Other side of the same coin: I work for a municipality, and I can’t even connect my phone to the intranet because they use MAC whitelists for the entire network. The only thing non-whitelisted devices can even connect to is the (really shitty) public WiFi. Many cities used to be pretty lax about cybersecurity, but a few high profile attacks have made most of them (at least anything larger than a small town) rethink that stance. Hell, one city a few miles away had a ransomware attack that left their city services entirely unavailable for like three weeks. That was actually studied by lots of the local cities, to see what they can do to prevent similar attacks.

Tired of those annoying cookie banners? They’re not just frustrating—they’re a lazy response to GDPR.

They’re not lazy, they’re maliciously compliant. The sites know how to comply with GDPR, but wanted to throw a fit instead. So they came up with the annoying cookie banners, to make users hate GDPR instead of hating the sites that were stealing and selling all of their data. And the worst part is that it worked. Many people wholly equate GDPR with the cookie banners, instead of the massive leap in privacy rights that it represented when it was passed.

I got around this by using a song that already made me anxious. I used the drowning music from Sonic the Hedgehog. Let me tell you, it fucking woke me up without fail. I was up and ready to go after the first six notes.

Yes, every other instance would also refuse to federate unless they also changed their code. Because the blocklist is baked right into the code, so anyone just pulling and running it as-is will fail to federate.

Also making a comeback because of things like Elsagate and YouTube Kids’ weird algorithms. Parents need to have reliable kid-friendly media that they can put on, without constantly needing to monitor it… And a DVD box set of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood won’t end up showing your kid softcore fetish content disguised as children’s videos, as soon as you walk away from the screen to make dinner.

I run a small Plex/Jellyfin server, and have a library specifically for kids’ shows. And my users can lock their kids’ accounts down so they can only access that library. So my various friends and relatives can put something on via Plex, and trust that it will stay safe for their kids.

Yes and no… Women do complain about a lack of pockets, while simultaneously buying pants that physically don’t have room for pockets.

But on the other side of the same coin, women’s heavy duty cargo pants have smaller interior pockets too. Like the exterior pouch pockets may be the same/equivalent size, but the main front and back pockets are often still tiny. There’s no real way to rationalize that or blame women for it, because that’s the entire point of the pants, and there is 100% enough room for larger pockets in those baggier pants.

And no, they often can’t just buy men’s pants, because the cut is very different. Guys tend to have narrower hips and wider waists. Women wearing men’s pants will tend to have the waistband fit (but can’t get their hips into them) or be able to get their hips into the pants (but then need to cinch down the waist by a ridiculous and uncomfortable amount). Women’s pants tend to have more hip room and narrow waistbands, to account for that.

Not quite. The debt collector is the one who reports it to the credit agency. And those debt collectors can do something called a “pay for delete” which means they completely remove it from your credit report, as if it never existed. And if the government is the debt collector, they can choose to delete the debt (forgiving it) whenever they want.

It’s paid using existing debt collection channels, which means the private insurance is only making pennies on the dollar, and it’s money they would have already made anyways.

Let’s say an insurance company has $1M in outstanding debt to collect. They don’t want to bother with actually collecting, because they know the chance of actually collecting any individual debt is low. They’re willing to write off a lot of it as a loss, but they want to get some money for it. So they sell it to a debt collector.

The insurance company takes that $1M in aggregated debt, (owed by dozens or even hundreds of people), and a debt collector buys it for like $50k. The debt collector gets the debtors’ contact info, and how much they owe. Oftentimes, that’s basically all they get.

Now the debt collector can work on actually collecting that debt. They know that collecting on any one person’s debt will be difficult, but anything past that initial $50k investment is pure profit for them. And there is a lot of potential profit to be made on that $950k. They’ll be able to do things like offer steep discounts to debtors, because even 50% of the debt is still $450k in profit. They’ll work on that aggregated debt for a while, and the ones that they can’t collect on will get re-aggregated and resold to another debt collector for even less.

The government basically went “well companies are already selling the debt… Why don’t we just buy it and forgive it? It’ll be cheaper than paying their debts outright or fighting with the hospitals to lower bills, and it doesn’t require getting voters onboard with socialized healthcare.” If they’re able to spend $50k to forgive $1M in debt, that’s a huge win even if it means $50k lands in the insurance company’s pocket. And again, that money would have eventually made its way to the insurance company anyways, via normal debt collectors buying the debt.

FWIW, simply living with an adblocker for a while will inoculate you to a lot of the most predatory BS. My wife had a similar experience. At first she was annoyed by the dual pi-holes I set up, because they broke her sponsored Google search links. Then she learned to skip those first few links and got used to having ads blocked. We recently moved, and I hadn’t had time to set them back up. I have simply been using the new ISP’s modem/router.

Last week, she basically begged me to find some time to set the network stuff back up, because she hated seeing ads now. She got used to the pi-holes, and then they were suddenly gone. She was like “yeah a lot of my favorite sites are basically unusable now. I don’t know how the hell I ever functioned before you set those things up…” What sent her over the edge was when she noticed an ad on our TV’s sleep screen. Not even in the show we were watching. Just on the sleep screen, because the show had been paused for like 15-20 minutes. That one ad was the straw that broke the camel’s back, because even when the device was idle it was still trying to show her ads.

There’s very little disagreement among .ml users because .ml is so heavily moderated. As an insider, it looks like calm waters all around you. But other instances easily see the dissent getting quashed, and only deal with the .ml users spouting insane comments on non-ml communities.

You caught downvotes for what seemed to be a genuine question. No, it’s not technically illegal. It’s a weird loophole that exists because of the way the laws are written. The jurors cannot be prosecuted for passing the “wrong” sentence, so it is not illegal.

Sitting on a jury while intending to nullify could be illegal, because it would require perjury; They make jurors swear under oath to uphold the law, and ask if there is anything that would prevent them from doing so. If you intend to nullify and answer “no”, it is technically a lie under oath. But they can’t prove that you intended to nullify when you were answering, so prosecuting jurors for it would be a fool’s errand.

who own land

Let me stop you right there…

Your June bugs are very different from the ones we get in Texas. Ours aren’t fuzzy, and they don’t squeak. They just clumsily buzz around your porch lights and hit you in the face.

She’s not my type, but I’ll leave it for you to decide. You can find plenty more photos of her by googling her name.

Yup, this is the real answer. Verified vendors’ stock isn’t kept separate from the shitty scammers’ stock. Vendor has 10 good memory cards in stock, and a scammer has 5 fakes? The bin will have all 15 cards… So buying from the vendor doesn’t guarantee you get a real memory card, because the counterfeits are in the same bin.

Every professional photographer knows that good SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from B&H Photo Supply… While bad SD cards are Sandisk branded and come from Amazon.

I had it happen to me at MicroCenter. Got a mechanical keyboard, in a seemingly-new box. No return sticker on it. Opened it up, and the damned thing was missing like six keys and absolutely covered in gamer chud. Someone very obviously bought it, put their old keyboard in the box, and “returned” it. And whoever took the return didn’t bother checking, or mark it as an open box.

This is even bleeding over into professional email. I’ve noticed that if I send more than a few paragraphs, the recipient won’t actually read any of it.

I’ve taken to highlighting the important things, so they’ll at least feel like they can reliably skim.

Nah, this is just the first time she hasn’t been treated with privilege. POC deal with the pay-downs all the time. This is just the first time they dared to pick her for the pat down.

It fully eclipses every other form of theft combined. Wage theft totals over 51% of all theft.

In the US, wage theft is larger than every other form of theft combined. It’s literally over 51% of all theft. But it’s typically considered a civil issue, not criminal. So cops won’t help, and individual employees need to sue to get anything. And when those employees are being stolen from, they can’t afford a lawyer to sue.

And the current administration has systematically defunded, delegitimized, and dismantled organizations like the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, etc which actually had the teeth to fight for workers.

When people talk about white collar crime not being prosecuted, this is the kind of shit they’re talking about. You walk into a gas station and blatantly steal a $2 candy bar every day. By the end of the week, they’ll have a cop waiting for you to show up… But that same gas station chain steals $2 from every single employee every single day, by requiring them to show up 15 minutes before their clock-in time, netting them hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen wages every year? That’s a civil issue, and the employees need to take it up with the gas station’s corporate lawyers… Who will drag a court case out until the employees are all broke and have to drop the case.