FYI: we’ve banned this user because after communicating our disinterest in being used as an anti-China dumping ground to shadowbox with people who can’t even see our instance, the user responded with a bunch of hostility about people pushing back on them.

yeah, no shit, that’s not the same as “your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features”–not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what’s happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don’t have a company without systematically exploiting children

it’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off

Then we slap a random-ass speed limit sign down and say “job’s done.”

we don’t actually–the basis we derive most speed limits from is actually much worse, if you can believe that. from Killed by a Traffic Engineer:

Traffic engineers use what we call the 85th percentile speed. The 85th percentile speed is whatever speed 85 percent of drivers are traveling slower than. If we have 100 drivers on the road and rank them in order from fastest to slowest, the 15th fastest driver would give us our 85th percentile speed.

Traffic engineers will then look 5 mph faster and 5 mph slower to see what percentage of drivers fall into different 10 mph ranges. According to David Solomon and his curves, the magnitude of the speed range doesn’t matter as long as we get as many drivers as possible into that 10 mph range.

and, as applied to the example of the Legacy Parkway, to show how this invariably spirals out of control:

North of Salt Lake City, the Legacy Parkway parallels Interstate 15 up to the Wasatch Weave interchange where these highways come together. It’s a four-lane, controlled-access highway with a wide, grassy median and more than its fair share of safety problems.

So how did the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) respond?

It increased the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph. It said the speed limit jump will “eliminate the safety risk” on the Legacy Parkway.

UDOT conducted speed studies up and down the Legacy Parkway. It found that most drivers were going much faster than the 55 mph speed limit. Channeling the ghost of traffic engineers past, the safety director for UDOT said, “We decided to raise the speed limit to a speed that is closer to what drivers are actually driving. In doing so, we hope to eliminate the safety risk of speed discrepancy, which can happen when you have a significant difference between the speed most drivers are actually traveling and those who are driving the posted speed limit.”

In the case of the Legacy Parkway, the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 65 mph to 75 mph. Based on that and what it deems engineering judgment, UDOT originally proposed raising the speed limit to 70 mph. After community pushback, it settled for 65 mph.

According to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), this slight adjustment is acceptable. The MUTCD specifies that speed limits “should be within 5 mph of the 85th percentile speed of free-flowing traffic.”

a curious development; of course, i would personally bet this does not actually end the conflict

Except it’s likely on purpose so they won’t have enough people to look into this and other large cases against corporations that might impact the people buying out the government.

this is exactly what has happened; previously, the FTC was aggressively pursuing anti-trust against Amazon, Google, etc.

i doubt there is a strong religious justification for this—most likely, Bhutan is doing it because they are cripplingly poor and limited in how much they can diversify their revenue, and Bitcoin is a fairly good speculative asset

Isnt nigeria basically the only african country right now that isnt a shithole right now?

Nigeria probably has the most theoretical wealth available to it of any African country because it’s super rich in oil, but there are definitely other countries that have it better than Nigeria (South Africa, Cape Verde, maybe Namibia or Kenya if you want some deeper cuts). Nigeria also has a metric fuck ton of problems (religious tension and sectarianism, terrorism, an openly corrupt political system which likely stole the last presidential election, and constant economic turmoil) that severely rob its capability to exploit its riches. and yes colonialism is a big part of that, it has fairly bad deals with major corporations to exploit that oil

you’re being very weird in this specific chain of comments, and it’s unpleasant to read and dragging down otherwise pretty decent conversation. dial it back, or you’ll catch a temporary ban.

hardly surprising. we talk about enshittification today but Skype was one of the most egregious offenders before the term was even coined, in late-stage Skype (circa 2016-2017) i couldn’t even run the fucking thing without lag because of in-line ads. the user experience was frankly awful, and once you’ve used something like Discord or Zoom there’s just never any reason to go back.

come on, this is not productive discussion

you’ve been having a minor meltdown throughout this thread to anybody who asks you basic follow-up questions. take three days off and stop it

By necessity, Maryam’s reporting process is far from typical—she takes great pains to keep the authorities from knowing who she is, and has to work with a male family member to secure interviews. Sometimes, the process of scheduling an in-person meeting can resemble a game of telephone: she asks her brother to call a male relative of the potential subject to make the arrangements. When she wants to meet with a source in person, she must bring along a man to chaperone. She’ll also ask around to assess if the person she’s supposed to meet can be trusted to keep her identity a secret. “It’s really hard for me,” she said.

Once the piece is ready to be published, Maryam removes all traces of her reporting from her devices, including deleting every email and call log, except for contacts with her immediate family. “If the Taliban checks my phone [and finds something], it will not be good for me. So, I delete everything,” she said. She only publishes the article after she has confirmed again that her subjects are comfortable with everything they’re quoted as saying. “It’s my job to keep her safe,” she said.

imo if anything the opposite causality is true: this DOJ was banking on a continuation of Biden in Kamala Harris, and because that is no longer forthcoming they’re now trying to get something out the door before the administrative changeover in the hopes it can stick. it almost certainly won’t, but most of Trump’s appointees are gigamad about “censorship” and they hate Google for “punishing conservative voices” or whatever so it’s hardly the most contrived hail mary if so

it is not okay to deadname people for any reason (as everyone under this post already has stated), and if you do this again on the instance you will be banned from Beehaw for at least a week.

Surely it can’t just be because a town name happens to contain “lsd” in the middle of it?

Facebook is a remarkably bad website so i think you’d be quite surprised at how stuck in the past they are over there

The Mozilla Foundation laid off 30 percent of its workforce and completely eliminated its advocacy and global programs divisions, TechCrunch reports.

“Fighting for a free and open internet will always be core to our mission, and advocacy continues to be a critical tool in that work. We’re revisiting how we pursue that work, not stopping it,” Brandon Borrman, the Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief, said in an email to The Verge. Borrman declined to confirm exactly how many people were laid off, but said it was about “30% of the current team.”

apparently, the path to profitability was “shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit”

As of 2019 the company published 100 articles each day produced by 3,000 outside contributors who were paid little or nothing.[52] This business model, in place since 2010,[53] “changed their reputation from being a respectable business publication to a content farm”, according to Damon Kiesow, the Knight Chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.[52] Similarly, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab deemed Forbes “a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism” as of 2022.[49]

they realized that they could just become an SEO farm/content mill and churn out absurd numbers of articles while paying people table scraps or nothing at all, and they’ve never changed

terrorism is when the UN provides humanitarian aid to the people you’re bombing, starving, and killing in large numbers—definitely not a genocide, folks