ragebutt

I don’t inherently disagree with you and I certainly don’t think loss of job is equivalent to loss of life, of course. But I’m just saying it’s not as simple as “he’s gotta secure the bag so he rolled over”

He is definitely complicit but he was forced into that position by a Zionist who knew he could put him in a very difficult position where either way Sheeran would catch all the flack. I’m not saying we should give his position a pass but I am saying the focus might make more sense on the oligarch that forced this situation over the soulless stooge that has decided to play the oligarchs game

Macklemore got dropped because he said some pro Palestine statements and the billionaire owner of the patriots and one of the stadiums they were arranged a boycott of many stadium owners, basically saying the tour would lose a ton of its venues if they kept him on

On one hand, ed Sheeran is comfortably extreme upper class with millions of net worth and cancelling the tour wouldn’t have really hurt him (except maybe not being able to buy a third vacation villa). On the other hand, I somewhat feel for him because the tour certainly has a ton of people employed who are very much not in that echelon of wealth. Bus drivers, caterers, security, roadies, lighting and sound people, merch desk people, etc. cancelling a tour of this size would mean fucking over dozens if not hundreds of people well beyond the headliner and openers that are financially comfortable and can easily afford to take a public stance that may cost them employment

He sucks and his music sucks but I get why this wasn’t an obvious “go fuck yourself” choice. The real villain is Robert Kraft, the literal oligarch that can arrange a blacklisting of a major concert tour at a moments notice over having his delicate feelings hurt by someone not denying a genocide. And that brings the bigger point up: I’m sure Kraft is pleased that his name barely comes up in this discussion and Sheeran catches the majority of the heat

Has to be proven that it occurs first I suppose. But it would also be a difficult thing to workaround. Like in your example the only thing stopping them is a firmware update that dictates the tv connect to as many other clients as possible and blacklist clients that can’t receive a challenge code or success packet or something

Of course I’m sure if that happened people much smarter than me would spoof all that too, make a spoofer that creates dozens of pseudo devices, break challenges and such, etc. cat and mouse game. Luckily these things are usually super lazily implemented by the ad scum but frustratingly that’s bc dedicating resources to this is not worth it usually (eg many people, a sizable and increasing percentage of users, may simply not connect their tv to the internet but once a raspberry pi or docker container or whatever is involved you’re in strictly nerd territory)

dont you see, a comic strip that is the equivalent of posting “trump and ai are dumb, am I right” reddit vote baiting is actually great

This is the far easier approach, but if you live somewhere densely populated (like an apartment building) keep in mind it’s been rumored that smart TVs can make a mesh network to upload data without a connection. Though to my knowledge this has never been definitively shown to be true

FYI most modern TVs have a second microphone actually in the display that’s actually used for the nefarious tracking and listening for assistant wake words to save remote battery life

This was many years ago and for the record not only has he never apologized, when asked to do so (in the aftermath of Arbery and during his senate run) he doubled down and refused to apologize

I don’t remember the name offhand but this definitely exists. There are mugs that you like charge with usb and will hold a beverage at a set temp

I bet money this works for them. Almost to the level that people will think flock was a psyop to direct hate before most counties switch to whatever nondescript alpr they can get their hands on. Americans have the collective memory of a goldfish and the outage will move on to some dumb bullshit trump pulls in a week

Or they just start directly integrating them into fixtures like traffic and street lights.

Definitely and the processor makes sure the floor is covered; my processor has 2.7%+ 15 cents per transaction to ensure they make a minimum amount per transaction, but there is no ceiling with any processor that I’m aware of

What’s also interesting is that with most processors the fee varies for in person and online with online being notably higher (1.5 vs 2.7% with mine). I suppose because online transactions are more likely to be fraudulent or something but ultimately the processing of the payment shouldn’t change between the settings

I eat the fee fwiw

And then the 3% surcharge is tacked on

Essentially a bunch of retailers decided they don’t want to absorb “the costs of doing business” anymore so they now charge $1-5 fees to cover when they have to replace a package that is damaged or lost in shipping. They sell it as “package insurance” but it’s once again consumers getting shafted to offset what was typically seen as a potential liability in running a business based around shipping. As a bonus if you don’t pay their extortion and your package is lost or damaged they will tell you to go fuck yourself

See also: merchants charging a ~3% fee if you use a credit card because similarly covering the cost of a payment processor is increasingly becoming a cost that is not absorbed. Even with medical practices!