alexgieg

Which risks?

Mega corps have access to guaranteed bailout by governments as they're considered National Security concern, plus massive lobbying departments to buy all the laws they need to favor themselves over most potential competitors both external and internal, plus massive legal departments with experts at twisting the laws they didn't manage to buy yet into meaning whatever they want them to mean.

And after all that socialism-for-the-rich, any remaining risk is transferred directly to their employees in the form of lay offs, coupled with non-compete clauses that forbid the most competent, for months to years, from working at their core area of expertize, plus arbitration clauses that forbid them from seeking relief at the actual courts. Clauses that are enforced by the courts due to the aforementioned lobbying and purchased laws.

As I remember, Kagi's index isn't entirely its own. They do some crawling themselves, but they still rely heavily on purchasing search results from Microsoft and Google to complement their own.

Then please correct me on the above.

Are gated free speech zones a thing, and do Americans obey that? If no, what are the news talking about when they show those? If yes, why do Americans submit to this?

And is carrying guns into protests allowed? If not, why aren't all gun carriers arrested on the spot? If yes, how does it make sense to allow them, but not fireworks, and how are fireworks more dangerous than loaded guns, and worthy of jailing, prosecution and imprisonment, while guns aren't?

I'm not American and don't know much about how protests are done in the US. From my perspective what you describe sounds extremely weird, in a cultural shock kind of way. I mean, how is it that, in the US, one can carry actual guns, including military-grade weapons, to protests, but carrying fireworks, whose core purpose is to make loud noise to force people to pay attention to the protest, is forbidden?

This sounds to me _exactly_ as weird as when I watch on TV those little gated "free speech zones" American cities have been implementing and, even worse, protesters obediently limiting their protest to within he gated area, "conveniently" placed several blocks away from where the protest would be effective.

Weird. Very, very weird.

What the sentencing calls attempted murder, the defendants are describing as one of the protesters watching a police officer preparing to shoot another protester who was running away on their back, and thus shooting in the direction of the would-be cold blood murderer to prevent the assassination attempt. If this description is correct (a big if, but it seems the judge didn't care for examining the evidence), then it's something that wouldn't have happened at all weren't for actions of the officer himself.

As for explosives, the defendants say it was fireworks. Carrying fireworks at protests is common.

Many countries don't use SMS, they use WhatsApp, for almost everything, from chatting with family and friends, to business contacts, to talking with your bank manager, to medical appointments, to 2FA, and even to transfer money.

That's what prevents most people on those countries from having a dumb phone, and forces even the most illiterate of 90yo great-grandmothers to learn how to navigate around Android or iOS, all the while placing uncountable many calls to their great-grandchildren because they opened up some random app by accident and don't remember how to get back to the only thing that matters: WhatsApp (talking from experience here).

A WhatsApp-capable quasi-dumb-phone would be a godsend for such places, provided it's cheap enough. At $500 this one definitely isn't, not when an ultra-cheap Android smartphone capable of running WhatsApp costs $90. But if this one sells well, cheaper ones may become viable down the line due to economies of scale. I surely hope that happens.

Those are pre-requisites, but not enough.

You also need society to have local cultures, as well as the culture at large, that actively oppose such behavior as immoral and/or shameful, with enforcement by peers. This I say based on two well-proven models, the sociological typology of societies as guilt, shame, or fear-based, and the psychological model of the six stages (level of complexity) of moral reasoning, that shows that up to 85% of the adult population worldwide derive their values from group-affiliation.

Atop that, individuals themselves need hope in the future, meaning the perspective of improving upon the baseline that those pre-requisites provide, since a baseline is emotionally neutral. The perspective of remaining at exactly that same baseline year after year after decade isn't sufficient.

With all of the above provided, petty crime is minimized to the point only people with severe personality disorders commit them. There's no way to fix this, but it becomes so low we're now talking of Japan levels of per-capita crimes, if not less.

I noticed it as LLM-written by the middle of the second paragraph. The text is filled with classic rhetorical structures LLMs love making, especially the "it isn't X, it's Y" and "not A, not B, not C, but D" patterns.

I'd suggest cheap Android-based Chinese e-Ink e-readers if you want flexibility. My current one is a Bigme B6, which was for sale in my country a few months ago.

Their main advantage is providing access to all e-reading apps available on the Google Play Store, including Amazon's own Kindle app, as well as sideloaded ones such as KOReader.

On the downside, the battery life on those isn't as good as that of dedicated Kindles, Kobos, or other lightweight e-readers, but they still hold a charge for four or five days if one turns off their antennas, which is plenty of time to recharge them.

As for the ebooks themselves, I switched to purchasing from Kobo and other ebook stores. Some sell DRM-less ePubs, which is nice, while those that come with DRM can be easily liberated. And for the occasional Kindle-exclusive that is struck with (temporarily) unbreakable DRM, the Kindle app, although annoying, works well enough.

I checked the numbers. OpenOffice reports about 230,000 downloads a week. LibreOffice, in contrast, reports about 1,000,000 downloads a week. Those are both direct downloads from their respective websites, thus not counting Linux distributions, in which the default office suite is LibreOffice. AFAIK, no distribution comes with OpenOffice as its default; it's always LibreOffice.

I also checked Google Trends for the last 3 months, comparing LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. The first is searched on average 4.7 times more than the latter, which tracks with weekly download numbers.

From those numbers, I'd say it's pretty clear the name "LibreOffice" won quite decisively over "OpenOffice". OpenOffice is still used a lot, but nowhere close to LibreOffice, especially when we add Linux distributions counts.

That didn't use to be the case. In the US many laws were approved in the 1930s that forced businesses to keep stakeholders in mind, not just shareholders. That led the US to become the global powerhouse it became, and its middle class to boom. Then in the late 1970s came deregulation, and those laws were all reversed, resulting in the new two-class system Americans are learning to hate, a new robber barons era very reminiscent of the previous one.

Too bad most everyone is lost in the artificially engineered "culture war" to notice they have a common enemy, one who benefits from the proles fighting each other rather than uniting against them.

Thanks, that was quite informative!

This is an interesting point. Supposing this sudden shock happens, wouldn't American towns, counties, and the like, run to buy buses and start providing emergency bus services all around to all those suburban areas where people couldn't afford gas anymore? Or at least, this is how I imagine a sane response would be.

There'd be a shortage of buses at first, but I also suppose it'd relatively easy to adapt current North American car manufacturing plants to start manufacturing buses.

But that's just an uninformed guess. Am I too much off base in this?

Oil demand is mostly inelastic. No matter how much or how little is produced, those who need it NEED it, so they'll compete with all others who similarly need it. The richest ones from among them get the oil first, and the poorest get nothing. The end price ends up being a function of how much oil is available versus how much the richest countries' absolutely irreducibly need for oil is versus how much wealth those countries can throw at the problem not to be left without before someone else with deeper pockets gets it.

Chinese planning revolves around mastering a technology no matter the cost, then monopolozing the global market no matter the cost, then bankrupting existing foreigner competitors or entirely preventing them from arising in the first place no matter the cost, to only then caring about costs and to start profiting from it all.

Does that apply to websites full of CSAM, or that sell for-hire animal torture real-time streaming services, or that provide hitman hiring services, or...

No, you're in the companion of anti-vaxxers, an all-American conspiracy theory spreading globally that denies hard evidence in favor of vague feelings of maybe this and maybe that and maybe the other thing and OMG we're so afraid and what if...

It seems US citizens are quite divided on this, which suggests there's intense dissatisfaction with the law as is, and therefore the need to re-legislate the topic following the current will of the majority.

You said what happened to him was just. Most people I've seen have taken the position it was legal but unjust.

That isn't in the Quran though.

That's incorrect. There have been studies on this. In a few cases seeing depictions of violence causes an urge to act violently, but in the majority of people predisposed to violence it causes a reduction in that impulse, so on average there's a reduction.

The same has been shown to be the case with depictions of sexual abuse. For some it leads the person to go out and do it. For the majority of those predisposed to be sexual predators it "satisfies" them, and they end up causing less harm.

Presumably the same applies to pedophiles. I remember reading a study on this that suggested this to be the case, but the sample size was small so the statistical significance was weak.

In your view, is legality always and invariably the same as justice? In other words, are all laws just, and all that's just is codified as law?

Could you point to any center-right policy (what Americans call "the left") that attempts to force straight people to submit and go through gender operations?

See, that's the core difference. One side wants to leave people free to do as they please. The other side wants to control what the first does.

Yes, there are exceptions, on both sides. But they're this, exceptions.

The French government managed to rein in Amazon so traditional French stores, both online and brick and mortar ones, don't go bankrupt due to Amazon's unending pockets.

If they deem it necessary to rein in Google, they will rein in Google. There's no lack of tools for this, ranging from obliging phones sold in French territory to offer the French search engine as the default, to forcing every Google search result to promote the local search engine prominently, to campaigns about how it's important for national security not to rely on an adversary/enemy country's services, to everything in between and beyond.

I hope they're not going to be foisting their newfound vaccine skepticism[0] on the rest of the world.

Unfortunately they are spreading it. Everywhere US far-right propaganda touches, including via local branches of American Christian denominations, becomes an anti-vax vector.

Brazil is a prime example. We have here a copycat version of the US far-right in the form of Bolsonaro worshippers, aligned with Pentecostal and Neopentecostal churches, spreading anti-vax rhetorics all around social media, to the point it's influencing people outside their bubble.

The scamming problem is a fault of the government. It's trivial for a national government to make rules forcing banks to become able to reverse wrongful transactions. That'd stop scammers cold. If your government doesn't do this, and instead transfers the responsibility to the client, it's because the government doesn't care for the people.

The European Commission, as well as many individual countries, are starting to see that as a problem in need of urgent solving, as they've realized it's strategic suicide for a country to be dependent on the goodwill of the (potentially, now turned likely, and going for almost declared) enemy.

Good points. But notice that, if the overall unemployment rate is the same, and in one country there's higher unemployment rate for youth compared to another, this means in the other there's higher unemployment rate for older workers compare to the first. The question then becomes: which is worse, more unemployed youth people, or more unemployed mature/elder people?

I'd argue more unemployed mature/elder is worse. Mature people in an at-will system don't become younger over the years to start finding better and better opportunities, rather their prospects become worse as time goes by. Conversely, young people become mature and find more and more opportunities as they age, so long-term not-at-will systems favor everyone, at the cost of making the start more difficult.

In both the corresponding difficulties can be reduced via welfare. But at-will systems tend, or at least it seems so to me, I may be wrong in this, to provide worse welfare, which may add weight to the comparison.

OP here.

True, if you prove they're in fact a completely underperforming employee. Notice this is not only for the position they're in at the moment, but for every other conceivable position they might be reassigned to before the conclusion becoming it's impossible to keep them and the company positively, absolutely, needs to hire someone else for their place.

For absolute unfireability, there are countries where government employees cannot be fired no matter what, but that's not private employment so it doesn't count for your question.

The closest to that for private employers, that I know about, was Japan before the 1990's economic crisis, in which the culture (not the laws, but the culture was strong enough for it to be the same in practice) prevented companies from firing employees. If an employee became useless, the company assigned them a desk and nothing to do. After a few weeks of this the not-fired employee felt so ashamed of being paid for doing nothing 8 hours a day, they themselves asked to be let go (which was also the expected cultural thing for them to do, so they did it).

Regardless, the point is that at-will employment vs not-at-will employment doesn't affect things as much as it seems to do. And if you look at statistic comparing US States that don't have at-will employment vs those that have it, there's no practical difference either.

You're uninformed. France has that, and it doesn't result in excessive unemployment; in fact, the unemployment rates in France and in the US are practically the same, respectively 7.5% vs. 7.8%.

What changes between the countries is the hiring procedure.

US and UK companies mostly use a "hire anyone, keep the slightly useful ones for as long as they seem slightly useful, fire everyone else, fire them too, wash, rinse, repeat" narcissistic-sociopathic trial-and-error pseudo-method that's just guesswork dressed up as "choice".

French companies, and those in countries with similar preferences, take their time to very seriously vet the people they're hiring with a focus on the long term, and do it right from the start, following scientific hiring methodologies that leave little to no space for guesswork and gut feelings.

The result for the company is the same: the proper employee, at the proper position, doing the proper job the company needs.

The result for the employee is that the first "method", being as it is narcissistic-sociopathic, promotes unnecessary human suffering with zero actual benefit to anyone, whereas the second promotes well-being, satisfaction, and good work-life balance.

And, again, unemployment rates don't vary between them.

Now, if you believe your company would do badly under this system, maybe it would indeed. Which only goes to show you don't know how to hire properly. Start hiring better, and it'd make zero difference for you whether you're in a system or the other. In fact, start hiring better, and you may even move ahead compared to your narcissistic-sociopathic competitors, since then they will be the ones going with simple trial-and-error, while you will get the right employees from the start, and without regrets.