For those that don’t know, this is one popular way of laundering money.

The other is real estate (which is how Trump made his comeback from early business failures).

Where I come from we call these, “up only” stairs. Kind of like how Perl is a write-only language.

I was going to say… Sure would be nice to have this feature in all the open source AI image generator tools but you’re absolutely right 😩

Is there such a thing as a conservative sociologist? Does that even exist? It sounds like a myth, like a conservative professor of ethics (not a self-described “professor of ethics” 🤣)

She lives outside all year round! We have a heater in there and heating pads for the winter months when it gets cold (we’re in North Florida so it only gets below freezing for like a week or two every year and even then only at night).

She seems to prefer 65-75°. When it’s around that temperature she’ll spend all day wandering the yard with plenty of energy. When it’s hotter she doesn’t wander the yard as much when the sun’s out and mostly does her foraging in the morning and evenings.

The “angle” is that slavery is very inconvenient for their world view. If you want to Make America Great Again you have to pick a time in the past when it was great. For most on the Right that means a time before the civil rights movement but for another huge segment on the Right it’s the time when the country was founded… They truly believe the Constitution was perfect after the Bill of Rights (when the 2nd Amendment was added).

Historically, there were probably tens of thousands of people named, “Jesus” around that time. There were also loads and LOADS of people crucified by the Romans. If you were to make up a story and try to make it believable wouldn’t you pick a likely starting point?

Just one? Sherwin Raymond: https://newrepublic.com/article/167633/roe-wade-abortion-doctors-dobbs-prison

…but doctors have been imprisoned or killed for treating the “enemy” since, well, doctors.

At least they’re open about it: The entire point (according to them) is attrition. The actual plan is to make work for these people much more hostile so they quit.

There’s a lot but here’s a reasonable one:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-threatens-defund-schools-teach-155006275.html

Santa is a stand-in for Jesus… for children. They’re both magical beings that can perform miracles and have similar methods: Both Santa and Jesus have naughty lists and forms of punishment that come later; much later (both are equivalent lengths of time to a child though 🤣). Both bring “gifts”. Both have traditional appearances. Both have followers that wear silly hats and strange clothes. But most importantly…

Both are imaginary.

If you believe in Santa as an adult you’re ridiculed. If you believe in Jesus as an adult you’re just labeled, “Christian”. Yet the fact that nearly every child eventually finds out Santa isn’t real is quite disturbing to a lot of Christians. After all, if they could stop believing in Santa–who is so similar to Jesus in every way–then they could stop believing in Jesus.

Was it the future of Windows when they did this the last bunch of times? The Wyse Winterm came out in 1993. It was a huge failure then and every iteration of the same same thing since has also failed.

What makes this version different? Branding? The fact that some of the OS/software doesn’t boot over the network? That you have to have a working Internet connection and not just a working local network and boot server (LOL)?

No business wants this. No consumer wants this. There is no “added value” in this device. It literally only runs software made by Microsoft and even then, only software that runs through Azure.

What office worker literally only needs Office 365? I mean, you can get away with a whole lot just in the browser but if you’re going to do that why bother with this device? Just use ChromeOS stuff (and never be locked in to Microsoft’s stuff).

Nobody actually ever asks that which is why I tell them anyway 😁👍

Doctors swear an oath, “first, do no harm.” So yes we can blame the doctors!

Doctors are supposed to behave ethically regardless of the law. This is not a new thing! Doctors providing appropriate treatment despite the law is a very fucking long tradition in medicine.

It still matters because the Federal courts can set precedent that the Federal law (obviously, that’s how Federalism works) overrides state abortion bans.

The largest contributors to Open Source make their money from patents and other IP.

The data in that video is (probably) accurate but your statement is completely wrong: In that list only Intel makes anything but trivial amounts of money from patents. In fact, Microsoft, Google, and Docker have famously lost shittons of money thanks to patents. They basically siphoned money out of those companies into the pockets of lawyers and provided absolutely no benefit to society.

For fuck’s sake: Features were removed from Android because of software patents!

Not only that but Google makes almost all of its money from advertising, not “IP”. Same for Meta which is oddly missing from the graph (even though they contribute to and maintain a ton of FOSS stuff).

Then let’s talk about #1: Redhat. They absolutely would be 1000% behind banning software patents. It’s nothing but trouble for them.

I’d also like to note that Microsoft has been very much in favor of software patents since they were invented by the courts (remember: no legislation added software as a category of patentable subject matter: They exist as a result of court rulings!) because they thought they would put an end to open source software (see: Halloween documents). However, software patents have actually cost Microsoft more than they ever helped the company! In short: They’re idiots. They opened a can of worms that’s kept them constantly under attack but because those worms also hurt their perceived enemies they’ve doubled down on their decision.

Software existed for decades without (software) patents and has innovated and evolved vastly more quickly than any other science. Then we created software patents and things actually started to slow down (because lawsuits take time and threaten to end great software before it even exists).

Software is already covered by copyright which is all that was necessary for some of the richest companies in the world to come into existence (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle). Software patents shouldn’t exist!

Why? Software patents are already covered by copyright. Anyone can write software and they automatically get assigned the copyright for it. The barrier to entry is basically zero since everyone has a computer and nearly anyone can learn to program by simply taking the time to do so.

I mean, I also don’t think patents should exist in general but there’s a pretty clear difference between software and things in the physical world. Software is “just math”. And I mean that literally: 100% of all software that exists can be reduced to math that you could–in theory–perform with a pencil and paper.

There’s a lot of reasons why software patents shouldn’t exist far beyond the scope of patents in general.

Imagine if any company could just copy an indie game and scale it up/polish a bit and get all the sales.

You’re describing the entire mobile games industry. You think all those top apps in the app stores are 100% original? No. They copied other games.

Also, patents have nothing to do with that. Software is covered by copyright.

Furthermore, “back in the day” manufacturing was expensive and required huge factories to build stuff (in quantity). The barrier to entry was enormous! People were mostly uneducated and there was not much in the way of “shared engineering knowledge”. Ten thousand people could look at a car engine and have no friggin clue how it worked. That’s why patents were necessary: Disclosure

These days disclosure has become irrelevant. Any engineer can look at an invention or product and figure out both how it works and how it was made. At the very least, they can figure out a way to make it. Just look at all the Youtube channels where every day people are making complicated machines, parts, and electronics! The mysteries are gone. Disclosure is unnecessary.

Since the entire point of patents was disclosure why do we still need them?

Here’s how it’s going to go:

• Pentagon will put up enormous resistance because of cost and impractically.
• Pentagon officials will be fired left and right because, “they can’t get stuff done.”
• Eventually enough competent people will be replaced with loyalists then they’ll actually start kidnapping immigrants and placing them in facilities that were never meant for large amounts of people.
• American citizens that look like the conservative enemy of the day will be kidnapped along with legal and illegal immigrants.
• The US government will get sued over and over again for fucking up basic shit like “accidentally” kidnapping Black/Asian/Latino Americans and even simpler things like keeping people fed (because the Trump administration doesn’t care about competency; only loyalty; or these people, for that matter).
• Countries will refuse to accept the sheer number of people (same exact problem Hitler had!) leading the Trump administration trying to come up with “solutions”.
• They’ll force the kidnapped people to do traditional prison work. Except there’s not enough demand for that many license plates so they’ll switch to literally selling their labor, allowing Trump’s personal circle of rich friends to profit at their expense.
• Due to unbelievable levels of sheer incompetentcy that won’t work out so near the end of Trump’s term–when he’s panicking about having to face justice again–he’ll attempt to implement a more, “final solution.”