Because they make more money than they’re paying in fines. They also may be making more money violating laws than they’re paying in fines, but that’s how they’ll have to determine how they conduct business.

Basically - and this is mostly for tech but I suspect it applies to other markets - the US is the single largest market. “Europe” is second, depending on how you want to define it, but even just the EU is a very big market. China is big and growing, and most companies are trying their best to keep growth there. Asia collectively could be huge, but the attempts to collectivize Asia have not worked out well, historically speaking.

But the takeaway is that a company will exit s market if it’s losing money, generally speaking. No one is sacrificing earnings to make sure Belgians have access to the latest phones out of the goodness of their hearts.

I’m going to assume that OP and most people posting here know the difference between trans and drag. Some drag queens are trans, most are LGBT, some are straight. But trans women are women.

Trans persons - at least many of them - mostly want to pass and have their identity accepted. This goes for trans men and trans women. And most people would like to be seen as attractive.

The truth is though that you might just be into trans women. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the community is generally aware of and quite wary of “chasers.” Those are people that fetishize trans persons.

The difference between being attracted to trans women and being a chaser is whether you see the person as an individual or as a class. Think about white guys who are really into Asian women or black men. On the one hand, it’s fine to have different tastes and perceptions of beauty. The fetishization occurs when the individuality of the person becomes less important than the fetishized quality.

I want to be clear. I do not blame Ghana’s people for these laws. I do not blame Africans for the many nations that have enacted similar laws.

Christian church organizations, acting under the rubric of evangelical outreach or even more offensively charitable giving have backed religious and political leaders with LGBT-phobic agendas up to and including execution for being gay. Of course they’re going to do it - they get power and money for doing so.

The US needs to extend the Logan Act to apply to these situations and make the crime a felony that can lead to the arrest of the people involved and the legal dissolution of the organizations.

Fascism. It’s fascism.

Economic and social collapse dislocates a lot of people. It dislocates people who think they shouldn’t be dislocated, because they played by the rules. They go to church, they had a job, they’re patriotic to their best understanding of the word.

Then, in their minds, something must have changed. It might be the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or weirdly drag queens for some reason this time around. Then someone comes along who validates them as victims and promises a return to their historical glory days.

The last paroxysm is the election or ascendency of a far right populist who elevates that narrative. They promise to restore national pride and return to traditional values, and to return the nation to its roots which had made it strong and put them on top.

It’s happened multiple times around the world, and there are a lot of books and articles on how and why it happens.

Also, this is literally their job. The surprising bit would be if US intel services weren’t doing a thing about a Russian invasion of an independent European nation.

I mean, sure, if a Trumpist gets offended by it because they want the fascists to win, I get how they’d get in a bind, but other than electing Trump and making sure fascism becomes the rule of the day around the world, I’m not sure what they expect to expect.

It wasn’t, really. We need to stop attributing some kind of infinite foresight and wisdom to the authors of the constitution. The Supreme Court was a bad idea poorly implemented, the senate as the superior house was a fucking terrible idea, and the independent executive is not defensible at this point.

The authors (who, let’s remember, were working with a 17th century philosophy on the nature of humankind that has since been discredited) were operating on entirely different premises, for an entirely different country, and balancing things like slavery and freedom and democracy versus rule by the elite (the elite were justified to rule by their identity as being elites) by trying to come to a middle ground compromise on those and related issues. It’s really kind of crap by modern democratic, political, and philosophical standards. The only reason it hasn’t been addressed is that we’ve become self-aware enough that we’re terrified that US democracy has fallen to the point that we could only do worse than 18th century slaveholders, landlords, and wealthy lawyers.

To make it explicit, the authors thought that a) the rich would put the country’s interests ahead of their own, b) that selfishness would mean people wanted to protect their branch of government rather than their party, and c) that part b would be a sufficient bulwark against demagoguery. They believed in a world where men (and I mean men, specifically, and rich men in particular) were rational actors who would act in their own self-interest.

Don’t get me wrong - they were reading the scholars of their time - but if political and social science hasn’t made advances in the past three centuries we should probably just give it up.

Please keep in mind that these books should be acceptable by the school and approachable by students who would be unlikely to accept or read very progressive material, so themes that strongly (just strongly) contradict Western narratives should be avoided.

This made me hesitate, but then I decided that you’re more than capable of reading a summary or skimming a book and deciding whether or not it makes a fit.

Let me start with some obvious ones:

• Orientalism by Edward Said

• A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

• 90% of Chomsky’s work

• 21 Things They Don’t Teach You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. Chang is an economist who I believe studied under the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. They both research the economies of developing countries, with Chang having a specialization in South Korea. He accused developed countries of “kicking away the ladder” when they force the Washington Consensus on developing economies while having violated those norms as their own economies developed.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - There’s a lot wrong with the book but it does make for an effective deconstruction of the myth of western cultural superiority by proposing a physical/geographical explanation.

Better than GGS would be any book by David Graeber, who for my money was the greatest anthropologist of our time and who brings a radical preconception of some of the most treasured but false narratives in the development of western history and capitalism. Debt is his most famous work, I think, but I’d especially recommend The Dawn of Everything.

Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson - the best bio of Che that I’ve read, but it’s really, really long. Maybe just watch Motorcycle Diaries and Even The Rain (which is about modern and even liberal colonialism but not Che).

Anything about James Baldwin

The Social Conquest of the Earth by EO Wilson. Wilson was the biologist who founded the field of sociobiology and who towards the end of his career came to the conclusion that its because humans exhibit the highest levels of cooperation (eusociality) that we’ve come to dominate the planet, for better and for worse.

I realize that a lot of these are US centric, and I’ve left out virtually everything on LGBT history and culture, but I think this might be a good start.

I have a few honest questions for anyone who supports this kind of legislation.

First, what problem specifically is this trying to address? Have teen pregnancies gone up since the advent of kids being able to access porn on the internet? Kids with STDs? Sexual assaults on children? What specific metric has changed that makes this kind of legislation a priority right now? Is there a model that shows a correlation between the behaviors this legislation intends to address and the social ills you believe are associated with it?

Second is the related question of what metrics you think will improve with the introduction of this legislation? How long do you think it will take for that change to come about? If it does not, would you support removing this legislation?

Third, if a social ill were to be associated as per the above with online content, would you support similar legislation to regulate access (eg, if hate speech or LGBT-phobia posted online were to show a positive correlation with intolerance or violence), would you require online services to monitor access to sites hosting that kind of content, such as requiring a government issued ID to be kept on record and associated with specific user accounts?

I can’t say anything about Soylent but it might be a good substitute. I thought there was some kind of issue with them (I think their target market was the “code academy” types), but I might be misremembering.

However, I can recommend Boost. It has something like 100 more calories than Ensure, and like Ensure I can down a bottle in a single go.

I’m currently going through something similar (although I did mostly stop getting sick in the morning), and I’m toggling back and forth on the solid food thing. I’d be interested in learning more about your diagnostics.

The summarizer could do better by just copying over the entire text of the article. This was incoherent. Its only utility is for people who can’t or don’t click through.

You know how they say an infinite amount of monkeys in an infinite amount of time could produce the works of Shakespeare?

This is five monkeys in fifteen minutes.

Oh, that’s a fun one. By the actual Y2K I think I had already transitioned into a dot-commie (where it pretty much was ignored), but the run up was interesting. I was previously in a much more Office Space kind of situation. I was the hot new talent using modern technologies like Perl and Java, but virtually everyone else was writing cobol on green screens for an IBM midrange system, with many many hours dedicated to updating code to use four digit dates. These were the days when news channels were predicting airplanes would fall out of the sky, nuclear plants would melt down, and cash registers would stop working entirely. World ending chaos.

The people around me were doing basically the same job for 30 years. I don’t even know enough cobol to write a joke in it, but we’re not talking about Donald Knuth here. I’m talking about green screen terminals connected via token ring or some kind of crap like that.

This is when Gateway Computer stores were in shopping malls and came with stickers on the front boasting about how they were “Y2K compatible” and were upgradable so that 16 MHz 386SX was the last computer you’d ever need.

Getting old is fun, other than the back pain, organ failure, and that memory thing I can’t remember the name of.

I am an engineering manager at a FAANG company and I get that it was mostly in fun, but as a professional who does this for a living I just wanted to point out that not only were you wildly wrong, literally Elon Musk’s lived and executed experience proves you wildly wrong.

Yup. I went back into academia, then rotated between that, military, and government work. Now I’m waiting to see if the other shoe drops and I either sponge off my partner or buy a beach house in Mexico.

I’ve been working in tech in one form or another since about 1994 and even before that if you include “writing some software for some guy’s cash register.” I’ve been through a few of these. They suck, but two years from now it’ll be forgotten.

I’m not disputing their experiences - I’ve replied otherwise on this thread - but I’m going to guess that a lot of those experienced devs didn’t go through the 2000-2002 ish dot com crash, or maybe even the 2008 recession.

Sometimes the money goes away for a while. The money has currently gone away. Eventually they drop the interest rates, people decide that real estate or EVs aren’t sexy anymore because they’re overbought, and the money floods back in. Then it gets too much, to the point that some kid gets $60M for the idea of selling barbecues and charcoal over the internet, and the cycle repeats.

We thought Keynes fixed this but then decided it was more fun for a handful of people to make shitloads of money and then crash the economy every decade or two.

While you’re right that many tech companies overhired, they overhired into an increasing market. Multiple companies, including Twitter, then over-fired and ended up trying to get employees to boomerang or otherwise hire into positions that they cut. Other companies, like Apple, expanded but did not overhire, and as a result have not done mass layoffs.

I also have no idea how you come up with a 20 person IT department at every site when internet services companies live and breathe on IT services. Everything from data centers costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to making sure devs can commit code and that backups get made takes IT services. I’m not sure what industry you’re in but you’re vastly under-budgeting and setting yourself up for failure, exactly the same way Elon is doing. Elon managed to crash twitter’s valuation by a whopping 90% inside of a year. If the cuts he made were justified, the line would have gone in the other direction.

Content moderators and ad sellers are literally the entire point of having a company like Twitter. Curation is the product, and the ad buyers - not the users - are the ones paying the bills.

So, yes - companies hired because they needed to hit production targets during Covid that were not sustained by continued market levels post-pandemic. That’s always going to result in cuts.

But a lot of what we’re seeing right now is upper management/c-suite types seeing how close they can cut costs to the bone without it hitting the quarterlies as production falls off and reliability tanks, and just hoping to make it out the door before that happens.

grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room

To be fair, those are the normal TARDIS sounds.

On the other hand, Dr Who doesn’t have an engineering or SRE staff.

I’m going to go with the former because if it were the latter the Russians would know about it and wouldn’t be using it for anything other than browsing onlyfans.

You should probably look into the chemistry needed to do 2 H₂O -> 2H₂ + O ₂

Obviously the biggest problem is making sure you have an even number of water molecules.

Hint: It’s not because this idea never occurred to any of the scientists and engineers involved in hydrogen power.

This the order in which you should try to access papers:

1. Normal Internet search including quotes to force the title and components like “pdf”
2. Organizational/lab pages of the authors. Very many people will put either full papers or preprints on their personal professional pages.
3. Preprint services like arXiv. The ones you look at will be determined by subject area. Preprints will usually only differ from the published work in formatting.
4. Just email the authors. Most of us are so happy that virtually anyone wants to read the paper we spent months on that we will happily send a copy. Because people are busy you might need to hit them up a couple of times, but most will be more than happy to send you a copy, and most publications specifically carve out to allow authors to do that.