If your goal is to act as a deterrent then harsher sentences do not work, at least according to research.

At this point, we think it is fair to say that we know of no reputable criminologist who has looked carefully at the overall body of research literature on “deterrence through sentencing” who believes that crime rates will be reduced, through deterrence, by raising the severity of sentences handed down in criminal courts.

https://www.crimsl.utoronto.ca/research-publications/faculty-publications/issues-related-harsh-sentences-and-mandatory-minimum

There is no limit. At some point The Onion will make an ironic story about it that gets reposted every time a woman getting killed by anti-abortion policies makes the news.

Warning: Taken from decades-old memories of things that I wasn’t involved in or paying much attention to! Anyway…

In Virginia a man sued the state like 30 years ago because they wanted to charge him to change his name, when a woman could change her name free when she got married. The state could either have charged women or made it free for all. They chose the later.

In the Netherlands a number of cities were banning fossil fuel for deliveries in the city. It was in planning for years, easing into implementation.

Our new government just scrapped all of those plans because the largest party doesn’t believe in climate change, and another party in the coalition is the “farmer’s movement” party and opposes environmental regulations.

😢

I work at a company big into AI. We build our own models. Our senior management drank the Kool-Aid. We don’t have search on our Intranet any more, just LLM chatbots.

Our TLS certificate expired last week on our main web page. I tried to find the contact details for the team responsible and the thing just hallucinated e-mail addresses.

Needless to say, I’m less excited than you.

Sorry what’s the g-word?

I used this movie as the basis for at least three school assignments in high school. Brilliant.

I mean… if something is illegal but the penalties are low or enforcement nonexistent then it’s more like a recommendation. Fines become a “cost of doing business”.

There are infinite prime numbers. This has been known for thousands of years. You can find numerous proofs of this online, and go through them until one makes sense to you.

Also, quantum computers are on track to make division-based cryptography useless in the next decade or two. (Note that this only affects public key cryptography, and not shared key cryptography. So your online backups should be safe as long as you have a password for them.)

If a company has a lot of money in assets and those assets are worth less than before, the valuation of the company drops. This should mean lower share prices, which is basically the only thing a company cares about.

Is this fictional? I thought that this was actually true from the Social Union in WWII. Maybe in the battle of Stalingrad?

I think it’s an oversimplification to say that it was never enforced:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniconism_in_Islam

By the way, my tinfoil hat uses Arch Linux.

EDIT: now I see that I’ve just repeated the same joke that someone already made better in a different post. Leaving my post up for posterity so I remember my shame.

Again? I guess I missed Microsoft being impacted in any way. 🤔

If you watch The Brainwashing of My Dad, this is basically what worked. The documentary maker’s parents moved to a new house and they deliberately didn’t connect Fox News, and then blocked a few web sites. A short while later their dad was back to being a jovial, friendly person again.

You can tell that this is an AI generated image because the hands are so small.

I didn’t think women were ever independent in Saudi Arabia, but were basically owned by their closest male relative?

EDIT:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/03/08/saudi-arabia-law-enshrines-male-guardianship

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

Is it? I mean, 100 years ago you might all be reading different things, with either a record on or possibly the radio. Why is it terrible that now you’re all… reading different things together in one room?

.TV is not new. It is a country-code TLD (ccTLD) and has been around since the 20th century.