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Comment Re:My biggest expense (Score 1) 237

Well look at it this way, your taxes mostly go towards keeping someone else from taking the rest of what you've earned. Whether the potential taker could be some other country or another American who feels like they drew the short straw in life.

That's what the Sicilian gentlemen with the double-breasted suits and no necks said, but they were taking a somewhat smaller cut.

Comment It's not dangerous...for Linus Torvalds (Score 4, Insightful) 70

If Torvalds steps down on his own, he can pick a successor at that time. If something happens to him or he just quits without arranging a successor, there's going to be a fight. The second scenario argues for arranging for a successor earlier, but the problem is as soon as you do, there's temptation on the part of people (possibly including but not limited to the successor) to try to force the succession earlier than Torvalds would want. So it's in his best interest to not arrange for a successor until he's ready to step down.

Comment Re: Can see both sides, but... (Score 1) 23

This but unironically. Why should Klarna have some sort of legislated privilege to get the banks to do work for them for free?

Incidentally, Klarna sucks; they offered some sort of premium -- I think a case or something -- for buying Bose headphones through them, then they never provided it and didn't respond to inquiries. It wasn't expensive enough to make a big fight over but it definitely soured me on Klarna.

Comment Re:How does youtube benefit from this scam? (Score 1) 98

It really bothers me the way social media companies use 230 for their own benefit. Initially, when I was young and naive I thought it was about protecting people's freeze peaches, but it's not.

No? Without 230 or something similar, the company hosting the content is liable for it. Since any given defamatory or copyright-violating post could be worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, running such a board would be far too risky and expensive for anyone BUT a large corporation, and they'd have to take steps like pre-approving every post or video to make sure it wasn't going to cost them big money. How much free speech do you think you'd have in such a world?

Comment Re:greater good (Score 1) 162

She actually threatened to kill "Mexico's".

The other girls on the chat were teasing H.M. about looking Mexican because of her darker complexion. One of H.M.â(TM)s friends asked in the chat, âoewhat are you doing this Thursday?â H.M. responded in jest, âoeon Thursday we kill all the Mexicoâ(TM)s.â To which another friend wrote, âoeIf Mexicans killed ur gonna die.â

This is obviously not a true threat.

Comment Re:And this is the fucking cause. (Score 1) 162

If it ainâ(TM)t the Medical Industrial Complex, you tell me what the fuck changed in 50 years. Because it wasnâ(TM)t the truck. Or the school. Or the shotgun.

It was the cigarette. They don't let the teachers smoke on school grounds any more, and that makes everyone way more on-edge.

Comment Re: seafloor carbon-fiber cannoli (Score 1) 124

The regulations were so bad that they came up with a (lawful) workaround (changing the mounting position of the engines) to avoid triggering some of the worst of them, and then when that workaround changed things enough that too much regulation would be triggered, they came up with another lawful workaround, MCAS. And that caused the trouble. They couldn't do make anything new because the regulatory burden for new things was too great, so instead they piled workaround after workaround on the old thing.

And you can scoff at "cheapest" all you want, but if the result of Boeing doing something else is their customers have to retrain their pilots, then as someone else put it "they might as well go to Airbus".

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