Install Blocktube or another extension that stops videos from starting when you open the link, and read the transcript. It used to be at the top, just under the video itself, but now they’ve moved it to the bottom of the video description so you have to go through all the affiliate links just to get to the fucking transcript button.

But once you’ve found it, transcriptions are your best friend: skim it to see if there’s any real reason to watch (usually not) and enjoy that portion of your life that you just saved for things that YOU want and not what Google and that content creator want. The transcript will also tell you what portion of the video you need to watch, if actually watching it suits your needs.

I also regularly speed up videos; 1.25 is great under most circumstances, 1.5 if they’re really trying to draaaag shit out. You can always slow it down again, but it’s great for getting through the fluff if you need to hear it all (like repair videos for something you’ve never done yourself).

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Excellent response. You put it perfectly.

I like this sub exactly the way it is. If something isn’t for me, I move on. Not a big deal. And OP asked a great question. I never thought about it either, lol.

Admin approval with some text that needs a little bit of thought to fill out is surprisingly effective and definitely slows down spammers a lot.

I had to do that on dbzer0 and I think beehaw, they were both a fun exercise and took no time at all. Hell, I ended up submitting a wall of text about Sacco and Vanzetti on dbzer0 if I remember correctly, lol. But if nothing else they knew that it was 1) a human, and 2) I really believe what I was saying.

If the point is to get regular users who are thoughtful participants in online communities, requiring an email address and the typing of a few coherent words on their own behalf is NOT a barrier to entry, or even a much of a bar. After all, these people are applying to join a forum in which they are presumably going to spend unlimited time typing statements of their own creation in the future. Instance owners are just requiring a bit of that up front, and it’s not a huge ask.

It is, however, a very frustrating requirement for people who want to open multiple accounts for spamming and trolling purposes, and for that reason alone is a great filter for applicants.

Yes, and that’s just the start. He preaches against bankruptcy, but he himself declared bankruptcy in 1988. He claims Christianity but has been sued by female ex-employees (one was fired for being pregnant by a guy she was not married to, another was fired for coming out as gay) and is a fully batshit insane covid denier.

And while he preaches this “nObOdY wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE” shit, Wikipedia lists his personal value at $55 million as of 2018, which, presumably, he would never have been able to get near if he’d repaid his own debts back in 1988 instead of declaring bankruptcy like the hypocritical fuck he is.

Right. Like AMC marketing execs have never heard the words vagina dentata.

Yeah. I’m just gonna leave that there. Like AMC did with the Dune popcorn bucket, lol.

I never heard it explained that way. What an excellent comment. Thank you for taking the time.

It was mandatory but essentially had to be done on your own time.

In the US, if you are an hourly non-exempt employee, that is overt wage theft in all 50 states. If a task is made mandatory by an employer, they must pay you for the time you spent on it.

I know this doesn’t help you now, of course, but it’s good to know in case you run into it again and feel like pushing back with a report to the Dept of Labor.

According to the article it’s all about the data, not the product, and how Microsoft 365 breaches EU data protection laws..

Which is really kind of funny, because if MS had left users’ data alone and focused on the product instead of backend data brokering revenue, they’d probably be keeping this business and not losing it.

He’s only 39 with a 40 year old image

Lol, great catch! I totally missed that.

EDITED TO ADD: It was the lady who was 39, not the guy suing her. My bad. I should probably just go ahead and revisit Hooked on Phonics now because I can’t fucking read, lol.

I’m not defending her, in fact I find her actions completely repellent, but Shamima Begum is walking proof that the UK has and will readily make a UK national stateless if it wants to do so, AND defend that legal position indefinitely throughout as many international tribunals as it takes.

Born in the UK, traveling on UK documents, and ostensibly holding UK citizenship, Ms. Begum went to Syria in 2015 to fight for ISIS. As a response to her requests to return to the UK when she got to the FO part of FAFO, the UK home office removed her UK citizenship in 2019 and are fighting her efforts to get it back even now, five years later. Just two days ago she lost another court battle to get her UK citizenship back.

While citizenship in the UK is not based on place of birth (jus soli), the government of Bangladesh holds that she does not and has never had Bangladeshi citizenship via jus sanguinis. The UK courts decided that she was a Bangladeshi citizen from birth, but that doesn’t make it so except in UK law. There is no actual citizenship for her in Bangladesh. For the purposes of winning in court, the UK is simply creating a legal illusion of citizenship for her in Bangladesh where one does not exist, and so far it’s working for them. There is no alternate citizenship in reality.

Ergo, Ms. Begum is, in fact, rendered stateless by the actions of the UK. This condition is 100% the legal creation of the UK as its own response to her reprehensible actions, and has nothing at all to do with Ms. Begum’s place of her birth or her lineage.

Bangladesh says she is not a citizen of Bangladesh. The UK says she is not a citizen of the UK. She does not have any right or claim to citizenship in any other country or territory.

Ms. Begum’s situation is, literally, the exact definition of statelessness:

In international law, a stateless person is someone who is “not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law.”

And in today’s episode of Totally Un-self-aware,

The company’s founder, Eric Umeofia, refused to budge, however, saying in a recent documentary on the local Arise Television channel that he won’t drop the lawsuit against Okoli and that he would “rather die than allow someone to tarnish my image I worked 40 years to grow.”

So this asshole is the person churning up that poor woman’s isolated bad review into ALL the Streisand effect he can possibly get, as hard as he can, to the point that it is now international news how abysmally shitty his product really is, AND he’s also the person announcing dramatically that he’d rather die than allow anyone to do that.

Hmmm. Will he ever connect the dots?

Nah. He’ll just keep blaming and harassing that poor woman for the rest of his days while people stop buying his product in droves because both it and he leave such a bad taste in the mouth.

That is fucking rich, lol. “You stole our stolen shit! WE stole that, not you! Give it back!”

It’s a goddamn shame he couldn’t get the Elgin Marbles to fit under his coat, he’d have been a hero around the world.

Four day old account, thirteen comments, ALL trolls.

I think it’s fair to predict I’ll be reading all of Mario Puzo’s Godfather books (again) before I’ll be reading anything more from your troll account, lol.

EDITED TO ADD: Already banned for trolling, lol – thank you lemmy.world mods!

Technically, no, the request itself very real and has teeth, but for it to just die and produce attention is what she seems to want and is betting on. It’s all a gamble on her part, but the dice are real.

A Motion to Vacate is a legal request for Congress to hold a vote on having the current Speaker vacate the office. -IF- it ever gets to a vote, a simple majority is all that is needed, under the new rules for this Congress, for a Speaker to be ousted.

But she’s personally betting it will never get to a vote, not be supported, and will be killed by others long before that. From Wikipedia (bolding is mine):

Under House Rule IX, a resolution to declare the office of Speaker of the United States House of Representatives vacant is considered privileged: once introduced on the floor by a member, the resolution must be put to a floor vote within two legislative days. In 2019, at the beginning of the 116th Congress, the rules were altered to prevent motions from qualifying as matters of privilege unless “offered on behalf of a party conference or caucus.” The 2019 rule change remained in place until 2023, when the 118th Congress reversed it. A member can decide whether to introduce the motion to vacate on the floor or through the regular channels: the motion is only privileged in the first case.

In the history of the House of Representatives, there have been only four instances of a motion to vacate the chair being filed: one in March 1910 against Joe Cannon, which ended up being voted down, one in July 2015 against John Boehner, which was never put up to a vote, one in October 2023 against Kevin McCarthy (which, unlike its predecessors, was successful) and one against Mike Johnson. All four were filed by Republicans against a Republican speaker.

Read further in Wikipedia if you want the details, but it’s the Speaker of the House’s main job to allow specific pieces of legislation to come to the floor to be voted on, and he can gatekeep whatever he wants. So essentially she’s counting on Mike Johnson refusing to allow a motion for his own firing to come to the floor for a vote, or for the House Rules Committee to shoot it down first. This is probably a good bet. Also, if it ever gets to a vote, any other member can respond to the motion by entering a countering Motion to Table (postpone) the vote itself, indefinitely if they like.

Thus, success or failure simply depends on how many votes are needed at any given step, and she is betting, probably rightly so, that there just isn’t enough hatred for Mike Johnson yet for this to get anywhere near a vote.

But she’s doing the legislative equivalent of waving a loaded gun. Don’t think it’s just perfunctory, because this is the same shit that got McCarthy ousted in under a week without breaking a sweat. Hence, the threat. It frankly reminds me of the same irresponsible, self-certain political brinksmanship that called for a “non-binding” referendum in the UK as to their continued membership in the EU that turned out to be very binding indeed.

Bitch is playing with fire.

No need to wonder. The rule was changed specifically for the 118th Congress (this one) and it’s the very first line in the summary:

Specific changes include

permitting a single Member to call for a vote to remove the Speaker;

Here are the rules as a whole, in PDF (link in page): https://rules.house.gov/rules-and-resources

Yesterday and the day before I was seeing some articles regarding attempted breaches of her health records, so I’m assuming they were in fact stolen, the story is out and about to break anyway, and this announcement is just the royal PR machine getting ahead of its inevitable release with or without their say.

Here’s one I saw Wednesday: NY Times - Report of Kate Privacy Breach Is Being Assessed by U.K. Authorities

Archive link

I’m not readily skeeved by differences in people, but I’ll be honest, this woman creeps me out hard. Her eyes, specifically. Something absolutely NOT right in there, and that’s before you get to all the weirdness regarding Trump.

And that involves her placing her entire judicial career on the line time after time, even risking censure and certainly many appeals, to help the con man that is Donald Trump by making obviously partisan and overtly inexplicable rulings in his favor, not once but regularly. As though she’s placing herself like a cloak over legal puddles in his way, daring anyone to stop her, chivalrously rescuing him from his own repercussions.

It’s ALL weird with her. ALL bizarre and inexplicable, even from the standpoint of everyday banal corruption. People who throw events for cash, be it a baseball game or a court case, are generally a bit more slick about it, trying to justify it with bullshit that’s less overtly attention grabbing, and not Every Single Time it’s in their hands, like someone who’s on the take but still wants to have a career to show for it at the end.

With her, it’s almost like she wants everyone to see that she’s throwing rulings for Trump. Rather than a payoff or gratitude for her appointment, it’s more like she’s actively in love with him and has some kind of personal fixation/fantasy with him that she proves to him from her professional occupation as often as she can.

And then there’s her creepy ass alien eyes.

So for me, the real question is how she keeps clerks at all.

Apparently not. It’s about crazy ass book bans in schools to begin with. This seriously creepy fuck just gratuitously tacked on his coworker’s name as though she was part of the narrative, but the original effort goes on:

The sponsor of the bill, Republican Sen. Joni Albrecht, apologized to her colleagues on Monday. “I’m so sorry that your name was injected into it,” she said. "That is absolutely, I will be the first to stand up and say I’m sorry.

But then, in the SAME SENTENCE, without a breath between, she adds,

This is in our schools. This is what’s going on. And I don’t want to see this elevated to any level."

I absolutely do NOT believe a person with a working conscience (!!!) would narrate a passage of graphic sexual violence out of a book as an example of what is being read by kids in schools and then ADD THEIR COWORKER’S NAME to the retelling as though she was a participant in the events described, whether as a joke or a come-on or for whatever perverted reason. That’s the difference between knowing right and wrong.

But what I’m getting from the article is that some (most?) of those present were fine with it, no one stopped him while he was doing this, and at least one of them (Albrecht, above) apologized only to try to rescue the book banning effort from this perv’s “one twist too far” efforts to use fear and loathing to ban more books.

So pointing out this asshole’s new low, as justified as it is, is almost like trying to find the worst protagonist in the last chapter of The Lord of the Flies, IMO. Because in the end, all this seriously warped bastard did was manage to shoehorn some very open and tightly targeted workplace sexual harassment into their concerted group workplace effort to harass the entire student population of Nebraska.

Which is the worse crime?

I honestly don’t know. I only know I would not be caught dead participating in either, and no one I know with an operating sense of human empathy would either: if you’re already lying to ban books, killing women by criminalizing pregnancy, demonizing people of color, and openly embracing other equally repugnant fascist principles, why would this further misbehavior against a woman shock and horrify you so much?

Also, consider that whatever justification he comes up with, it only has to work for his fellow Republicans, and that’s a bar low enough to turn an average cockroach into an Olympian.

But a male Republican state senator openly sexually harassing a Democrat female state senator on the floor of the Nebraska state senate? As horrific and gratuitous as that performance was, as much of an open sexual act toward his coworker as it was, nothing will be done, except the female senator will be pressured to “forgive” and let it go. Why? Because the doer is a man, a Republican and a state senator in Nebraska.

Lol, blocked