Funny thing is, I probably did work fewer hours... due to being far more productive.

All of our productivity metrics went way up when Covid started and we were fully embracing WFH. Employee satisfaction, etc. went way up too. I spent a lot less time on BS and a lot more actually doing things that help my employer.

The butt-in-seat time really did go way down, but that's never what they should have been measuring to begin with.

> He was clearly trying to make her afraid. You don't write stuff like that second quote unless you are trying to say "I'm crazy, and there's no telling what I might do to you."

For what it's worth, I agree this guy was a troll who spent years harassing this person and who belongs in a mental hospital in this specific case. I'd probably find him guilty under both the old standard and this new one given what I know of his years of harassment.

But this ruling doesn't just let him wander free. SCOTUS tried to walk the middle road on this one, saying that the jury should consider both what an objective person might think and what the speaker was thinking at the time, not just one or the other. So he gets a new jury who will do exactly that.

> Wet markets don't have blockchains tracking every thing that enters and exits out of it, dumbass.

No, but there was published research on that particular wet market looking for what animals were traded specifically because they often contain endangered species.

And the nearest sample we have is from a bat in Laos, about 1000 miles from Wuhan. Which we know about because those bats are studied by the Wuhan Institute of Virology...

Yes, and your own article shows why with an example of pizza restaurants.

In this, the framing is just weird. This declassified intelligence found that Wuhan studied viruses and manipulated them in ways that would not show signs of genetic engineering and that they had lax safety, both things we already knew, but just more confirmation.

Yet we're supposed to believe that it came from a bat or maybe a pangolin in a wet market that doesn't sell either animal according to prior published research and not from the lab nearby that studied the closest precursor virus in a bat sample they got from a cave about 1000 miles away?

Never mind it was well-adapted to humans when it got out, the weird sequences it has all seem to exist in prior patents, and nobody has found a sample quite like it in those same bat caves.

And never mind we know that EcoHealth was funding this research, so top level people on both sides would not want to spread a message about "oops, maybe this is really our fault."

> AOL was a walled garden with no access to the Internet until late 1993.

It was still when most regular people actually experienced the internet, though there was an explosion of lesser-known dial-up providers alongside them.

Yes, there was ARPANET and access at universities, but the average person had no access.

> But hey, free coasters.

Showing your (lack of) age here, but you got useful floppies for years and people loved that. The coasters/frisbees came rather late in the game and we disliked them because we loved the free floppies.

> 1800 is an exaggeration to make a point. What the lawyers call reductio ad absurdum.

Yeah, but it's a silly one, the 1990s were good, in the 1800s you could still be a slave. You had actual community and people weren't nearly as horribly divided about everything. I see people saying "go outside" but there's nobody else there, everyone else is on their phones or whatever. This doesn't work as reductio because there's no uniform claim that the past is always better, just that a certain time is better in some respects than the present.

So saying that the 1800s or whatever were bad to live in does nothing to rebut the idea that things might've been better 30 years ago.

> Disease was rampant and death was a fact and life expectancy was great.

You do realize that to most people that'd be pre-AOL (i.e. the 1990s) and not the 1800s, right?

You responded to someone saying:

> Housing first - taking in people without requiring drug treatment- does not work. In fact it has been a failure by a wide margin.

By linking to a Guardian piece about Rukkila, where they say: "Rukkila does not allow drug or alcohol use; some other Housing First units do" without quantifying how much of each exist and a powerpoint slide that doesn't mention drugs at all, none of which seems to show that it's an idea of housing first wherein there is no drug treatment.

None of this does anything to rebut the idea that drug treatment works far better than no drug treatment, which is the original claim that grandparent made.

> That's funny, I do IT for a small grocery store chain in California and I know for a fact that we turn shop lifters over to the cops all the time and yes we do press charges!

In California != in SF, which had the DA not prosecuting and all the weird laws, like making it a misdemeanor then doing catch & release when it's under $950.

It's true that other parts of CA haven't done this, but that's also part of why SF is falling apart like this. People are just... leaving.

Not really, most of the stuff from the Innocence Project or similar things are people who were identified by unreliable witness testimony for whom there is little physical evidence tying them to the crime, which is a rounding error.

In fact, people who do one crime tend to do lots of different crimes, so keeping those people away from society benefits their victims, whether they're merely directly funding murderous cartels or stealing or what have you.

Turns out that 327 people in NYC were responsible for a third of all shoplifting arrests so things would get nicer for crime victims if we were harsher on people living lives of crime.

> Kind of an off-topic tangent, but this is because the ranting from the tighty-rightys about "defund the police" has largely been projection.

Well, it was mostly a stupid idea from activists that got walked back after most people were against it, especially black people.

What actually got implemented was a that reduction of shoplifting under $950 to a misdemeanor which lead to an epidemic of shoplifting which forced many retailiers to close along with other reductions in prosecuting crime. While in other areas the prosecutors like Kim Gardner who did that got reprimanded and forced to resign, CA seems to be happy to let things degenerate further. Now they're planning to ban employees from confronting shoplifters because I'm sure that will fix the problem?

Never mind that crimes like this are a long tail problem, with one study showing that 327 people in NYC were responsible for a third of all shoplifting arrests.

But I digress, you have indeed heard some stupid people suggest defunding the FBI, as can be seen from three of your links talking about Trump saying this. This is also dumb, has little support, and they've yet to implement anything like the above. But there are and have been good reasons to want the FBI to be reigned in, since they have repeatedly misused powers like FISA and they have a long history of going after people for political reasons, like when they told Republican Martin Luther King to commit suicide. We might need something more like a new Church commission, but removing the FBI is not a good answer.

> Approximately 2,000 employees worldwide walked off the job

As of 2022, Amazon supposedly employs 1,541,000 people.

Unless there's something unique about this 2,000 employees, that doesn't seem like they'd even notice.

> sounds like absolute fluff of a political agenda. "They targeted this innocent grandma and kids, super hero to the community, who eats lots of fiber, and always gives to the poor, while helping elderly people across the street to deliver their home cooked meals and baked cookies to the food shelter, while stopping to give people on the street a blanket on the way by"

I thought something similar and went to look up why they put up those cameras. Apparently, this person was charged with defrauding the VA over disability payments and that's what the recordings were used for, to prove that they were lying about their disability.

You're not wrong... but we've kinda been doing that the whole time without realizing it.

> More self checkouts have shown more theft. Which causes the stores to put in crazy amounts of gadgets and cameras to "stop" shoplifting. Stores that were profitable (Portland) are closed instead of simply reverting back to the profitable state. Probably all to avoid paying people a bit more.

We have mostly self-checkouts here too, but not the massive amounts of theft, nor the cameras, so our stores haven't closed.

Weird.

One, "fire in a crowded theater" is bad law from an overturned case.

Two, this is more like yelling "fire" in a burning theater. It had already been called out for being unable to produce depositor's cash months prior and the recent filing was sort of a tipping point because they had enough financially literate depositors such that they knew it was a race to get their money or else they might not be able to make payroll and would end up in a world of legal hurt, etc.