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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Are they? As the article OP shares suggests, these films quietly make us compare our lives to what is portrayed on screen. This is advertisement 101: display people in enviable positions to portray a sense of longing for a lifestyle that one would not normally seek. A food commercial isn’t selling you a product, it’s trying to make you hungry.

    If all you wanted out of these rom coms is the portrayal of a carefree life, you could just watch pharmaceutical, banking, or insurance ads.


  • You live in the country, but don’t drive for environmental reasons, yet you are considering using Door Dash? Can we also assume you don’t want to face the obvious answer: stockpile or grow food and cook for yourself?

    I don’t mean to be overly critical, but it sounds to me like you are trying to avoid compromising on both your ideals and modern day expectations, to find a practical solution. Your pre-industrial agricultural ancestor would have spent a week stockpiling food in the root cellar, by scrounging around locally, or going very far to stockpile food. They probably were also farming animals in a significantly more sustainable/humane way, though certainly exceedingly scarcely.











  • I’m pretty sure Windows is a key part of their “cloud stuff” strategy. You are right that consumers are not the direct focus of Windows, since they are not the direct paying audience, and that shows in the direction Windows is going, but getting consumers to use Windows is a big part of creating corporate buy in for Microsoft cloud services. Corporate environments will shun Microsoft cloud services if employees can’t use Windows, or Windows features run afoul of corporate policies (like blanket LLM bans).



  • The second part of this comment doesn’t make a lot of sense.

    My understanding is that the tax system allows for the declaration of depreciation in assets as a business expense. This is fine for assets with transparent market valuations.

    The part where this system could be abused is in willfully withholding the release of a movie, overvaluing the expected revenue, and then subsequently declaring the lack of revenue as a depreciation in assets which is then declared as a business expense to reduce the tax burden.

    A clearer example of this, with very obvious fraud, might be:

    • I paint a picture, spending about an hour of my time and 30$ of paint and canvas.
    • I then organize a silent/shady auction for my painting, and secretly bid $1,000,000 for my own painting
    • Then I decide to not pay for it and at the same time I decide to retract the sale instead of opening it up.
    • On paper I have a $1,000,000 asset that has been depreciated by $1,000,000 which allows me to deduct $1,000,000 from my other taxes.

    So obviously this example was fraudulous. It’s possible that the expected revenue on the cases involving movies was estimated transparently and was fair, because of market forces.

    Maybe something more scummy was at play?

    Who knows.






  • It depends on the law really. There is no one rule.

    For example, owning lockpicks is in many places not illegal, but owning lockpicks with the intent of bypassing a lock is.

    Some laws are very specific about the severity or testability of a crime where as others are not. In that case a judge has to interpret the criteria for legal tests, either from previous case law or by building new case law.

    In any case, being charged for something or not is a completely separate issue. Things are no less illegal just because the state has no resource or will to execute the law.

    Also, being charged does not mean you broke the law either. Nor does judgment determine it (although it’s a very strong hint) since a latter appeal could acquit you of chargers.

    The determination of guilt is in the facts of what happened. And that’s the whole point of the legal system. Being charged, getting judgement, appealing. It’s all a process to determine guilt or not. It is not itself the mechanism of guilt.

    The idea of a “guilty conscience” enshrines this idea in expression.