I wonder what would happen if the app stores posted info on the app page like "the top 1% players of this game spent an average on $5,000 on it last year". Would that do anything to help people avoid getting into this form of quasi-gambling?
> like "the top 1% players of this game spent an average on $5,000 on it last year"
The top 1% don’t spend nearly that much. The number of people spending eye-popping amounts is relatively small. You have to get deep into the long tail before it gets into the hundreds or thousands.
Posting these numbers might have the opposite effect: Players who spend a lot of money want to be at the top of leaderboards. If they saw what the 1% were spending they might convince themselves that not only is it okay to spend that much, but that they need to spend even more.
I think what would help is that any F2P game was mandated to never cost more than $x/year to be listed in the app store, and possibly have different tiers that a game could decide to be in ($10/$100/$1000) based on the maximum yearly spend. The game also should prominently display the total spend per year, and lifetime, every time it is launched.
Although I do not like F2P for all the dark patterns (which have infiltrated non-F2P as well unfortunately) if it was capped to a reasonable maximum amount a year, with no player to player trading at all, and no multiple accounts for the same store account, it might could be made to not be as predatory while still keeping it financially sustainable for the companies that produce the games.
It isn't just "the rich" who need blood plasma. It's everyone. And paid plasma is the only mechanism in the world to date that yields enough plasma to meet demand.
What diseases has Gates eradicated? Polio has been surging back and nOPV (which Gates stands to generate a lot of personal wealth from, by the way) has been a bit of a bust. Measles is going strong, too, and Malaria seems to have been a bit of a token effort for Gates.
You may want to check your numbers because polio type 2 and type 3 are both still around (in fact, cVDPV type 2 is very, very common). The GPEI website has the recent numbers, updated weekly (although with ~3 month lag).
400k to 4k is not 400k to 0. Eradication means 0. People don't get smallpox vaccines today because we hit 0. American children get ~4 doses of IPV still, despite what you are claiming as "eradication."
Attributing that whole reduction to Gates alone is a ridiculous thing to do. He didn't even fund most of the project and the only thing he really brings to the table is money. This has been a multinational effort with literally millions of people for 3 decades. Gates mostly wrested control from them in the last decade.
If he manages to bring the project over the finish line, I will celebrate his achievement. At this point, signs point to failure of the GPEI being a near certainty. Unfortunately, we'll be back to 400k in about 10-15 years if we give up at this point.
I am not conflating cVDPV with WPV. The parent comment claimed type 2 and type 3 polio were gone, which is not true. WPV 3 and WPV 2 are gone, but type 2 and type 3 polio are both still around. If you get polio today (unlikely but possible), there's a pretty good chance it's cVDPV 2.
So you you're saying you knew the two types of polio were eradicated but inexplicably assumed the parent comment must have meant the vaccine-derived poliovirus was eradicated. Or you think these are the same virus because you saw "type 2" in the names of both.
I don't think these are the same thing. But when someone says that polio type 2 has been eradicated, that means the entire family of WPV, cVDPV, and VAPP. Not just WPV.
For all intents and purposes, yes, cVDPV is the same thing as WPV. There have actually been instances where cVDPVs have evolved into things that look quite a bit like WPV. Declaring victory over "type 2/3" because WPV is gone is meaningless when lots of people still get cVDPV and have exactly the same symptoms.
There's an UK-based company providing anti-theft tracking services for cars, motorcycles, heavy equipment etc. and they have a YouTube channel where they document some recovery operations. It's quite remarkable how fast a car goes from stolen to stripped. They also can't rely on just GPS to actually recover stolen goods. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdGoxDPMv9Y
I sort of disagree. There _is_ a process, which optimises for holding people as long as possible for the prison industrial complex to make money. When you privatise these kind of social services, this is what happens. This is not due to a few officials on the ground that just happened by chance to be "incompetent, ignorant, and have contempt for you". As the article concludes,
> The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.
> Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.
> The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.
One is the private prison industry being incentivized to hold as many people as possible.
But there's also a bureaucracy (ICE and State) with little to no pressure to perform better for this particular population (because who cares about criminals?).
Consequently, you get an industry that's perfectly happy to warehouse people... coupled with a slow and ineffective government controlling the keys to their release.
Private detention facilities should be banned.
But the government also needs KPIs with consequences tied to them. E.g. average holding time, average response time to filing, etc. And leaders get fired / budgets cut if targets are missed.
At this point, I am not sure if we can exclude that lobbying from private prisons does not affect the way bureaucracy runs, from the stage of legislation to the point of how said legislation is executed. Thus I am not sure that these two are in truly independent.
But otherwise I agree; even in places where detention facilities are not privatised, bureaucracy can still pose a lot of issues because, as you say, "who cares about criminals", or because certain traits are overrepresented in the group of people who take up these jobs.
The "I don't know"s in the article smack of bureaucratic ineffectiveness more than deliberate obsfuscation.
To wit, that no one actually cares about doing anything.
And granted, that's long been a consequence of low morale in the prison and ICE employee pool, but now it's coupled with a removal of even the least pressure from above to do the job well.
In short, I don't think "Be cruel to people" needs to be messaged from above: "We don't care about anyone you're holding" is sufficient for low-level employees to be their worst selves.
> The "I don't know"s in the article smack of bureaucratic ineffectiveness more than deliberate obsfuscation.
I’m pretty sure it’s not either.
In situations like this, it’s simply conflict avoidance and sticking to the responsibilities of your pay grade. Any given ICE employee may have a good idea where someone is likely to go or not go, but they almost certainly don’t know enough about any specific case to make a comment about it in a way that may have legal ramifications.
This may sound like punting responsibility, but if an ICE employee says something incorrect to someone being held, that could come back to haunt them via legal consequences. As such, if it’s not their job to answer questions about a detainee’s status, it’s probably prudent for them not to answer.
Let me be clear, I think that this is a racket. I also think that any person with decent morals and ethics should consider not working at these places.
That said, I don’t think it’s necessarily reasonable to criticize the ICE folks for staying in their lane when on the job.
Well, now those incentives work in the opposite direction. There have been many reports of Trump being livid that his deportation quotas aren't being met.
When the incentive is a quota rather than just adjudication, you end up with what's going on now.
However, the US has long been very clear: constitutional rights only apply to citizens. US law is perfectly happy with arbitrary brutality towards non-citizens.
(ECHR is different on this, which has caused a lot of controversy in the UK from people who want to be arbitrarily brutal towards non-citizens)
This isn't true and what I wish more than anything in life is if people would stop repeating unadulterated propaganda because that literally normalizes it.
> The Court reasoned that aliens physically present in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are recognized as persons guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments
> However, the US has long been very clear: constitutional rights only apply to citizens.
Nope, most of the constitutional rights apply to all people under the jurisdiction of the US. It's why the Bush administration set up Guantanamo--to try to evade any hint of constitutional protection, and he still failed that. (Of course, as Guantanamo also shows, the remedies available to people whose constitutional rights have been grossly violated by the government are quite lacking.)
> Not within 100 miles of the border unfortunately.
Taken from your link:
> In practice, Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse. No matter what CBP officers and Border Patrol agents think, our Constitution applies throughout the United States, including within this “100-mile border zone.”
It seems that non-US citizen still have rights, but abuse is rampant within the US border patrol.
I'm waiting for 'jcranmer to respond to this, because it was a response to this claim years ago that started me following him, but, no: the "100 miles from the border constitution-free zone" thing is a myth.
I wasn't planning on responding to this, because the sibling comment already points out that the ACLU's own explainer page is walking back its original description of it as the "Constitution-free zone".
Although while I'm here, I will note that they still don't discuss the fact that--as far as I can tell--all the regulations and laws means the 100 miles start not from the water's edge, but from the international boundary, which is 12 miles out to sea. And which also means Chicago is not in the 100 mile border zone, since the actual Canadian border is on the side of Michigan, well over 100 miles away.
...except at border crossings (which may be at a US border crossing or at an international port of entry like an airport gate where US customs has a checkpoint).
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) may search any electronic devices without probable cause at these points.
I was disagreeing that it is just a matter of some officials doing a bad job. And in any case it is not about who is right or wrong, OP is right in identifying that there is no due process, and I did not disagree with that.
To some extent this has always been the case in the US fairly broadly. From living in cities in the Midwest I've heard stories from people I know and their interactions with police and luckily the stories aren't this bad but they are in the same vein of incompetence and cruelty with little recourse.
There's that proverb "You might have the right of way, but the semi truck will still kill you". We might have the Constitution, but it apparently is enforced on an honor system. (Plus non-citizens don't have any rights, so I guess they aren't inalienable human rights after all, eyeroll)
If you look at international press, horror stories happen everywhere, semi-certified (the press from Country C diffident against Country Y will publish if they have a warning piece). The issue is telling the exception from the norm and similar.
> But they were all perfectly competent and infallible under Biden.
It's clear that you're trying very hard to fabricate assertions and muddy the debate. If it helps clarify, until January 20th they were just as abusive and shitty, but with Trump imposing a political mandate to ramp up their abusive and shitty behavior then of course the abusive and shitty behavior will ramp up. Is there something specific that you don't understand?
The San Diego port of entry is the busiest land border crossing in the western hemisphere. The takeaway here should be that the resources to handle immigration along the southern border are insufficient.
If you’re deporting someone, they have to be in custody. They have to deport her to Canada, not Mexico. They likely deal with many other countries and have to arrange for transportation back to all those countries.
I don’t think anyone would have a problem if she was processed promptly and quickly deported or if the confinement accommodations were nicer. That’s purely a resources problem.
One represents a time in a specific place, and one represents merely a shift from UTC. A specific time zone can have different offsets depending on the time of year, for example with Daylight Savings Time.
Do you think that's what the average American pays for their sandwich? Including bringing lunch from home.
If you don't understand working poverty, you won't understand how devastating only $3kpa really looks like on a low wage. Lot's of people right now can't afford that, so cost-neutral alternatives have to exist or you price people out.
There is going to be an interesting breaking point when DVDs and Blu-rays stop being sold mass-market. I think a lot of people will realize the downside of going all-in on streaming.
New ones, sure. But there's a thriving retail market of "recycled" optical media being repackaged and sold for cheap in discount stores last I checked. That should stick around for another few years after.
It’s pretty obvious after their data grab with the new Outlook. They destroyed the built-in app which I used all the time just to try to get all of my emails.
The New Outlook(tm) is an Edge Webview to the cloud.
In the stupidest twist of fate, you cannot open Outlook offline, at all. There is no concept of "offline" in the New Outlook. I assume this is Microsoft forcing away the issues of the past of 50+GB OST files by making Outlook a glorified webmail client instead.
Oh, and Microsoft Teams? You can open that offline and it's got a full cached experience. Innovation at its finest!
