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Joined 23 days ago
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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • So I used to do a lot of freelance, and encountered similar situations a few times.

    The most blatant example that comes to mind was a charity run. I had the client reach out for AV gear and crew for a charity run. They needed some projectors and a small stage (and all of the AV gear+crew to go with the stage) for a charity event; They were going to be at a college campus, with joggers making laps on a 1/2 mile loop. For every lap, sponsors would donate to charity.

    The projectors and stage were to give the MC a place to be, and to keep the audience entertained while the joggers ran. They’d have a band playing, and cap the event off with a movie screening. Sounds fun. I quoted the job like any other gig. The perceptive reader may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned what kind of charity they were raising funds for. That’s because I didn’t think to ask ahead of time. I got there, and discovered it was a pro-life fundraiser. Fucking yikes.

    But I still did the job. I needed the money, and didn’t want to burn future bridges with other companies that were involved. I simply made a mental note to ask more questions the next time a charity event came across my desk. But the big takeaway is that even if I didn’t do it, someone else inevitably would have. The event still would have happened, and the charity money still would have been raised. At least with me doing it, I was able to avoid adding another enthusiastic voice (whoever would have taken my spot) to the echo chamber. Even if I had climbed up on stage to interrupt the event, it wouldn’t have changed any minds. Afterwards, I donated what I could afford to Planned Parenthood and moved on.




  • The issue with baby formula is that it’s pretty strictly regulated by the FDA, and getting approval is a lengthy (and extremely expensive) process. So there are only a few companies that hold a functional near-monopoly on the production, because they’re the only ones who had the resources to go through the process.

    And to be clear, I’m not advocating for looser regulation on formula. Safety regulations are writ in blood. But local formula production would essentially require massive subsidies and fast-tracking to offset the costs and testing associated with starting production.





  • After a certain point, I’d imagine that there are diminishing effects. The difference between 100ug and 200ug is huge, but the difference between 1100ug and 1200ug isn’t anywhere near as big. After a certain point, it all just becomes a trip. But the size of the trip is entirely up to your mindset and individual brain chemistry; I know people who have found or lost religion on 300ug, and others who said 1500 was just a nice smooth trip.

    To be clear, it would be a mind-bogglingly large trip. But I doubt it would have any more of an effect than a much smaller (but still very large) dose.





  • I think a lot of the liberal attacks were more of a “there’s a time and place, and this is neither” issue. The Genocide Joe posters were at their peak right as Trump (who straight up said he’d be worse about genocide than Joe was) was at the height of his campaign. The big difference was more about whether “perfect” should get in the way of “good enough.” Nobody thought Joe (and later Kamala) was the perfect candidate. But they thought it would be better than Trump.

    If you live in a state that’s 100% guaranteed to go blue, then sure, abstain your vote in protest. After all, it won’t make a difference. But if you lived in a swing state, then abstaining was the same as saying “I don’t care who wins, even if it makes the genocide measurably worse in every way.” It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face, while also trying to claim moral superiority. Refusing to vote for a democrat because of the genocide was like handing a flamethrower to a compulsive arsonist, because the current administration didn’t do enough to support firefighters.

    The end goal should have been to keep things from getting worse first, before you focus on hammering the genocide before the midterms. But apparently people on high horses don’t know how to play the long game.






  • Yeah, 18k games, but a lot of that is going to be shovelware. Steam has a big issue with shovelware designed to look like a good deal. They’ll release like 25 games, one will be priced at like $100, with the rest priced at like 50¢.

    Then they do a publisher bundle, which marks all of those 50¢ games down by like 90%, but doesn’t touch the pricey game. So on the surface, the bundle is marked as like $100 for 25 games, at 87% off. Looks like a great deal. When in reality it’s just 24 cheap games marked down, and one super expensive game. And all of them will be shovelware. But it’ll be enough to fool anyone who doesn’t bother to dig into the actual bundle details.


  • What’s to stop actual child abusers from just photoshopping a 6th finger onto their images and then claiming that it’s AI generated?

    Aside from the other arguments people have presented, this wrecks one of the largest reasons that people produce CSAM. Pedophiles are insular data hoarders by necessity, because actually creating and procuring it is such a big risk. Every time they go online to find new content, they’re at risk of stumbling into a honeypot. And producing it requires IRL work, and a LOT of risk of being caught/turned in by the victim. They tend to form tight-knit rings, and one of the only reliable ways to get into a ring as an outsider is to provide your own CSAM to the others. CSAM is traded in these rings like baseball cards, where you need fresh content in order to receive fresh content.

    The data hoarding side of things is where all of the “cops bust pedophile with 100TB of CSAM” headlines come from; In reality, it was probably like 1TB of videos, (which is a lot, but not unheard of) but was backed up multiple times in multiple places, because losing it would be catastrophic for the CSAM producer; They can’t simply go grab a new blue ray of it. And the cops counted the full size of each backup disk, not just the space that was used.

    Intentionally marking your content as AI-generated would ruin the trading value, because nobody will see it as valuable/worth trading for if it’s fake. At best, you won’t get anything for it. At worst, you’d be labeled a cop trying to pass off AI content to gather evidence.



  • In a scenario where things are so bad that the US has halted all financial electronic transactions than your electronic dollars don’t mean anything no matter where you are, amd your paper dollars mean almost nothing either.

    This is honestly the biggest takeaway. If the US actually stops cooperating with foreign banks, the dollar will instantly become worthless; The dollar only holds international worth because other countries want to have and hold dollars. If those other countries are unable to do so, there is no incentive for them to accept dollars as valid currency.