If we don’t win this November, Guatemalan immigrants are gonna come for your birds. And they’re gonna set them on fire.
That whole thing was fucking amazing. I envy the composure to stay in character and on point the whole time. The attendees who kept laughing were the cherry on top.
Like the custom endocrine systems of combat sleeves in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon edit: I think I was thinking of Iain M Banks’ “Culture” series actually, but both are worth a read! Need to be strong or fast? Just give yourself a little squirt of adrenaline! Time for slow heart rate and low energy use? Slow-release a skoche of acetylcholine.
You make a good point about subscriptions. The repo when you stop paying would be pretty grim.
Accurate. In order for this to stop the punishment needs to be more than the cost of doing business. Thankfully, Valve seem to be hell bent on doing right by their customers, in most cases at least (just to leave room for scandals I haven’t heard about or forgot 😅)
If you think that an arbitration company isn’t going to end up sympathetic to the people signing their cheques after some amount of time in operation, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Even if the loser pays (and that’s not a guarantee, some companies foot the bill regardless to make it seem like the better option to the consumer), it’s still the company contracting the arbitrators and the consumer doesn’t get a look in on that, so future business is absolutely an incentive to put the thumb on the scale. “After all, both parties agreed to be bound and waive their right to trial, so what are consumers going to do?” is the logic. Most will drop it after losing arbitration, and there are savings on court costs there too.
I don’t assume arbitration wraps up in any arbitrary amount of time (🥁). I say it’s quicker than litigation because it is, every single time. Because it is quicker it is also cheaper, every single time. Small claims court is different again, and not at question here, just to head that off at the pass.
You however do assume a lot like my location and the location of the suit I brought though, based on my vernacular, and I’d recommend against that. “Mate’s rates” could put me in the UK, or Australia, or New Zealand, or even some places in South Africa and other former colonies. None of those would be accurate.
If you push everybody into arbitration, you’ve already got the arbitrator in your pocket and your costs will still be less than litigation in 99% of cases - even class action. I don’t think you understand just how long and expensive and unpredictable litigation can actually be, but I’ve brought suit before so I do. It took four and a half years to get an initial court date from first filing the complaint. Not the trial, just a date so the judge could hear the facts of the case and opening statements from attorneys. Four and a half years of paying my attorneys, as a private individual, with a lot less money than you might think. And they were giving me mate’s rates; I’ve worked with companies where the legal work billings were in the tens of thousands per day for a single participating law office. That shit is expensive.
Maybe Valve did this to fuck their customers, but they don’t really have a track record of that, and since in the majority of cases arbitration is without question an anti-consumer move, I’d say that if your aim is to paint Valve to be the villains for this then it’s going to be an uphill battle.
Arbitration is always cheaper and faster than the courts, because the courts are very backed up especially since the pandemic, and there’s a lot of admin cost which doesn’t exist in arbitration. That is why almost every other company is trying to force arbitration. So if the goal was to save money, forcing court would have the opposite effect.
Hey hey, you’re an honorary American now! Your flag and genocide kit are in the mail (don’t worry, we’re pretty sure we got the right address from that darkweb database).
But for real there’s not much you can do but keep an eye on it. If Europe has similar credit agencies to the ones in the US, then freeze your credit and keep it frozen until you need to apply for more (new card, car, house, etc).
Use a password manager so if an account gets compromised they can’t get into anything else.
And, as advised, watch for unusual activity (but forever, not just a few months, that’s just a false sense of security).
This should keep you largely safe. My data has been leaked in dozens of breaches, but I do the above, and while I’ve had two instances of card fraud, I don’t see hard enquiries into my credit that I didn’t make even after 6+ years.
My Gul isn’t very friendly at all, he keeps trying to genocide pastoral societies, is he broken?
the most important factor in having a mouth that feels clean is clearing the spaces between the teeth
This. Sadly the spaces between my teeth are way too tight for even the finest of interdental brushes, but floss works a treat for me.
My brother, you have made it. Congratulations. Now all you gotta do is return it, every day, with interest. I don’t think that’ll be too hard, somehow 😊
Not really, since it’s now public knowledge that the entirety of Trump-positive media is bankrolled by the Kremlin.
One is a Russian asset intent on destroying America from within; the other is Kamala Harris. Your eyes must be getting real bad to not see that.
There are alarm clocks that have a lamp built in, and instead of a loud alarm they play things like birdsong and rushing water at increasing volumes while brightening up the lamp to simulate dawn. I much prefer that to a nuclear launch siren, when I have to use an alarm. I don’t like to post shopping links because I’m not an ad machine, but if you search around for “gentle wakeup alarm light” you’ll definitely find some.
Ah, I’ve made a few things in my time and I tend to look at price of a thing through the lens of whether it does what I need it to and if I could build it cheaper myself. Do you mind if I ask what you would call a fair price for a device like this, and which features you absolutely could not do without if you were to buy one?
I find this appealing too, but it’s because for my use case the e-ink screen is non-negotiable. This would be a replacement for paper notebooks and scratchpads. To be honest if you don’t need the power efficiency and natural-light readability of e-ink, on a tablet-sized screen, I don’t understand why you’d be tempted by this at all. What am I missing?
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I think selling such skulls would be highly unethical.
Would you? Why? FWIW I agree that as long as there’s a living person who cares about the fate of the bones then selling them would be unethical, I’m just curious as to your specific reasons - like, what is the hypothetical you’re imagining, behind this statement? Are you contending it would be unethical even if nobody living cares, just due to the provenance? I can see why you would object if the former user of the anatomy believed in the sanctity of remains, for example.
I’m not sure I’d agree, but I’m not sure I’d disagree either. I’d need to think on it more. Right now, I’m leaning towards respecting the wishes of the dead as far as their remains go, because the universe is big and cruel and the only kindnesses are those we make for each other, so why shouldn’t that extend as far as we do?
But then they’d have to spend money on shoes to send to Russia, instead of not paying their lawyers!