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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Yes, they are protected by “qualified immunity,” a supreme court invention that says that cops cannot be individually prosectuted when engaged in reasonable, legal acts. It also has a fun carve out that says that cops can do brutally, blatently wrong things as long as they don’t “clearly” know they were wrong, I.e no one had been sued or arrested for doing that literal, specific thing.

    Its a shit ruling, and why cops in the US are so brutal. Literally no personal consequences for their actions.

    This cop was clearly agitated and took a simple, non threatening “shush” gesture as a reason to brutalize a 71 old, non violent man. He will not likely not be fired, but also won’t face a lick of jail time for assualt. The likely soon to be dead mans family, who will lose their relative specically because of his actions, will make some number of millions in a few years from a lawsuit from the city that will admit no fault. The cop will go on brutalizing and murdering others needlessly.

    Thats the norm for this, and Trump has promises to let cops get away with it more often.




  • “Free and open source software.” It’s an ethos that says that code should be free and open for people to use and improve as they see fit. The core of it is that if you modify any software that is FOSS, your software must also be FOSS. So overtime the software and what its used for improve, change, widen. Lucky for us, the movement has been ongoing for 50+ years, so it’s a mature ethos whose benefits are everywhere. Most of the internet runs on FOSS. Lemmy itself is FOSS.

    It doesn’t necessarily mean an app is more private, but it does mean you can generally self host, as the commentor said. There isn’t a profit motive with most FOSS, at least not at its core, so there is little desire to data harvest generally. There is also a heavy overlap between FOSS advocates and privacy advocates, so they tend to be more privacy conscious via local data storage or encryption.







  • I’m glad they are going to take the DLC from the alpha state they released it in to an actual product people will want to buy.

    They should have done that before they started selling it, especially for such a beloved franchise, but at least they are willing to go the cyberpunk route and actually fix the broken game they released.

    They have still burned a lot of goodwill. I was planning on a day 1 purchase, but got caught up at work and ended up seeing the terrible reviews first, thank fuck. I sure won’t be buying this until it’s done, and I’ll wait on all future DLC too, if they happen.



  • Tons of questions here, but sure I’ll give it a go.

    Any autonomous or nearly autonomous hardware device would be taxed. Exceptions can apply. Maybe autonomous tractors are not taxed because food is needed, but unemployed farmers also need to be cared for.

    As to the code question and m365, maybe, maybe not. It may be reasonable to tax all cloud automation as a whole, or maybe just all SaaS, leaving IaaS and PaaS out of it. Exceptions may apply.

    The tax would be on the good or service forever, yes. If you displace human workers with automation, then thry need their basic needs met for human decency, but also so they don’t tear society to pieces, justifiably in my mind.

    Incumbent companies using automation may have an advantage, but only until they use a new robot or new automation. That advantage goes away if they are stuck 5-10 yr behind to avoid a tax. If they want to keep avoiding it, newer companies using taxed but getting a huge productivity booster will surpass them. That will incentivise them to use the tax producing goods or services and remove any initial advantage.

    I think I would also be okay with “no tax until you hit X automations” as well. You clearly can’t give tax breaks on employees, as not employing people will be the whole point of this, but you could likely work it out.



  • Most laws aren’t retroactive. If you do the thing before it’s illegal, then you skated by. That could very easily be the answer here, especially as most all the physical automation is barely existent. If a company deploys now, they don’t pay the tax, but they will when they upgrade models.

    As to code automation, same rules apply. Excel macros get by, but I would apply the tax on companies that replace white collar jobs via SaaS or other applications as their core businesses model, or for that line of buisness for vendors that do a lot of things. It would have to be refined as to where you draw the line, but you could.