I think they also have an EMP effect that can damage ship/sat electronics.

But, like the internet, a sub is a series of tubes. You have a big horizontal tube that the people and the engine lives in, and you have vertical ones where the things that blow up cities live.

I mean, there are optional smaller horizontal tubes, but I feel like if you’re going to launch a sub into space it really ought to be one of the big ones. Maybe it’s just a Freudian thing.

I want to be clear. I do not blame Ghana’s people for these laws. I do not blame Africans for the many nations that have enacted similar laws.

Christian church organizations, acting under the rubric of evangelical outreach or even more offensively charitable giving have backed religious and political leaders with LGBT-phobic agendas up to and including execution for being gay. Of course they’re going to do it - they get power and money for doing so.

The US needs to extend the Logan Act to apply to these situations and make the crime a felony that can lead to the arrest of the people involved and the legal dissolution of the organizations.

Also, this is literally their job. The surprising bit would be if US intel services weren’t doing a thing about a Russian invasion of an independent European nation.

I mean, sure, if a Trumpist gets offended by it because they want the fascists to win, I get how they’d get in a bind, but other than electing Trump and making sure fascism becomes the rule of the day around the world, I’m not sure what they expect to expect.

Not all states support recalls. California kind of goes all in on the democracy thing with the ease of introducing ballot initiatives and recalls and such. It’s mostly fine, but it can also result in pretty stupid plays like this.

Yeah, this was an easy one to call. It’s repeated in other countries as well.

One other factor that they don’t mention is that the surge in street opioids corresponded to a crackdown on doctors writing opioid prescriptions. I saw this coming when I was doing policy analysis and looking at unintended consequences in complex systems. I don’t remember much about what degree of a surge we saw in prescriptions, but I do remember all of those “pill mill” headlines. That always struck me as a pretty manufactured crisis - but even if not, the crackdown certainly didn’t improve the situation.

This is entirely subjective - I haven’t gone around counting things up - but I’ve noticed both more pro-Tesla and pro-SpaceX posts and increased arguments on the anti-Musk posts. It seemed (on lemmy) to be coming from the same small number of accounts, so it could just be an enthusiastic handful of fanboys.

If one of them became a mod, that might explain it. They were very active in the Tesla and SpaceX subs with multiple articles posted within minutes of each other within the past couple of days.

Sure, unless there was a correlation between the technologies deployed by the individual companies and their vulnerabilities.

I’m not saying there is in this case, but it’s a phenomenon we see all the time in systems ranging from technological to immunological. When network (social, computer, whatever) connect systems with correlated vulnerabilities, there can be cascading failures that do not spread outside those networks. It’s been so long (over 30 years) since I’ve even thought about RF and related systems that I have no idea what specific or proprietary technologies the major companies have, so I just shrugged it off as I was unaffected, and penciled in that there may have been a correlation with solar activity.

You’re absolutely right. In my memory, though, the ones that stick out the most are the ones where the hero is pro-corporate but in an anti-corporate way. I’m thinking about movies like Working Girl, 9 to 5, and Secret of My Success, and even Other People’s Money. The villains were the very straight and square boss types and the heroes were the young(er) upstarts who could out-business them. OPM was a little different but I think it fits the theme.

The main difference I’m seeing is that even in the pro-capitalism shows, it was still all about sticking it to the man. If the good guys were cops, the man was the chief of police. If the good guys were businessmen, the man was their boss. If the good guys were soldiers, the man was their CO, or the generals or politicians back in Washington.

Maybe it’s purely subjective on my part, but it seems like there’s a lot more pro-authority movies being made now. You can’t take a movie like Top Gun (which still had the shaggy haired rebel as well as one of the most homoerotic themes in mainstream cinema at the time) with something like Bill Murray in Stripes. Stripes is great comedy that I’d place almost at the level of Caddyshack, but even though both movies could have been shown by recruiters to get people to enlist, Stripes was still a goofball comedy of the slobs against the snobs (with the snobs in this case being their leadership).

I’d really like to get back into that kind of default cultural image. Cops were mostly corrupt (Serpico) or idiots (Cannonball Run), or else inept (Escape from New York, or all of those stupid Charles Bronson movies).

It just feels like we hit that point where the default is to love Big Brother.

Wasn’t there also a report today (I think) about an unusual level of sunspot activity? Without digging into it, I think I sort of just assumed they were related.

I have AT&T fiber and a Verizon iPhone and I didn’t notice disruptions on either. My partner has an AT&T iPhone and didn’t notice any issues.

Ironically, Robocop would have defended him from the terminators.

I really do miss the 80s/90s era anti-capitalist dystopian future movies. We have the Purge series now, which has been pretty good (at least 3 and 4), but nothing approaching the massive numbers of productions ranging from They Live to Rollerboys to Robocop to Running Man and so many others.

It feels like we’ve hit a tipping point where subconsciously at least we’ve figured out we’re actually the bad guys from Red Dawn and the Wolverines are the people we’re killing, and just decided to lean into it. I’m waiting for Handmaid’s Tale to get a Birth of a Nation makeover in the next ten years.

It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.

I have a few honest questions for anyone who supports this kind of legislation.

First, what problem specifically is this trying to address? Have teen pregnancies gone up since the advent of kids being able to access porn on the internet? Kids with STDs? Sexual assaults on children? What specific metric has changed that makes this kind of legislation a priority right now? Is there a model that shows a correlation between the behaviors this legislation intends to address and the social ills you believe are associated with it?

Second is the related question of what metrics you think will improve with the introduction of this legislation? How long do you think it will take for that change to come about? If it does not, would you support removing this legislation?

Third, if a social ill were to be associated as per the above with online content, would you support similar legislation to regulate access (eg, if hate speech or LGBT-phobia posted online were to show a positive correlation with intolerance or violence), would you require online services to monitor access to sites hosting that kind of content, such as requiring a government issued ID to be kept on record and associated with specific user accounts?

I already control technology with my thoughts. I just use my fingers to do it.

I clicked thinking it was an Elon Musk thing…

The summarizer could do better by just copying over the entire text of the article. This was incoherent. Its only utility is for people who can’t or don’t click through.

You know how they say an infinite amount of monkeys in an infinite amount of time could produce the works of Shakespeare?

This is five monkeys in fifteen minutes.

Oh, that’s a fun one. By the actual Y2K I think I had already transitioned into a dot-commie (where it pretty much was ignored), but the run up was interesting. I was previously in a much more Office Space kind of situation. I was the hot new talent using modern technologies like Perl and Java, but virtually everyone else was writing cobol on green screens for an IBM midrange system, with many many hours dedicated to updating code to use four digit dates. These were the days when news channels were predicting airplanes would fall out of the sky, nuclear plants would melt down, and cash registers would stop working entirely. World ending chaos.

The people around me were doing basically the same job for 30 years. I don’t even know enough cobol to write a joke in it, but we’re not talking about Donald Knuth here. I’m talking about green screen terminals connected via token ring or some kind of crap like that.

This is when Gateway Computer stores were in shopping malls and came with stickers on the front boasting about how they were “Y2K compatible” and were upgradable so that 16 MHz 386SX was the last computer you’d ever need.

Getting old is fun, other than the back pain, organ failure, and that memory thing I can’t remember the name of.

In the US, there is no law or regulation. It’s decided company by company. We usually distinguish between vacation days and sick days, and the number of hours for each accumulate throughout the year based on the number of hours worked, with more senior employees having a higher ratio (meaning they accumulate hours faster). The total number of hours are generally capped (eg, they can’t go above 240), but they do carry over year to year. Some companies (and I believe this is required in some states, like California) must pay out the remaining vacation hours when the employee leaves the company, so that if you leave with 120 hours of vacation on the books, you get three weeks vacation pay in addition to any additional severance package. That does not hold for accumulated sick leave. These are both considered “paid time off” (PTO) because employees are paid their salary/hourly pay. When I left my last position, I did so with 240 hours of vacation that they had to pay out, which was in addition to my hiring bonus and moving allowance at my new employer. It came in handy.

Other companies do what’s called “unlimited paid time off.” This means there’s no pre-existing cap and that vacation and sick time get bundled together. It’s all at the manager’s discretion. Depending on the company, though, it can be a disadvantage. Corporate culture can be such that people are discouraged from taking time off, and there’s no vacation pay out if you leave, because you don’t have set hours on the books. Americans in general take long weekend or week-long vacations, sometimes up to two weeks. Depending on the role (and the nature of the vacation), they’ll still work some hours, because that’s often the cultural expectation.

The worst jobs - and this means the majority of service jobs - allow for either zero PTO hours, or will routinely deny employee requests to use them. The above applies to corporate jobs (eg engineers and designers), union jobs, and government work. The person making your pizza or telling you where the shoe department is probably doesn’t get those “benefits,” and if they do, they have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops (including facing the wrath of their manager) to exercise them.

I’d like the US to have legislation to force minimum levels of PTO, and I’d like to have the culture change so one can say “I’m going to be in Greece for four weeks but will call you when I get back” rather than saying “I have stage three liver cancer and will be getting my organs replaced but I can make the meeting at ten.”

Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.

I am an engineering manager at a FAANG company and I get that it was mostly in fun, but as a professional who does this for a living I just wanted to point out that not only were you wildly wrong, literally Elon Musk’s lived and executed experience proves you wildly wrong.

Yup. I went back into academia, then rotated between that, military, and government work. Now I’m waiting to see if the other shoe drops and I either sponge off my partner or buy a beach house in Mexico.