No way!

But it’s too late. I’ve already seen everything.

You want me to find illegally trafficked wildlife? What do I look like? A giant rat??

The existence of “echo chambers” is debated by scientists. It really doesn’t matter who you hang around with, you’re going to disagree with people.

The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media.

Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber?

Echo chamber? What echo chamber? Reviewing the evidence

Yes, except bail bonds don’t exist, bail bondsmen don’t exist, and there isn’t a bail bond system.

In Canada, our Charter of Rights and Freedoms says anyone accused of a crime is innocent until found guilty and therefore cannot be held in custody unless the state can convince the court that releasing them would be a danger to the public.

Which sounds great, but bail is often denied because courts are easily convinced someone is a danger to the public. There is also a surety system but that’s to ensure someone follows bail conditions. If the court agrees to grant a conditional bail, the accused needs someone to act as their surety. If the accused breaks conditions, and the surety doesn’t immediately report it, the surety will be required to pay the court a very large fine. Not being able to find a surety is a common reason for bail being denied.

The action would have been done as vice-president, not president. Vice-presidents are held accountable. This is why Trump got in trouble for defamation of E. Jean Carroll.

He defamed her as president and called it an official act. The case was put on indefinite hold. Then he said the same things while he wasn’t president. A new case was brought against him and he was found liable. Then, Carroll’s lawyer asked the original case to be resumed arguing that Trump’s statements couldn’t be an official act of the president since he performed the same action while he wasn’t president. The courts agreed and resumed the case and he was found liable again.

The qualities that make one a good worker do not make for a good CEO. A good worker thinks the best way to make money is to produce better quality product or produce it more efficiently.

A good CEO thinks the best way to make money is to lay off quality control and use their salaries to buy up company stock to increase the stock price for shareholders knowing the increase is instantaneous while the problems caused by not having quality control anymore won’t be realized for months if not years. Even better if they can force employees who didn’t do quality control to now be responsible for it, on top of their regular duties, while receiving no additional pay.

Our profession

Gonna stop you right there Jeff. You’re not a journalist.

The requirement for a steady paycheque is what keeps everyone working in terrible conditions. I’m lucky enough that I’ve always had a lot in savings and it has come in handy a few times. Twice I’ve walked off a job and never went back after failing to negotiate proper working conditions with the boss. Both times I burned through about $10,000 in savings while searching for a new job. Almost nobody has that much saved up. If they did, terrible bosses would lose employees on the regular.

“Fake it till you make it” doesn’t mean pretend to be happy until you are happy. I committed to a relationship I wasn’t happy in, a career I wasn’t happy in, and hobbies I wasn’t happy doing, all because I wanted the approval of others. A divorce, career change, and hobby swap made me much happier.

Answering that is actually very complicated and a great example of what the article is talking about. Trump specifically can vote because, while he lives in Florida, the conviction wasn’t in Florida but in New York. Florida defers to New York laws in that case. New York law says that only incarcerated felons cannot vote. Trump isn’t incarcerated so New York law says he can vote, meaning Florida law also says he can vote. If he was convicted in Florida, he wouldn’t be able to vote until his sentence was served, regardless of if that sentence was incarceration or probation. There are also certain crimes Florida never gives voting rights back if convicted, unless the Governor grants clemency.

I give you cash, then you give me cash, what are we doing here?

This is why I don’t give people gifts and tell others not to give me gifts. Holidays arent about gifts. If I do get a gift, I give it back to them the next year. Bonus points for giving it back in the exact same gift bag. After a decade of this, people have finally stopped giving me gifts!

Peanut butter out of the jar.

First cousin once removed

This made me curious as to how many different legal systems there were. This wiki page has a global map of systems. Surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of variety. Most legal systems tend to be based on legislation (called civil law, originating in Rome), court rulings (called common law, originating in Britain), religious texts (called canon for christian, sharia for muslim, and halakha for jewish), or some mixture of those.

How are they still in business? Every single farmer, bar none, has to know about their business practices

Wendover Productions has a decent video on John Deere’s market dominance. tl;dw It’s by cutthroat capitalism of course.

John Deere has bought out all their competitors and continues to do so. Every single breakthrough in farming equipment technology in the last decade is owned by John Deere. As a farmer, you either choose to sign a one-sided contract with John Deere or you use outdated inefficient equipment that John Deere hasn’t purchased the patent rights to. Or, of course, you sell your farm all together. Large corporate farms don’t care much about the John Deere contract since they have the power to negotiate a better deal. A lot of small farmers have been making the choice to sell out.

Soon, all farming will be done by one megacorp, buying their seed from Monsanto, using John Deere equipment, and cashing in a ridiculously fat subsidy cheque from the government.

There was a jogging app known as Strava that posted an image on their Twitter that was a heatmap of all the jogging activities of all of their users. Their idea was just to show how popular their app was by showing the entire world lit up. Twitter users were able to locate secret US military bases on that data alone. Turns out nobody jogs in circles in the middle of the desert except GIs.

Recently a group of Harvard students did a demo where they used Meta’s camera glasses and a chain of commercial programs and products to find out people’s names, address, workplaces, and family based only on their facial data.

These are just two examples off the top of my head. Essentially, the more data someone can accumulate, the more info can be analyzed from it. With things like AI tools, that analysis is incredibly fast even with huge datasets.

Really dodged a bullet by not going with “Auto Goon”

Very cool, Coolio! I wonder how Eminem feels today. He initially gave Weird Al permission to do a music video for his parody of Lose Yourself, titled Couch Potato, but changed his mind just before Weird Al was finished filming it. Weird Al released a faked interview where he asks questions and Eminem’s responses are clips of him from other interviews. It mostly centers around how much of a strong supporter of artistic expression he is and how he’s against censorship of artists.