JohnGB

You say that as if the courts are a reasonable solution for most people. In many cases the cost and time render them useless and often cost more than the invoice that is due. In some jurisdictions you may recover this, but in many you can't.

This is reported on as if the loopholes allowing foreign money into US politics was not intentional in the first place. It would be quite simple to close these sorts of holes, but those in charge have generally made use of loopholes, and so are not about to close off their funding sources.

What happened to Republicans and small government?

Google's entire process is opaque and open to dodgy behaviour. I had an app which was growing really well with about 5-10k downloads a day growing at about 20% a week and an average rating of 4.8 stars over a few thousand reviews. Suddenly this is tanking overnight and when we look into the data, we have twice as many new uninstalls per day as we do downloads a day. Next to no uninstalls from existing users, no change in the ratings, and no technical outages. It looked like a bot farm was just installing and immediately (as in less than a minute later) uninstalling the app over and over again. Google decided that this meant the app was bad, and we went from position 2-5 for our main keywords to not even in the top 50 overnight. I tried appealing, and tried getting information, but Google did absolutely nothing about it.

Wow, that's going to teach them a lesson! A whole $8.5M - That's literally only 23 minutes of 2022 revenue lost (I did the maths). I'm sure they will never do it again, despite the fact that they likely made way more than $8.5M from doing it.

If we want companies to stop doing illegal things, then the punitive consequences need to be so high that they prioritise not doing it. If a person steals $100, they could spend a decent amount of time in jail for it. Time that is worth a lot more than then $100 benefit they received. Companies want all the benefits of being a "person", so let's apply the same principles to them.

The Netherlands did a study on bike helmets and found that cars tend to be more dangerous with cyclists if the cyclists are wearing a helmet, which is why there are no mandatory bicycle helmet laws in the Netherlands. However, it's worth noting that the cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands also for the most part separates bikes and cars with more than just a line of paint, so their experience may not translate well to other countries with poor cycling infrastructure.

Oh how I wish Mcmaster would open an EU branch... I don't even mind if they charge us more, but PLEASE for the love of all engineers in Europe, just open a branch here.

That's because those laptops were specifically designed to not be easily repairable. The new ones are complying with EU regulations, and so are easier to repair.

It's not as if Apple didn't do everything they could to not do this. They were forced kicking and screaming by the EU to do this, and now they are trying to take credit for doing it.

I have a background in electricity regulation and policy analysis. A good friend (who knows nothing about energy regulation or science got assigned as a senior consultant in one of the big 5 consulting firms to advise a national energy producer on their technical and economic strategy for a new plant.

So, she asked me if I could spare a few hours to sit with her and get her up to speed on electricity regulation and policy so that she would "know all about it" for the kickoff meeting in two days time...

That's an ironic take given that these rules are there to take away monopoly power and have an actual open market.

I'm just dumbfounded by the fact that the US Supreme Court has no term limits, age limits, or reasonable impeachment mechanism for justices that have unethical behaviour or outright lie on their job interview.

The USA is the most "at will employment" country in the world until it comes to the most critical functions of a government. It's absolutely crazy to me.

I see you follow the Chamberlain method of giving Russia whatever it wants because it won't possibly ever come back to affect you...

> Normally, cases of fraud or mistakes could be rectified or reverted by the bank or similar institutions after a review of the situation by humans.

This "could" happen, but in practice it rarely happens because the money has moved on as soon as it hits the account. Additionally, for many types of fraud, there has to be an actual court order to get a bank to take action. So the argument is predicated on a false assumption.

What did the USA have to do with blocking Nordstream 2? Germany stopped certification, no the USA.

Which is why I put through a request to have my Patreon account deleted today. Sorry to the channels that I supported, I'll try find a way to support you without using Patreon.

To me at least, the issue is less about his guilt, and more about the lack of due process. In this case he was guilty, but in many others the lack of due process provides a way of punishing someone without any oversight or fair treatment and trial.

One of many reasons that I will never enter the UAE. There is no rule of law, and so no protection if anyone decides to charge you for anything. I've read of women being raped and then being charged for reporting it which essentially admits sex outside of marriage, or of foreigners who get driven into by a local and then charged as if they were the ones being reckless.

That's not even going into their de facto slavery with foreign construction workers, environmental damage, and sexism.

Remember that the Texas GOP had (has?) the following official policy:

"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs..."

So I'm not surprised that they oppose anything to do with a decent education, like a different point of view, but have no problem promoting a book that encourages slavery, rape, genocide, and misogyny.

Reference: http://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012Pla...

It's too educational about the true state of the American system and encourages people to do something bad for the US oligarchs, which in the USA is the ultimate evil.

Only the Dutch Covid response has set a new low bar for complete incompetence and responsibility avoidance.

The company's response is very much in line with standard Dutch policy. Unless someone forces you to do something, only do the absolute bare minimum necessary to not go to jail. The common term for this is "zesje" (little six in English), which comes from school and university where it's the bare minimum grade to pass. Anything more than the bare minimum is considered a waste of work.

Before any Dutch members get worked up, I'm Dutch.

I'll just cut this functional part off a baby because I don't like the look of it. Now if we were talking about earlobes, suddenly we would be barbarians, but part of the penis is just fine.

More genital mutilation of babies happens in America than any other country on earth. Think about that for a moment.

And 0.001% of households are billionaires and often pay no tax at all. Somehow, that doesn't seem fair to me.

This just shows that Zeus is the one true god! /s

You've left out PeerCoin (PPC) the original PoW cryptocurrency which has been in constant operation and development since 2013. It is by far the most energy efficient, as that was one of the main goals in the design of PeerCoin.

That is essentially how it works in many European countries, but even stricter. In the Netherlands for example, if 70%+ of your work is for a single employer and the number of hours is above some reasonable threshold, then you're an employee.

No, Stanford is sorry that they were called out, but not sorry for what they did - or they wouldn't have done it in the first place.

Autophagy is always active, the real question is how that activity changes during fasting. The number of 18 hours is fairly arbitrary, as even after a few hours of fasting autophagy increases.

That's not quite accurate. Soy contains phytoestrogen, which is a plant estrogen, not a human estrogen. It's similar in many ways and does have (in a much weaker form) some of the effects of human estrogen. However, just calling it "estrogen" implies that it's the same as human estrogen. It isn't.