptographic PoW is a different small cost.

Either way, it only takes a small cost to prevent mass bot registration.

You're treating processing power and time as if it is 100% free just because it can be done in a VM. But it doesn't matter if it is a VM. It is still going to require at least some certain threshold of processor time, and that processor time has a real cost. For the kind of place that can just spin up thousands of VMs and use it to do massive bot registration... they could just be mining bitcoins instead.

It's not just whether you can do this. It's how much value it has vs what ELSE you could be doing with the time and energy. A Signal account is already worth vanishingly little as a spam tool, they just need to give it enough of a cost to make it not worthwhile.

I still cannot comprehend their logic for why having full SMS integration would be such a disaster. It just makes no sense and I wish they'd admit that it isn't a security concern but is just that they don't want to do it. They just don't want to, and don't care that this policy makes it harder for users to adopt and use their service.

I know that SMS is a US-specific thing. But at least in the US, most people regularly interact with SMS. Having a platform that supports SMS means you can basically live in that platform -- this is a major part of the success of iMessage.

The idea that it would create huge security gaps... I just don't believe. I think the kind of user who wants to be on Signal clearly understands that SMS is not secure. All they need to do is have a clear visual indication when you are texting instead of using Signal, which isn't that complex.

Instead, people like me who might try using it as their primary platform just see no point. None of my friends use it. So why should I even have it installed? And none of my friends see a reason to install it because I and everyone else don't have it installed. If I could use it as my SMS app I might have it installed and lived-in, which greatly lowers that barrier.

But they do produce smaller cheaper cars that can follow those emissions standards - for markets like Germany or the Netherlands. They just refuse to go through the process of certifying and selling those same vehicles in the US market.

Not to be all tinfoil hat, but I think they have a gentleman's agreement to just not be competitive like that in the US market because they can get away with it. Because the US consumer is gullible and our Regulators are asleep at the wheel.