https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/en-masse

The generally refers to the exceptions where no consent is needed. Had the ladies been committing a crime, then no consent was needed to start filming. Had they been filming some landmark and the ladies walked through the frame, again no consent needed from them. But generally speaking, consent is required before you may start filming a stranger.

In Belgium people do have an expectation of privacy in public, what they did is straight up illegal under Belgian law. If they want to film or photograph a person (not as an accidental passerby, but as the subject as was the case here), then they need to get consent from that person. If they want to share that footage online, then they need consent for that as well.

I’m neither an astronomer nor an astrophotographer and I do this. The sun always rotates in the same direction, it’s not exactly rocket science.

But if I were to ever visit the southern hemisphere, then I’m practically guaranteed to pick the worst possible sitting spot at least once.

He identified $385,000 worth of transactions that might be “unreasonable director-related transactions … in favour of a director, a close associate of the director or to a person on behalf of [either]”.

The company has debts with everyone (customers, government, talking head, sponsors), definitely a fraudulent* bankruptcy. The director’s name (George Zacharia) is unfortunately too common, I wish that I could have found some cringe social media that was definitely his. Damien Costas and his many bankruptcies are easy to find back. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zacharia was a strawman for Costas.

*Edit to add: that disappeared money wasn’t splurged on anything fancy, it was siphoned out.

That looks like 2 grey haired men. The nearest guy is looking slightly to the left, head bent forward a bit, the clothes are his. In front of him there’s a shorter guy who is looking slightly to the right and it’s his ear and side of the face that we can see.

Source: https://www.moralambition.org/stories/tax-fairness-explainer

Also, the above graph compares averages vs averages. The average of the top bracket is made up of some very rich people who accept that paying taxes is a fair thing to do, and some who try to contribute as little as possible by evading as much as possible. Because he’d prefer us to not talk about this, I have the suspicion that Mr Steve Roth falls into the 2nd category.

Pretty much this. A 0.02% error margin when there are tens of thousands of visitors per year, means it’s almost guaranteed to have errors.

99.9% ^700 = 49.6% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^3466 = 50% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^23000 = 1% chance of no errors occurring.

The problem is wider than the tech companies, so personally I’d prefer a wider definition that includes the non tech bad actors. Something like “Return of the Robber Barons”.

Robber Barons = By the late 19th century, the term was typically applied to businessmen who used exploitative practices to amass their wealth. Those practices included unfettered consumption and destruction of natural resources, influencing high levels of government, wage slavery, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors, and to create monopolies and/or trusts that control the market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

That description seems like a perfect match for the present day USA economy.

(Rhetorical) Why is it restricted? With this kind of restriction, my first thought is that something must have happened to cause the restriction to be implemented.

I can imagine a few good reasons (+ also some bad ones) for why the restriction is there, but imo it would be best practice to explain why it’s there. So that people don’t have to speculate, and also to pre-emptively take the wind out of the sails of mysogonists that want to use it as a pretext to attack the organisation.

I doubt it, for example Wikipedia is about as clean as it gets for knowledge sites, and their traffic is down significantly. The ai summaries of wiki articles are usually almost the same as the summary at the top of the wiki page, so if people have enough info with the summary, then they’re not clicking through.

“intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it”

This reads like victim blaming or scapegoating. That ai company makes shoddy software that outputs faulty results, users output faulty results when using that software, and now the ai company blames the users for outputting faulty results. That some (but likely not all) users know that the results are faulty, doesn’t change that the software itself is faulty.

My suspicion is that it’s because the playstore has become so awful that google is seeing the effect in their earnings. If customers get burned one too many times on a crappy app with fake reviews, then they’re not going to spend any money on anything else in the store anymore. So now Google tries to sabotage the possible alternatives, rather than try to fix their product.

I usually download apk directly to my android devices and install from there, no pc or other device is needed. So your whenever is for me almost never.

It’s what Amazon, Walmart, etc want it to mean. They want the profits, but none of the responsibility that comes with selling goods. So they did some legal linguistic gymnastics and thus according to them, stuff that is bought in the Amazon store, with a % markup by Amazon, with payment to Amazon, and with shipping by Amazon, is somehow not Amazon’s responsibility.

The USA government had gone after the large platforms for selling defective/dangerous goods, but that was in 2024 under Biden, so I expect that investigation to be dead by now. The EU is still going ahead though: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/eu-make-temu-shein-amazon-liable-unsafe-goods-ft-reports-2025-02-01/

I’d say stupid. I live in a country where most houses are brick walls + concrete floors, and smoke detectors are still common + since a few years also mandated by the government.

The government mandate came after it was found that of the dozens of people that died every year from house fires, 95% suffocated in their sleep.

Some numbers for my region: ~7m population, 70% of houses had smoke detection before the mandate, on average 63 died per year from house fires.

Some incorrect approximative math: Lets assume that the amount of dead could have been halved if those 30% houses had 2 smoke detectors per person (lets say 2 cheap ones for 2x20 euros per 10 years): 7m x 0.3 x 2 x 20€ /10 /63 x2 = a cost of 267€ per year per life saved. Imo that’s a no brainer, it’d be stupid to not invest in smoke detection.

So your idea of justice is to heavily sentence people for actions that are not related to the crime that they are being sentenced for. That’s not justice, that’s called vengeance.

And yes, someone defrauding the government should be sentenced less severely than someone who does a violent robbery. Violent robberies can get people killed and even if noone dies or gets wounded, the victims will still be traumatized. None of that can happen with white collar crime against a big organisation. That this difference isn’t obvious to you, should imo be a wake up call for yourself that you need to calm down and take some time to rethink some of the things that you belief.

And Trump does the following: “President Donald Trump signed off on several eyebrow-raising pardons this week, including a man whose daughter donated millions to his PAC and a convicted fraudster he had already freed from prison for a different fraud scheme during his first term”

Trump hands out pardons after blatant corruption & at the start of people’s sentences. Biden did not do that. That you want to portray Biden to be as bad as Trump, shows that apparently your fairness compass is very broken.

And that person who got pardoned after already serving 10 years of his prison sentence … 10 years is already a freaking long time for non violent crime, which also didn’t ruin anyone else’s lives. Sentences have to follow a gradiant along the severity of the crime, if not you end up with a broken system (like the USA one). Prison should be temporary, a chance for correction and rehabilitation, where the person one day gets released with another chance at living a quiet honest life. That you want that man to die in prison … Says a lot about you again.

I looked it up and there was a good rationale based on fairness behind Biden’s pardons. Most of Biden’s pardons also weren’t really pardons, but commutations of sentences: “Context: The thousands pardoned on Friday were “serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today,” Biden’s statement said.” https://www.axios.com/2025/01/17/biden-presidential-pardons-clemency-record Which seems fair and also needed to me. Imagine having 10 years left to serve of your 20 years sentence, while new convicts only receive max 5 years for the same crime.

What Biden did with pardons was completely different from what Trump is doing with them.

The surface of the salt grains reacts with what is in the air (moisture, smells), slowly changing the surface over time, and since it’s that surface that touches our taste buts most, the taste of the salt will be different.

Salts are also often not pure sodium, but have added elements that give it a distinct taste and aroma. That original taste/aroma will be lost over time, because aroma = smell = particles flying away in the air. Long exposure to a strong smell will also cause the salt to acquire that different smell as part of it’s new aroma.

Starting from larger grains and grinding them shortly before usage, would thus give salt that smells and tastes more like it’s fresh from the salt factory. But I do wonder how many people would be able to tell the difference in a blind test.