The terminology in Aus / NZ is pet (owned by people) vs stray (socialised around people but not owned) vs feral (not socialised to people).

Generally speaking, pets & strays like people - they’ve been handled as a kittens. Pets can become strays and vice versa. But feral cats (past being a kitten) will never become stray / pet (and vice versa) - it is only the next generation that can be raised differently.

While the article is defining feral cats as any cat that isn’t a pet, in reality the vast majority of what it is talking about are truly feral cats - nothing like a house cat.

They are not wrong that Israel is radicalised. However, peace is a process, and what will lead to an enduring peace is actually more important than what is just.

If Israel was actually willing to reconcile and treat Palestinians as equals, the South African model of truth & reconciliation (including amnesty for abuses in exchange for full disclosure of what happened), it wouldn’t be just for the victims, but it would allow both sides to move on peacefully.

The real problem is that Netanyahu, Smoltrich, Ben Gvir etc… don’t actually want peace, so even a neutral truth & reconciliation is currently unlikely to happen without their backers (especially the US) forcing them.

While someone’s political beliefs are highly multi-dimensional, there are two axes that are commonly used to define where someone sits:

• Economy - Left is favouring social responsibility for people receiving economic support (supporting people to meet their basic needs is everyone’s collective responsibility), while right is favouring individual responsibility (meeting your basic needs is your responsibility, and if you die because you can’t, even if it is due to something outside of your control, tough luck).
• Social liberties - Social Libertarian is favouring individual decisions on anything not related to the economy / rights of others, while Social Authoritarianism supports government restrictions on social liberties.

Since there are independent axes, there are four quadrants:

• Socially liberal, Economic left - e.g. Left Communism, Social Democrat, most Green parties, etc…
• Socially authoritarian, Economic left - e.g. Stalin, Mao. Tankie is a slang term for people in this quadrant.
• Socially liberal, Economic right - Sometimes called libertarian. Some people with this belief set call themselves Liberal in some countries.
• Socially authoritarian, Economic right - e.g. Trump. Sometimes called conservatives.

That said, some people use tankie as cover for supporting socially authoritarian, economic right but formerly economic left countries(e.g. people who support Putin, who is not economically left in any sense).

I’m not sure why people choose Youtube as their platform to criticise big tech like Google.

Cloudflare are notorious for shielding cybercrime sites. You can’t even complain about abuse of Cloudflare about them, they’ll just forward on your abuse complaint to the likely dodgy host of the cybercrime site. They don’t even have a channel to complain to them about network abuse of their DNS services.

So they certainly are an enabler of the cybercriminals they purport to protect people from.

I am not sure why anyone would use an AI code editor if they aren’t planning on vibe coding.

Vibe coding means only looking at the results of running a program generated by an agentic LLM tool, not the program itself - and it often doesn’t work well even with current state-of-the-art models (because once the program no longer fits in the context size of the LLM, the tools often struggle).

But the more common way to use these tools is to solve smaller tasks than building the whole program, and having a human in the loop to review that the code makes sense (and fix any problems with the AI generated code).

I’d say it is probably far more likely they are using it in that more common way.

That said, I certainly agree with you that some of Proton’s practices are not privacy friendly. For example, I know that for their mail product, if you sign up with them, they scan all emails to see if they look like email verification emails, and block your account unless you link it to another non throw-away email. The CEO and company social media accounts also heaped praise on Trump (although they tried to walk that back and say it was a ‘misunderstanding’ later).

I think it is probably a living document that has been updated since.

Yep - I think the best strategy is what Richard Stallman suggested in 2005 - don’t give her money under any circumstances.

I’d suggest not giving the works any form of oxygen; definitely don’t buy the books or watch the movies for money, including on a streaming site that pays royalties, or buy branded merchandise. But also don’t borrow them from a library (libraries use that as a signal to buy more), promote them by talking about them in any kind of positive light, don’t encourage your kids dress up as a character (builds hype and creates demand), use analogies drawn from the books, or otherwise support them.

As far as books about wizards and educational institutions, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is way better anyway - they have more realistic character interactions and social dynamics (despite being a comic fantasy), and it makes for a much better read.

I think it was a 18th century British fad that spread to America - for example, look at the date on this London newspaper from 1734:

- in the text it does also use the other format about “last month”, however.

It didn’t make it into legal documents / laws, which still used the more traditional format like: “That from and after the Tenth Day of April, One thousand seven hundred and ten …”. However, the American Revolution effectively froze many British fashions from that point-in-time in place (as another example, see speaking English without the trap/bath split, which was a subsequent trend in the commonwealth).

The fad eventually died out and most of the world went back to the more traditional format, but it persisted in the USA.

GENEVA CONVENTION relative to the treatment of Prisoners of War of 12 August 1949 Article 52 Unless he be a volunteer, no prisoner of war may be employed on labour which is of an unhealthy or dangerous nature. No prisoner of war shall be assigned to labour which would be looked upon as humiliating for a member of the Detaining Power’s own forces. The removal of mines or similar devices shall be considered as dangerous labour.

Sometimes I wonder if they are trying to get a high score by committing every possible war crime.

Possibly “Making History” by Stephen Fry - although at 380 pages it doesn’t quite match as a short story, and the protagonist doesn’t stop himself so much as do something else to reverse the effects of his actions to save Hitler.

Or at least the other way around. Reddit is banned from me.

“Except for Claims (i) in which a party is attempting to protect its intellectual property rights (such as its patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, anti-circumvention, or moral rights, but not including its privacy or publicity rights) …”

So in other words, the types of matters Nintendo thinks it might have a dispute against users, court and class actions are okay, but for everything that they think users might file against Nintendo, they think arbitration is best.

Easy! Why do you think it happened? Inadequate food regulation? Underfunded healthcare? Insufficient regulation of pollutants that can impact health and cause chronic disease?

I don’t know your individual circumstances, but given the state of the world right now, I’d bet it’s a combination of all three.

IANAL, but it is an interesting question to consider whether it would be illegal in Australia (if anything, as a test to see if the right laws are on the books to block this kind of thing). The laws are likely different in the US, and it might vary from state to state.

The Fair Work Act 2009 (Commonwealth), s325 provides that:

An employer must not directly or indirectly require an employee to spend, or pay to the employer or another person, an amount of the employee’s money or the whole or any part of an amount payable to the employee in relation to the performance of work, if:

(a) the requirement is unreasonable in the circumstances; and

(b) for a payment—the payment is directly or indirectly for the benefit of the employer or a party related to the employer.

I think you could imagine the employer arguing a few lines:

• The employee is not required to spend, it is only a factor in promotions and not retaining the same role. OP said you can “get in trouble for not using this” - countering this defence perhaps depends on proving what kind of trouble to show it is a requirement. In addition, under s340, employers are not allowed to take an adverse action against an employee for exercising or proposing to exercise a workplace right, and adverse action includes discriminating between and employee and other employees of the employer.
• That the employee is not required to pay any particular person, they can choose what to buy as long as the select from a prescribed list. However, I think that could be countered by saying this is an indirect requirement to spend, and the “or another person” attaches to the “pay” part, so I don’t think that argument would fly.
• The the requirement is reasonable - however, that could be countered by arguing the privacy angle, and the fact that this is for personal shopping, far outside the reasonable scope of an employment relationship.
• That the payment isn’t for the benefit of the employer. I think that could be countered firstly by arguing this is a requirement to spend not pay, and event if it was to pay, it is indirectly for the employer’s benefit since it allows them to attract and retain clients. The way they are pushing it could further prove this.

So I think it would probably be contrary to s325 of the Fair Work Act in Australia.

Another angle could be the right to disconnect under s333M of the Fair Work Act:

An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, from an employer outside of the employee’s working hours unless the refusal is unreasonable.

If someone has a work and a personal phone, and has the app on the work phone, but refuses to use take the work phone or install an app on their personal phone so they can respond to tracking requests from the employer, then maybe this also fits.

I also wonder if in Australia this could also be a form of cartel conduct - it is an arrangement of where purchases (other than those the company should legitimately control) are directed centrally under an arrangement by an organisation.

Under s45AD of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010,

(1) For the purposes of this Act, a provision of a contract, arrangement or understanding is a cartel provision if: (a) either of the following conditions is satisfied in relation to the provision: (i) the purpose/effect condition set out in subsection (2); (ii) the purpose condition set out in subsection (3); and (b) the competition condition set out in subsection (4) is satisfied in relation to the provision.

So the purpose condition has several alternatives separated by ‘or’, one of which is:

(3) The purpose condition is satisfied if the provision has the purpose of directly or indirectly: … (b) allocating between any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (ii) the persons or classes of persons who have supplied, or who are likely to supply, goods or services to any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding; or

It sounds like there is a solid argument the purpose condition is met - they are allocating where people who are part of the arrangement (employees) shop.

They’d also need to meet the competition condition for it to be cartel conduct. For this to be met, the arrangement might need to include the clients of the company:

(4) The competition condition is satisfied if at least 2 of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (a) are or are likely to be; or (b) but for any contract, arrangement or understanding, would be or would be likely to be; in competition with each other in relation to: … © if paragraph (2)© or (3)(b) applies in relation to a supply, or likely supply, of goods or services—the supply of those goods or services in trade or commerce; or

So it could be argued that this is a cartel arrangement between the company, its clients, and its employees, and so attract penalties for cartel conduct.

It is possible for all of the following to be simultaneously true:

• The Israeli War Cabinet are war criminals and terrible people for slaughtering civilians in Palestine and Lebanon.
• The Houthis are war criminals and terrible people for targeting civilians in Israel.
• The US Trump Administration are war criminals and terrible people for killing civilians in Houthi-controlled areas.
• Hamas are war criminals and terrible people for targeting civilians.

While all of the above crimes are of roughly the same type (albeit for different reasons), they do differ in extent - the Israeli War Cabinet is responsible for the most suffering by a wide margin.

I think it is a morally consistent position to condemn all of the war crimes above, although perhaps to prioritise efforts condemning the bigger ones.

The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site

That is assuming they don’t make significant amounts of Fe-60 (2.6 My half-life) by exposing steel pipes to neutron flux. While the fuel itself might have a shorter half-life, other waste still needs to be dealt with.

Years of carefully curated anti-intellectualism in every bit of media they consume, because facts didn’t suit the wealthy (smoking is bad for you, fossil fuels are destroying the planet, private prisons drive more recidivism are facts that get in the way of someone making lots of money). Those fighting facts that aren’t on their side have embraced a number of other groups with anti-intellectual elements (white supremecists / neo-nazis / anti-woke, religious, anti-vaxxers, natural health advocates) to create alliances of anti-intellectual thought.

This has driven increasing polarisation in the US; 49% of republicans approved of JFK as president, and 49% of democrats approved of Eisenhower. It went down over time - other party approval was 30% of Carter, 31% of Reagan. There was a break in the pattern (44% for Bush Senior), but back on track to 27% for Clinton, 23% for Bush, 13% for Obama, 7% for Trump (first round), and 6% for Biden. So in other words, Americans are so polarised that they’ll vote for whoever their side puts up, and for one side, being anti-intellectual is actually seen as a strength.

I think many of the people who started the anti-intellectualism ball rolling on purpose are wealthy neoliberals who believe in laissez-faire free trade as a fundamental value, and so there is a certain aspect of ‘leopards ate my face’ to this leading to the anti-intellectualism extending back to rejection of mainstream economics (even though the neoliberals’ preferred theory is notoriously flawed, Trump’s approach to pulling economic levers is wholesale rejection of all theory rather than replacing it with something less flawed).

Traditionally legal tender means that a person / entity has to accept it for the payment of a debt - i.e. they can’t refuse cash and say you didn’t pay them because you didn’t use some other method.

However, in many retail scenarios there is no debt - there is an exchange of payment for goods, and so the traditional common law legal tender rules do not prevent retailers from refusing that exchange (i.e. customer doesn’t get the goods, retailer doesn’t get the money, the transaction just never happens) on the grounds of payment methods.

Some places have additional laws on top of legal tender that might require retailers to accept cash.

I believe nothing in the podman rm family worked because the container was already gone - it was just the IP allocation that was left.