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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • The article later states that they continued investigating, and found ten people (eight girls and two adults) who were targeted with multiple images. They charged two boys with creating and distributing the images.

    It’s easy to jump on the ACAB bandwagon, but real in-depth investigation takes time. Time for things like court subpoenas and warrants, to compel companies like Snapchat to turn over message and image histories (which they do save, contrary to popular belief). The school stopped investigating once they discovered the kids were using Snapchat (which automatically hides message history) but police continued investigating and got ahold of the offending messages and images.

    That being said, only charging the two kids isn’t really enough. They should charge every kid who received the images and forwarded them. Receiving the images by itself shouldn’t be punished, because you can’t control what other people spontaneously send you… But if they forwarded the images to others, they distributed child porn.







  • In the US, wage theft is larger than every other form of theft combined. It’s literally over 51% of all theft. But it’s typically considered a civil issue, not criminal. So cops won’t help, and individual employees need to sue to get anything. And when those employees are being stolen from, they can’t afford a lawyer to sue.

    And the current administration has systematically defunded, delegitimized, and dismantled organizations like the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, etc which actually had the teeth to fight for workers.

    When people talk about white collar crime not being prosecuted, this is the kind of shit they’re talking about. You walk into a gas station and blatantly steal a $2 candy bar every day. By the end of the week, they’ll have a cop waiting for you to show up… But that same gas station chain steals $2 from every single employee every single day, by requiring them to show up 15 minutes before their clock-in time, netting them hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen wages every year? That’s a civil issue, and the employees need to take it up with the gas station’s corporate lawyers… Who will drag a court case out until the employees are all broke and have to drop the case.






  • Tax productivity, not work. Worker productivity has skyrocketed in the past few decades, but taxes have remained constant. So the rich have been able to extract increasing amounts of productivity, while paying proportionally less and less in taxes. Meanwhile, worker wages have remained stagnant, meaning their productivity has gone up but they’re still being paid (and taxed) the same.

    Wealth taxes should still absolutely be a thing, but they should be entirely divorced from a work (productivity) tax.




  • The problem with Stremio is that it relies on torrents, but only caches the content you’re watching. Essentially, it puts you into a permanent leecher mode, and rarely contributes any meaningful seeding because the content is deleted shortly after you’re done watching it.

    Stremio users are the libertarians of the piracy world. They’re staunchly independent, but also completely reliant on the infrastructure that seeders have set up and maintain. They want all of their content available conveniently, without actually putting in any of the “pay it forward” work that piracy relies on to stay healthy.

    Essentially, if everyone used Stremio, nobody would be able to use Stremio. Stremio is only possible because of the people who actually seed.




  • They already do. Paid parking is a thing in pretty much every city in America. In many places, parking lots are wildly profitable. Each parking spot can often earn upwards of $50 per hour during surges.

    Paid parking lots in Dallas average somewhere around $8 per hour. That’s with some people paying like $30 for three hours, or $60 for all-day parking. Assuming a ~50% occupancy (busy during the day, emptier overnight) will have a 100 spot lot taking home around $9600 per day.

    That’s a number that many coffee shops and convenience stores could only dream of… And the lot doesn’t even need to worry about things like maintaining inventory or hiring cashiers. Their overhead costs are basically nonexistent. They just plop a sign with a QR code at the entrance for people with Apple/Google Pay, and have an automated card reader for the people who don’t have phones. A pair of minimum wage attendants can watch multiple lots in a few city blocks, golf carting between them every ~20 minutes as they make the rounds to scan license plates and make sure people are paid up. Maybe give the attendant who calls in the most tows an extra vacation day each quarter to keep them “motivated”.

    Security cameras make limiting your security liability easy. Hell, in many cases tow truck companies will even pay the owner to be allowed to tow from their lots. Because the tow company makes money every single time they snag a car, so they’ll pay a percentage of that to be allowed to tow cars from their lots. So towing enforcement actually makes you money instead of being an expense.


  • I mean yeah, the poverty line is unrealistically low. It’s tied to the average annual price of food, even though food is not a major expense in most impoverished households. Truly broke people are spending like five dollars a day on food, with beans, rice, lentils, bouillon, spices, and whatever else they happen to have available/find on sale in a 20 year old crockpot. Food is a negligible expense when you take the time to prep, and truly impoverished people don’t have a choice. They’re forced to prep, or else they’ll starve.

    The other costs, like rent, car payments, utilities, etc., have all massively ballooned in comparison to the price of food. Rent only used to account for ~20% of expenses, but now it often accounts for over 50%… But since the poverty line is tied directly to food, it hasn’t adjusted to maintain a realistic measure of expenses.