"If they don't like it they're free to do as imgur did and make a token effort to block UK visitors."

Why should it be on them to make any effort, token or otherwise, to block UK visitors?

If I left my lawn mower in the front yard that doesn't mean the guy who stole it was in the right because I didn't make an effort to protect it from theft.

If they don't block their website and some schnook reads it who's not supposed to be there, that's on the schnook, not on the website.

"The judgment on the five lead defendants will also bind other manufacturers including Jaguar Land Rover, Vauxhall/Opel, Volkswagen/Porsche, BMW, FCA/Suzuki, Volvo, Hyundai-Kia, Toyota and Mazda, whose cases are not being heard to reduce the case time and costs."

Excuse me? Since when is that a legal procedure?

We're having a trial to find out if these guys are guilty. And then we'll consider these other guys guilty and penalize them too.

Aren't they entitled to a trial?

Your neighbour has been found guilty of assaulting the mailman. Since you live on the same street we're sending you to jail too.

Yet somewhere in history, someone did just that.
90% of new businesses today fail.
So someone stepped up, risked his own future and probably family, to build that business. So they get to set the rules.

Nobody in the businesses we're talking about is enslaved. They're trading their time and effort for $ according to a set of rules that business (presumably) offered them IN LIEU of putting their own ass on the line against that 9/10 failure rate. I get it. But the idea that someone bitches "this is toxic, I should QUIT" and then not do so means I simply won't be taking them seriously.

Honestly, I see it like the work from home argument. I expect most employed people today were hired precovid, where working from home was barely a discussion. They were hired on the premise that they work at an office, every workday, usually 8-5 or whatever.
When a pandemic comes along and the business spends resources to make it possible for people to work remotely successfully (we all knew it was POSSIBLE, to be clear), and then people whinge about coming back afterword that's just sour grapes. A lot like this. If you don't like that pointy-haired boss telling you to come back...QUIT.

It does matter.

If the government forgives $1mil in student loans, that's ANOTHER $1m they're going to have tax the taxpayers (eg the productive members of society) in the future.

I get it, we'd ALL love a free ride.

OK, thanks for the reply. I agree, most people don't.

Now - do they understand that SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE, SOMEWHEN took exactly that risk to found the business that they're working for? That built a going concern to the point that they could reliably trust business was stable enough at a volume large enough that the marginal returns are such allowing them to promise people stable, ongoing employment and a paycheck every week for dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of employees?

And then contemplate that the global new business failure rate sits roughly around 90%.
Meaning out of the people that DID form such a business, 9 of them lost that gamble, only 1/10 limped along well enough to survive and (ostensibly) grow into those awful oligopolies that benefit from economies of scale. Are those founders (and, let's be clear, their descendants) entitled to some sort of reward for putting THEIR futures and scratched-together $ on the line?

Now with that context, "this workplace is toxic, I should just QUIT" sounds pretty childish, given that most individuals can't afford the alternative.

We can agree all day that IN ANY CASE it's unwise for a business to tolerate toxic or negative environments. It drives away good workers and probably raises their salary costs as informed employees demand more to stay.

But this discussion is ultimately just whinging. A microscopic percent of people "love" working. We trade our time and effort for a paycheck. We are not enslaved; we are in fact free agents. Either put up or shut up. If it's so toxic, leave & start your employee's utopia. I'm sure you'll have workers breaking down your door to work for you at your much-higher-than-market wages, with 'work when you want, vacation when you want' hours, work freely from home policies, and (somehow) the most expensive glorious health coverage available.*
If it's not enough to leave, stay and STFU. Complaining AND staying is just cowardice and carping.

*FWIW I had that for my company and all my employees (BCBS Aware Gold premium or plus or something - literally the best we could get). Obamacare FUCKED us by threatening a massive tax on 'cadillac' health plans that simply would have broken us and closed the business.

They're just peddling the usual bullshit that coral reefs are dying.
Nope. This is just stressing the warm-water corals which are the minority of coral species. There's little comment on how this may actually benefit the cold water corals and deeper corals as less delicate and less specialized than their warm water cousins.

Corals date from before the Cambrian explosion, about half a billion years ago. They evolved when the avg global temps were on the order of +40c (today is 15c, and we're getting collywobbles over it going up by 1-2C). If anything, coral flourishing may have been been stunted by the overall general cooling of the planet over the millennia.

In case you claim it's about the "rate of change" (the next-fallback argument, in my experience) corals have likewise comfortably survived vast spans of vulcanism and many events like Chixiclub that radically changed the earth's climate over the short term orders of magnitude worse and faster than anything we're discussing today.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology)

Whether you want to get upset over the impact that Milankovic and Solar cycles are going to have on our planet and relatively delicate human technological society of billions that has accreted relatively suddenly onto impermanent shorelines in the midst of an interglacial warming, that's up to you. Valid point.

But Corals are going to be fine long after every human is dead and forgotten. Pick dolphins or puppies or something else as your poster children, but corals are a terrible proxy for your fears that the sky is just about to fall; they're just not convincing.

Are we in favor of these new laws to protect children?

Because I heard a lot of complaints on this site about Texas implementing age verification for the same sorts of purposes.

I'm quite curious where the slashdot crowd stands.

A CHARACTER'S style or appearance, no. But a specific artist's performance of that character? That feels like a creative work by that artist to at least 50% degree.

To be clear, I wish indeed that we were debating the first principles and original intent of copyright but let's be honest, current interpretation is a rather far distance from those.

The principles that are in play today - eg the ones that have girded the inviolate title/ownership of a cartoon mouse for 50 years past the creator's death (which I personally take issue with as being contrarian to the original intent of copyright) - should be the SAME principles that guard artist's rights to their performances. Anything else would be hypocrisy.

Again, just to reiterate: I personally AM AGAINST the current rules, and would prefer that they be fixed to align with the original intent AND THEN applied equally to all parties. Failing that revision (and I expect that's a much bigger fight) at the very least we can apply the same rules on both sides of the court.

"According to the survey, more than half of workers (57%) say they'd rather quit their job than continue working in an environment they feel is toxic ... "

So why don't they quit?
Not being snarky, it's a genuine question. If they're that unhappy, there is absolutely nothing stopping them starting a business themselves and running it with all the principles of kindness and generosity and compassion that (they assert) is missing in the workplace they're in.

And while I know the (coincidentally self-exoneratory) meme is that the past was this magical place where jobs were flying at you while you bought a $10 home. It was not.*
Previous societies were very much work or die. The bulk of populations lived in a relative subsistence state (at best) scratching by hoping their children survived.

*The 50s were a notable historical exception, the US having an unprecedented Renaissance due to being the only nation to escape WW2 unscathed. First, this isn't happening again, it needs to be seen as the EXCEPTION it was. Then again, curiously, many of the people insisting that's 'how it should be' today ... would also insist fervently that MAGA is wrong for suggesting a better time ever existed. Curious.

Well, considering your tax money is used for the loan and not being paid back, it's not like you're involved.... Duh?

Gen Z are a bunch of babies whose feelings are hurt if you look at them funny.

> Do NOT use a loyalty card.
Pay more money for the stuff you need.

>Pay cash.
Don't collect any of the discounts from your credit card company either.

>Say nothing that doesn't NEED saying.
You do you, I suppose, but I can't see many people going for this arrangement.

Anyone remember tub girl?

That's what I said. You needed an extra board to keep the time between boots and most people didn't bother with one.

So every time you booted up your computer if you didn't enter the date and time (and a lot of people didn't bother) then your files were dated January 1, 1980.

If the Russians and North Koreans haven't started doing this yet I'm sure they'll be getting into it very shortly.

It's too effective as a weapon to leave it undeveloped.