Yep, and if you’re a real techbro, you start off by making the offering great. But then, you gradually enshittify it. Popups start coming up that ask her to consent to things she doesn’t really want forever, on unconscionable terms, but at first there is a ‘Yes’ or ‘Not now’ option. Behind the scenes, there are terms saying you can change the terms any time you like, and her only option is to leave within 14 days, and it is her responsibility to monitor the terms and stop using it if she doesn’t agree. You start silently changing the terms to allow you to opt her in by default to consent to things she doesn’t want. She opts out, so you change the terms again so she has no choice. All the while the service gets worse - but what’s she going to do, she’s locked in.

And that sort of thing is why working for companies known for doing the equivalent of the above but to the public is not going to get a good reaction.

But I also think he did really believe in electric cars and solar power

Musk is very good at separating wealthy investors from their money. Said investors are not entirely stupid - but Musk has historically been very skilled at cultivating a perception that he’s going to do something revolutionary that will change the world and make his investors rich, if only investors would give him money. You know, that he can colonise mars, build fully self-driving (on motorways) cars by 2015, and build a practical LA to SF hyperloop.

To con investors he was an amazing futurist, there needed to be a grain of truth mixed in there, even if there were other significant logical gaps in his claims. I don’t believe he genuinely cared about the planet or other people, but he did see (as many people were, in fact, already screaming) that change was coming and decide he could sell it to investors and enrich himself.

Pretending to be an amazing engineer and to care was his modus operandi for a long time - perhaps the most notable incident was in the 2018 Tham Luang cave incident in Thailand; Musk pledged to put engineers on inventing a submarine to rescue them. When Tesla’s design was unlikely to work, but a heroic team of divers rescued the children, instead of expressing relief the children were safe, Musk labelled the rescuer a ‘pedo’, showing that he never really cared and it was just a stunt.

The Dunning-Kruger paper was later discredited because, ironically, Dunning & Kruger thought they were better at statistics than they actually were!

There is a dark triad of personality disorders that often occur together: psychopathy (lack of empathy for others), Machiavellianism (manipulative) and narcissism. High narc people boast they are the greatest even if they are pretty terrible (but it’s not Dunning-Kruger because even if miraculously a high narc person became mediocre instead of poor at something they claim they are good at, they’ll still think they are good rather than reflecting on what they now know they don’t know).

Imagine if you were someone with no moral scruples and a lust for making more money than you ever need, and you somehow become the US president. How can you make lots of money off the position without being so blatantly corrupt that you actually end up in jail?

Well, you have the power to make decisions, decisions which drastically affect things like the oil price. You could monetise this small time by making bets on prediction markets, or maybe buying futures low and selling high, but that’s a higher risk strategy after you lose the presidency and has limits to how much you can make.

To think bigger, you could leverage the retail petrol industry. Normal participants buy wholesale and sell quickly at retail prices aligned to the replacement cost of what they are selling. They don’t usually stockpile large amounts, because they have no insight into what oil prices will do, and don’t want to take the risk. But if you are the president, you can influence that price, so you have a a strategy no one else has to profit big: drive the prices down through government actions, build up a large reserve wholesale while the prices are low, and when your reserve is full, drive up oil prices (antagonising another country into disrupting oil transport will do, for example). Your competitors put up their prices, and you undercut them and sell your reserves at a price significantly higher than what you paid, but less than your competitors are paying to replace their reserves.

You keep the level of your reserves, and your next move secret (refill reserves at the current higher price and try to drive prices even higher, or drain reserves, then lower prices with a fig leaf deal to the country you antagonised, refill reserves, and then drive higher again). This way, competitors can’t copy your strategy and reduce your profits, and they lose while you get richer.

Of course, all this is net destroying value for the world and your country as a whole - you are shrinking the pie, but none of that matters because you yourself get a much larger slice, and who cares about anyone else?

The quotes from the business owners in that article who feel so entitled to not pay their staff a living wage and then blame their customers for not making up the shortfall are infuriating: “If they don’t receive any tips, it’s impossible to survive in the service industry”, “It’s just to protect our staff”. Well if you really care about the waitstaff getting paid a living wage, how about this, pay them a living wage and stop trying to blame your customers for a problem you created.

Of course, part of the problem is that they don’t want to advertise the true cost - they want to advertise a price that is lower than the actual price, and then say stuff like the above to guilt their customers into paying more than the advertised price. With their competitors doing the same, it’s a race to the bottom dynamic. So the real solution is for the local government to: 1) require businesses to advertise the actual total amount of cash customers will have to hand over and not some misleading number, with enforcement if businesses mislead, 2) set a livable minimum wage, with no exceptions, and serious and well enforced penalties for employers that steal wages. If they did both of those things, then the problem would likely solve itself quickly.

Hmm, it seems like it was perhaps not engineered for large numbers of pedestrians, but it still seems like the article is a bit hyperbolic (that said, I’m an Australian and don’t know the area, and am going off things like Google Street View and maps).

It looks like there is a road, “Patterson Plank Road”, that actually has a footpath, and has a speed limit of 40 (presumably miles per hour, so 64 kph - about the same speed as most arterial roads in Australian suburbs), and connects to the local area. Then there is a “Rd A Plaza” that seems to go around the outside of the complex, that has a footpath for most of the way, up until there are vehicle barriers. From that point, there is a wide grass verge that looks relatively well drained, and runs all the way to the start of the car park (which presumably has to be walkable to the actual entrance). It would take crossing a 4 lane road that seems to mainly serve the stadium, and isn’t well engineered for pedestrians (no pedestrian refuge islands or anything) - but people do that all the time in Australia and areas are still considered walkable.

Now if the intent is to make it harder to access on foot specifically so they can increase profits (create a problem for people and then sell them the solution), then it is possible they’ll throw up more obstacles. I think Americans might be much more tolerant of what is called ‘drip pricing’ in Australia (and is illegal), where a low initial price is presented, but then lots of additional unavoidable expenses are presented (see also, some American retailers apparently exclude taxes from pricing, many Amercian hospitality providers underpay waitstaff and then demand that customers pay a ‘tip’ or ‘service fee’ that wasn’t reflected in the menu price, and so on). In Australia, the law that is for sales to consumers, the total price has to be displayed up front at least as prominently as any other price - so unavoidable additional charges from the same (or a related) company wouldn’t fly.

deleted by creator

Attacking a military ship is generally not a war crime (as defined by international law such as the Geneva treaties, Rome Statute etc…). It is an act of war (same as invasion or bombardment of another country), and is likely to see retaliation by the attacked country.

Aggression (i.e. unprovoked acts of war) is against the Charter of the United Nations, which also includes the International Court of Justice as a dispute resolution mechanism. It is up to the United Nations Security Council (at which the US has a veto) to authorise enforcement of ICJ rulings.

If a nation is acting to protect another nation facing aggression from the US, it would be legal for the attack US military ships. The reason why they wouldn’t would more be that it would likely bring counter-retaliation from the US.

Liberal by itself is an ambiguous term, so it’s generally best to prefix it with another word / prefix to clarify.

e.g. Neoliberal / Classical liberal - aligned to what I think parent post is saying. Implies economic right. Socially liberal - probably what the GP post means, meaning in favour of social liberties. Can be associated with economic left (usually coupled with positive protection of social liberties) or the economic right (e.g. libertarianism - usually believe government shouldn’t trample social liberties, but businesses can). Liberal is also a political party in many countries - e.g. in Australia it is a (declining, but formerly in power) right-wing party.

That said, I believe most wars are started for reasons of cronyism / crony capitalism, to distract from issues or project an image for the leader and/or for reasons of nationalism, and politicians from all sides will give an insincere pretext aligned to the politics people expect them to have.

So back in 1994 my neighbours and I agreed that I’d give them my anti-theft fog cannons, as long as they promise not to steal my stuff.

Then in 2014 they sent some buddies in to burgle my place, and got away with a chunk of my stuff - and I know it was said neighbour behind it, because they now openly claim what was taken is theirs (of course, I never agreed with them on that).

Then since February 2022 they’ve started regularly burgling my place - in the first few weeks, they tried to take literally everything, but fortunately I hired good security guards and they only got away with about 20% of my stuff (including what they stole in 2014).

I’ve been trying to make arrangements for a monitored alarm system that will bring in a large external response if more burglaries happen, but the security company doesn’t want to take it on the contract while a burglary is in progress - but they did sell me some gear. I’m still working on getting the contract.

They say they’ll stop trying to burgle my place as long as I promise not to ever get a monitored burglar alarm, to officially sign over the property they’ve already stolen and to stop trying to get it back, stop buying stuff to protect my property from the monitored security company, and that I fire most of my security guards.

Do you think this is really their end game, or if I agree, do you think they’ll just be back burgling more as soon as I make those promises, with fewer security guards and stuff to protect my house? After all, I did have an agreement with them back in 1994 and they didn’t follow that.

That doesn’t work as a defence in common-law jurisdictions (at least), because all participants who deliberately participate in a crime are considered equally guilty of it.

I’d say this is not a strategy to avoid prosecution, but more the brazen acts of individuals who don’t fear prosecution.

I suspect anything about heaven was likely to manipulate religious voters into voting for him.

Most likely, he is envious of other US presidents like Obama who were given a Nobel Peace Prize. For the whole ‘Board of Peace’ thing, he likely also sees it as a way to manipulate into becoming something of a world dictator who sits above world leaders.

There is a thing called the ‘Dark Triad’ of personality traits, consisting of Psychopathy (lack of empathy for others / celebration of others suffering / impulsive), Narcissism (thinking of oneself as superior) and Machiavellianism (manipulating others, seeking revenge etc…) - and they often occur together in the same person. The dark triad is correlated positively with jealousy - and dark triad people consider themselves superior to peers (even when evidence points the other way) and deserving of recognition. They are vindictive towards people who get in the way of what they think they deserve.

Maybe they figure if you can’t fix the form to make it submit, you wouldn’t be up to their standard :-)

I think there is some value to MBFC, even though there are also cases where it is problematic - I don’t think a blanket rule would be right.

The issues (& mitigating factors):

• Some of the ‘mostly analytics’ sources still have ‘bias by omission’ problems or misleading headlines, even if the facts in the articles are accurate. But I think on the fediverse, we aren’t beholden to algorithms or their editorial choices in terms of the balance of what we see, so the impact of this is limited.
• Opinion pieces have a place, although arguably not on World News. At the very least, factual pieces from outlets that also publish opinion have a place. But MBFC downrates outlets for having an opinion at all even when clearly labelled as such.
• The attempt to categorise every bias on a left to right scale when really there are so many dimensions any bias could be along isn’t as helpful.

So I’d suggest:

• Only mentioning it when an outlet has a history of publishing things that are factually incorrect (or there is reasonable doubt over it). Not every fact can be verified from first principles (and sadly often articles don’t name their primary sources - in a better world having no source would reduce credibility, but it is often hard to find articles that meet the well-sourced bar). People deliberately muddying the waters create think-tanks to cite with fake facts, fake scientific journals, and cite other unreliable sources - fact checking often requires on the ground investigation, asking reliable experts, and so on; it is simply impossible to be in expert in everything you read in the news to spot well-executed fake news. I think of the approach like a tree - there are experts in an area who can genuinely apply critical analysis to decide if something is fact or bogus. But there are also bogus experts. Then there are aggregators of facts (journals and think-tanks, etc…) that try to only accept things reviewed by genuine experts. But there are also bogus aggregators. Then there are journalists and outlets that further collect things from genuine aggregators and experts, and refine them. But there are also bogus outlets. Sites like MBFC try to act like a root to the tree and help you identify the truthful outlets, who have a good record of relying on truthful aggregators, who rely on truthful experts.
• The left / right bias part means very little - I’d suggest ignoring it if you’re looking at a single article.
• Any of the higher tiers of factual reporting should be fine and not worth a mention.

If there are reliable sources countering some facts, posting those instead of (or as well as) complaining about the source is probably better.

The US for years kept the screwworm from spreading back into Panama by maintaining a virtual wall of sterile flies across the Darién Gap, which was a cheap way to protect all of North America.

But then stupid MAGA politics came along, put idiots in charge, and they decided that they’d rather try to protect the Mexico-US border and not give Mexico and Panama the incidental benefit, rather than protecting a smaller border that happened to help other countries. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/we-once-rid-the-us-of-this-nasty-parasite-now-it-could-be-coming-back/ar-AA1DKRSV has some information about how it became a problem again.

The terminology in Aus / NZ is pet (owned by people) vs stray (socialised around people but not owned) vs feral (not socialised to people).

Generally speaking, pets & strays like people - they’ve been handled as a kittens. Pets can become strays and vice versa. But feral cats (past being a kitten) will never become stray / pet (and vice versa) - it is only the next generation that can be raised differently.

While the article is defining feral cats as any cat that isn’t a pet, in reality the vast majority of what it is talking about are truly feral cats - nothing like a house cat.

With the added complication that it’s unlikely that Mangione actually killed anyone - someone killed someone in favour with the Magats, so by their logic, someone has to be killed to send a message.

Like how likely is the story that someone (who looked nothing like the surveillance photos released at the time) was called in by restaurant staff, and despite having allegedly travelled a long distance from the scene of the crime, and many opportunities to destroy everything, had a manifesto confessing to the crime, and the murder weapon still on him? Despite him having no prior inclination towards that sort of thing even?

Hopefully any jury has good critical thinking skills and can see through an obvious set up.

Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan described it as “obsolete” and said it “completely misrepresents Amazon’s current water usage strategy”.

Interesting that they don’t say in which direction it misrepresents (is it saying it is too high or too low). Maybe they are hoping the reader will infer from what they are saying that they’re using less now, without them having to say that.

They are not wrong that Israel is radicalised. However, peace is a process, and what will lead to an enduring peace is actually more important than what is just.

If Israel was actually willing to reconcile and treat Palestinians as equals, the South African model of truth & reconciliation (including amnesty for abuses in exchange for full disclosure of what happened), it wouldn’t be just for the victims, but it would allow both sides to move on peacefully.

The real problem is that Netanyahu, Smoltrich, Ben Gvir etc… don’t actually want peace, so even a neutral truth & reconciliation is currently unlikely to happen without their backers (especially the US) forcing them.

While someone’s political beliefs are highly multi-dimensional, there are two axes that are commonly used to define where someone sits:

• Economy - Left is favouring social responsibility for people receiving economic support (supporting people to meet their basic needs is everyone’s collective responsibility), while right is favouring individual responsibility (meeting your basic needs is your responsibility, and if you die because you can’t, even if it is due to something outside of your control, tough luck).
• Social liberties - Social Libertarian is favouring individual decisions on anything not related to the economy / rights of others, while Social Authoritarianism supports government restrictions on social liberties.

Since there are independent axes, there are four quadrants:

• Socially liberal, Economic left - e.g. Left Communism, Social Democrat, most Green parties, etc…
• Socially authoritarian, Economic left - e.g. Stalin, Mao. Tankie is a slang term for people in this quadrant.
• Socially liberal, Economic right - Sometimes called libertarian. Some people with this belief set call themselves Liberal in some countries.
• Socially authoritarian, Economic right - e.g. Trump. Sometimes called conservatives.

That said, some people use tankie as cover for supporting socially authoritarian, economic right but formerly economic left countries(e.g. people who support Putin, who is not economically left in any sense).