Re: Land of the Free
All remaining provisions of USA PATRIOT Act expired in 2020.
Doesn't mean some of them weren't snuck into some form of reincarnation under even more sinister things like FISA.
799 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2022
It will set in when a precedent is set: Ts & Cs which it is impractical for a reasonable person to comprehend in the interval between being shown them and being asked to accept them are void. Ts & Cs that you actively have to seek out else not shown, with the option to just press an "Accept" button, likewise void.
Foolishly, I followed you to Dublin
Like a ghost I walked the streets of Temple Bar
And all the bright young things were throwing up their Guinness in the gutters
And once I thought I saw you from afar.
Now I'm in a nightclub in Helsinki
And they're playing La Vida Loca, once again,
And I can't believe I'm dancing to this crap but I'm a chance here
And every fucking city sounds the same.
- Every Fucking City, Paul Kelly
(Okay, so Temple Bar's the other side of the Liffey...)
Every Australian employer is obliged to put a fraction (currently 11%, up to a limit of $27500/year) of each employee's wages into a retirement superannuation fund which becomes accessible to the employee when they retire. This has been the case since the early 90s.
The funds under management as a result of this scheme reached AUD3.5 trillion in 2022.
Unisuper started as the industry fund for tertiary education. They are the 5th-biggest such fund and the $120b mentioned in the article is in AUD.
For the time being, the court has said that as long as the footage remains visible anywhere, then X is in violation of the instruction from the AU government to take down the graphic violence. The court found that geoblocking was an inadequate response, because VPN circumvention is easily accessible.
Interestingly, X tried to avert an interim injunction by arguing that it was 2am in San Francisco and that their lawyer had not had sensible instructions from their client.
There has been no argument from X to the court claiming that keeping the footage visible in Australia is justifiable. Allegedly attempted murder is fine for everyone in the world to see, as long as it doesn't happen where you live.
X basically live-streamed the attempted murder of a religious leader from a notoriously religiously sensitive geographic region. It was then one of the main rumour distribution networks for the messages that provoked the riot that followed. During that riot dozens of police cars were vandalised and paramedics had to shelter in place for more than three hours.
This is a public order issue, not a free speech issue. Famously there is no legal right to shout "fire" in a crowded building. Free deliveries of petrol to people in a burning building whether they want it or not is wrong and stupid.
Musk is loudly proclaiming his right to be wrong and stupid. $750k/day fine is a good start to remedying that. Long may he fight. X might be good at dodging compulsory taxation, but they look to be rubbish at avoiding the voluntary ones.
He can have his $56b but it has to be in the form of new equity in the Tesla company.
If shareholders really think he's worth it they won't object. If he's really worth it, everyone will get what they want. And if he's a posturing egotist about to deflate like a bad soufflé, they can all lose their fictitious wealth together.
Erm, it's tidally locked to the Earth. That's why the face of the man in the moon always looks at us and the really cratery bit is the half that faces away from us.
At a point on the lunar surface there's a sunrise and sunset, once per lunar month, but Earth just sort of hovers in the same place in the sky, nutating a little because of the elliptical orbit and tidal precession.
Apollo astronauts only saw Earthrise when they were in orbit around the moon, not when they were on it.
Crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried's conviction was expedited by the cooperation of the chief software engineer at his FTX crypto exchange, prosecutors have revealed
sounds better at trial than
Crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried's crimes were enabled by the cooperation of the chief software engineer.
Doesn't mean they're not both true. Someone who didn't listen to their conscience is listening to their lawyer.
The $250k valuation was what taxi licenses were rumoured to change hands for between investors prior to the intervention of Uber and the like.
It was actually an investment strategy for some, buying some of the finite supply of taxi licenses, usually from state governments at about $20k a pop, and hiring drivers to do the actual work - at pay rates not much better than what Uber delivers to their drivers now. In some cases, they were people's life savings and job security rolled into one.
The class action was to settle the perceived destruction of value those investors and owner/operators suffered.
What's interesting is that Uber has chosen to settle rather than have the internal office discussions of the illegality of their strategy to pry their way into a regulated market aired in open court. At one point they were paying fines of nearly $2k for any driver who scored a ticket from an inspector; they were running "ghost cars" in the neighbourhood of the taxi inspectorate so that the inspectors who were trying to catch them at their illegality would never find a real Uber car, and they were blacklisting / ghosting devices if they suspected they had been used to prove Uber was operating illegally.
Now they claim their local operations don't make a profit, so they don't pay tax. Funny how well those Irish / Dutch / BVI subsidiaries are doing, though.
Don't say it too loud, they might hear you! That said, they'd keep the money and escalate their support fees.
Exponential support fees, firing the quality control department, mandatory hardware upgrades, the difficulty of creating an account without an online subscription... all point to the the same conclusion.
Micros~1's business model is to charge you rent on a computer you already own.
And fair enough, too. If you do a crime all on your lonesome, you get the punishment. If you find some other person to help you who but for your solicitation would not have helped, and enabled your crime, extra punishment is fully in order. Your accomplice might already have been criminally-minded, but you helped make them a criminal.
I thought that too, when I received a bill for about a year's worth of gas supply in summer, when I basically don't use gas.
I had already done my own meter-read and got a refund from the utility company by the time I realised my mistake: the first 100MJ (or something) of gas are the most expensive, then an intermediate tariff for 100-500MJ, then the cheapest rate was for usage 500MJ+ per billing period. So by paying for gas I hadn't used yet, I was buying the most expensive gas in advance at the cheapest rate.
The winning strategy therefore becomes: pay what looks like an exorbitant bill for gas I haven't used yet in summer, then get a negative bill the next billing period and use the credit on the account to pay for the gas in the winter when it's expensive and I actually use it.
This strategy becomes possible because I realised the gas company can't be arsed to do an actual meter-read more than one or twice a year, and because of the time of year that they do the actual meter-read, their extrapolated estimate of my consumption is based on winter usage, not average usage, let alone summer (non-)usage.
Oh, and I'll heat my house with solar powered reverse cycle AC which is free, even in winter.
Sometimes safe distances are higher than that.
I have treated a man for electrical injuries who was working on an 11kV power pole on a drizzly day, after a dust storm the day before. Leaning against the wood of the pole was enough for him to complete the circuit with the layer of electrically conductive mineral mud that now coated the outside of the pole. He was standing on the ground, easily 10m from the conductors.
Correct response though, full marks, to the person who sent the tar-box back as a biohazard. Some jobs are inherently dangerous, but not that one.
"Sorry sir, the carcinogens that broke your Apple box are yours, because you put them there. You'll have to remove them before I can do anything to help you."
Workplace Edvard Munch moments can be fun in retrospect, and how we deal with them makes them more so.