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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • That last part is particularly noteworthy. If I’m in the UK, I can make it to London in 8 hours pretty much regardless of where I am. That’s less than a full work day of driving. Many Americans have done that to visit family.

    If I’m in France, I’m never more than 9 hours away from Paris. Again, many Americans have done a drive like that just to go on holiday.

    If I’m in Newport Oregon, it’ll take 43 hours of driving (and crossing two full mountain ranges) to reach Washington DC. That’s a full work week of driving, just to reach the capitol.

    So most Americans protest locally if they’re able. But that’s far less effective, because it splits the protests apart and makes them easier to ignore or break. Americans can’t go full “light Paris on fire for a full month because the retirement age is getting raised” because there aren’t enough protestors near the capitol to do that. The small protests that do start almost unanimously get broken up by cops as quickly as they started.








  • The decision reaffirms that the President can be held accountable for actions outside the scope of their official duties.

    But notably, it does shield them from prosecution for crimes which are tangentially related to their official duties. For example, granting a presidential pardon is an official duty. Taking a bribe in exchange for that pardon would be a crime. But now the president is allowed to openly and blatantly take that bribe, because the bribe is tangential to their official duty, and they are therefore shielded from prosecution.

    It does not grant blanket immunity for all actions or allow the President to act as a dictator.

    Many experts disagree with the second half of your sentence, because ordering an assassination could easily be argued to be an official duty; After all, the POTUS is the commander in chief of the military. According to this ruling, ordering it illegally would be protected, because the illegality is tied to the official duty.






  • If you’re using Windows, the built in AV (Windows Defender) is actually pretty great. Maybe run Malware Bytes every now and then, (as in, install Malware Bytes, run it, then immediately uninstall it again). Between those two (and healthy browsing habits, like using an adblocker, not downloading random .exes, etc) will keep you protected. No AV in the world will be able to fully defend against bad browsing habits, so it all really comes down to that.

    But this is Lemmy, so you’re bound to get buried in “just switch to Linux cuz Windows is a virus” stuff. And while that may be true, it’s clearly not the answer to your question.




  • Yeah, my higher belt tests had us fighting two or three people at a time. It’s only for two minutes at a time, but holy fuck you feel like you ran a marathon afterwards because it’s exponentially harder than fighting just one; You can’t let yourself get pinned down or cornered, and have to constantly stay moving. You only throw the occasional punch or kick when you can find time to fit them in between all the dodging and running. The goal isn’t even to win the fight; It’s simply to avoid losing too badly. I can’t even imagine fighting five at once and coming out anywhere near the top.

    Real fights aren’t like a video game where enemies circle around and attack one or two at a time. They all rush you at the same time, and if you get grabbed you’re done.



  • Yup. He’s “working” 7 days a week but only doing like an hour or two of actual productive (if it can even be called that…) work. This is how a lot of C-level executives use weasel words to make themselves seem important.

    They’ll show up to the office at 8AM, but they’ll say that they started “working” at 6AM because they woke up and had an idea while in the shower. Then they’ll play golf with their friends (“business associates”) in the morning and say they’re working. Then they’ll go to lunch with their affair partner (“potential client”) on their way back from golf, and say they’re working. Then they’ll sit in one meeting in the afternoon, where they don’t even do any actual work but do a lot of talking with a lot of buzzwords to sound important. And finally, they’ll leave the office early and talk online about what a hard worker they are for starting work at 6AM.

    The “I work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week” stuff is all just capitalistic “we deserve to get paid more because we work hard to run the companies” propaganda.


  • Because their entire argument thus far has basically been “but we’re a library.” But that completely misses the point that even libraries need to comply with licensing laws. Even with ebooks, they can’t just lend an unlimited number of copies. They have licensing agreements with the publishers, to be able to lend [x] copies of [y] book at a time.

    They purchase digital licenses to be able to lend those books, and they can only lend as many licenses as they own. Just like physical books. They need to use time-gated DRM to automatically revoke access whenever the rental time is up.

    And at first, that’s exactly what IA did. But they decided to disable that DRM, and just start lending unlimited copies to people instead, which flies in the face of established copyright law.


  • Yeah, that last paragraph is important. I’m a professional audio technician, and way too many people will begin with boosts instead of cuts. But cutting is much easier on a technical level, because you’re just lowering the volume of something. Boosting is much more technically complicated, because you’re “adding” signal that doesn’t already exist. So you have to make that signal from something, and that’s much more technically difficult than simply turning the volume down.

    Imagine you have a signal coming in at a baseline of 0dB. Cutting 6dB is easy, because you simply let less of the signal pass. But if you want to turn it up 6dB, you need to “create” that 6dB from somewhere, because it doesn’t already exist. You can’t just “turn it up” because it’s already turned all the way up at 0dB.