deathbird

u/deathbird@mander.xyz
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By the plain text reading, yes. Would be nice to see PS streams fall to 0, but people ignore the terms and Sony doesn't enforce them until they want to. Doesn't matter what any of this BS says until they drag you in front of a judge... I mean private arbitrator... and say "look, plain as day, subsection 18.XXVI.xix D(13a) on page 47 where it clearly says we get to move our VP into his spare bedroom and shoot his dog"

We seriously are overdue for putting limits on so-called consumer contracts.

The period is year-to-date, or about 8 months. I mean, elsewhere I looked up US suicide rates and trends in methods, and it seems quite plausible actually. It's rare enough, but across the whole population it could easily be more than that.

That's of course not dispositive of murder in any given case, but I think it points away from any sort of trend towards or rise of lynching.

The other thing about lynching is that it's traditionally done for a public. It is often a person being made an example of, so the idea of a hidden or secret lynching is just less likely. More likely is a public murder with an obfuscated motive. Something more like the Floyd killing by Chauvin.

I mean, okay.

Step 0: Company secretly abuses you. Step 1: New regulation requires that the abuse be disclosed.

More than I expected out of this administration. Honestly thought they'd say "Do it more! Abuse of customers is innovation or something!"

Obviously the solution is actually to make this practice illegal and aggressively persue violators like they're Ecuadorian fishermen and a new batch of Epstein emails dropped with incomplete redactions, but the bar for this administration is so low it's somewhere at the bottom of the river Styx, so gg I guess.

All murder (including lynching) is killing, but not all killing is murder (for example, if one kills someone accidentally or in an act of lawful self-defense it's not considered murder).

That aside my point is that it's incorrect and counterproductive to conflate lynching and hanging. They're not the same thing like I said, and it obscures cases where a person is lynched (killed under extrajudicial or corrupt pretenses for the perceived violation of some moral or social order) by other means, and if used to describe all hangings it misrepresents many killings that aren't lynchings (like suicides by hanging) as such.

Elsewhere in this thread someone was citing the CDC and it was a lot. Looking it up myself, 48,824 total in 2024, and 11,453 were by suffocation (including hanging, but not just hanging), so that's 23.5%. Suicide rate for Black Americans is about 8.7 per 100k, Black population is about 51.6 million (or 516 100ks) so figure 4489 completed suicides per year. If the number carries, that's 1055 by suffocation. But a paper by Choi et al from 2022 seems to say Black people are about 10% less likely to use this method than White people, so maybe it's closer to 950. A paper by Yau and Paschall from 2018 gives trees as the most popular anchor points for suicide by hanging, though that is a bare plurality at 9.7%. Still, Yau says 90.7% of suicide by suffocation is hanging, and from my look at the numbers that's 8.8% of suicide by suffocation. So based on all that, if 950 Black Americans commit suicide by suffocation per year, we'd expect about 83.6 to do so by hanging themselves from a tree. Also there are known patterns of physical trauma that one will typically see in a body when someone deliberately hangs themself vs when this is done as an attack on a person (Kryezi 2022 mentions some). None of this is to say that every death we believe is a suicide actually is, but this particular method is not so rare or hard to identify that even half a dozen a month would seem improbable.

The company benefits by convincing investors that it's still growing and innovating. If investors think they are still growing their stock prices go up. If their stock prices go up then they can use their stock as an asset to borrow against or as a form of payment in lieu of cash. Stock is particularly useful to a company as a medium of exchange because they can just make more. But they can only do that without tanking the value if people are buying, and they can only keep people buying if they think the price will go up, and the only thing the price will go up if they think the company is going to become more profitable in the future.

This is basically Cory Doctrow's argument in his latest book.