The requirement for >30 hrs requiring insurance is only for companies with >50 employees. Do you have any idea how much revenue a company with 50+ employees has? They cam afford it.
Maybe not. In my state, the Democratic government issued an executive order stating that NO part-time employee could work more than 25 hours per week. The sole purpose was to avoid putting those employees into the health care system.
If a state government is trying to save money doing that, I would expect most business to do the same.
The police did their job and they did it correctly.
No, they didn't.
You get a complaint and some evidence, and the accused says "I didn't do that".
He also gave the police the ATM receipts and transactions on his OWN account. That should have been the red flags for the police. Their job was to go back with that evidence and get Wells Fargo to confirm the account matches the guy they are looking for. Like, before they bring the guy in and book him and threaten him with "well it's Well's Fargo's word against yours, you lying bank fraudster." Completely unprofessional.
And as many crimes as Wells Fargo has been caught committing, they should really have been more skeptical of anything they said. Not so for the pastor, they could have checked and seen he did not have a record.
As for 4K- seems superfluous to my demands, it would be nice, be don't need the extra cost, and the cable ISP that has a monopoly in my area isn't good enough to really support 4K straming so it's a waste on me anyway.
Console games are SOOO much better in 4k, though! That's what I use it for.
I feel like there is a fundamental difference between not assisting someone with their interstate commerce and with the government putting a stop to it.
There was no difference in the Patreon case, or Sargon's. And wouldn't be for lots of other businesses and individuals.
indeed MC needs little encouragement
I'm sure they received plenty of encouragement for this one. Government encouragement probably little to none. But that's kind of irrelevant.
Also a more general point - being funded by the government does not make someone an instrument of the government. There are many counter examples. It doesn't even apply to non-government funding arrangements, e.g. Mozilla is not some kind of Google stooge just because it gets substantial funding from Google.
I think you're being a bit disingenuous, here. I don't think you are truly naive enough to believe that those groups did not modify their behavior based on who is signing their checks. Government funding always comes with oversight, even if you assume that no government agent specified certain behaviors, it still creates the appearance of government control and endorsement. This is the only premise that is required to keep even a hint of religious doctrine and symbolism purged from government funded schools and government-owned public spaces.
Again, how is MasterCard acting like the government here?
By acting as a regulator, with a monopoly on the ability to allow interstate commerce or prohibit it for any entity, effectively shutting down any non-compliant actor.
The difference is that the government is forbidden from regulating the content of speech in its regulatory enforcement. So they are using companies and NGOs as proxies to do it for them. So, for instance aside from financial companies that are highly regulated, there are organizations such as the Atlantic Council, which is partnering with tech companies to police content on the Internet. The Atlantic Council is funded by the US government.
He pretends to be not racist by dressing it up, but eventually gets down to measuring skulls and ranting on about racial IQ and all that shit.
That's why they call him alt-lite. He puts a more acceptable veneer on all that supremacist stuff, playing the anti-identity politics line, but occasionally the mask slips.
You've seen something he's done that I've never seen. Or you're just repeating something someone said he said.
Of course, there are differences in IQ on the averages between races, so it's actually okay to mention that. What doesn't make it okay is trying to turn some problem-solving test into a measure of racial superiority. But that nuance gets lost on some people.
That's your theory, but do you have actual examples of it happening so we can observe the results? Or is it purely hypothetical?
You said it was already the case, right?
It is. And here's one example of it that you keep claiming cannot possibly exist. So you can shut up, now.
April (Patreon)
Aug 14, 3:20 PM PDT
Hi Robert,
My name is April and I’m on the Trust & Safety team here at Patreon. I’ve been notified by Mastercard that we must remove your account from Patreon, effective immediately.
Mastercard has a stricter set of rules and regulations than Patreon, and they reserve the right to not offer their services to accounts of their choosing. This is in line with their terms of service, which means it’s something we have to comply by.
The link to their Twitter page about MasterCard forcing the deplatforming of Robert Spencer (NOT Richard Spencer, Robert is a totally different person, and not a racist or alt-right).
I'm frankly not much of a Sargon fan, but what I've seen of him, on Joe Rogan's show, some other interviews, and a few of his, is that he is clearly not a racist, despises identity politics from the left AND the alt-right, and is nothing but critical of white supremacists and people that actually promote racist views.
So what you're displaying, here, is exactly the problem with corporate censorship and de-platforming. It doesn't matter what ideas someone is actually discussing, if we can find some off-hand comment out of an hour-long discussion, we can paint that person and unacceptable and that he will be banned from having his voice heard at all.
That's not okay. It's not even okay to consider, that the corporations in control of banking and payment processing and de facto messaging platform monopolies get to silence voices of dissent. But here you are going along with it, and not even making a very credible claim that his ideas might be dangerous, only that maybe he is thinking something distasteful, and not even based on his ideas but on what someone else said he said. And you're okay with turning him into a non-person based on that.
Meanwhile, the top two people in charge of the state of Virginia are wandering around in black face and KKK hoods and facing credible accusations of forced sexual assault.
As far as Paypal and MasterCard, should they be able to arbitrarily deny services to anyone, for any reason or none at all?
Yes; it's their system and they have the right to decide the terms of service. They are not your slaves, to be forced to provide services on your terms. The right answer here is to ensure that there are alternative payment systems available which they don't control.
So, if they decided they don't like Jews, you're okay with them not providing any services to any of them? Maybe they don't like people that post on Slashdot, so suddenly JesseMcDonald's card doesn't work any more, he calls his bank and they say, "Yes, JesseMcDonald, your account has been closed due to our terms of service," so you're still okay with all that behavior, I assume.
And it doesn't matter to you, does it, that they don't need to tell you what terms you may have violated, how you can stay within the terms without losing access to banking. You'll soon be homeless and starving, of course, because you can't get access to cash, you can't cash any checks, you can't pay your rent, and can't buy gas once all the cash in your pocket is gone.
You're basically advocating that it's okay that people are killed if some industry corporations decide they don't like them.
Are you saying that Patreon and payment processors should be forced to provide services to him? It's not like being a racist is a protected class.
Well, he isn't a racist. In fact, he was kicked off of Patreon for criticizing the racism of some alt-right figures. They just didn't like the way he criticized them, or something. They really haven't been very forthcoming about reasons at all, but it looks like it was pressure from payment processors.
As far as Paypal and MasterCard, should they be able to arbitrarily deny services to anyone, for any reason or none at all? Should banks be allowed to ban a person from accessing any financial system on a whim? Because that's the path you're going down, here.
Most of the problems with people being harassed by criticism are to do with monetization, which is not a free speech issue. They aren't being silenced, they are just not being paid to speak.
I can't see any way to force people to pay for stuff they don't want, that isn't ridiculously evil. Do we really want a Sargon tax?
No one was forced to pay Sargon - they were doing it voluntarily. Until Patreon and Paypal decided they didn't like what he said and got in the way of voluntary payments by refusing to allow them. Do we want the banks to decide who can be paid to create content?
There is no question that the behavior you describe is what the Washington legislature was trying to address. But, as is typical of politicians, they tried to grab too much power for themselves. This is evidenced by the fact that Clarence Moriwaki was able to actually obtain a restraining order, and, worse, that investigators recommended that Rynearson be charged with cyberstalking! Because of a political disagreement. On Facebook.
That's not a solution to the cyberstalking problem. It's a source of greater problems (censoring the speech of your political opponents). Because that's how the law was used in this case. If Rynearson had not initiated his lawsuit, the government would have continued to silence him. In fact, they are still threatening him in this case, the prosecutor's office saying they would wait to see how Rynearson behaved in the future (they're monitoring him).
just that the prosecutor's office would see how Rynearson behaved and take action if necessary
This reminds me of Patreon's excuses for their selective enforcement of policies and subjective policing of creators. They called it "Manifest Observable Behavior." (really) So, the MOB rules.
This is the model of the future. Legacy media is dying, just look at all the layoffs happening lately. And to be "advertiser friendly" they have to promote a corporate agenda. Most of their stuff is just stories they write about things they saw on Twitter.
Alternative media is growing rapidly, using the donation model primarily. They are building new studios, hiring people. And if their stuff isn't "advertiser friendly," so what? Sure YouTube will "demonetize" them, but they all have other sources of revenue, and won't be silenced.
Matt Christiansen even left Patreon over their censorship practices, and is still doing well. What surprised him the most? People like sending checks to his PO box. Go figure.
Great! Insightful argument. Terrific for persuasion!
Anything advertised as medication should be regulated
I guess you missed the part where they are marketed as supplements, not medicine. Let's not talk about the most profitable pharmaceutical product in history: statin drugs. These are nothing but derivatives of red yeast rice, which the FDA banned when the drug companies wanted to patent their derivatives. And they don't even treat a disease, just a marker of potential disease. Wow.
it's got nothing to do with the origin, be it straight from nature or from a complex industrial process.
Right and wrong. Right, it has nothing to do with the origin, it's about the patents. And wrong, because the origin determines whether you can get a patent and gouge the public for it, after multi-million dollar studies and paying off the FDA to the tune of a million dollars or so.
I suggest to make a nice smelling tea from the pretty Lily of the Valley, I guarantee it will solve all your physical problems!
Even better than the "idiot" opener, a "go kill yourself" closing! You win the argument for sure.
Oops! Telling the truth about a huge government bureaucracy under regulatory capture by the biggest and most profitable global corporate industry in history....
Licenced users are allowed to republish whatever they're licenced to. AP and Reuters wants their news published elsewhere, hence their customers are licenced to do so.
Even with this new law in place, you can still run an aggregator site. You just need to negotiate licences with those whose stories you link to (with a summary and all.) If they think you drive traffic to their site, you will get that licence easily. If they think you simply take their traffic (your summary has the whole story) then you don't get the licence. Simple.
And you will pay. The dying legacy media will demand extortionate prices for the licenses, they see it as a way to shore up their falling revenues. So, no, it's not simple at all.
If you're a news aggregator site, maybe they'll provide you a cheap or almost free license if the legacy news site has a paywall. It's free advertising that way. But how many news aggregator sites will actually have any visitors, anyway, if all your news comes from paywalled sites?
The Greeks and Romans weren't destroying entire ecosystems and devastating entire oceans and sources of fresh water....
Yes, yes, they were. In fact, even the indigenous folks of the North American content were doing it -- they hunted the Woolly Mammoth to extinction and they didn't even have running water or horses.
I am unsure if it is because they are just so out of touch with reality and the "Rich Guy" solution of the problem seems so obvious, that they just don't understand how a lot of people just do not have the upfront money, or personal power to follow these solutions.
That's exactly how I feel about all the government subsidies and targeted taxation imposed for the sake of "green agenda" items.
Lots of other people feel the same way. It's what triggered the Yellow Vest protests, which are spreading all over Europe.
Researchers do consider things like that. In a proper study there shouldn't have been anyone else in the room with him at all.
The CIA may not be the best research institution.
Well it was Stanford University, using the best researchers they had at the time. They weren't in the room all the time, they just came in occasionally to ask some questions and take some health readings. The CIA is actually still involved in projects there, although they are more open about it now. They even offer a CIA internship program. Christine Blasey Ford was involved in running that program, which makes since considering her father was involved in MKULTRA.
Anyway, no one knew for years that the CIA had anything to do with it. Kesey himself didn't believe it until the documents were made public.
Ken Kesey described his experiences on LSD when he volunteered from the CIA's MKULTRA experiments. He pranked the researchers through the whole thing. Of course, one of the evaluations was to check the subjects' perception of time. Of course his sense of time was wasted (they used pretty high doses), but Kesey noted that the idiot checking wore his wrist watch into the room. So Kesey just checked the second hand on the guy's watch, and was able to tell him how much time had passed to the second.
Funny how researchers never consider things like that.
Ken Kesey described his experiences on LSD when he volunteered from the CIA's MKULTRA experiments. He pranked the researchers through the whole thing. Of course, one of the evaluations was to check the subjects' perception of time. Of course his sense of time was wasted (they used pretty high doses), but Kesey noted that the idiot checking wore his wrist watch into the room. So Kesey just checked the second hand on the guy's watch, and was able to tell him how much time had passed to the second.
Funny how researchers never consider things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
I have PS Vue, but no Playstation (XBox instead). Vue works fine on the Roku. Wish it would run on the XBox, which offers nothing similar.
The requirement for >30 hrs requiring insurance is only for companies with >50 employees. Do you have any idea how much revenue a company with 50+ employees has? They cam afford it.
Maybe not. In my state, the Democratic government issued an executive order stating that NO part-time employee could work more than 25 hours per week. The sole purpose was to avoid putting those employees into the health care system.
If a state government is trying to save money doing that, I would expect most business to do the same.
The police did their job and they did it correctly.
No, they didn't.
You get a complaint and some evidence, and the accused says "I didn't do that".
He also gave the police the ATM receipts and transactions on his OWN account. That should have been the red flags for the police. Their job was to go back with that evidence and get Wells Fargo to confirm the account matches the guy they are looking for. Like, before they bring the guy in and book him and threaten him with "well it's Well's Fargo's word against yours, you lying bank fraudster." Completely unprofessional.
And as many crimes as Wells Fargo has been caught committing, they should really have been more skeptical of anything they said. Not so for the pastor, they could have checked and seen he did not have a record.
As for 4K- seems superfluous to my demands, it would be nice, be don't need the extra cost, and the cable ISP that has a monopoly in my area isn't good enough to really support 4K straming so it's a waste on me anyway.
Console games are SOOO much better in 4k, though! That's what I use it for.
I feel like there is a fundamental difference between not assisting someone with their interstate commerce and with the government putting a stop to it.
There was no difference in the Patreon case, or Sargon's. And wouldn't be for lots of other businesses and individuals.
indeed MC needs little encouragement
I'm sure they received plenty of encouragement for this one. Government encouragement probably little to none. But that's kind of irrelevant.
Also a more general point - being funded by the government does not make someone an instrument of the government. There are many counter examples. It doesn't even apply to non-government funding arrangements, e.g. Mozilla is not some kind of Google stooge just because it gets substantial funding from Google.
I think you're being a bit disingenuous, here. I don't think you are truly naive enough to believe that those groups did not modify their behavior based on who is signing their checks. Government funding always comes with oversight, even if you assume that no government agent specified certain behaviors, it still creates the appearance of government control and endorsement. This is the only premise that is required to keep even a hint of religious doctrine and symbolism purged from government funded schools and government-owned public spaces.
Again, how is MasterCard acting like the government here?
By acting as a regulator, with a monopoly on the ability to allow interstate commerce or prohibit it for any entity, effectively shutting down any non-compliant actor.
The difference is that the government is forbidden from regulating the content of speech in its regulatory enforcement. So they are using companies and NGOs as proxies to do it for them. So, for instance aside from financial companies that are highly regulated, there are organizations such as the Atlantic Council, which is partnering with tech companies to police content on the Internet. The Atlantic Council is funded by the US government.
He pretends to be not racist by dressing it up, but eventually gets down to measuring skulls and ranting on about racial IQ and all that shit.
That's why they call him alt-lite. He puts a more acceptable veneer on all that supremacist stuff, playing the anti-identity politics line, but occasionally the mask slips.
You've seen something he's done that I've never seen. Or you're just repeating something someone said he said.
Of course, there are differences in IQ on the averages between races, so it's actually okay to mention that. What doesn't make it okay is trying to turn some problem-solving test into a measure of racial superiority. But that nuance gets lost on some people.
That's your theory, but do you have actual examples of it happening so we can observe the results? Or is it purely hypothetical?
You said it was already the case, right?
It is. And here's one example of it that you keep claiming cannot possibly exist. So you can shut up, now.
The link to their Twitter page about MasterCard forcing the deplatforming of Robert Spencer (NOT Richard Spencer, Robert is a totally different person, and not a racist or alt-right).
I'm frankly not much of a Sargon fan, but what I've seen of him, on Joe Rogan's show, some other interviews, and a few of his, is that he is clearly not a racist, despises identity politics from the left AND the alt-right, and is nothing but critical of white supremacists and people that actually promote racist views.
So what you're displaying, here, is exactly the problem with corporate censorship and de-platforming. It doesn't matter what ideas someone is actually discussing, if we can find some off-hand comment out of an hour-long discussion, we can paint that person and unacceptable and that he will be banned from having his voice heard at all.
That's not okay. It's not even okay to consider, that the corporations in control of banking and payment processing and de facto messaging platform monopolies get to silence voices of dissent. But here you are going along with it, and not even making a very credible claim that his ideas might be dangerous, only that maybe he is thinking something distasteful, and not even based on his ideas but on what someone else said he said. And you're okay with turning him into a non-person based on that.
Meanwhile, the top two people in charge of the state of Virginia are wandering around in black face and KKK hoods and facing credible accusations of forced sexual assault.
As far as Paypal and MasterCard, should they be able to arbitrarily deny services to anyone, for any reason or none at all?
Yes; it's their system and they have the right to decide the terms of service. They are not your slaves, to be forced to provide services on your terms. The right answer here is to ensure that there are alternative payment systems available which they don't control.
So, if they decided they don't like Jews, you're okay with them not providing any services to any of them? Maybe they don't like people that post on Slashdot, so suddenly JesseMcDonald's card doesn't work any more, he calls his bank and they say, "Yes, JesseMcDonald, your account has been closed due to our terms of service," so you're still okay with all that behavior, I assume.
And it doesn't matter to you, does it, that they don't need to tell you what terms you may have violated, how you can stay within the terms without losing access to banking. You'll soon be homeless and starving, of course, because you can't get access to cash, you can't cash any checks, you can't pay your rent, and can't buy gas once all the cash in your pocket is gone.
You're basically advocating that it's okay that people are killed if some industry corporations decide they don't like them.
Are you saying that Patreon and payment processors should be forced to provide services to him? It's not like being a racist is a protected class.
Well, he isn't a racist. In fact, he was kicked off of Patreon for criticizing the racism of some alt-right figures. They just didn't like the way he criticized them, or something. They really haven't been very forthcoming about reasons at all, but it looks like it was pressure from payment processors.
As far as Paypal and MasterCard, should they be able to arbitrarily deny services to anyone, for any reason or none at all? Should banks be allowed to ban a person from accessing any financial system on a whim? Because that's the path you're going down, here.
Most of the problems with people being harassed by criticism are to do with monetization, which is not a free speech issue. They aren't being silenced, they are just not being paid to speak.
I can't see any way to force people to pay for stuff they don't want, that isn't ridiculously evil. Do we really want a Sargon tax?
No one was forced to pay Sargon - they were doing it voluntarily. Until Patreon and Paypal decided they didn't like what he said and got in the way of voluntary payments by refusing to allow them. Do we want the banks to decide who can be paid to create content?
There is no question that the behavior you describe is what the Washington legislature was trying to address. But, as is typical of politicians, they tried to grab too much power for themselves. This is evidenced by the fact that Clarence Moriwaki was able to actually obtain a restraining order, and, worse, that investigators recommended that Rynearson be charged with cyberstalking! Because of a political disagreement. On Facebook.
That's not a solution to the cyberstalking problem. It's a source of greater problems (censoring the speech of your political opponents). Because that's how the law was used in this case. If Rynearson had not initiated his lawsuit, the government would have continued to silence him. In fact, they are still threatening him in this case, the prosecutor's office saying they would wait to see how Rynearson behaved in the future (they're monitoring him).
Pretty blatant overreach.
just that the prosecutor's office would see how Rynearson behaved and take action if necessary
This reminds me of Patreon's excuses for their selective enforcement of policies and subjective policing of creators. They called it "Manifest Observable Behavior." (really) So, the MOB rules.
This is the model of the future. Legacy media is dying, just look at all the layoffs happening lately. And to be "advertiser friendly" they have to promote a corporate agenda. Most of their stuff is just stories they write about things they saw on Twitter.
Alternative media is growing rapidly, using the donation model primarily. They are building new studios, hiring people. And if their stuff isn't "advertiser friendly," so what? Sure YouTube will "demonetize" them, but they all have other sources of revenue, and won't be silenced.
Matt Christiansen even left Patreon over their censorship practices, and is still doing well. What surprised him the most? People like sending checks to his PO box. Go figure.
Idiot.
Great! Insightful argument. Terrific for persuasion!
Anything advertised as medication should be regulated
I guess you missed the part where they are marketed as supplements, not medicine. Let's not talk about the most profitable pharmaceutical product in history: statin drugs. These are nothing but derivatives of red yeast rice, which the FDA banned when the drug companies wanted to patent their derivatives. And they don't even treat a disease, just a marker of potential disease. Wow.
it's got nothing to do with the origin, be it straight from nature or from a complex industrial process.
Right and wrong. Right, it has nothing to do with the origin, it's about the patents. And wrong, because the origin determines whether you can get a patent and gouge the public for it, after multi-million dollar studies and paying off the FDA to the tune of a million dollars or so.
I suggest to make a nice smelling tea from the pretty Lily of the Valley, I guarantee it will solve all your physical problems!
Even better than the "idiot" opener, a "go kill yourself" closing! You win the argument for sure.
Oops! Telling the truth about a huge government bureaucracy under regulatory capture by the biggest and most profitable global corporate industry in history....
TROLL!
Licenced users are allowed to republish whatever they're licenced to. AP and Reuters wants their news published elsewhere, hence their customers are licenced to do so.
Even with this new law in place, you can still run an aggregator site. You just need to negotiate licences with those whose stories you link to (with a summary and all.) If they think you drive traffic to their site, you will get that licence easily. If they think you simply take their traffic (your summary has the whole story) then you don't get the licence. Simple.
And you will pay. The dying legacy media will demand extortionate prices for the licenses, they see it as a way to shore up their falling revenues. So, no, it's not simple at all.
If you're a news aggregator site, maybe they'll provide you a cheap or almost free license if the legacy news site has a paywall. It's free advertising that way. But how many news aggregator sites will actually have any visitors, anyway, if all your news comes from paywalled sites?
I hope I get this update on my Huawei phone!
The Greeks and Romans weren't destroying entire ecosystems and devastating entire oceans and sources of fresh water....
Yes, yes, they were. In fact, even the indigenous folks of the North American content were doing it -- they hunted the Woolly Mammoth to extinction and they didn't even have running water or horses.
It's as if they believe Native Americans retained enough of their culture to still be able to communicate with smoke signals!
FTFY, bad analogy guy.
I am unsure if it is because they are just so out of touch with reality and the "Rich Guy" solution of the problem seems so obvious, that they just don't understand how a lot of people just do not have the upfront money, or personal power to follow these solutions.
That's exactly how I feel about all the government subsidies and targeted taxation imposed for the sake of "green agenda" items.
Lots of other people feel the same way. It's what triggered the Yellow Vest protests, which are spreading all over Europe.
Researchers do consider things like that. In a proper study there shouldn't have been anyone else in the room with him at all.
The CIA may not be the best research institution.
Well it was Stanford University, using the best researchers they had at the time. They weren't in the room all the time, they just came in occasionally to ask some questions and take some health readings. The CIA is actually still involved in projects there, although they are more open about it now. They even offer a CIA internship program. Christine Blasey Ford was involved in running that program, which makes since considering her father was involved in MKULTRA.
Anyway, no one knew for years that the CIA had anything to do with it. Kesey himself didn't believe it until the documents were made public.
Ken Kesey described his experiences on LSD when he volunteered from the CIA's MKULTRA experiments. He pranked the researchers through the whole thing. Of course, one of the evaluations was to check the subjects' perception of time. Of course his sense of time was wasted (they used pretty high doses), but Kesey noted that the idiot checking wore his wrist watch into the room. So Kesey just checked the second hand on the guy's watch, and was able to tell him how much time had passed to the second.
Funny how researchers never consider things like that.
Ken Kesey described his experiences on LSD when he volunteered from the CIA's MKULTRA experiments. He pranked the researchers through the whole thing. Of course, one of the evaluations was to check the subjects' perception of time. Of course his sense of time was wasted (they used pretty high doses), but Kesey noted that the idiot checking wore his wrist watch into the room. So Kesey just checked the second hand on the guy's watch, and was able to tell him how much time had passed to the second.
Funny how researchers never consider things like that.