There's definitely a scam somewhere in the gift card's history; the guy writing about his situation is upset because Apple glassed his account over it, not over the gift card value. The process of not being credited for the gift card's code and then talking to the retailer to get one that hadn't been tampered with apparently went smoothly; but then the account and everything associated with it got terminated without comment or recourse.

Someone is presumably going to eat the value of the gift card, apparently the retailer either directly or through merchant fees and the payment card processor doing it; but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account if you inadvertently interact with a gift card that has been used for some sort of scam activity; even if you have proof that you purchased it from a normal retailer that sells gift cards; rather than some dodgy flea market arrangement that screams 'bagman'/'too good to be true'.

Aimed directly at the scammers? Probably not, unless the penalties for the scam are currently insufficient. Aimed at the ad networks who, currently, have zero to negative interest in ensuring that ad spend isn't overtly hostile before plunking it in front of you? Quite possibly more helpful.

I don't know if Google has been caught out as dramatically as ; but based on the sorts of ad impressions they deliver their standards are clearly pretty low or apathetically applied, and more or less the same perverse incentives exist.

It has two meanings, neither of which has anything to do with corrosion. One is RobUST, the other is the name of a highly adaptive and parasitic fungus.

Contractually, they very much do.

False. This isn't like your beloved Nazi land where only the guy with all the assumed power gets his way on everything. There are a lot of reasons why this doesn't work the way you think it does, (among other things, the board of directors don't get to make all the decisions for the company, rather its legal representative does) but the biggest concern here is IP transfers. The joint venture has to be given rights to the IP in China in order to actually use them. And, even if you have ALL the voting shares, you still have a fiduciary responsibility to those who share an equity stake, which also means that trying to revoke those rights is going to fail as it devalues the company, thus going against your fiduciary responsibility.

Well, they are in Chinese, a language I don't speak. But here's a summary:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lexology.com%2Flibra...

Knock yourself out.

No, it's an analogy. I'm describing it in terms that I thought you're familiar with. But obviously I was mistaken, and I should have known because you've already proven that you're not even a software developer. Not a competent one, at least.

Nope. In fact, even majority shareholders can't. Authorized representatives of the company can, however, even if they own no shares at all. In the United States, Even if you control 99% of a company, taking company money for personal use can get you arrested for embezzlement. If you're a 100% owner, it could be tax fraud rather than embezzlement. This isn't like your Nazi land, where the man at the top gets to do whatever he wants with impunity, just like your fuhrer stated about Fritz Kuhn when he committed embezzlement. It doesn't work that way in China, either. Though in China, those in power can look the other way if it suits them.

Nope. When I post, you always see my username.

Oh, for sure. Like that time rsilvergun tried ziplining:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fshorts...

If that's true, that basically solves your problem, does it not? You don't need them, they don't need you. You can go your separate way from them, and live happily ever after. You are neither slave nor serf. You are just you.

This does not follow your previous assertion. You said they don't like to compete and they don't like being dependent on consumers. What the hell would they need with a feudal system and militaries if they're off on their own, doing their own thing?

Drones are now effective anti-tank weapons. They're also easy for just anybody to build.

Socialism doesn't fly because it just doesn't work. It never did. In the absence of an authoritarian government to enforce it, it just falls apart. Gorbachev, like every other socialist, including the guy who dreamed up the scheme to begin with, just assumed that going into socialism is inevitable, and once in socialism nobody would ever want to go back to capitalism. Until Eastern Europe did exactly that once their authoritarian governments lost their legitimacy. The only countries remaining under socialism to this day are still authoritarian governments.

But you said, and I quote "they are[sic] absolutely done with capitalism", remember? Elon already replaced you with grok and optimus robots, according to you. He certainly didn't need you before, and especially doesn't need you now. Of course, you're going to have to figure out how to feed yourself once you've run out of his detritus.

He's basically leaning into classic Maoist thought: If any person isn't useful to him personally, then they're either a counterrevolutionary, or at best a distraction from the revolution. Either way, they need to be flogged in public, if not executed, and have all of their stuff taken away.

It's called projection.

To this day I don't understand what makes old people like you fantasize about being oppressed. Sure, when you're young, you're more likely to have a sense of adventure, seeking glory on the battlefield, etc. This is, after all, what motivated german youth to fight for their Kaiser, and again to fight for their Fuhrer. It's also what motivated the youth in Mao's china to kill their teachers, because apparently intellectualism is a tool of oppression. And of course, it motivated the bolsheviks to kill and enslave anybody who Stalin declared the enemy of the people for the glory of the revolution. Happened in the Iranian and Cuban revolutions too.

But when you're older, and you've had the benefit of learning from hindsight like this, especially while living in a high-technology free society where all of this information is available at your fingertips any time you want it, uncensored, why would you continue going down what history has always shown to be a very destructive path? The only explanation I can come up with is that such old people, like yourself, are simply incapable of learning from past mistakes. Sure, there's some neuroplasticity involved that makes even entertaining viewpoints outside your preconceived notions difficult, but far from impossible. And yet here you are. So I wonder if there's something else wrong with you, like a pathology.

We do know a few things:
- Chronic alcoholism, FASD, and related conditions before and during soviet times https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2F...
- Maoism came at the tail end of the opium wars
- Devout socialists such as yourself and Bernie Sanders both have FASD

Of course, this isn't to say that correlation is causation by any stretch, but the strong correlation in your case is undeniable all the same. So that does strongly hint at there being a causal effect, or at the very least, a common pathway.

Tomato, tomato. It's still a business entity. This isn't like comparing a deque to a linked list.

That's still a controlling equity stake. Just like with your linked lists, the devil is in the details, namely in the form of "Corporate Structure Requirements". Among other things, it gives the "partner" a lot of leverage to set terms, including things like technology transfers.

Indeed quite an oops on your part. But I doubt you'll understand why. I don't believe any explanation I give you will be adequate, like when I tell you that you take a big performance hit with linked lists, and even point you to a video of the man you believe is a living deity saying exactly the same thing, you still don't get it and continue to build everything with linked lists, and then you still wonder why it runs like doucheland-sausage-eating ass.

Sounds like a program perfectly suited to kicking welfare in the direction of preferred corporate allies(both in terms of what tech gets adopted for federal use; and who gets to use the government payroll as an internship/evaluation program) and for ensuring that none of the departments with significant technical requirements who had their own internal expertise DOGEd to ribbons will get to regain it; instead periodically getting the Accenture Experience from a free-floating layer of loyalists who don't give a fuck because they'll be off to the private sector in 18 months anyway.

When that predictably turns out well; we can presumably grab some folksy Reagan line about how the government can't do anything right; and just directly farm out the contract to palantir or whoever.

If you think theater is a 'sacred space' perhaps you should get on theater management about that. Outside of some very atypical or heavily stage-managed cases the movie theatre experience is typically fucking dire. Paid admittance to a half hour of commercials; seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

It certainly remains very possible for a proper large scale theatre install to handily outgun anything you'd get at home, and definitely the 'whatever is cheap and 65in' best buy experience; but there doesn't appear to be much interest in making the overall experience a compelling sell.

If all you do is attend directorial release screenings with your colleagues I assume that isn't a you problem; but if you genuinely care about the viability, and survival, of the theater experience maybe you should care more; because it's not like people are staying away from theaters just because they are philistines who hate art and desire aggressively mediocre experiences; it's because the theater is an aggressively mediocre experience that squanders much of its remaining technical edge to apathy and cost cutting that can definitely make it more miserable than staying home; but will never make it a better value.

I already do. Why are you whining about that?

Well, for example, if they do business here, they have to partner with a local company who owns a 51% share.