Gambling, like a lot of other things, is a high dopamine reward behavior which can be fun recreationally but also lead to serious addictions. Prohibition-only approaches to things like this tend to just lead to it becoming a widespread source of funds for organized crime, and so I tend to favor a public health perspective which involves legalization with heavy regulation and taxation + behavioral health support as a part of a robust safety net.

That having been said, this to me is a strong indication that there are some things it should not be legal to bet on.

But also I’m also pretty sure that this is illegal under the Commodities Exchange Act already? So this feels like either a loophole in emphatic need of closing, or, more likely, the law just no longer fucking mattering under this administration because too many of the enforcers are corrupt.

Okay but is no one going to take a moment to ask about this person and someone he knows both doing self drilled dental work though? Is this some “yeah dental care in the US sucks even more than you think” thing or??

I am a big believer in regulation, and some governments right now are in a position where they can be pressured to take anti-monopoly action against Amazon, which I want very much to see. Being in the U.S. as I am right now, though… There are some state governments I would like to see act (and shout-out to California for doing so here), but I am also brainstorming other nonviolent disruptive action which could be taken, because the federal government right now is actual fascists and Amazon is in league with them.

Flags for Good has a lot of great flags available, if you want to peruse their collection. https://flagsforgood.com/

I was looking over instances sorted by uptime, saw one that had high uptime, a lot of users, and a literal promise that shit will just work in its name. I did a bit of scoping to see that it was easy to view communities across all instances from SJW and figured, fuck it, seems like as good a choice as any.

What a beautiful companion he was. I’m so sorry for your loss.

Frustrating, but I appreciate your answer; thank you.

Why is “(most favored nation status)” in parentheses?

I have often wondered whether targeted internet boycott days would shake up AWS, but I don’t know enough about their billing structure to run the numbers to see how much that would dig into AWS profits + how much of their income is flat subscription fees vs. billing on number of calls and haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet.

This feels like a “read the room” kind of comment.

All humans are biologically considered animals, and there are many times when I feel that viewing human behavior through that lens genuinely encourages compassion and understanding, and yet: there is a long history of people being called “animals” as a dehumanizing measure in order to justify doing the same horrible things to them that humans routinely do to non-human animals. This is particularly true for historically marginalized groups.

Likewise, there is a long, racist history of white people calling Black people “apes” or “monkeys” to justify racist systems and treat Black people the way they view monkeys and non-human apes, as resembling humans but not fully human.

This representative is specifically responding to a video shared by Trump, who has a long history of racist behavior, in which the Obamas were depicted as distinctly non-human apes (I cannot recall the specific ape and cannot readily look it up. Gorillas, I think?), echoing that racist trope.

When someone responds to Trump trafficking in racist tropes with “Black people aren’t apes,” they are not getting into the nitty gritty of taxonomical clades, they’re countering that trope. “Well, actually”-ing about humans technically being apes is undercutting the focus on countering Trump’s racism. Time and place.

The other commenters here are right about Amazon’s initial methods, but I’m also going to highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification for a detailed explanation of how this happens (including a breakdown on Amazon specifically) and what to do about it.

Congratulations!

District heating systems have fascinated me since I learned about them and I wish I could find more information on things like the financial costs and work involved in converting existing neighborhoods to block heating, etc. I don’t like having single points of failure, but the idea of having some kind of central heating station for every square mile or something seems like a happy medium and I’m curious how the numbers actually play out.

Another reason to avoid patronizing hotels that house I.C.E. agents.

I believe it’s a 9/11 reference, with the “two very big reasons” alluding to the Twin Towers.

It’s not quite the movie/documentary you are looking for, but I have seen https://leavingmaga.org/ spread around.

This looks super interesting and is new to me; definitely going to check it out, thanks!

It’s far from a perfect solution at this point, but I’ve been quite curious about the reticulum mesh network recently. I was looking into it as a disaster resiliency thing, but LBR, is this not also a disaster of a form?