… “Apples can go bad, but so can oranges” is literally comparison.

the representing of one thing or person as similar to or like another.

You didn’t have to argue about the meaning of the word comparison if you didn’t care. If you’re going to argue at someone, don’t tell them to stop responding. It conveys a weird energy of “I care enough to respond, but not enough to read a response”.

My day is going great. I got the day off and good leftovers for lunch, and now I’m just playing games and relaxing.

Here’s a bewildering product image for the leading brand of rabies vaccine in the US:

A friend woke up to a bat freaking out in their bedroom. We told him to go to the doctor, who said that he almost certainly didn’t have a rabies risk because the bat seemed fine, he had no visible bites, and most bats here don’t bite, buuut the “certainty of a slow and painful death” compared to “low risk moderate discomfort rabies vaccine series” means they recommend it anyway. To cheer him up we shared the terrible website design of the manufacturer. Seems people aren’t looking for the hip new thing when they’re looking for rabies vaccine.

… You directly compared the two of them, but okay.

It’s a really odd product comparison that totally distracted me from the product.

Eeeh, he’s closer to how you want that situation to go than Cosby, by far.

He asked permission to touch himself in front of someone else, and only proceeded when he had their consent.
Turns out that consent between people earlier in their careers and someone more established can be tricky, to say the least.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41950043

What he did wasn’t violent, just ignorant to power dynamics. What he did wasn’t okay, but it’s far from drugging people.

What about when their beliefs are “people you care about should die?”

It’s a reciprocal relationship. I can tolerate them if they can tolerate me. If they base their beliefs on failing to tolerate me… I won’t extend the courtesy either.

Except that with the website example it’s not that they’re ignoring the price or just walking out with the item. It’s that the item was not labeled with a price, nor were they informed of the price. Then, rather than just walking out, they requested the item and it was delivered to them with no attempt to collect payment.

The key part of a website is that the user cannot take something. The site has to give it to them.
A more apt retail analogy might be you go to a website. You see a scooter you like, so you click “I want it!”. The site then asks for your address and a few days later you get a scooter in the mail.
That’s not theft, it’s a free scooter. If the site accused you of theft because you didn’t navigate to an unlinked page they didn’t tell you about to find the prices, or try to figure out payment before requesting, you’d rightly be pretty miffed.

The shoplifting analogy doesn’t work because it’s not shoplifting if the vendor gives it to you knowingly and you never misrepresented the cost or tried to avoid paying. Additionally, taking someone’s property without their permission is explicitly illegal, and we have a subcategory that explicitly spells out how retail fraud works and is illegal.

Under our current system the way to prevent someone from having your thing without paying or meeting some other criteria first is to collect payment or check that criteria before giving it to them.

To allow people to have things on their website freely available to humans but to prevent grabbing and using it for training will require a new law of some sort.

It really does matter if it’s legally binding if you’re talking about content licensing. That’s the whole thing with a licensing agreement: it’s a legal agreement.

The store analogy isn’t quite right. Leaving a store with something you haven’t purchased with the consent of the store is explicitly illegal.
With a website, it’s more like if the “shoplifter” walked in, didn’t request a price sheet, picked up what they wanted and went to the cashier who explicitly gave it to them without payment.

The crux of the issue is that the website is still providing the information even if the requester never agreed or was even presented with the terms.
If your site wants to make access to something conditional then it needs to actually enforce that restriction.

It’s why the current AI training situation is unlikely to be resolved without laws to address it explicitly.

The thing is a robots.txt file doesn’t work as licensing. There’s no legal requirement to fetch the file, and no mechanism to consent or track consent.

This is putting up a sign that says everyone must pay, and then giving it to anyone who asks for free.

Seems lacking in details. DARPA is only connected to a few rather inconsequential things, ARPANET is mentioned for some reason but not “the Internet”. In-q-tel is entirely absent and their entire purpose is to direct funds to tech companies that have possible security, defense or military applications. They’re “legally not the CIA”. Just founded by them to be an unaccountable organization for directing US funds to potentially valuable startups. (Not conspiracy stuff, it’s from their about page.)

I feel like if your goal is to tie stuff together more meaningfully, you’re going to be better served by saying that there’s no company not connected to military interests by a shockingly short chain.
Like, chances are high that any random person has a home appliance produced by non-trivial defense contractor. As in there are multiple companies that make kitchen appliances and heavy munitions, and openly work on AI weapons platforms.

If you send me $45.50 a month, I’ll send you a pair of my musky socks to huff and absorb my masculinity once a week. For another $10, I’ll also send you a supplement pack that’ll help you feel like a real man again. (It’s caffeine, ibuprofen, Mucinex and an secret ingredient that’s legally different from tums).

Florida: shithole of shitholes.

Yup. And bobcat, of all things. Last I checked that was the last US confirmed case. (It makes sense since bobcat obviously can get trichinosis, but eating bobcat seems like such an unlikely thing to do)

I didn’t get persnickety on the details there because common understanding hasn’t caught up with the reality of the food safety situation. It’ll take a while before people really accept that you can cook pork medium rare and be just fine, and longer still for tastes to adapt, since the guidelines only officially changed in 2011 and medium rare pork still feels underdone to a lot of people.

The stated reason is because pigs are considered unclean because they’ll live in conditions we consider dirty, and will eat things we consider unclean.

It can be very tempting to look at ways that modern beliefs and practices overlap with historical ones and find ways that make them “make sense” from a modern perspective. This can make it harder to understand what people actually believed, or see the framework they were using, pushing the “oddness” somewhere else, like a bubble under a piece of plastic.

For parasites, we think of pork as carriers of parasites in the modern world because our supply chain has eliminated them from other commonly eaten meats.
This lines up with 2/3 of abrahamic religions having a prohibition against pork: they must have gotten the right answer for the wrong reason.
Except in the times those religions were developed pigs weren’t greater vectors than other animals.
There were also other contemporaneous cultures that didn’t have that prohibition despite very similar circumstances. If it were a food safety issue we would expect to see other cultures have the same prohibition. Similar problems have similar solutions after all.

https://archaeology.org/issues/march-april-2025/letters-from/on-the-origin-of-the-pork-taboo/

… No. It means they made a terminology error.

I would never advocate or incite for imminent lawless action. I would advocate for a change in public policy that included things currently held to be illegal.
As long as it makes a difference, the first amendment protects your right to advocate for changes to law and policy. You just can’t tell people to right now go and break a specific law if you have reason to believe they might.

“People should shoot maga fascists dead in the street and hang them from lampposts” is protected because it’s saying what society should do, not actively calling for people to go do this.

Also in the sense of literally trying to outlaw Christmas. The Bible doesn’t describe a Christmas festival and celebration, so many Christians felt that it was improper and unchristian for a very long time.

In the US the only real war on Christmas was fought by Christians. The soviets, the CCP and briefly the French revolutionaries are the only times atheists have actually pushed against it. The Nazis were in favor of a pro-nazi version of Christmas that was more about the state.

Tit for tat is a good tactic, usually. There is something to be said for a chilling effect, or “intimidation”, as a way to not just punish current behavior but to forestall future escalation. The only key is that it needs to be selective, and not permanent, and then extremely reversed when they switch to cooperation.

They preach hate, you destroy their landscaping and signage. They remove your memorial and you burn down their building.
Meanwhile you praise the episcopal church and very visibly support fundraisers by the united Methodist Church.

It only alienates the people who were already too far gone. Others will tut at the disproportionate response but agree to the middle ground of “it’s self defense, so it’s justified in principle”.

Gotta shift the center somehow.

The laws are usually amongst the oldest ones in a state and only revised pretty infrequently if someone has a particular issue. The dead person constituency is pretty weak, so the matter doesn’t get a lot of attention. Basically once they wrote down that embalming chemicals can’t be explosive (to prevent the coffin torpedo and general miguided insanity) there hasn’t been much need to update them.

In a lot of ways the funeral industry is better than others, regulation wise. You don’t need to do business with anyone. You’re dead. It’s illegal to act as a funeral director without a license, and the regulations are entirely imposed in the director. If you’ve got a body to get rid of, you don’t have to pay a funeral director. The government will take care of it pretty quickly if no one else will.
We’ve got similar restrictions on barbers. Except for the government giving you a haircut if no one else will. They don’t particularly care if you’re hairy.

I do agree though, a lot more basic functions of society should be fundamentally provided by the public. “Doctors” would have been a better, but less funny, example above.

Most states have laws indicating you must involve a funeral director to ensure the.body is disposed of properly, and then define the licensure requirements for a funeral director to include the types of disposal they can oversee.
It means they don’t need to define every type of burial you’re not allowed to do, and there should be a qualified professional to ensure whatever you’re doing is okay before you do it.

The libertarian impulse to say that if it doesn’t hurt anyone it should be legal butts into the reality that every time we have that policy for body disposal things tend to go funny in unexpected ways.

Certain types of burial allow the body to potentially contaminate nearby soil. Others can leave behind a void that can either collapse and disrupt nearby graves, or in some cases lift the body back to the surface in heavy rain. (Extremely uncommon now because essentially nowhere allows you to use those methods)

Funeral pyres or other forms of open air cremation are generally not legal due to concerns of fire spreading.
Whole body water burial is probably not legal in a body of fresh water in the US due mostly to the complexity of figuring out which law applies to that circumstance in any of the bodies of water that could be used that wouldn’t be grossly undersized and unsanitary. (Basically that means the Great lakes, which are the only ones with the depth and size sufficient, but are shared between multiple states and also Canada. Usually the rule is that if it’s not forbidden it’s permitted, but body disposal is more complicated)

According to people I know who worked in the kitchen there, the correct reason to go to cracker barrel is actually their biscuits and gravy.
The cheapest way for them to make 'em is from scratch. Everything else is premade bags and mixes, but the biscuits and gravy are made fresh a few times a day.