

The same preppers who hoarded ammo and canned foods and water filters couldn’t be bothered to wear a mask when a real pandemic showed up, too.
The same preppers who hoarded ammo and canned foods and water filters couldn’t be bothered to wear a mask when a real pandemic showed up, too.
I didn’t know eggs come in metric outside of the US.
I get that Lemmy skews young and male and not on 2010s social media (like old Twitter) but it’s almost like they weren’t around for the discussions that the “NotAllMen” hashtag generated, or the coining of the term sea lioning.
Amazon is worse for those communities, though. They undercut retailers by even more, and then don’t hire local employees at all. In the communities where they do set up warehouses, the working conditions are even worse than Walmart.
That kit is $40 on their site. Weird that it’s cheaper on Amazon in the first place.
No, Amazon does this on purpose. If you want to sell on Amazon, the search and recommendation algorithms will make your product hard to find unless you have Amazon fulfillment. But if you sign up for Amazon fulfillment, not only do you have to give Amazon a bigger cut of the price, you have to agree to never sell your product for less than Amazon does, even on your own website with your own fulfillment.
The FTC sued Amazon for this practice, and that case is progressing. But who knows if the Trump administration is going to maintain the lawsuit, or if the court will rule against Amazon.
In another thread I was laughing about how U.S. utilities charge for electricity by the kilowatt hour, but charge for piped natural gas by the “therm,” which is 100,000 BTUs. BTUs are the energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, like a shitty imperial calorie.
Confusingly, most gas appliances are marketed as being a certain number of BTUs per hour, but people often omit the implied “per hour” when talking about them, and will talk of their 12,000 BTU stove burner or 30,000 BTU water heater.
Talking through residential energy use without having a solid command of what unit means what would be confusing.
By cherry picking a few Republican priorities designed to spite big tech and totally ignoring the big enforcement efforts that the Biden administration has pursued through the FTC and the DOJ Antitrust Division, in both tech and non-tech industries.
The communication that kicked off this whole thing was saying something positive about Trump and something negative about Democrats in direct comparison, on an issue that the Democrats are actually way better on.
It’s not just saying something positive about a political official or party. It’s actively saying “this party is better than that party.” And he was wrong on the merits of the statement.
And then amplifying the message using an official account is where it went off the rails. CEOs are allowed to have opinions as individuals. But when the official account backs up the CEO, then we can rightly be skeptical that the platform itself will be administered in a fair way.
These fuckers act like they’ve never heard of Lina Khan. Let’s see if Republicans try to replace her with someone with a stronger track record. Or, if they’re so serious about tech competition maybe they’ll get on board with net neutrality.
And look, I actually like Gail Slater (the Trump nominee that kicked off this thread). She’s got some bona fides, and I welcome Republicans taking antitrust more seriously, and rolling back the damage done by Robert Bork and his adherents (including and probably most significantly Ronald Reagan).
But to pretend that Democrats are less serious about antitrust than Republicans ignores the huge moves that the Biden administration have made in this area, including outside of big tech.
We want to desalinate water so that we have fresh water.
Doing so generates salt as waste and requires safe/responsible disposal.
We can sell some of the salt, as a product.
But the market won’t buy all of the salt.
So the salt just goes back to the “waste” category, and we need to find disposal methods.
I don’t see where scarcity (whether artificial or natural) comes into play. The world has lots and lots of salt, and anyone who wants it can get it very cheap.
Even if you’re using metric units, area of land times height of water is a common calculation. If you have a 200 hectare plot of land that you want to plant wheat on, and know that wheat needs about 35cm of rain to thrive, but a drought comes in where you only get 10cm, then you’ll want to irrigate with 25 cm times 200 hectares = 5000 hectare cm of water. If you irrigate that volume from a 5000 hectare lake you can expect to deplete it by 1 cm, which would replenish with 0.1cm of rain if the watershed feeding that lake happens to be 50000 hectares itself. Or you could do it with square kilometers. Or square meters. The conversion itself just happens to want to stick with the area for ease of analysis, whenever talking about water use from rain or rivers or lakes.
See also the calorie (non-SI unit of energy that is still convenient for certain calculations), electron volt (non-SI unit of energy useful in quantum physics), or the watt hour (non-SI unit of energy useful for electricity use or battery capacity). These are all metric derived, but different units of the same thing (energy) based on ease of conversion in different calculations.
It’s the amount of water to fill an acre sized area with 1 foot of water.
Acre inches and acre feet are used in a lot of land use and water use analyses. If a crop needs a certain number of inches per year of rain, or calculating the depth of flooding a certain amount of rain will cause, or how much water can be diverted from a river while fulfilling obligations to downstream rights owners, etc.
It’s like watt hours or calories or light years or electron volts: not exactly an SI base unit but sometimes an easier unit for certain types of conversions and formulas.
Any quiet firing will tend to selectively get rid of more good workers than bad workers. The stars with good resumes and reputations in the industry can find good work elsewhere, and on the margins shittier work conditions will cause them to leave. The ones who can’t get another job are the ones that stay, and aren’t going to be as productive.
I’m going to answer from the perspective of U.S. law, because that’s what I know.
age is a protected class
The idea of protected classes comes from whether Congress or a state legislature protected that class by passing a valid law prohibiting that kind of discrimination. We can describe that generally with protected classes, as a broad summary, but if you’re actually going to get into the weeds of whether some kind of discrimination is legal or not you have to figure out the specific laws.
First, you have to ask what the context is. Is this employment discrimination? Public accommodations discrimination? Housing discrimination? Education discrimination? Each is governed by its own laws. For example Title VII prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Title VI has the same protected classes, but applies in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance (like universities and hospitals and others). The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits discrimination in providing credit on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex (like the Civil Rights Act) and adds on marital status, age, receipt of public assistance.
The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, family status, or disability.
The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act add protections for discrimination on the basis of disability.
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act prohibits discrimination against those over 40 on the basis of age.
So if you’re talking about neighborhoods, you’re only looking at housing discrimination, and not public accomodations or employment or schooling or anything like that. The Fair Housing Act doesn’t prohibit housing discrimination on age. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act doesn’t apply to housing discrimination (and is one of the few that only goes one way, in protecting only people above 40).
How is that not the same as an “active white living” community that bans other races?
Because the Fair Housing Act prohibits whites-only neighborhoods, or any other kind of race discrimination in housing.
On a side note, there’s also constitutional Equal Protection claims for governmental discrimination that comes from the Constitution rather than any law passed by Congress. Those aren’t discussed in terms of “protected” class, but rather in “suspect class,” where non-equal treatment on the basis of race, color, or religion is reviewed by the courts with “strict scrutiny” (and almost always struck down). Unequal treatment on the basis of sex or citizenship is subject to “intermediate scrutiny,” which sometimes survives court review. Unequal treatment on the basis of pretty much anything else, though, gets “rational basis” review and basically survives if the government can come up with any rational reason for the rule.
Using scientific terminology in colloquial speech is weird and creepy in most contexts. Calling kids “juveniles” and women “females” carries certain connotations, most of them bad.
The scammers, which is to say most people at upper level positions in these companies, they just don’t respect human life at all, and they’ll take money wherever they can get it.
I think a lot of the profiteers in this space believe their positions are important and improve health outcomes, and that what’s good for the world is good for the company. Pfizer will tell their investors that inventing a life saving drug (e.g., a COVID vaccine) will be good for health, and that the shareholder therefore deserve to make a hefty profit from it.
Same with the hospital execs. They’ll pat each other on the back about how much good their hospital does, and see the very expensive billing department as an important function in their war against insurers.
And actual scammers, who bill for services not actually rendered, order unnecessary procedures, and prescribe the drugs the pretty rep is pushing, tend not to think they’re doing anything wrong or that they’re not hurting people.
People in each of these groups are saying in hushed tones that the insurance companies had it coming, and kinda sorta cheering the death of the United guy with their caveats (“well I’m not saying murder is OK but I’m not shedding tears,” etc.).
We only had enough trash to sustain a dumpster fire for one year but by some miracle it’s been stretched to 8 years.
The providers (hospitals, clinics, labs, doctor practices), insurers/payers (whether for profit like United, nonprofit like most Blue Cross Blue Shields, or government like Medicare), and pharmaceutical/medical device companies fight each other the whole time to make the most money off of the patients/beneficiaries/taxpayers. Big Pharma runs up prices and persuades doctors to prescribe their treatments, while doctors themselves have a profit motive in running up unnecessary treatments, all while insurers try not to pay for stuff, necessary or not.
It’s a broken system, but it’s also worth pointing out that the scammers in each camp hate the other camps just as much as the public does. There are hospital execs and pharma execs basically cheering on the anger at insurers, who will turn around and rip off the same victims in a different way.
Yeah it’s a somewhat standard reporting structure, of an intro paragraph about the stat, 4 paragraphs about a specific person’s journey from unemployed college grad living with parents and mowing lawns for extra cash to becoming a CFO in the span of 15 years, and then a longer description of what the stats show, then placement of those stats in context comparing to Gen X and Boomers, and important caveats in what the stats actually mean (unclear whether this makes millennials better off when they’re expected to face higher lifetime costs on housing and healthcare). Then it dives back into the anecdotes, including how most rich millennials perceive the fragility of their own financial position.
Here’s an archive.is link:
https://archive.is/Gr6qG
Oil is just in a precarious position with supply and demand.
High prices will accelerate demand destruction, as people and businesses move to cheaper energy sources, like solar/wind/geothermal/nuclear, plus spur the continued development of grid scale storage and demand management technologies. Sustained high prices could cause lifestyle and consumption habits to change, too: fewer gas guzzlers, fewer supercommuters, improved shipping efficiency, etc.
Low prices would put strain on the finances of producers, whether for profit corporations in the West or state owned (or closely affiliated) producers in places like Saudi Arabia or Russia, and would weaken those countries’ influence on geopolitical issues.
There’s a reason they want a strong cartel, which is what OPEC tries to be, but that cartel has been weakened considerably by non-OPEC Plus nations becoming huge producers. OPEC cut supply to try to hurt Biden, but it ended up being a handout to American, Canadian, and Norwegian companies, by propping up prices while losing market share. Meanwhile, sanctions on Russia (and Iran and Venezuela) add a bunch of friction (and some cost) to their exports, so that they need higher prices to break even.
For the first time in modern history, societies have access to non-fossil-fuel energy sources in competitive volume and price, to where an oil oligopoly can’t push around consumers. Trump can’t put that back in the bottle.