Even billionaires are not as mobile as they like to pretend. Yes, they certainly have the means to pull up and relocate to some private island in the tropics where they won't be taxed, if they really wanted. However, by and large, their wealth is maintained by access to markets, connections and institutions without which, they canot function as well, and places like New York City have these things in droves. They don't want to pay 1% more in taxes a year if they can get away with it by bluffing, but do you really think they'll let it go if they still make more money in NY after raising taxes on them than they would in their private island?
I think it may be a distinction that is only made in the US, perhaps? For myself, a sling is the ancient weapon featured in the story of David and Goliath, but would never be called a slingshot. Likewise, a slingshot would always refer to your catapult, and never David's weapon.
Pretty sure I remember seeing he had a bunch of Naruto fansubs on his computer, too. He could even watch your weird kid and keep them entertained for the night.
It just seems like the shrine itself doesn't really treat it with reverence so dumb tourist behavior is kind of to be expected.
That's certainly not what I took away from the bit you quoted. I read it more as "Since acceptable attitudes aren't limited to the super solemn, dour ones common in Western churches and holy sites, you can understand somewhat how foreigners might not understand where exactly the limit is in acceptable behavior, but this is definitely past it, so don't do it."
Your very statement about them not treating the site with reverence reveals the crux of your misunderstanding. You keep considering this situation with your norms, by which the shrine's staff fall short of their duties, ergo they're not being reverent. The whole point of the article is that, while standards for behavior and attitude at holy sites in Japan do permit a wider range of expressions than is common in the West, it doesn't mean you have carte blanche to act as you please, and while Japanese people will overlook gaffs relating to the finer points of their etiquette, this is too grave a faux pas and risks significant consequences as concerns Japan's attitude towards foreign tourists in the future.
They could make use of all those CCTVs the UK is famous for having everywhere, and just try and track the illegal vehicles to wherever they're being stored when the rides finish, then seize them there. Chasing them while they're riding tends to lead to fatalities and injuries, for either the people riding them, or more often, for the people who just happen to be in the area.
As far as the underlying issues, I have to confess I really don't get the thought process of people who do this. I was watching a youtube video following some of them in NYC, and they were like "Well, the city doesn't have any place for us to ride our bikes legally, so they should build us some parks and trails where we can go ride if they don't want us taking our bikes out on the streets." Seems a bit backwards to me, like I wouldn't move to Austria and then demand the city build a waterway for me to ride a boat on if they don't want me rocking up to the local swimming pool and launching my sail boat on it.
I think a part of it also comes down to the people riding them choosing to be assholes about it. We can do soul searching all we want about how they've been oppressed or whatever, but sometimes I get the feeling that "You're being an antisocial asshole, knock it off," is pretty close to the right answer, but it's become taboo to actually attribute any amount of fault to someone who could be categorized as belonging to any sort of marginalized group. The people who do it in NYC could easily just book a train trip upstate and rent a quad for a weekend to ride on approved trails, for example, but choose instead to buy these quads and dirt bikes and ride them on city streets, where they become menaces to themselves and others. I don't see how you square someone being so oppressed and downtrodden that they can't afford to do things the proper way and rent a bike for the odd weekend and ride it on designated trails with them having enough money to purchase a quad outright, store it in a major city and keep paying to put fuel in it.
If you have time still, it can be good to just go over all the projects you've worked on and just give yourself a quick summary of what you did on them, and if there are any concrete examples of ways you contributed to them. It can make things easier for you to sell yourself in interviews afterwards, but it's one of those things that we often don't think of until we've already lost the job and no longer have access to the files we would need to reference to put it together.
Aside from that, there are some big questions on the financial side of things, if you happen to be based in the US. Do you qualify for severance, and if so, how long will it be? If you get it, will you also have access to your medical insurance during this period, or will you have to consider COBRA coverage? If you are based in the states, then this should like serve as a qualifying event to let you register with your state health marketplace and sign up for subsidized insurance there, which will likely be much cheaper than COBRA coverage long term. However, if you do get severance, you may have to wait until your severance period ends.
Also, take care of yourself. It's never fun going through a layoff, happened to me about 2 years ago. Finances permitting, give yourself a few days or a week to just get yourself together and decompress, then start bombing out applications and looking for something else. I like to try and give myself a target date, that way I can take a bit of a breather, but I've got a hard deadline on it so I don't let things drag on too long and just waste my time and make things even worse for myself in the long run.
I was disappointed by a lack of option for "Icing is what you get when someone gives you a proper cake from a bakery, frosting comes out of a Betty Crocker jar forgotten in the back of a cabinet when someone has made a boxed cake." for this one.
And in the state of Wyoming, you can actually have a minimum wage below the federal minimum, of a mighty $5.15/hour. I don't know how common it it, as I think a business can't get away with it if they receive any federal funding, but it is technically legal for them to pay you less than $7.25/hour in some circumstances, aside from the lower wage for tipped workers.
That may be accurate, but it won't do him any good if he dies of neglect or suffers irreversible damage to his health before he even gets a chance to show up in court.
Because, as I already mentioned, the companies behind those distros are based in North Carolina and the UK, respectively, not California. It makes no sense for them to comply with a silly law in California, when they could just as easily rent servers outside of CA to their clients based there for whatever business needs they have, tell their clients to figure out compliance for the clients on their own, and ignore the law. Otherwise, they would have to take on the perpetual responsibility of maintaining compliance not only for their own contributions that they pack in their respective distros, but also for any upstream contributions that would be subject to these laws by upstream contributors they have no control or influence over. If some dev from Poland comes up with a great new idea for the kernel and it gets widely adopted, but doesn't comply with this law (because why would a Polish dev waste their free time adding this?), now Red Hat or Canonical would have to either forgo those new features that their clients will be hearing about, or waste time and money reviewing all these commits to make sure they don't miss any contributions that would touch on something covered by this law and updating and supporting their updates to ensure compliance.
Even if they did want to comply with the law to be able to sell their OSes in California, it would open up a huge can of legal liabilities for them that is nearly entirely dependent upon the actions and work of individuals they don't control, and they have plenty of trivial ways of circumventing California's jurisdiction if they decided doing so was the better course of action.
That shit looks, and to some degree functions, like medieval dungeons.
As criticism, this one kind of confuses me. I've taken public transit in the UK, Oslo in Norway and Istanbul in Turkey, and major transit hubs seem pretty similar in terms of design. Getting to the train platform from the airport to Oslo proper feels like taking the endless series of escalators to reach the Long Island Rail Road in Grand Central. The metro stations near where I was staying in Istanbul wouldn't have looked terribly out of place in the Bronx or Brooklyn.
The major difference was that the stations and vehicles outside of the US were kept much cleaner, and people actually showed consideration for one another while using it. People would queue up in a more orderly fashion, let others disembark before trying to rush in, and there wasn't anybody (aside from one kid in Oslo on the last tram for the night one day) blasting music or TikTok videos on their phones. Even on the occasions where I encountered homeless people in those systems, it was night and day between what you deal with in the US and what you see over there. That, and the systems were way more developed than what we have in the US. I don't just mean in terms of destinations or the sheer reach of the transit systems, but that you'll have cities with metros, trams, buses, light rail and inter-city high speed rail options all within (mostly, aside from the weirdness of the UK) a single system, giving you tons of options to get around.
In short, I'd be less worried about the apparently sinister design of the stations in an American subway system, and more concerned that you have to share that system with Americans.
I think it's actually a common sense exemption comparable to things like the FMLA having a carve out for small persons with a small number of people. FOSS operating systems bring a lot of value to businesses, higher education and presumably California's government, but the many devs who make contributions that create this value on a volunteer basis could feasibly determine that they will either simply refuse to comply with it and pull these OSes from California, or that even if they did want to comply, they have an argument that compliance is simply an insurmountable burden for them to develop and maintain, in addition to maintaining the other features that actually provide the majority of the value.
On top of these, as others have pointed out, it's a trivial for a sufficiently capable user to modify an open source program to circumvent this. Furthermore, there are a ton of FOSS OSes where development is not based in California, and it would be a ridiculous waste of time and money trying to enforce the law on them. I kind of doubt Canada is going to extradite the OpenBSD devs (or at least the folks your donations to the project go to) to face trial in the US on this, for example.
In a way, it's an unusually aware law that lets legislators avoid the egg on their face of passing a toothless law when it comes to FOSS OSes, while still letting them please the "Think of the children!" crowd and squeeze more data and money (in fines) from Microsoft, Google and Apple, who will be subject to the law.
The overall goal of the law is still terrible, but the way they went about making this exception shows a rare understanding of technology for legislators, even if it was due to public backlash and relevant technical input, rather than the legislators suddenly understanding the tech they want to control themselves.
For a more niche, but possibly more lucrative option once the cracking problems were fixed, figure out how to preserve them properly, mount one on a carriage frame and rent it out to people crazy about Disney for Cinderella themed parties. I have seen the intensity of the Disney obsessed, they would drop $$$$$$ for something like that.
Nowhere did I suggest binning it, and I support their eventual transition into being able to leave even hybrids behind. You stated "racing EV’s would be more exciting" and I just pointed out some of the issues that currently prevent it from being more widely adopted and more popular with motorsport fans at large. Otherwise, I doubt you'll find many people to agree that a fully EV Indy 500 was comparable in impact of the event as it exists now if the vehicles could only do 2/3 of the distance with a car capable of less than half the power of the machines it's meant to replace. An F1 car outputs 1000hp, while a Formula E car can do a touch under 500hp. This isn't a knock on them, and I fully expect them to keep improving, but this is an edge case wear current EVs aren't there yet.
Ah, yes, my mighty average of .608 comments per day (including this one), versus your 21.92/day, you've really got me with your brilliant wit there. Go learn to troll better.
Wasn't really a competition, just for illustrating a point. I've only passed through Texas for a layover, but honestly, Texas as a state has zero appeal to me. I'd rather just go to Mexico for better versions of pretty much anything in Texas that's remotely interesting to me, while avoiding a fair chunk of the things that make Texas so miserable a prospect to me in the first place.
Besides, Texans might have improved upon nachos at some point, but claiming you have a superior version doesn't invalidate that nachos have already been widely accepted as a Tex-Mex dish. "Nachos are a Tex-Mex dish" is the opening to the wiki article on them, with 8 different citations to back up that claim.
Wow, you lack the attention span to read two small paragraphs, so that means anyone functionally literate is must be going and dipping into that AI well, too? Projection skills like that could probably land you a fine job at Imax, buddy.
Probably because you publish a sheer volume of comments that rivals a coked up Stephen King's output trying to browbeat people into not believing their eyes and ears when establishment Democratic figures are being as blatant as they can be in demonstrating they are not on the side of the people and will not be coming to help us, but fighting against us when it comes to down to it.
It's fucking exhausting to have every thread be full of you guys going "But see, he said he'd only break one of your arms and legs if he wins, not both of them!" as if that's supposed to make people suddenly say, "You know what, that's great, he's got my vote." when folks simply point out he's said these things and wish that he would commit to not breaking any of our limbs if elected instead. "Ah, but harm reduction! The republicans will break both your arms and legs if they win." Yeah, and assholes like Hakeem Jeffries will be holding you down while they do it to make sure they don't miss while you squirm, thanks a lot.
Formula-E has been a thing for a few years, and this year notably included a mandate to drastically increase the reliance on the battery units over the ICEs for power in F1. In either case, it's not really there yet, but I'm looking forward to the day that it does get there.
Formula E had (I don't know if it's been rectified since) a pretty significant issue with the batteries just not being able to last for F1 race distances on several tracks. They haven't got the top speed and endurance at those speeds that the F1 hybrids deliver, and because it's a racing sport, you can't just make the battery larger to add capacity without a significant impact on your race pace, nor can they just pop into the pits and patiently wait for a rapid charge to finish topping off their batteries.
That aside, I can't imagine Formula E really manages to deal much better with the major source of pollution and emissions for F1, which is shipping a full track worth of cars, drivers and support crew around the world many times a year. Of course, in that regard, I don't know how many of the Formula E drivers are actual pulling in the sort of money to be owning and maintaining private jets for this purpose, and at least one of the F1 drivers has sold his off. I remember Lewis Hamilton used to get a lot of flack for telling people to go vegan to save the planet while using a private jet 20 odd times a year, and I guess he finally felt silly enough about that contradiction to sell it off.
Edited, realized my comment on F1's new power unit rules was poorly written and confusing at first.
Even billionaires are not as mobile as they like to pretend. Yes, they certainly have the means to pull up and relocate to some private island in the tropics where they won't be taxed, if they really wanted. However, by and large, their wealth is maintained by access to markets, connections and institutions without which, they canot function as well, and places like New York City have these things in droves. They don't want to pay 1% more in taxes a year if they can get away with it by bluffing, but do you really think they'll let it go if they still make more money in NY after raising taxes on them than they would in their private island?
I think it may be a distinction that is only made in the US, perhaps? For myself, a sling is the ancient weapon featured in the story of David and Goliath, but would never be called a slingshot. Likewise, a slingshot would always refer to your catapult, and never David's weapon.
Pretty sure I remember seeing he had a bunch of Naruto fansubs on his computer, too. He could even watch your weird kid and keep them entertained for the night.
That's certainly not what I took away from the bit you quoted. I read it more as "Since acceptable attitudes aren't limited to the super solemn, dour ones common in Western churches and holy sites, you can understand somewhat how foreigners might not understand where exactly the limit is in acceptable behavior, but this is definitely past it, so don't do it."
Your very statement about them not treating the site with reverence reveals the crux of your misunderstanding. You keep considering this situation with your norms, by which the shrine's staff fall short of their duties, ergo they're not being reverent. The whole point of the article is that, while standards for behavior and attitude at holy sites in Japan do permit a wider range of expressions than is common in the West, it doesn't mean you have carte blanche to act as you please, and while Japanese people will overlook gaffs relating to the finer points of their etiquette, this is too grave a faux pas and risks significant consequences as concerns Japan's attitude towards foreign tourists in the future.
They could make use of all those CCTVs the UK is famous for having everywhere, and just try and track the illegal vehicles to wherever they're being stored when the rides finish, then seize them there. Chasing them while they're riding tends to lead to fatalities and injuries, for either the people riding them, or more often, for the people who just happen to be in the area.
As far as the underlying issues, I have to confess I really don't get the thought process of people who do this. I was watching a youtube video following some of them in NYC, and they were like "Well, the city doesn't have any place for us to ride our bikes legally, so they should build us some parks and trails where we can go ride if they don't want us taking our bikes out on the streets." Seems a bit backwards to me, like I wouldn't move to Austria and then demand the city build a waterway for me to ride a boat on if they don't want me rocking up to the local swimming pool and launching my sail boat on it.
I think a part of it also comes down to the people riding them choosing to be assholes about it. We can do soul searching all we want about how they've been oppressed or whatever, but sometimes I get the feeling that "You're being an antisocial asshole, knock it off," is pretty close to the right answer, but it's become taboo to actually attribute any amount of fault to someone who could be categorized as belonging to any sort of marginalized group. The people who do it in NYC could easily just book a train trip upstate and rent a quad for a weekend to ride on approved trails, for example, but choose instead to buy these quads and dirt bikes and ride them on city streets, where they become menaces to themselves and others. I don't see how you square someone being so oppressed and downtrodden that they can't afford to do things the proper way and rent a bike for the odd weekend and ride it on designated trails with them having enough money to purchase a quad outright, store it in a major city and keep paying to put fuel in it.
If you have time still, it can be good to just go over all the projects you've worked on and just give yourself a quick summary of what you did on them, and if there are any concrete examples of ways you contributed to them. It can make things easier for you to sell yourself in interviews afterwards, but it's one of those things that we often don't think of until we've already lost the job and no longer have access to the files we would need to reference to put it together.
Aside from that, there are some big questions on the financial side of things, if you happen to be based in the US. Do you qualify for severance, and if so, how long will it be? If you get it, will you also have access to your medical insurance during this period, or will you have to consider COBRA coverage? If you are based in the states, then this should like serve as a qualifying event to let you register with your state health marketplace and sign up for subsidized insurance there, which will likely be much cheaper than COBRA coverage long term. However, if you do get severance, you may have to wait until your severance period ends.
Also, take care of yourself. It's never fun going through a layoff, happened to me about 2 years ago. Finances permitting, give yourself a few days or a week to just get yourself together and decompress, then start bombing out applications and looking for something else. I like to try and give myself a target date, that way I can take a bit of a breather, but I've got a hard deadline on it so I don't let things drag on too long and just waste my time and make things even worse for myself in the long run.
I was disappointed by a lack of option for "Icing is what you get when someone gives you a proper cake from a bakery, frosting comes out of a Betty Crocker jar forgotten in the back of a cabinet when someone has made a boxed cake." for this one.
And in the state of Wyoming, you can actually have a minimum wage below the federal minimum, of a mighty $5.15/hour. I don't know how common it it, as I think a business can't get away with it if they receive any federal funding, but it is technically legal for them to pay you less than $7.25/hour in some circumstances, aside from the lower wage for tipped workers.
That may be accurate, but it won't do him any good if he dies of neglect or suffers irreversible damage to his health before he even gets a chance to show up in court.
I think they were implying you should put custom firmware on your PS3 so you could just play pirated games on it, rather than selling them.
Because, as I already mentioned, the companies behind those distros are based in North Carolina and the UK, respectively, not California. It makes no sense for them to comply with a silly law in California, when they could just as easily rent servers outside of CA to their clients based there for whatever business needs they have, tell their clients to figure out compliance for the clients on their own, and ignore the law. Otherwise, they would have to take on the perpetual responsibility of maintaining compliance not only for their own contributions that they pack in their respective distros, but also for any upstream contributions that would be subject to these laws by upstream contributors they have no control or influence over. If some dev from Poland comes up with a great new idea for the kernel and it gets widely adopted, but doesn't comply with this law (because why would a Polish dev waste their free time adding this?), now Red Hat or Canonical would have to either forgo those new features that their clients will be hearing about, or waste time and money reviewing all these commits to make sure they don't miss any contributions that would touch on something covered by this law and updating and supporting their updates to ensure compliance.
Even if they did want to comply with the law to be able to sell their OSes in California, it would open up a huge can of legal liabilities for them that is nearly entirely dependent upon the actions and work of individuals they don't control, and they have plenty of trivial ways of circumventing California's jurisdiction if they decided doing so was the better course of action.
As criticism, this one kind of confuses me. I've taken public transit in the UK, Oslo in Norway and Istanbul in Turkey, and major transit hubs seem pretty similar in terms of design. Getting to the train platform from the airport to Oslo proper feels like taking the endless series of escalators to reach the Long Island Rail Road in Grand Central. The metro stations near where I was staying in Istanbul wouldn't have looked terribly out of place in the Bronx or Brooklyn.
The major difference was that the stations and vehicles outside of the US were kept much cleaner, and people actually showed consideration for one another while using it. People would queue up in a more orderly fashion, let others disembark before trying to rush in, and there wasn't anybody (aside from one kid in Oslo on the last tram for the night one day) blasting music or TikTok videos on their phones. Even on the occasions where I encountered homeless people in those systems, it was night and day between what you deal with in the US and what you see over there. That, and the systems were way more developed than what we have in the US. I don't just mean in terms of destinations or the sheer reach of the transit systems, but that you'll have cities with metros, trams, buses, light rail and inter-city high speed rail options all within (mostly, aside from the weirdness of the UK) a single system, giving you tons of options to get around.
In short, I'd be less worried about the apparently sinister design of the stations in an American subway system, and more concerned that you have to share that system with Americans.
I think it's actually a common sense exemption comparable to things like the FMLA having a carve out for small persons with a small number of people. FOSS operating systems bring a lot of value to businesses, higher education and presumably California's government, but the many devs who make contributions that create this value on a volunteer basis could feasibly determine that they will either simply refuse to comply with it and pull these OSes from California, or that even if they did want to comply, they have an argument that compliance is simply an insurmountable burden for them to develop and maintain, in addition to maintaining the other features that actually provide the majority of the value.
On top of these, as others have pointed out, it's a trivial for a sufficiently capable user to modify an open source program to circumvent this. Furthermore, there are a ton of FOSS OSes where development is not based in California, and it would be a ridiculous waste of time and money trying to enforce the law on them. I kind of doubt Canada is going to extradite the OpenBSD devs (or at least the folks your donations to the project go to) to face trial in the US on this, for example.
In a way, it's an unusually aware law that lets legislators avoid the egg on their face of passing a toothless law when it comes to FOSS OSes, while still letting them please the "Think of the children!" crowd and squeeze more data and money (in fines) from Microsoft, Google and Apple, who will be subject to the law.
The overall goal of the law is still terrible, but the way they went about making this exception shows a rare understanding of technology for legislators, even if it was due to public backlash and relevant technical input, rather than the legislators suddenly understanding the tech they want to control themselves.
For a more niche, but possibly more lucrative option once the cracking problems were fixed, figure out how to preserve them properly, mount one on a carriage frame and rent it out to people crazy about Disney for Cinderella themed parties. I have seen the intensity of the Disney obsessed, they would drop $$$$$$ for something like that.
Nowhere did I suggest binning it, and I support their eventual transition into being able to leave even hybrids behind. You stated "racing EV’s would be more exciting" and I just pointed out some of the issues that currently prevent it from being more widely adopted and more popular with motorsport fans at large. Otherwise, I doubt you'll find many people to agree that a fully EV Indy 500 was comparable in impact of the event as it exists now if the vehicles could only do 2/3 of the distance with a car capable of less than half the power of the machines it's meant to replace. An F1 car outputs 1000hp, while a Formula E car can do a touch under 500hp. This isn't a knock on them, and I fully expect them to keep improving, but this is an edge case wear current EVs aren't there yet.
Ah, yes, my mighty average of .608 comments per day (including this one), versus your 21.92/day, you've really got me with your brilliant wit there. Go learn to troll better.
Wasn't really a competition, just for illustrating a point. I've only passed through Texas for a layover, but honestly, Texas as a state has zero appeal to me. I'd rather just go to Mexico for better versions of pretty much anything in Texas that's remotely interesting to me, while avoiding a fair chunk of the things that make Texas so miserable a prospect to me in the first place.
Besides, Texans might have improved upon nachos at some point, but claiming you have a superior version doesn't invalidate that nachos have already been widely accepted as a Tex-Mex dish. "Nachos are a Tex-Mex dish" is the opening to the wiki article on them, with 8 different citations to back up that claim.
Wow, you lack the attention span to read two small paragraphs, so that means anyone functionally literate is must be going and dipping into that AI well, too? Projection skills like that could probably land you a fine job at Imax, buddy.
Probably because you publish a sheer volume of comments that rivals a coked up Stephen King's output trying to browbeat people into not believing their eyes and ears when establishment Democratic figures are being as blatant as they can be in demonstrating they are not on the side of the people and will not be coming to help us, but fighting against us when it comes to down to it.
It's fucking exhausting to have every thread be full of you guys going "But see, he said he'd only break one of your arms and legs if he wins, not both of them!" as if that's supposed to make people suddenly say, "You know what, that's great, he's got my vote." when folks simply point out he's said these things and wish that he would commit to not breaking any of our limbs if elected instead. "Ah, but harm reduction! The republicans will break both your arms and legs if they win." Yeah, and assholes like Hakeem Jeffries will be holding you down while they do it to make sure they don't miss while you squirm, thanks a lot.
Formula-E has been a thing for a few years, and this year notably included a mandate to drastically increase the reliance on the battery units over the ICEs for power in F1. In either case, it's not really there yet, but I'm looking forward to the day that it does get there.
Formula E had (I don't know if it's been rectified since) a pretty significant issue with the batteries just not being able to last for F1 race distances on several tracks. They haven't got the top speed and endurance at those speeds that the F1 hybrids deliver, and because it's a racing sport, you can't just make the battery larger to add capacity without a significant impact on your race pace, nor can they just pop into the pits and patiently wait for a rapid charge to finish topping off their batteries.
That aside, I can't imagine Formula E really manages to deal much better with the major source of pollution and emissions for F1, which is shipping a full track worth of cars, drivers and support crew around the world many times a year. Of course, in that regard, I don't know how many of the Formula E drivers are actual pulling in the sort of money to be owning and maintaining private jets for this purpose, and at least one of the F1 drivers has sold his off. I remember Lewis Hamilton used to get a lot of flack for telling people to go vegan to save the planet while using a private jet 20 odd times a year, and I guess he finally felt silly enough about that contradiction to sell it off.
Edited, realized my comment on F1's new power unit rules was poorly written and confusing at first.