Did people care enough about the Best Buy commercial for this to be on Gamestop’s radar? Did she have a fan club or something? She’s fairly attractive, but not in a memorable way. It seems like good casting in the sense that she looks like she might be someone who works a retail job.

I never signed up, mainly because there was never any need to sign up. You could just go there, paste an image, and get a link to it.

Why would you sign up? It would be like signing up to use a URL shortener.

If this is what he has on his face, imagine the stretched horrors he must have elsewhere on his body.

It still surprises me that people use Imgur as a social media site. Imgur to me is a place that hosts image to be used on other social media sites. Using imgur as a social media site is like using a url shortener as a social media site. What’s next, Captcha becomes a social media hangout?

Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.

there is a very strong extent to which the notion of “nonsense lawsuits” being an epidemic in America is pro-corporate propaganda

Really, it’s not. Every other country looks at the absolute chaos of lawsuit nonsense in America and recoils in horror.

Take the infamous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit, for example. The woman in question received third-degree burns.

Sure, and in most countries that would be solved by good regulations not lawsuits. As you said, they’d received multiple reports of it being a problem, but the US laissez-faire system means that corporations are free to do whatever they want until someone gets severely injured. In a properly run country this woman would never have been injured, and if she was injured she wouldn’t have to rely on lawsuits to get her medical bills paid.

I’m still there. I’ve always wanted to be able to offer an email service to family or friends. But, even though I’ve been doing it for a couple of decades, it’s never been stable enough to offer to them. For part of that time it’s because I didn’t really know enough of what I was doing, but the more I learned and the better I got at it, the more I started to lose the war against both spammers and against the major service providers who kept making it harder and harder to prove you’re not a spammer.

The latest one was literally issue 3. My provider splits an IPV6 /64 among multiple VPSes, when most of the world, including blocklist publishers, think a /64 is for a single “entity”. The only way to resolve it was to not use IPV6.

One reason why there are so many nonsense lawsuits in the US is that unlike Europe and the UK, it’s unusual that the loser has to pay the winner’s costs. In Europe that’s standard. As a result, an American person or group is much more likely to sue, because if they lose all it costs them is their own legal fees. AFAIK they also do the reasonable thing and cap fees so that if someone sues a rich multinational corp and loses, they’re not out millions of dollars because the multinational hired a huge, expensive team to defend themselves.

Justice would really be a world where these nonsense lawsuits didn’t happen at all.

Normally when the people rise up they’re slaughtered. When rich countries go through major changes normally there’s a lot of chaos and blood before things get better. If you’re someone who lives in one of those countries it’s better if you can ride the chaos out somewhere else. In fact, in a country where things are getting bad, it’s generally a good idea to get out long before the chaos starts.

Languages evolve in weird ways. Pedophile comes from “pedo” child and “phile” for love. It could just be a mother or father, someone who loves children. But, it has been used to describe people who love children, but in the wrong way. Similarly, homophobe has been used for people who hate gays, but the “phobe” part is about fear not hate. Also, “homo” isn’t necessarily homosexual, it could be homogeniety. Homophobes could be people who are afraid of people of their own race, but instead we’ve decided it’s the term to use for people who hate or are angry at homosexuality.

Let’s say that Trump doesn’t manage to cancel or subvert the next couple of sets of elections and that in 2029 the US has a democratic president and a democratic congress. Let’s also imagine that the next president cares about monopolies and puts Lina Khan back in charge. I wonder if there’s anything that they can do about decisions made by Trump’s FTC. Or is Netflho just now legally in place and we’re stuck with them unless the FTC can prove they’re abusing their monopoly?

Content will eventually be produced by the masses

And it will be owned by one of the many monopolies.

Barring that, local community theatre productions.

Put on in a theatre owned by Ticketmaster.

Yo ho ho.

In theory a smart fridge could be useful.

If it automatically scanned everything you put inside, it could tell you what ingredients you had if you were planning a recipe. If you were at the store you could know what to buy. It could warn you before something reached its expiry date, or remind you what leftovers were still uneaten. Depending on how much you trusted it, it could learn what you always buy, and add them to your shopping list when you were running low, or even actually order them.

In theory this could reduce food spoilage and wastage, and could save you money in the long term. It requires trust though. Samsung is obviously mistreating users by showing them ads. But, it could be much worse. The fridge could order food that the user didn’t need, or if it ordered food Samsung could strike a deal with one company and always prefer their brands even when there were cheaper options. And, of course, Samsung could sell your buying habits to Google and Meta who would use it to more effectively target you with ads. Or, Samsung could cut a deal with insurance companies to tell them which users had unhealthy eating habits so the insurance company could deny coverage or hike rates.

The big issue here is section 1201 of the DMCA. If that didn’t exist, someone could open up a business installing a new, custom, privacy-centric OS on people’s fridges. But, with section 1201 in place, that’s illegal and you could be thrown in jail for performing that service. Even outside the US laws like that exist because the US insisted on them on condition that otherwise the US would force those countries to pay high tariffs. Of course, now the US is jacking up tariffs regardless. I have no idea why no country has yet repealed their equivalent of section 1201. Whichever country does it first will have a huge advantage.

I don’t want to have to completely redo my whole email stack.

Web services, and then various components of an email system.

I’m using automated renewals.

But, that just means there’s a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven’t had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it’s going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.

Yeah, but nothing is perminant, (or permanent). All hierarchies are temporary because everything is temporary.

Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen

People have come up with ideas since forever. I’m sure the first philosophy on the redistribution of wealth was “Unga bunga, bunga unga bunga!” The problem is putting those ideas into practice. So far, when people try to eliminate hierarchies, the result is that someone comes in and takes advantage of the people who don’t think there’s a hierarchy.

Humanity itself may be temporary, but it seems like the idea of hierarchies will outlive humanity.

Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.

My neighbors, friends, family, all of us

That’s exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don’t really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that’s just not in our ape nature.

We have to usher in the collapse of [permanent hierarchies]

That would be nice, but is it realistic? It’s not just that humanity has always had hierarchies. It’s that it seems to be a feature of even the animal kingdom. It also seems like when people try to create a system without hierarchies, someone steps into the power vacuum. The end result is that things are even worse for the people at the bottom.

Maybe a better plan is to accept that human animals are going to end up having hierarchies, and instead of trying to completely eliminate them, instead aim to shrink them as much as possible while still maintaining a functional government that at least somewhat answers to the people at the bottom.