I'm a huge fan of WFH and don't have much good to say about RTO.

But what I don't understand is this whole business about ignoring work attendance policies and simply not being fired, just like what would happen if you if flat out defied other major employer policies, and expecting to get away with it, or allowing employees to get away with flat out defiance.

Fire the motherfuckers. What's the hold up? If all the big employers had any balls and stuck to their guns, people would fall in line rather quickly. Sure, you might lose some and it would maybe hurt for a very short period, but not long enough to matter, and I think it would be better than all this continued drama over the issue.

The holdup is driving away the people you don't want to drive away. The people generally not being in the office are likely your star performers - they know you need them more than they need you (even in this economy)

Also, firing is generally considered an excessive remedy - the person is still putting out good work and getting work done, the only crime being committed is he isn't keeping his office chair warm.

You will find with every RTO mandate that it starts off good, then maybe in 6 months everyone starts drifting off again. If you demand and check, sure you'll drag everyone back in the office, but then it's not like they're going to be highlly productive - they'll likely end up doing a lot of "collaborating" than "working" (i.e., shooting the breeze and having chats about sports and anythingn else but work).

And enforcing it by firing is also along the lines of "the beatings will continue until morale improves" and shows you care about butts in seats than actual productivity.

Actually we do. Many PFAS compounds have been studied and most of them have been found to be harmful at levels above a few 10s of Parts-Per-Trillion in animal testing. This is what really started this entire thing in the first place - the recognition that there is a harmful level, and the general levels in many people is above this level.

Nevermind the fact that the industry itself knew it was a problem decades ago. And they covered it up when regulators started sniffing around by modifying the chemicals to be slightly different, calling it a new name, and calling it good because the levels of the original chemical fell below the limit. Meanwhile the new chemical they use has the same effects, but because it's new, it wasn't regulated. They even did it again after the new chemical started getting regulated.

The reason they are a problem for humans is because they mimic fatty acids in composition so your body takes it up assuming it's a fatty acid. But they are "forever chemicals" because they are really inert, so your body tries to react those PFAS in order to do some biological function and it fails because they are inert. Sure your cells can try another molecule that fits and if it's a normal fatty acid great, body function continues, but now you have this fake inert molecule that's just doing nothing other than jamming up cellular functions

Veritassium did a nice video on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If you actually give a damn about security, encourage whistleblowers and journalists to get yubikeys and generate PGP keys and communicate that way. Encrypt e-mails.

You do realize that doing this makes you a bigger target right? Sending encrypted emails back and forth is evidence a lot of governments use to determine nefarious intentions. And this has been true for decades, which is why journalists don't use PGP/GPG or other encryption system - it makes them a bigger target. Especially if they're filing reports from regimes that aren't so free with the press.

Anyhow the problem here is Proton suspending the accounts of some journalists - the whole reason why they use Proton was to avoid situations like this because it was supposed to provide secure email services. A government being able to shut down your email account was the whole antithesis to why Proton exists.

Yeah, but humans generally don't make up fake citations, because those things are easily fact checked. If you want to make up a quote from someone, you would typically find a work they did and then choose one that most likely might contain the fake quote, especially if ti's a more obscure work so it's much harder to verify.

But attributing something to a movie that doesn't exist? Not likely something a human would do., Maybe quoting an obscure thing that someone might have a difficult time getting and verifying, but that would be a very real citation.

What theatres should do is offer a discount card that encourages concession sales.

Like if you buy two tickets, you get one free small popcorn. This is cheap, and because you bought two tickets, you probably brought a friend. Well now the friend will want popcorn so they'll want to buy some. And you'll want drinks because the popcorn will make both of you thirsty. Oh, how about besides that free popcorn, you get 10% off concessions to sweeten the deal?

The goal being to encourage sales of concessions where you otherwise might not have them. Someone buys two tickets, decides concessions are two expensive and that's it. Zero revenue. But hey, if we give you a free small popcorn and 10% off, suddenly you might get the sale more more popcorn and drinks. So for the cost of a few tens of cents for popcorn, you made dollars because that pair of people would want more popcorn and drinks.

If you buy bigger groups of tickets, even better - offer more free stuff. Buy 4 tickets, get a hot dog and popcorn for free, and now everyone of your friends gets 20% off. Now you'd probably buy a drink, and the friends you're with will want a popcorn, and maybe a hot food item as well.

Basically the goal is to encourage sales of concessions which make the theatre money to people who otherwise wouldn't buy them. Offering free food to a card holder is one that costs little but encourages everyone to buy more.

Even a family pack - buy a ticket for a family (3, 4, 5 people or more) and all kids get free popcorn and everyone gets 15% off concessions. Well now the parents will have to buy a drink for the kids, and if they're doing that, they may as well get something as well.

Depends how long it's been out, that 80% is usually for the first week or two then it flip flops to the theaters advantage also depends on the studio and the arrangement.

New releases are usually 100% to studio/distributor for at least 2 weeks. Big name releases can often go for a month at 100%. Theatre makes 0% for new releases. Then it drops to 80% or so.

But you have to realize traffic at 100% is often way higher, so even though the theatre may make a couple of bucks at 80%, far fewer people are seeing the movie a couple of weeks in. It's why if you look at movie listings, a lot of movies start dropping off after a couple of weeks and it takes a really big hit like Top Gun Maverick, Barbie, Oppenheimer that have staying power for a movie theatre to get much revenue from ticket sales. Most movies disappear from theatres after a month - they head straight into second run.

And a lot of studios determine the ticket price because they're getting it all.

Unlikely. What happens is colleges will just lay off staff and cut unprofitable programs.

The big decline in applicants is from international students - no doubt because someone decided to go after foreigners, and foreigners pay a LOT more money. That money funds the school operations.

Cut back on those increased fees and get stuck with domestic students - well, they don't pay as much money and now there's a shortfall. Couple that with again a certain administration's cutback of grants and such, and there will be deficits.

All that happens now is cutbacks to programs - those research grants were often what attracted professors to a certain college and without those, well, the college can't replace those grants and likely the stipend the professor gets so professor pay goes down. Staffing gets cut, etc.

Chances are prices will go up to try to stem the losses from lack of international students and lack of research grants, layoffs, and other fun things.

Huh? I've personally used VirtualBox in an enterprise context. I'm not sure where you got your information.

Might want to take a look at the license. Oracle is getting antsy to go after enterprises using VirtualBox. Not VirtualBox itself, but the extension pack. They're starting to enforce the licensing where enterprises get 7 days to evaluate the extension pack license and then need to pay up.

(The extension pack adds USB 3 and RDP support which is not included in the open source VirtualBox).

Also, VMWare Workstation Pro is free which is the competitor to VirtualBox. Bare metal hypervisors is where VMWare's primary market is not VM software running on a host OS.

VMWare ESX is the primary product that brings in the money. Competitors would be like ProxMox and Hyper-V.

Waiting for cult members to say how this is a good thing.

It's good for PepsiCo and Coca-Cola who can sell you their oversugared and overcaffieneated drinks instead for cheap!

Why drink overpriced coffee when you can have your Red Monster Fuel Ade by the gallon for the same price!

And you get to hurt Dr. Pepper (Keurig Dr. Pepper) as well - remove your expensive coffee machine and replace it with our cheap sugar water energy drinks

Will this change my tax exposure when providing 'gratuities' to supreme court justices?

No, because they make more than $150,000. (The same limit applies to "no tax on overtime" as well - which many in the trades are PO'd about because a good tradesman will easily make much more than that - remember the Obama plumber making $250k/year?)

Though it might be interesting since many of the larger creators are owned by private equity (you probably know them - Veritassium is a huge one, but others like Donut, MenTour (aviation), LTT and others), so in a way, the no tax on tips helps billionaires because they're sinking money into these creators with the hope of getting a return. And having it tax free is likely a huge bonus (yes, it pays to know if you're a patreon or subscriber paying into these creators, your money is not going to the channel, it's going to a billionaire).

You could tell because many of those creators suddenly became full time content creators - they quit their jobs. And in the early days, you often saw videos like "Why I left X" by some on screen talent who suddenly left their channel. You're less likely to see it because they got smart that people often watch for the talent, so you don't watch Scott Manley's channel to see someone other than Scott Manley doing the content. (Note: I do not have proof that Scott Manley has been bought by private equity - but sudden changes like leaving your job for content creation should be looked on with suspicion because normally it's hard to do it - see the 8-bit guy who went back to work).

And yes, I mention ones like Veritassium because they actually publicized their takeover in a bout of openness and honesty. But it pays to remember that many now are being funded by billionaires hoping to reap that sweet sweet patreon and membership cash.

No, you ignore the 1 star and 5 star reviews.

Look at the 2/3/4 start reviews. Because fake reviews are always leaving 1 and 5 star reviews, humans really are the only ones doing 2/3/4 stars and thus those are the ones you should read. The 4 stars will likely highlight the big imperfections and the 2 stars showing there might be something worthwhile.

but can Nintendo's say it's there property due to some EULA BS? while telling Sega they are buying an dev kit?
Can tesla sell dev kit cars with an car TITLE but hide in the EULA that they still own the car?

It's not through the EULA. Sega acquired the devkits by leasing them from Nintendo. In a similar way you can lease a car from Tesla. In both cases the car is owned by the leasing agent - Nintendo or Tesla.

The leasing agent may give the option to buy out the lease for a certain amount, or they may demand the leased item be returned back.

Legally Sega never owned the product, they just paid to lease it from Nintendo. And usually there are penalties if you break the lease.

You cannot sell a leased vehicle - at least not without dealing with the leasing agent to let you buy it out (usually with a penalty)

I love version numbering schemes that aren't quite accurate

With things having yearly releases, it can be a bit of work trying to figure out what version came out when.

So switching to a yearly identifier helps a lot. It's hard enough to track say, which Ubuntu release goes to which animal name because the release name is used in some places. So having to identify which release this animal is can be an annoying experience.

Who said anything about increasing employment? It just means you call tech support and instead of someone answering in 5 minutes to handle your call, you'll be on the phone for days. You might ask why don't they hire more people? Well, I'm sure they can, work from home, $3.25/hr (which is the federal minimum wage?). I'm sure you'll be helped by Cletus who can even barely read the script.

And part and parcel of the whole "no overtime tax", well, they will likely scrap overtime pay for everyone, so your IT worker may be locally hired, but he's doing the job of 3 people. Given the current joblessness, well, if you quit, someone else will take your spot.

Well, financial networks do go offline from time to time. There are many businesses I've seen that had to put "CASH ONLY" signs because their machine went down.

One business simply couldn't get their machine to connect to the network - no matter what they did, the machine refused to make a connection. Another business got a replacement terminal but it wasn't properly provisioned so it wouldn't start up properly.

And sometimes, the entire network goes down - usually for a few hours.

It never hurts to have cash on hand for emergencies. Or if you're going to an unfamiliar area having a few bills can help.