When you’re that rich, the world is what you want it to be.

It’s interesting to think of the world religions that could have been, had the scales of power tipped in different directions. Gnosticism is an interesting take on Abrahamic religions, almost like a blend of Christianity and Buddhism.

There were even literal Greek Buddhists before there were Greek Christians. Heck, Christianity as we know it might not have survived without the original Greek drafts of the New Testament. There’s another universe out there where the eastern Greco-Romans were way too busy with the karmic cycle and achieving enlightenment to worry about the execution of some random guy with daddy issues in the desert.

In my later days of working at a supermarket, knowing I was going to imminently give my two weeks, I used to apply all sorts of discounts to people. “You get a senior discount”, “You get a student discount”, “You get bonus points”, “I can’t tell if these are the organic tomatoes so I’ll just charge for the cheaper ones”, etc.

On my last day, I loaded up the savings card of my last customer with bonus gas points equivalent of having spent $1000 in groceries (basically just $1 off per gallon of gas). Curious to know if I ended up causing a stir after leaving, I asked a friend of mine who still worked there if anyone made a fuss. No one ever noticed or complained.

The store probably loses an order of magnitude more each day just on the amount of expired food they throw away. Yet the corporate propaganda wants their employees to feel like they just robbed a bank if you so much as scan a coupon that the customer didn’t bring with them.

Can’t speak for the previous poster, but I’ve blocked a lot of (non-American) football and Formula 1 racing comms.

It’s mostly just a couple users. I just blocked them and then almost never see it.

I usually try not to block users if I can help it, but it was the only viable option when they spin up a new community for every genre of borderline CSAM that someone posts to pixiv.

I guess my only question is how this changes the situation enough to be meaningful?

For example, it’s easy enough to say a corporation is not allowed to donate to candidates or campaigns. Great, that has been a law for a long, long time now.

But then they get around it by donating to PACs, which are not the campaign, but organizations that voluntarily promote whatever candidate they want.

A PAC is the equivalent of a small business putting a “Vote for Whoever” sign in their front window, times a billion. And that is what the court is going to be looking at when these sorts of acts are challenged.

I get that a state can decide what corporations can and cannot be and do, and they’re welcome to address that sort of regulation since no one else is trying. But even then, suppose I’m a company like Google, what stops me from putting a promotional banner for any given candidate on every search someone performs?

Seems fitting, though. I don’t think anyone accused the average religious person of being good at critical thinking.

Healthcare has also been bleeding. My local news has run multiple stories over the past few months of massive hospital layoffs. No more Medicaid revenue means no ability to pay staff that provide those services.

Same here. Trump’s followers are mostly people who spent a lifetime accepting the contradictions of their religious beliefs. I don’t think they’ll have any trouble continuing to believe that he knows what he’s doing.

I use Niagara launcher, so all of my apps are in a single scrollable list.

This isn’t a screenshot of my own phone, but this is essentially what it looks like. There’s an A-Z list on the right that you can use to jump to a specific letter, or just scroll down the full list on the left. You can keep a small list of favorites at the top. It does support folders, but I don’t use them.

I would say flopped, but failed to be as big as, say, A24.

Everyone should watch I Love Boosters. One of my favorite movies of the year.

The bigger controversy though surrounds the video game arm of that publisher, which had all of its staff walk out in protest last year. Annapurna is still producing games, so guessing they must have hired replacements, but I’m assuming they had to dip into the Ellison family fund to avoid an embarrassment.

“I was just using AI to help me come up with dystopian cyberpunk scenarios. Whatever it chose to do with the prompt is on the AI.”

Not likely. AI data center hype is just the latest chapter in a long series of data center expansions.

If every AI company closed up shop tomorrow (not likely), the existing data centers would just be repurposed for some other use, otherwise it’s just leaving money on the table.

Gimme that burrito deep dish.

No you may not ask any questions.

Wilhelm Scream is what you’re thinking of.

So we can have the “View Image” button back in Google now, right?