I do feel bad for anyone who was affected by this who did not support Trump and his dismantling of the weather services that could have prevented this.

However, for anyone who was affected who voted for Trump and supported his dismantling of said programs? Fuck around, find out.

I mean, I definitely didn’t jump to “let me shower in your apartment” like some suggested, that’s absurd. The whole reason for starting with a coffee date is because it’s low-stakes and in public so either party can bail easily if it’s not a match. Women especially shouldn’t be giving out their home address to strangers and letting them in as a first-time-meeting. I am also a cancer patient with limited income so driving 20 minutes to the nearest truckstop or trying to buy a daypass at a local gym were both unrealistic as well.

I just asked to reschedule and was ghosted, but yeah, I get that people usually think that’s someone trying to flake out. It just sucks when you have a legitimate reason and that gets assumed.

Anyway, waters back on now.

Counterpoint: When Louis CK (prior to being outed as a sex pest) released one of his comedy specials on his website DRM-free for $5 he became a millionaire almost overnight.

https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/drm-free-experiment-makes-loui.html

Price point matters, too.

It also jives with early Steam Sales when Valve would cut titles like Left 4 Dead Counter Strike down to 90% off, and they would sell so many digital copies that they were actually making more money off the lower price.

https://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell/

Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. Without making announcements, we varied the price of one of our products. We have Steam so we can watch user behavior in real time. That gives us a useful tool for making experiments which you can’t really do through a lot of other distribution mechanisms. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant. We thought, hooray, we understand this really well. There’s no way to use price to increase or decrease the size of your business.

But then we did this different experiment where we did a sale. The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation. …

Then we decided that all we were really doing was time-shifting revenue. We were moving sales forward from the future. Then when we analyzed that we saw two things that were very surprising. Promotions on the digital channel increased sales at retail at the same time, and increased sales after the sale was finished, which falsified the temporal shifting and channel cannibalization arguments. Essentially, your audience, the people who bought the game, were more effective than traditional promotional tools. So we tried a third-party product to see if we had some artificial home-field advantage. We saw the same pricing phenomenon. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent and 75 percent very reliably generate different increases in gross revenue.

I’m having trouble finding a link to substantiate it, but I remember in the early 2000’s a group of artists having to sue their record labels because of the lawsuits on file-sharing users. The record labels said they were doing it for the artists, but the artists had to sue the record labels to even ever see a penny from the fruits of those lawsuits. The record labels were just pocketing the money for themselves while saying it was “for the artists.”

Anyway, long story short is that kind of behavior from the recording industry made me want to give money directly to the artists and cut out these selfish middlemen who did nothing but claimed all the profits.

http://www.callbeforeyoudig.org/washington/

At least in Washingon there are free services to locate pipes and lines for this exact purpose.

Also, it’s a legal requirement for anything deeper than 12 inches, and the 12 inch exemption is mostly for homeowners and road work.

https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=19.122

Finally, I’m pretty sure you’d have be using a backhoe or other industrial equipment to bust open a water main that affects a whole neighborhood.

Devil’s Advocate: Many pirates would have not paid for access to that media so to say it takes away from the creators profit isn’t exactly true since one act of piracy does not equal one lost sale.

Devil’s Advocate Part II: There is s significant amount of research that supports the notion that pirates actually spend more money on media than the average person.

I personally am an example of part II. I pirate a lot of music but I refuse to use Spotify because of how little it pays artists and I have also spent significant amounts of money buying music from artists I enjoy via Bandcamp or buying from the artist directly because I know they get a bigger cut of the profits that way.

Honestly, that’s what I’m thinking since I got no response.

Possible, but if there’s one thing that’s been shown about Trump during his life in the media, it’s that he has a near encyclopedic knowledge of all the racist slurs. He pulls out some real obscure ones, and that was even before he even ran for office.

Already did that, and didn’t get a response. 🙄

Now we just wait for Let the Bodies Hit the Floor or Dead Bodies Everywhere to rise in the charts again.

we all know he’s never read a book in his life.

That’s what I came to say, too. Not only does he not read, but he’s not smart enough to remember the character nor understand the implications. We know he hasn’t read a lick of Shakespeare. So where the fuck else would he know this term from other than antisemitism?

It’s clearly to let people die.

Nah a non-insignificant amount of the citizens of the country suck too.

That feel when you’ve been cucked by a ghost.

We can indeed hope for a multilateral system, but both Russia and China are in positions to potentially exploit the power vacuum. I actually have more faith in China being the more reasonable and safe choice between the two, but they have just as many questionable things their government does as the US does, sadly.

The sad truth is that when there is a power vacuum, other positions of power end up vying for control of the now empty position of power.

As an American… Knowing our own history… Our government’s predilection to installing “friendly” dictators in foreign countries to get what’s best for the USA and fuck what’s best for that country’s citizens…

This isn’t the worst thing that could happen to the world, the real problem is the power vacuum being replaced by an even more unsavory country pulling international strings. We can only hope Europe comes out on top here.

Yeah fuck this guy trying to make inroads with the likes of Steve Bannon.

To quote They Might Be Giants classic song “Your Racist Friend”

Can’t shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding

Exactly, I doubt the person or persons who developed ICEBlock are getting tons of income from the project compared how much it costs to host and run the project, but the project is immediately creating a positive impact in society.

Out here just rawdogging that code.

They drove a Datsun, an automatic
The radio blaring static
He made a face into the light and burst out laughing at the sight
The hysteria ensuing would dominate the night