Label makers aren't all that expensive, even for relatively high volume and fancy options. It's been relatively useful IMO to have bins and labels available. That said, my own office space is a bit cluttered right now with a handful of half-completed projects that I've been too lazy to finish.
I painstakingly type out MAC addresses etc. on a retro embossing-style label maker beacuse I prefer the aesthetic. I think that's the point to start making personality judgements!
I hope you're being sarcastic. If you do want a debate, there's plenty of research on bias at the BBC, and there are examples of bias left and right, pun intended.
So, who loses money here and why aren't they upset? And are they important enough to worry the president. Those of us without stock aren't direct victims here, but someone must be. Bosch is mentioned in one story, I wonder what they're doing. My observation is lots of friends of the president are being forgiven crime, such as the J6ers, who if you believe the documentaries were violent toward the police, but the police aren't minding the pardons?
Trump is a master in captivating people to cast aside their values and go all in for Dear Leader. I bet many of the people who were conned are still supporters, and eagerly asking for another serving of Kool-aid.
One of the most glaring examples of the effect is how in his previous term he led all of all of his supporters to the opposite side of a clear second amendment issue - the summary execution of Breonna Taylor in retaliation for Kenneth Walker's Constitutionally-protected act of night time home defense. This is one of the exact situations the NRA and wider gun lobby always invokes to rally support, and yet they just completely discarded it in favor of cheering on the jackbooted home invaders that came to make those "cold dead hands".
I'm just waiting to see where Trump's current gun control push is going to go. Gun registration/prohibition for "trans, foreign-looking people, liberals, antifa hiding under your children's beds, etc", but really anyone and everyone who might have some semblance of a spine. These cultists really have no values left.
Former shareholders, whoever currently holds the assets of the company as Nikola is in bankruptcy. Unless those people buy influence, they’re worthless to the current admin.
Each of the above guys did the smart thing of buying influence (Milton retained the attorney general’s brother as his lawyer, for example). In the past you’d have to hide that better, but now it’s out in the open.
One of the guys mentioned in the article is now cleared to work on his new crypto venture. Of course.
Edit: not to “both sides” this, but it is interesting and mentioned in that NYT article that Biden pardoned a guy involved in a multi-billion dollar ponzi after serving 10 years (with 10 to go). Found an article from 2008 showing that the Bidens were linked with the firm. Not as direct of a quid pro quo but more the standard back scratching …
Commuting the remaining 4 years of a 17 year sentence (based on an 85% federal minimum) and leaving the financial penalties intact for someone who apparently had jointly marketed a hedge fund 20 years prior with a family member isn’t remotely the same as preemptively pardoning someone to save them $200M in fines and all prison time after they gave your campaign $2M.
> But I think if the office of the President is selling pardons it's better they do that with money in the open than with backslapping behind closed doors.
This is, of course, the right thing. The pardon is no longer a relevant power. Scooter Libby's pardon was already too much and that's the one which scared me straight about them.
Insanely unethical worldview. My actual ‘take’ is that people should pay for the crimes they commit and bribing officeholders to avoid repercussions for criminal behavior is very bad and extraordinarily corrosive to democratic rule.
It’s a common parlor trick to talk in the abstract about things like this to avoid the magnitude of the corruption.
But to be clear, the actual comparison here is a multimillion dollar bribe to save almost $200M in penalties from a convicted fraud - and someone who had served 13 years in Federal prison having the last 4 years of their imprisonment commuted, but having all of their other post-sentence restrictions and fines remain in place - with absolutely no benefit to the President who commuted that sentence.
So, no, I reject that these two are remotely comparable cases. Regardless the propriety of pardon power in general.
Doing a favor to a friend of the family is definitely worse than making it available to all. Far more corrosive to society for institutional nepotism to be considered better than payment. Nepotism is definitely more unethical.
>>The laptop workers using Badge pledge a minimum spend. Badge gets a commission of that minimum spend. Cafe owners get more people and revenue, so they are happy to pay that.
A user books a space using Badge, and promises to spend, and the Cafe owner pays Badge a commission on a pledge. This seems ripe for a disputes process (the customer didn't spend) and Cafe owner actually not being "happy to pay that."
Cafe owner can pay the commission after/if the user spends. Also a user who books a space and skips the spending can be marked in the app so that next time booking can be impossible or hard.
And if the user deliberately or accidentally doesn't spend their money, or if the Cafe doesn't attribute spend to the right user, or even that owner begins to resent the further sliver of profit, there's incentive to game the system. Badge might ask users to upload receipt images for disputes, but that's an expensive business overhead. The problem is based on the problem that cafe staff can't or won't gently enforce the social contract that you pay if you take a table, and the proposed system is that cafe staff are doing exactly the same thing and the owner is paying Badge a commission. Might a user complain to the staff that they were "marked" unfairly? We live in a world where store owners add 3% to credit card transactions because of the loss to the Banks but would they want to return to the days of stores managing their own customer tab/lending?
Yes customers over-staying, complaining, not spending enough seems to be the problem Cafe owners have. One near me had a threatening sign that "if you're sitting, you need to be sipping" (you're welcome, but not for long). The solution of a printed-flyer to tell specific customers to move on seems like the good idea here, and I would think a cafe owner could print a card which says "we need to pay the bills, you've taken this table for an hour, please come get another drink." or maybe ask two laptop users to share one table. Also noteworthy is the Capital One (ING Direct (USA)) model where laptop users are welcome, but the Capital One Cafes are brand enforcing, not profit making coffee shops. This 2005 Slate article is one of my favorite on the topic: https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nigh...
DIVX/XVID is ambiguous, it is a video format and separately a crappy DRM ecosystem from defunct Circuit City. The format DIVX would compress a full length movie to about 700MB (a CD capacity), where VCD MPEG-1 only got 75-80 minutes. LaserDisc owners were already trying to solve the disc-change interruption problem with premium two sided players. The format was also better to watch, in that the compression artifacts were less obvious. But the Rights Holders at the time, like for music, were more concerned with piracy, even though everything they did would make the consumer experience worse and drive more piracy. DIVX the DRM is a great example of an anti-consumer consumer format, and environmentally wasteful too as the plastic disc became "spent" after 30 days.
I agree and piling on. Capitalism is good for those with capital, the wealthy few. Then wonder where they got the capital, and mostly it's something environmentally bad, like the extraction industry such as coal and oil.
As an atheist, mention or quotes from the bible are interesting to me because they help explain our current culture. I'm just challenging your proposal that (all) atheists are not curious.
Ah sorry for the confusion! I chose atheism because it seems diametrically opposed to Christianity in the US, but my intention wasn’t to single out atheists :) . The same sentiment I voiced in my first comment could be said about any religion or belief system: I won’t close an article with Buddhist, relativist, Muslim, etc views just because they mention their belief system.
