A peanut with a top hat and a monocle selling you other peanuts, to eat.
Considering humans did sell humans.
If you can deny the sentience and right to exist without being property of cows, pigs, and chickens, its a very small step to humans.
Is the answer not chattel slavery?
Mandatory “hide the opt-out if there’s even an opt-out at all” “AI” trash that is shoved into everything from operating systems to browsers. It’s less than useless, outright malicious in both intent and practice in many cases, and dumps more carbon into the air just so the “AI” trash doesn’t seem like a sunk cost investment for venture capitalists.
Today I heard Meta has laid off workers because they brought their own food for lunch instead of buying it from the company cafeteria.
Well yes, but also no. Meta fired those folks because they were using their lunch stipend provided by meta for things other than lunch. Petty, given how much they were paying the employees, but almost certainly a breach of contract on the employee’s part.
Meta is probably trying to do layoffs without paying layoff costs or taking the stock hit layoffs can cause. Which is still capitalist AF by any measure, lol. For fans of watching what kind of shit the oligarchy is trying now, Meta is definitely one to keep an eye on. Mark Zuckerberg has been moving very conservative very quickly lately.
You see, I at least buy food from my lunch stipend, although it’s usually my grocery trip and not necessarily my lunch of the day. And I only get about 7€ lunch stipend per day, not >40€.
Some random company that sells fruits overthrowing another country’s government; it’s so ludicrous I’d say it’s too silly to be the plot of a serious movie and like no no, actually this ludicrous story is actually real.
A more recent example comes from the med-tech giant Abbott Labs, which used DMCA 1201 to suppress a tool that allowed people with diabetes to link their glucose monitors to their insulin pumps, in order to automatically calculate and administer doses of insulin in an “artificial pancreas.” -eff.org
We joke about someday having to jailbreak our own organs, but we’re basically already there.
An exoskeleton let a paralyzed man walk. Then its maker refused repairs.
Did OP ask an LLM for the “most Lemmy question to ask”?
That person who was in a car that ended up crossing three lanes, hitting a pole and then hitting a tree. They declined an ambulance because they were scared of the ambulance bill - then got a bill for $150 for refusing the ambulance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Owning more than one home
Actually owning two or three homes is okay-ish. The problem is when you own tens and rent them all
Two or three makes you a slumlord
There’s nothing wrong with that.
I once read that there are some states in the U.S. where firefighters don’t put out fires in houses that don’t pay a monthly subscription.
Crassus would be proud.
Time for melting some gold.
That sounds apocryphal.
I live in an area with a subscription fire service.
It’s not expensive - around $200/year. And if you don’t have a subscription they still come and put out your fire or cut you out of the car or whatever needs to be done. You just get a bill for $3000/hr/apparatus that responds.
But I still find it abhorrent. Just put it in my fucking taxes and be done with it. Jesus.
I live in an area with a subscription fire service.
I thought the earlier guy was doing a joke. I knew that those were a thing in the 1800’s or something, but even today?
You just get a bill for $3000/hr/apparatus that responds.
That’s pretty insane. So basically the firemen and ambulances are too expensive for the average citizen to use, and if you happen to be black, you probably don’t want to call the cops either.
Great services.
Private fire fighters have been a thing since at least the 1600s.
No no. Not “since”, but “in”.
It genuinely shocked me those still exist in the states. That’s fucking insane.
We have a somewhat different mentality about public safety here in Finland.
yep, we can say the same thing about slavery.
The US Empire.
Health Insurance that covers next to nothing but costs a fortune anyway.
I’m in the middle of trying to get a fairly expensive surgery.
If I had insurance, I would need to pay about $15,000 (between premiums, copays, annual deductible, coinsurance, and out of pocket maximums) with the only insurance available to me through my workplace before anything would be covered. So it’s not really worthwhile, right? Well, the surgery I need–around here–gets quotes of as much as $89,000. The most recent quote that I have is around $18,000. Keep in mind that the surgery takes about an hour, is a surgeon, one OR nurse assisting, and an anesthesiologist. The fee for the surgeon and nurse is about $5000, and the facility takes about $10,000. In the case of surgery in a hospital–rather than an ambulatory surgical center (ACS0—it’s even worse. With the same surgeon and OR nurse at an ACS, I had a quote of $16,300; at a hospital the quote was $49,000. The surgeon and nurse get the same fee regardless, which means that the hospital charged >$30,000.
…And good fucking luck getting a lot of places to give you prices at all, even though DHHS has mandated pricing transparency. Even if you know exactly what CPT billing codes are going to be used, it can be days of back and forth before you can get a price. If you need shit fixed NOW, you’re just going to be stuck with whatever they charge.
☝️ recently got a covid test that based on all my research beforehand, it should have been covered except for $10 I would pay.
Jokes on me, it actually cost me $200 they charged to my credit card two weeks later. I didn’t even get to know the price at the time I needed medical care.
Sometimes other countries make fun of America for things they don’t understand. Not on this one, America deserves every bit of mocking it gets for it’s medical coverage atrocity.
It’s a developing country. You will catch up.
Also we guys in western Europe are happy we are not ruled by Russia or China, and that’s because of the USA I think.
I kind of like the US culture, but it’s ridiculous how they treat human beings when money and power is on the line.
It’s a developing country. You will catch up.
It isn’t and we won’t. The US is a post-developed country backsliding.
It’s a joke… :)
Yeah, gallows humor!
You can get free rapid covid test kits from the US government with a valid mailing address.
Yeah man that and the cheese are just unforgivable
Americans stupidity is another one that they get correct but there’s plenty of things to laugh about America as there is to laugh about 3rd world countries.
A lateral flow test or something using a lab?
Must be a lab test as lateral flow is like £2:
https://www.boots.com/flowflex-antigen-rapid-test-lateral-flow-self-testing-kit-1-test-10312288Or $7 in Walmart: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Flowflex-Covid-19-Antigen-Home-Test-1-Test/837992467?classType=VARIANT&athbdg=L1200
Nose swab into a piece of lab equipment about the size of a bread toaster. They put the swab into the thing right in front of me but I didn’t note any further details about the equipment.
I went in for strep testing (which is what it ended up being). They advised covid test too due to local outbreak, I predicted that they might so had done some prep research and thought I could expect a much lower bill.
Lesson learned, avoid getting tested for covid 😂
suppressing wages and social housing so that starvation and homelessness make labour cheaper
Motorcycle airbag vests that will not work if you aren’t up-to-date on the subscription payments when you have a crash…
I mean, it kind of makes some sense. Part of what they’re doing is checking your location, speed, bearing, etc., and–IIRC–using cell signals for some of that. That’s bandwidth, and someone has to pay for it, even if it’s not very much. OTOH, Helite makes a vest that uses a tether, and that’s going to work well enough in most cases.
I think that there might be some that have options to pay for it all up-front instead of having a subscription, but I’m not positive; I just rely on leather and Knox inserts.
I don’t have any direct info on how it works, but I would have assumed it could be done completely offline with some sort of accelerometers. But I am a Lay Person so…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯Accelerometers don’t work that great with motorcycles; when you go into a hard turn, the accelerometer still thinks that you’re straight up, due to centripedal force. You’d actually need gyroscopes. (…Which is why adaptive headlights for motorcycles end up being so expensive, and why only BMW specs them, and only on one or two touring models.)
Recently?
How a lawyer in America got jailed for legally fighting against(and defeating) an American multi-national oil company that polluted the Amazon and more importantly harmed the lives and health of the locals with the pollution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OtIAZMqrZE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_DonzigerYep, learned about this just yesterday from the YouTube channel BoyBoy who covered the situation quite well and had a lovely interview with Steven (as lovely as such a depressing topic can be)
In June 2022, a federal appeals court affirmed Donziger’s criminal contempt conviction. In March 2023, the Supreme Court declined to hear further appeals.
I’m shocked.
I learned about this during the pan through interviews he did with Chapo Traphouse. Absolutely nuts.
Donziger’s story is heartbreaking and infuriating, and I’m continually disappointed that so few people are familiar with his story and what the courts did to him. It’s one of the clearest examples of judicial corruption and the power and benefits that are afforded to corporations and almost never extended to the people fighting for what’s right and just.
