I worked midnight to 8am as a security supervisor at a hospital. It was nice in some ways and awful in other ways. Honestly, all the ways it was awful occurred outside of the actual shift itself. It was harder to hang out with friends, I was always tired, I had to try to get tired and sleep while it was sunny out (blackout curtains and sunglasses on the drive home ftw), and the world was waking up while I was going to bed. It was hard on my relationship with my wife.

The shift itself was pretty great actually. The hospital was quieter at night. As a supervisor, I did have some issues with my guards falling asleep at desks or trying to hide and take naps. Two people got fired over it. But most of them were pretty good. One guy fell asleep while driving the patrol vehicle and crashed it into a gate. That was embarrassing for everyone and he ultimately lost his job (he didn’t admit to falling asleep, but we all suspected it - he was working two jobs and was perpetually tired). The best thing about the job was sneaking up onto the roof early in the morning on my patrols and watching the sun rise.

I think a more serious and probable question is what would happen if your doctor had a heart attack during surgery. Doesn’t take a degree from Hollywood Upstairs Medical School for that to happen!

LENNY!!!

You’re not wrong and I’m happy that piracy communities exist in spaces where access is easily cheap and accessible if only for the days that those industries get greedier. But for now, I’m happy to pay when it’s affordable and easy to access.

I half agree with what Gabe Newell said in regards to piracy being a service issue and not about price. I think it largely is a service issue. Access is the greater problem. Price is secondary as long as it’s somewhat reasonable. I don’t pirate video games because I can get them reasonably, but he is a smidge wrong insofar as I don’t buy the outrageously expensive games. Steam’s major success is having good sales that keep me away from pirating because the possibility of games I want going on discount at some point is realistic. It’s telling that the only time I did dabble in video game piracy was to relive my childhood memories of Nazi Zombies from the Call of Duty video games. I dabbled in it then because Activision is selling their decades old games for outrageous prices considering their age and their “sales” are weak considering the already overinflated price. I refuse to pay for that. And so I sailed the high seas.

The music industry is still affordable and accessible, so I don’t feel that pressure at all. Back when Limewire was around the pressure was there partially because I was a kid and didn’t have much money and hunting down CDs I wanted for the obscure music I liked was challenging. It was mostly an accessibility issue that Spotify fixed. If their prices move beyond my means then that relationship will no longer benefit me and the sails will raise once more.

What purpose does throwing someone in prison for ten years do though for something like forgery? Would it not be better if they were forced to do community service and lost access to the tools that led to them committing forgery? Why pay money to remove someone from society for a decade? Is it to teach any other potential forgerers a lesson? Is it to teach the forgerer themself a lesson? Is that really a lesson that needs to be worth a decade in a cell to learn? The world’s justice systems have generally erred too much on the side of retribution instead of rehabilitation. It’s especially sinister when you consider how much our capitalist systems place more value on things like capital over people’s lives and wellbeings. To be clear, I consider myself to be a capitalist, but a social democrat that believes in heavy regulations on our capitalist systems. I think our retributive, excessively pro-business justice system is a clear example of what happens when you let capitalism go unfettered and bleed into every aspect of our lives. Forgery is not violent. Most of the time it is not actively dangerous. Why don’t we come up with more creative and proactive ways of punishing people that would benefit people at large rather than ruin the criminal’s entire life? Even in a case where I am not on the criminal’s side I find myself pretty appalled that ten years could even possibly be on the table in a forgery case.

Seriously. Why the fuck is it even a possibility for ten years of prison over something like this? It’s crazy to me that a nonviolent crime could be punished so severely. I mean, why do we have prison? Is it to remove dangerous people from society? That’s certainly how I think it should be, but these sorts of punishments really show that it’s all about sating the bloodlust of victims.

Some day the orioles will discover the same technology. I’ll be walking through a forest and hear a really sexxed up voice saying “Hey big guy, why don’t you come up here and make me moan?”. So I’ll naturally climb up the tree to investigate and all I’ll see is an oriole excitedly staring at me and holding its phone using the Birdnell Humanology app. Only then will the birds have their revenge in full.

I love the ornithology app so much! I recorded an oreole singing in the forest the other day, then the app identified it and gave me a list of recordings of oreole songs, so I was able to loudly play it on my phone and sure enough the oreole came over to investigate! (I felt a bit guilty for faking it out like that, so I stopped as soon as it came over.)

To me, the larger issue for the world outside of Russia is the ensuing chaos would be pretty scary when there are nukes sitting around. All it would take is one bad actor to get ahold of those for bad things to happen. I don’t think it’s likely and I can’t currently see the motivations for using nukes on any other nations apart from Russia itself and Ukraine, but chaos is chaos and many would consider the evil we know to be safer than whatever else lurks around the corner.

Personally, though, despite being aware of this it would regardless please me so much to see Putin fall. I would especially love to see Russia democratize more, but I’m afraid that’s probably a pipe dream anytime soon. Uncontrolled chaos generally doesn’t lend itself to more democracy.

This is very true in my experience. My college expenses were slashed in half when I moved out of the dorm and into a tiny studio apartment across the city from my campus. It also really hurt my ability to study when I was so far from campus. It hurt my studies even moreso when I needed to take on a part time job to try mitigating the costs of my rent. It’s a really toxic system, because the parts of cities with universties tend to be the expensive parts of cities.