To expand a little more: The CEO of a Jewish anti-defamation organization used an antisemitic and pro-Nazi website to defame a Congresswoman.

Huh?

Yep. What's more, this effect is even seen in countries that had less lead poisoning to begin with, like Sweden. Average blood lead levels in Sweden were below the level that the US government even considered concerning at the time — but they still got a ~5% decrease in crime by phasing out leaded gasoline.

Lead makes people stupid & impulsive; and stupid & impulsive people do more crime.

https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.207429.1413788630!/menu/standard/file/WP14no9.pdf

Elphaba

Suing your former customers, now there's a way to make people want to do business with you!

Instead of displaying the true driving range, the software provided a "rosy" projection of how far cars could drive before needing to be recharged, the report said. The distance EVs can travel before needing to be recharged is one of the main disadvantages the cars face in comparison with gas vehicles. The order to inflate the driving range displayed on the cars was given by Tesla's CEO Elon Musk around 10 years ago, according to Reuters.

If you know the true answer, but you give your customer a false answer to make your product look better than it is, there's a word for that. It's "fraud".

The NYPost (low-quality tabloid) is just echoing an actual article at Forbes, which can also be accessed in archive form here.

In general, when a low-quality tabloid site merely reports on the existence of research done by actual reporters, it's better to follow the links and post the researched article instead of the tabloid one.

Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That's why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service's user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.

You don't have to. You can, if you want. You have options in your life. You could always just go plant tomatoes instead. 🍅

That'd be a confession to treason, then.

As a reminder, Brave was created by the guy who brought you JavaScript and was later fired from Mozilla for donating to hate groups. Brave also profits from multiple forms of fraud including NFTs and affiliate hijacking.

"Government shutdowns" are, among other things, wage theft from government employees.

In the Gingrich shutdowns of the 1990s, even active-duty military members' pay was delayed without compensation for up to three weeks. Yes, that's right: the Republicans literally stole paychecks from our soldiers and sailors just to stick it to Bill Clinton. (And maybe to give a little handout to their buddies in the payday loan business.)

More recent shutdowns have spared active-duty DoD, but still perpetrated wage theft against members of the Coast Guard and other defense-critical services. That was the case in the 2018-2019 shutdown, for example.

You can't convince me you care about border security if you don't fucking pay the Coast Guard.

Eric "Keep Britain White" Clapton?

Dude's been a racist assbag longer than I've been alive.

Some proposed design principles:

1. It's a car.
2. It's not a goddamn TV.
3. It's not your goddamn ads platform or subscription service.
4. It is, however, a piece of life-safety-critical equipment.
5. Because it's a car, the driver wants to deal with car stuff like driving, navigating, fuel, roads, obstacles, and not killing people.
6. They also want to make it passably comfortable by messing with the heat or AC, the fans, the windows, and the fucking moon roof.
7. Messing with your phone while driving is Actually Illegal these days in civilized parts of the planet. This is for good reason: people get killed that way.
8. If the car requires messing with your phone, or messing with something that is basically your phone, then you have failed.
9. There should be a big knob with a fan icon on it. Turning this knob all the way to the left causes the fan to turn off all the way. Turning the knob all the way to the right causes the fan to turn on all the way.
10. If I ever have to use a touchscreen to control the side mirrors, I will become an extremely unhappy ape.

Real Men™ don't vote for rapists.

I live in a house with three queer/poly people. Around here, people sometimes introduce themselves or others with a note about their pronouns. But if someone doesn't, it's okay and either people will pick up the right ones from context, or they will guess and maybe be gently corrected.

"DiD yOu JuSt AsSuMe My GeNdEr??" is not real; it's an Internet troll parody.

Some of these names (like OpenVMS) are from before the term "open source software" was coined (which was in 1998). They refer instead to "open systems", meaning computer systems with published specifications, interoperable hardware, portable software, etc. -- things that might seem like obvious choices now, but were not in early business computing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_(computing)

What baffles me about this whole situation is McDonald's (corporate) role in perpetuating it. It doesn't make sense as a way to squeeze money from the franchises, because the extracted rents¹ don't go to corporate; it goes to Taylor. It's a loss to the franchisee, and no benefit to McDonald's central.

This smells of graft. Someone at McDonald's corporate is getting paid off illicitly.

¹ In the political-economy sense of "rent", not the one that means "lease payment".

The name "yam" is used for a few different root vegetables.

The word is from West Africa and refers originally to Dioscorea yams, which are found in many parts of the world — having been independently domesticated in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The word "yam" is related to the Fulani word for "to eat", and was introduced into European languages by way of Portuguese colonizers.

But in the US, "yam" almost always refers to a variety of sweet-potato (Ipomoea genus), which is more closely related to a morning-glory flower than to either Dioscorea or a true potato (which is a Solanum nightshade).

Both sweet-potatoes and potatoes are native to the Americas. Sweet-potatoes probably were grown first in the Yucatán or in eastern South America, while true potatoes are from Peru and western South America.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, a "yam" is oca, an Oxalis species — close relatives of sourgrass and redwood sorrel. And in Malaysia, "yam" is taro root!

A Google spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement at the time of the unionization that it had “no objection to these Cognizant workers electing to form a union,” but that it would not bargain with them. “We are not a joint employer as we simply do not control their employment terms or working conditions—this matter is between the workers and their employer, Cognizant,” the spokesperson said.

NLRB seems to disagree. This will be an interesting case, I suspect ...

Taking away privacy makes it easier for children to be abused.

Remember, the most likely abusers of children are not strangers off the Internet; they're people who have authority over those children: parents, church leaders, teachers, coaches, police, etc.

Private online communication makes it easier for abused children to get help.

In other words, these laws are not "fighting pedophilia". They are enabling child abuse.

Think about email. A lot of people use Gmail, Hotmail, or other big email providers. However, Oxford University can run its own email server for its own university community. The EFF can run their own email server for their own purposes. Google or Microsoft doesn't get to dictate to Oxford or the EFF how they run their email server; and they can't stand in the way of Oxford and the EFF sending email to one another.

I suppose that's a hazard when you rent your office space from fascists: if you later go against fascism even a little bit, they might take revenge on you.

https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vb515nd6874/20230724-fediverse-csam-report.pdf

I'd suggest that anyone who cares about the issue take the time to read the actual report, not just drama-oriented news articles about it.

Did cars peak around 2016? That's when you could get a plug in hybrid, with Bluetooth audio, a rear view camera, but no spyware or mandatory subscriptions. Sure they'd pester you to get SiriusXM but you could just say no.

A social worker’s report attached to the complaint said the couple was asked how they would feel if a child in their care identified as LGBTQ or struggled with their gender identity. Kitty Burke responded by saying “let’s take the T out of it” and called gender-affirming care “chemical castration,” according to the report.

Corrected headline: Massachusetts couple rejected as candidate foster parents after reciting hate slogans and promising to deny medical care to children in their care.

As a reminder, the first targets of Nazi book-burning were LGBT+ too: Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sex Research.

Perfluoroalkyls aka PFAS appear to screw with all manner of body functions.

Since you mention tobacco: It's worth noting that the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.

People sometimes assume religious traditions’ ideas about gender have always been conservative and unchanging.

In many cases, "conservative" views are actually new! Conservatisms always claim to stand for the values of the past, but they quite often make up a past that didn't actually occur.

My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.

If "no, thanks" is not treated as a complete sentence, you're in a bad crowd. Doesn't matter if it's beer with the coworkers or MDMA at a trippy cuddle party. "No" requires no further elaboration.

If you feel like discussing your reasons, feel free to bring them up. But you should not have to. If your "no" is not accepted about drugs, get out -- because those people are in the habit of rejecting people's "no" on other things, too.

And by the way, this rule is just as important, maybe more so, for people who do choose to take recreational drugs sometimes. Just because I'm okay having a beer in one context does not oblige me to do shots with your buddies.

"Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by Dickless here." — Ray Stantz, Twitter engineer

They complain about political correctness, and they go and do shit like this.

The immunity from criminal prosecution has to do with official acts, not personal acts. It wouldn't apply to Biden personally shooting Trump.

It would apply to a military proclamation as commander-in-chief that the Trump movement is a domestic insurrectionist movement that carried out an armed attack on the US Congress; that the Trump movement thus exists in a state of war against the United States; and directing the US Army to decapitate the movement by capturing or killing its leaders, taking all enemy combatants as prisoners of war, etc. (Now consider that the Army is only obliged to follow constitutional orders, and would have Significant Questions about the constitutionality of such an order.)

Further, the immunity is only from criminal prosecution and would not protect Biden from impeachment and removal from office by Congress while the Army is still figuring out whether the order is constitutional.

Video: China confirms CNN report on missing foreign minister

Until you know a few very different languages, you don't know what a good language is, so just relax on having opinions about which languages are better. You don't need those opinions. They just get in your way.

Don't even worry about what your first language is. The CS snobs used to say BASIC causes brain damage and that us '80s microcomputer kids were permanently ruined ... but that was wrong. JavaScript is fine, C# is fine ... as long as you don't stop there.

(One of my first programming languages after BASIC was ZZT-OOP, the scripting language for Tim Sweeney's first published game, back when Epic Games was called Potomac Computer Systems. It doesn't have numbers. If you want to count something, you can move objects around on the game board to count it. If ZZT-OOP doesn't cause brain damage, no language will.)

Please don't say the new language you're being asked to learn is "unintuitive". That's just a rude word for "not yet familiar to me". So what if the first language you used required curly braces, and the next one you learn doesn't? So what if type inference means that you don't have to write int on your ints? You'll get used to it.

You learned how to use curly braces, and you'll learn how to use something else too. You're smart. You can cope with indentation rules or significant capitalization or funny punctuation. The idea that some features are "unintuitive" rather than merely temporarily unfamiliar is just getting in your way.

To be clear: the story is that the sheriff of the state capital is openly violating state law.

Here's the actual blog post.

The article about the blog post adds nothing.

Dude needs to stop posting every time he tries a new psychedelic.

No.

First, "open source" doesn't just mean "you can read the source"; it means that you have rights to modify it and make new versions too.

Second, compiled programs (e.g. most programs you run on a phone or a desktop PC) do not have source available for you to read.