gila

In the startup I worked for, the HR lead was the CEO’s significant other. They had made fundamental contributions to the operations of the company since its inception and relatively humble beginnings. Once it had grown beyond a certain size, there wasn’t really any particular executive position within a logical company structure for them to fill. The individual departments were run by people more qualified in those areas. I think it made sense for the company to continuously recognize their contributions (and obviously the boss isn’t going to fire their partner), but HR ended up being mostly just a cushy job for them to fall into.

It was one of those companies that likes to say its “like a family”, but really there’s an in-crowd (i.e. the founding staff) and everyone else. I was part of the former, so I could be honest and open with them with regard to HR issues and be supported, and that was nice. But on the other hand, I witnessed HR actions related to incidents involving other staff that caused me cognitive dissonance, because it would’ve been handled differently if I were the staff member involved. More than anything else, because I had found myself in the right place at the right time. Because I was a part of the landed gentry, as it were. That’s fucking bullshit, and the experience made me realize that they weren’t actually different from other companies like I had thought.

LiveCaptions

I’m sorry, I meant to respond about the lack of BBC archival footage, as it had to be archived to be able to compile it. You’re right that it was probably shot straight to VHS.

I remember the VHS we watched was presented as a compilation of episodes with a new introduction and interludes so my guess is there was some kind of professional reproduction of the episodes themselves

The groups forming the roots of digital media piracy established ‘the scene’, which holds itself to rules and has particular distribution methods. For example Usenet was popular for many years. https://scenerules.org/

By P2P I’m meaning these are ‘non-scene’ releases, just something a random person on the internet cooked up and released somewhere, in these cases by feeding some prior standard definition release through an upscaler and creating a torrent from the output, which involves certain considerations.

We can’t exactly determine the pedigree of these files, but we can say they are lossy transcodes, that is they first existed in a compressed format and later were re-encoded by the upscaler to another compressed format.

While the upscaled may look sharper to your eyes, data from the files as they were before that process was inevitably lost due to this transcoding. If we define “quality” as the amount of information from the original presentation that was retained in the output, then the standard definition versions are definitely higher in quality than the upscaled ones.

I’m not meaning to use the term in any perjorative sense, but it’s useful information to have. If an official HD presentation is ever made from the original film, it would certainly get a ‘scene release’ that would look better than these ones.

Yes, that is the quality of the original presentation. If anything it looks worse because it has been converted from film to a digital signal, as well as being stretched to be a bit larger than normal. Lmk if you young whippersnappers have any questions about this, I grew up watching this on VHS back in the dark times 👴

Yes, both are upscaled p2p releases

Same, the last straw for me was the ‘white lives matter’ Yeezy fashion show.

Just used this to load up some concerts for my long haul flights tonight and it worked great, thanks for the rec

I’m really meaning the lack of option not to consume fast-moving consumer goods, rather than the option to pay a premium for them elsewhere. When their market position is similar to like an outlet for government rations except for private profit, their net is essentially what was skimmed off the top of free enterprise. 2.66% is just the current maximum amount that is justifiably worth without doing societal harm

That’s an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It’s not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It’s meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.

Hot, then once I’ve read everything switch to Active to check popular posts I missed, then back to Hot and there’s usually some new stuff

Same shell, mine has Intel CPU though

I’ve had a lot of thinkpads and currently use an ideapad flex 5. I prefer the smaller form factor for a portable machine I take travelling or out to biz meetings etc. The autorotate and touchscreen work great in Debian with gnome-shell out of the box. No pinch-to-zoom but I believe that works on KDE plasma out of the box.

I don’t think there’s any reason why Oakes’ recollection of McBride’s intent trumps what McBride has publicly said about his intent. Doesn’t the court have a word for that?

It seems fairly logical to me. He had the personal experience of witnessing soldiers unfairly scapegoated by superiors. His substantiation for the unfairness is that those superiors were complicit in war crimes. That the motive was there for superiors to make false specific allegations of misconduct in order to sweep systemic issues under the rug.

If McBride were a perfect witness, he’d have been motivated enough by war crimes to speak up. But the doubt about his awareness of what he was exposing is an appeal to authority which flies in the face of Occam’s razor.

Simply, whistleblowing as a means of recourse only became preferable after his fellow soldiers, whom made the same choice he personally did to sacrifice their normal lives to enlist, presumably with virtuous intent i.e in Australia’s name, were effectively betrayed by their own.

That might leave something to be desired about his morals, but this must be considered in context, and “not whistleblowing” under prior corcumstances isn’t something that could reasonably be prosecuted. Oakes is right to conclude that our military personnel should have been more closely monitored in general. That doesn’t speak to the specific conduct of the soldiers McBride aimed to exonerate, though.

Summit fits image to screen horizontally, ideal layout for me

They aren’t concerned with deaths, this legislation positions the most harmful and most physically addictive nicotine option as relatively more accessible.

They aren’t concerned with nicotine addiction, else NRT gum wouldn’t be allowed to stock within reach of children in retail outlets.

They’re just NIMBY’s, there’s nothing else to it.

In Australia our tobacco strategy was to effectively ban vapes and price cigarettes out of existence.

The impact to date has created two totally new black markets: one for vapes after people realised anyone could just hop on AliExpress to buy them in bulk and resell for a 2000% markup. They are banned for import, but nicotine is a colourless odourless liquid and there are no rapid tests for it, no capacity to do expensive GCMS testing on all the random freight entering the country from China (our biggest trading partner by far).

The other new black market is for “chop chop”, the colloquial name for unprocessed tobacco illegally grown and sold by gangs for cheaper than regular cigarettes / RYO tobacco.

There’s also been a big increase in violent robberies at tobacco outlets and even gang turf wars over sales of illegally imported or stolen cigarettes. The excise tax is so high that the gangs can extract enormous sales margin and still undercut the market.

Predictably (and contrary to the rest of the western world) tobacco use has gone up nationally over the past couple of years following a significant downtrend lasting several decades. I’m confident that this strategy, which has been bipartisan amongst our 2 major political parties, will be used as a future case study in why prohibition is fucking moronic. It has continuously demonstrated to be a net detriment to public health, in this case related to a totally preventable yet leading cause of premature death and public health spend.

There is literally no logic to it beyond Lovejoy’s Law, except for some false manufactured statistics parroted by our leaders which blatantly ignore scientific consensus.

For what it’s worth, Mozilla did release a Firefox nightly test build a couple of months ago which included a proof of concept vertical tabs feature: https://www.ghacks.net/2024/04/02/mozilla-released-a-firefox-nightly-test-build-with-vertical-tabs/

Still not clear whether they’re gonna implement it properly though

There has been a lot of investment into exhibition matches over the past few years, and into a Major League Cricket domestic competition which started in 2023.

There have been failed attempts at domestic leagues in the past, but MLC is a T20 competition. That’s a shorter and more accessible form of the game where a match generally takes around 3 hours to complete.

That could make a difference, because it’s a lot easier to keep kids interested for a few hours vs. the more traditional formats that could last anywhere between 8 hours, up to 5 days.

It’s only a 1-month season though, 25 matches over the course of July. I should hopefully make it to a few of them!