One major point is what exactly constitutes the national flag of Japan. Especially since it’s just a red circle on a white background, I could drop some spaghetti sauce on my shirt and end up wearing the flag. So, how is it legally different from a real flag?

According to the latest revision of the bill, the flag is defined as generally made of cloth or paper, primarily displayed on poles as a sign or decoration, and usable in real society. This means the Japanese flags in the virtual world are fair game, which is great news for my upcoming smartphone game Flag Blaster 3000.

It looks like there are ways around it, but yeah, that’s massively fucked up.

The last time I bought a prepaid phone, I had to give them my identity to register it (not an eSIM), but you could just as easily drive three cities away and use a pay phone at a truck stop or train station (only places I see them anymore, and they’re often hidden away, but still there). Maybe take a cab from a nearby area to the truck stop to avoid linking your license plate with it? I’m honestly not sure if they’d put that much effort into solving it, but you could also probably ask to use the phone at a library and they’d let you (though it might not be private enough for you to make it a convincing call)

Yeah, there are a lot of potential business purposes for it falling on a Wednesday, it’s really just that I can’t imagine 4 am working as well or better than basically any other time of day for this.

Although laying a tenth of your staff off immediately before some of their benefits vest is also bound to disgruntle employees, so maybe it’s just hubris.

Not coming into work I totally get, but that’s why most companies do this on a Friday during the afternoon, cut off access during the conversation, and walk the person out, if they’re on site. Doing in the middle of the week and compensating by giving the employees a WFH day is an abnormal choice, but whatever, maybe their pay periods start on Thursdays or something.

Announcing layoffs during the middle of the night and thereby ensuring that your retained employees are less productive on Wednesday (if not the rest of the week, we’re generally affected by sleep disruption a lot more and longer than we realize and having everyone a little bit affected will magnify the effects across the entire company) and the newly laid off former employees receive that news when they’re not as emotionally stable as if they had an uninterrupted night of sleep is bizarre.

Meta plans to lay off about 10 percent of its nearly 80,000 employees on Wednesday, with notices going out to affected workers’ personal and corporate email addresses at 4 am in their local time zone, according to a company-wide memo sent on Monday.

What an insane way to do things. How is ensuring that the majority of your employees either stay up way too late or wake up really early (after a likely restless night’s sleep) smack in the middle of the week going to improve efficiency in any way?

Weird that they didn’t just give them access to parking lots, that would have been way faster.

I’m not disagreeing with the point of your statement, but I do want to clarify that vaginas absolutely stretch, just not permanently. You’ll have a very different experience if you work up to fisting over a couple of hours vs. launching right into it, because vaginas loosen with arousal.

3/8 phew

Neurodivergent, anti-AI, and, given the number of times I’ve inadvertently referenced internet culture and had to explain it to people, probably very online.

When does middle age start again?

The “experiment” is one you conduct on yourself, it’s not for thinking about a process and using your imagined results as the basis of further study. It’s very useful in a number of non scientific fields, and it can serve as an aid in scientific education though, so it shouldn’t be written off generally.

The paper clip thought experiment is a punchy, memorable example of the conflict between what input you give to a computer and what the computer interprets from that. The goal is for people who hear it to remember that they need to be thoughtful about what exactly they want and precise in their phrasing when they’re programming or training an AI.

Tbh, I think we’re going the Russia route. I wish we could have as graceful a transition out of being a superpower as the UK (I’m not calling theirs objectively graceful, just less erratic and batshit).

2031 still sounds like a year out of a sci-fi story to me, but it’s only five years away

Monkey’s paw: everyone is now from Newfoundland

I don’t know why I’m surprised that the sun doesn’t know the difference between affect and effect, but I am.

I’m an immigrant in Germany and my boss (from here) recently asked me if it was a jerk move to do laundry on a Sunday if she checked with her neighbors first.

It made me realize I’ve been such an unintentional asshole. I’ve been avoiding things like carpentry and band practice, not laundry. There’s a guy on my street who mows the lawn before nine in the morning on Sundays though, so I’m not the worst in my neighborhood.

Tbh, I used that phrasing specifically because you were snippy about someone else making a claim based on their own experience and I was trying to prod you about the evidence you’re using.

When people kill each other “for no reason,” there’s often still a reason (though not an excuse)- territory in the case of gang or murder of romantic partners, protection or survivor’s benefits for your own family for soldiers killing in war, or people accidentally letting a killer instinct loose during play for people who get into brawls or similar. Even horrific crimes like genocide are committed out of a dual protective of kin/and aggressive of outsiders instinct.

The Wikipedia lists possible reasons, but we don’t actually know why animals do this when it’s actively harmful to them yet.

I don’t see how that supports that humans are one of a few species that kills for no reason, if we know that other animals kill in scenarios where it hurts them and we don’t actually commonly kill each other for no reason.

You might not, but I do 🤷

6 7

That’s impressive as hell, tbh. I’m glad rehab centers focus on such useful, otherwise seemingly inaccessible skills

I don’t like chimps, but bonobos and gorillas are also very chill

I don’t know where you saw that fact being presented, but surplus killing has long been documented in many species, including those who don’t make caches for winter.