Because I don’t have the capital, and jumping into forming a large worker cooperative is incredibly risky. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to, but I’ve found my niche and it’s organizing unions within the tech industry.

I’m trying to reframe the point of the discussion, which is about IP. Nitpicking the example is counterproductive, because it’s absurd to assume that no one would ever pay for a piece of software.

If game companies stood to make no money, why would they bother with such a large production?

I’m a games industry professional. I would continue to do this work as an unpaid job if my basic needs were met on a societal level.

You think you’re asking a neutral question, but you’re not. Companies operating within capitalism will behave in the interests of capitalists. IP laws aren’t required for the AAA studios other than to domineer control over an idea. A game like Call of Duty is a titan made by 1000s of professionals. One of those games gets launched every year. By shear force of momentum, there are very few companies that could ever replicate it in any fashion.

Now imagine if COD was made by a company in which IP didn’t exist, all the profits went to the workers rather than shareholders, and that the workers have a say in the launch schedule. Would you be willing to pay for a game in that instance?

It’s illegal in the US too. That doesn’t stop them from calling me and everyone I know.

There’s an extremely common cold call scam where a VOIP calls you to notify you about your car warranty expiring, and for the low, low price of 100s of dollars they’ll give you an extended car warranty.

If you truly want to help him, give him a list of post-carceral support resources, a note stating that you’re only willing to help more if he truly wants to change, and a small amount of money to get started.

Make it clear in the letter that you don’t want to see him in prison and that you know he’s a better person than that. Do not bring up the falling out just yet in case he’s willing to contact you for a real life change.

I’m pretty affordable as a friend, I’ll be yours for $5. I’ll even use it to share some ramen

There are some truly beautiful areas to drive through. But that also means it would be beautiful for buses and trains too

Das Kapital described crypto before digital computers were even an idea. His work is still relevant.

If you’re celebrating Vermont cheese, you need to get out to Wisconsin. I’m a Minnesotan so it does pain me to say that they’re better than us at something, but Wisconsin cheese lives up to the hype.

It looks to me like the only difference is that the card is flatter than the wall

That’s the kicker lol I was a lucky little shit, I blinked at the moment of impact which was enough to prevent me from losing my eye entirely. My retina detached and was operated on, a macular hole still exists today, and I still don’t eat bologna. That Christmas, I got a Christmas Story tshirt from my grandma that says “you’ll shoot your eye out kid”

I was shot in the eye with a bb gun when I was in 9th grade. It was absolutely miserable. Right after it happened, I had to practically get carried back. My cousin and one of my friends held me up on either side because I couldn’t see anything and wanted to just lay there due to how severe the pain was.

The trip to the emergency room is a story too. A nurse in the ICU thought I was hit by a baseball despite the paperwork and asked me, a teenager that definitely didn’t get to the hospital myself, if I knew my mom when she returned from the bathroom. After getting to the ER, I vomited up the entire stack of pancakes and the half dozen bologna sandwiches I had eaten that day (I was 14, teenage hunger). 2/10, do not recommend.

Voyager often has strange sync issues. I find that attempting to reload the post (just pull down while viewing comments) will often work to load the comments. If that doesn’t work, I find that reloading the entire feed will generally fix the issue

My workplace offers a mental health benefit similar to this, we inform HR that we’ve scheduled a mental health appointment during work, tell our manager that we’re stepping away for an hour, and then return to work after the appointment. It would be a good idea to ask someone in your company how to use your benefit.

I’ll be the first person to remind you that HR is not your friend, but this is exactly what they exist for

I use the app opentask. Based on your criteria, it’s exactly what you’re looking for. It’s all stored locally on your phone, it has the ability to set recurring tasks, and you can create categories of preset and custom tasks. Deadlines can be set as far into the future as you need, down to the minute. It’s available on F-Droid.

I don’t remember giving permission for this picture of me

Content moderators are superexploited. These employees primarily work from African countries like Kenya, so there’s a whole second layer of neo-imperialism that I won’t get into right now. They’re given poverty wages, sometimes as low as $1.30/hr. Because they’re content moderators, they have to look at images and read descriptions of traumatic events without respect for mental health. OpenAI, Amazon, and Facebook have engaged in aggressive union busting tactics for these workers as well, though workers were still successful in organizing one of the largest labor unions in Africa.

• https://www.medianama.com/2023/07/223-kenyan-workers-call-for-investigation-into-exploitation-by-openai-3/
• https://time.com/6296196/ai-data-gig-workers/
• https://futurism.com/the-byte/african-workers-openai-training

You’re probably out of luck trying to convince this person of your opinion. However if it comes up again and you want this person to walk away, I’d recommend mentioning the horrible working conditions that content moderators have to go through. Contrarians don’t like unassailable facts.

CVE-2022-2601 was discovered in 2022, but for unclear reasons, Microsoft patched it only last Tuesday.

I respect their journalistic integrity for not speculating, but it was definitely because the NSA was exploiting it.