Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Still necessary to quiet-quit at $48K and keep looking for openings in competing companies.

According to a How Money Works video (a while ago), tech companies stopped paying for training or promoting from within, so employees just started keeping their résumé current, and keeping an eye on openings. As a result, companies actually paid more to fill their middle-management positions than if they kept on promoting from within.

It is scary just how incompetent top-down companies are at maximizing their profits, especially considering how much data-driven research there is on human resources.

In Rise of Nations modern-era wonders are science projects like space programs and supercolliders.

The LHC is absolutely a recent wonder.

I hope the lawsuit succeeds and stings the precinct hard.

Since the officers themselves can hide behind good faith and qualified immunity it becomes necessary to penalize the institution for hiring unprofessionals who overdepend on technology and draw their guns in advance.

It’s crap like this that fuels the movement to abolish the police. And yeah, I think that model for responder is obsolete.

Right now, legal wonks are considering the necessity of abolishing or tightly regulating judicial review. While we’re used to SCOTUS copaganda, e.g. Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade there are a whole lot more Dred Scott v. Sandfords in history. Citizens United v. FEC, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and Louisiana v. Callais are only a few recent examples. SCOTUS has typically sided against human civil rights and for business property rights ever since Marbury v. Madison.

It turns out that most of our evolved civil liberties were passed through politics (id est, through Congress and signed by the President. And SCOTUS often struck them down, so it had to be done multiple times.

Getting the Democratic party to overhaul the Supreme Court (and potentially the entire federal court system) is another story, and may require public pressure, but it’s a critical step if we’re going to try to make the US democratic and public-serving.

If we don’t, If we don’t uncapture SCOTUS and then ironclad it so it doesn’t get captured again, then we’ll be right back where we are now, and next time the US might become a one party autocracy.

To be fair, we may not make it this time. It’s like the goblin army at Minas Tirith, a lot of things have to go right in succession if the US is to become a public-serving liberal democracy.

I’m afraid SCOTUS believes you are wrong, which is why it’s so open to rolling back human rights, and hobbling regulatory bodies so that corporations can violate rights with impunity.

Actually they (Republicans) love the government, specifically because it pays them money to pass corporate protectionism bills. Remember, when Republicans take over and lock out the Democrats, then:
~ They no longer need Republican votes, so officials no longer have to serve their constituents
~ The Executive no longer needs Congress, so their money train is in jeopardy. ~ The businesses no longer need lobbyists, so their money train is in jeopardy.

(Considering the level of incompetence we’ve seen in the federal government lately, it’s possible that our congresscritters haven’t fully thought this through.)

We’re in the AI age now, which has shown us IP laws mean nothing when an entire major industry wants to violate them. This has always been true, as the studios and record labels pirated all the time, but it wasn’t as open and in the sunlight as it is with AI development. And Big AI is currently propping up the entire stock market.

It turns out IP laws never meant anything anyway. Copyrights and patents were justified as temporary monopolies to promote science and the useful arts, specifically to produce a robust public domain.

Except it does neither. Artists and scientists are rarely the copyright holders, and to get to own their own stuff, they need to be hot property (still making content) and have good lawyers. Also, the temporary monopolies have become permanent in practice. (much thanks to Walt Disney.) SCOTUS has not only refused to see the public as a stakeholder, but has taken things out of the public domain, so it has to be licensed again, in defiance of the Constitution of the United States.

So now IP law is only a rent-seeking racket. Especially now since you need subscriptions to use your appliances.

But as Sony has made clear for us in 2026, if purchasing isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t a copyright violation.

This bill is a technology solution and has technology countermeasures. They can order ISPs DNSes and VPNs to block piracy sites, but those sites change all the time, and can do so faster than it takes to update the registries. Furthermore, when services don’t follow through, they will get more usage (and will make more money) so there’s a perverse incentive to slow walk the updates, and not talk to whoever makes the lists.

We learned this a long time ago when the biggest selling point of ISPs was free porn and free movies.

Like encryption with backdoors for law enforcement, there’s no way to nerd harder to make it work.

It also depends on foreign service offerings cooperating with US law. Unless we build the Great Firewall of the US (which, I’m sure, is on the table), US offerings will be obligated to follow the law while foreign ones do not, which will run against the interests of local businesses.

Sometimes when I can’t find an answer online I’ll ask the DDG AI assistant. It’s disabled on my PC so I have to ask on a mobile device.

It still gives me answers that don’t make sense. It’s still an LLM, Siri with a tad more oomf.