Woobies. A librarian turned me on to it when I told her I’d gladly listen to more audiobooks but I hate just sitting there, having nothing to do with my hands. She told me to ignore how it looks and just do it. She was right. I still miss it when I’m just listening to music, or did until today.

Of course I went and played it immediately, lol.

There is a game I used to play in the late 90s and aughts that was simply stupid but fantastic for stress relief, and I still think about it even though it’s been possibly fifteen years or longer since I played it. Just checked the archive and it’s there.

I had no idea this even existed until now. Many thanks.

Holy shit. That’s some arrogance right there, thinking no one would ever know or find out. Grand juries are secret, but they’re not THAT secret.

they think everything is more openly corrupt than it is yet.

You nailed it.

That whole “a good prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich” was when you could pull your jurors out of a citizen pool that didn’t walk in already believing you were lying through your fucking teeth.

But then they pulled the mask off, and let us all see how they are using the courts for vindictive prosecution and political harassment.

Looks like the ham sammich days are ending, lol.

They would have to get rid of juries altogether.

Given that our current legal system was created as a direct reaction to star chambers and baked into the constitution, they have an uphill climb, at the least.

You’ll never guess what Bill Gates’ daughter has been up to . . .

More information

Apologies for not replying to you directly – I meant to, lol. But thank you.

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted; this is far from being a fringe idea. Rather, it is well established and being studied. (Look at the About pages for an idea of who is behind research such as this.) To extrapolate that it is being done for political gain is no far leap, lol.

Roblox is a known nexus for this kind of activity (pick one, lol) and why wouldn’t it be? It’s one of the places where all the children are there and unsupervised.

Your points are well taken, but usually when responding to a lawsuit – especially a big dollar suit against a deep-pocketed corporation with an army of attorneys – the defending legal team will pile on every exonerating thing it can possibly think of, and continue to do so throughout the proceedings, because every single one is not just a chance to win but a chance to argue on appeal if they lose.

So they will throw in whatever they can think of, because something somewhere might stick, and meanwhile everything they tack on is something else the plaintiffs have to address in their own filings, adding to the plaintiff’s upfront cost of bringing the suit.

isn’t the age at which she signed the ‘contract’ even more relevant?

It’s everything – or it used to be, before the current administration (US) decided to turn two and a half centuries of law into Calvinball.

I’m still pissed off about that. The guy’s wife fucking died and they pulled that shit.

But this was not in court: Disney was trying to force the surviving husband into arbitration and simply withdrew the objection to trial after it got a lot of bad publicity, so it was never heard in front of a judge. Disney never actually said it did not have absolute right to arbitration, it just withdrew the objection, meaning that they could do it again at any time.

I’m no expert, but my Business Law professors were absolutely adamant about the fact that a minor can never execute a legal agreement and there are no exceptions.

No, you’re absolutely right. There are no exceptions. In the US there are roughly six elements necessary for a contract to be legally binding, and this one is the issue of “legal capacity”: does the party entering into the contract have the capacity to understand and be bound to such an agreement? For minors, the broad answer in law is always no. They can get emancipated (a judge rules you an adult for legal purposes), they can have a parent or legal guardian act in their behalf, they can postpone until they are of age, etc. But they do not, as a rule, have the legal capacity to enter into a binding contract.

That’s what this is. Minors appear to enter into contracts all the time. Every time a minor clicks on a EULA they’re purporting to enter into a contract. But that does not make it valid. Just because a signature is on a line that is not enough to make a contract binding and enforceable.

The defendants are pulling this because in the US we’ve entered into a new wtf era in the courts and they’re simply hoping to get a judge to allow it to stick, but this whole “an eight year old successfully waived his rights” argument has no basis in law.

To put it another way I’m going to pivot and use a different example that more people are familiar with, and one that I care a lot about: underage marriage. Apologies in advance for the shoehorn but it illustrates the point.

This exact issue of being unable to legally enter into agreement, or provide legal consent, is why underage marriage is so problematic: it’s a legal trap for the minor, and essentially a form of legal slavery. Children can get married, but children have no legal power to initiate a legal proceeding (like getting a restraining order or filing for divorce) nor direct their own health care, even reproductive health, unless they act through a parent or legal guardian. If they are mistreated they can’t even be admitted to a shelter, since shelters have agreements and children cannot enter into contracts, period end of.

Legally, just because a child has married, they do NOT suddenly gain legal emancipation. This is another big misunderstanding. Emancipation happens solely by court order, not by marriage. Even the marriage itself required parental consent to be legally binding, depending on the exact age and location. The married minor is still legally a child, unable to execute or be bound to contracts. The exceptions to this are informal, such as when despite a child’s minority, others allow a child to go through the motions and honor an invalid contract anyway, OR formal, when the child has a legal guardian that is willing to enter into contract and genuinely act on the child’s own behalf.

And the worst of it is that in most states and under federal law, sex with a child that would otherwise be considered rape – in some cases, felony rape – becomes legal within marriage. In those situations, the marriage license becomes a “get out of jail free” card for a child rapist. That’s how few legal rights children have in reality.

There are organizations working hard to turn this around, but it’s an uphill battle. Here’s more information for anyone who wants the actual legal picture: https://www.unchainedatlast.org/child-marriage-in-the-u-s/

Same here, I think we’ve had it close to ten years now. After seeing how the cats respond to it we started calling it The Food God.

I suspect my ongoing emphasis on individuality and use of words and phrases like “one by one” and “personally” and “different for everyone” may have escaped you.

I don’t see groups as masses of fungible humans; I see them as a collective unit of individuals like myself, each one with a separate history and a separate set of decisions to make about their lives, and for that reason I tend to avoid all-encompassing generalizations of “people” as homogeneous units – to the point that statements such as your own strike me as propagandistic, more intent on changing my view and laying down a law on a subject than on considering any evidence to the contrary.

When I read your reply to me, so confidently wrong about what I see around myself in terms of phone usage, I wondered if asked the same you’d even see anyone not on their phone, because you seem to have decided that everyone everywhere at all times is glued to it by choice, permanently and without exception.

For myself, I’ve chosen to be off technology for long stretches, and I see more and more people making their own decisions to do the same even if their individual choices don’t look exactly like my own. And yeah, when I go out, I see plenty of people both off and on their phones. When I make eye contact in a store aisle, I see plenty of eyes making contact back. When I eat dinner out, I see as many phones face down on tables as I do in hands. Mostly I don’t pay attention because I don’t need to: others being on it or not is their own battle to fight.

And they will.

The future of computing is corporate controlled siloes people simply cannot escape

Lol, no. To remain in a prison of choice requires the consent of the imprisoned. I am not bound to engage in computing on demand, nor am I addicted to it, and if it comes down to it I’ll just turn the shit on only when absolutely necessary. I’ve done it before and every time it is great; I’ll do it again in a heartbeat.

Some may have to participate by necessity in corporately-controlled computing structures to some degree depending on work needs, for example, but most of what is booming now is entertainment, not business: social media, streaming, subscription services. Entertainment is a matter of individual choice and again, I find myself in no prison not of my choosing.

I can escape those silos simply by walking away when I am not contractually obliged to interact with them, such as in a work scenario, and so can everyone else. Even you.

There’s also the fact that an internet full of bots, AI slop, and privacy risks is making more people pull away from the online world. In our poll, 97% of people said the internet today was a hellscape compared to its early days, and it looks like things are only going to get worse.

Looks like the cure is inherent in the disease. Anyone else remember the early 90s when Usenet was just text-based fun and then some motherfucker thought it was a grand idea to run ads? I do, and it’s been downhill ever since.

It’s sad that it has come to this, but as usual a handful of greedy fuckers have ruined it for the rest of us. (My personal opinion is that big tech could have arrested this downhill slide at any point, even from back in the first days of email spam, but have chosen to monetize it every step of the way instead.)

Real humans are already individually opting out, one by one, as we each personally get sick of the slop and realize it’s just not helping anymore. For myself I’m only on intermittently, I’ve ditched all social media, Lemmy is all I participate in regularly now beyond the odd comment here and there, and that seems about right for me at this time.

I adjust it regularly, often just by going offline for days, but I had to see the problem before I could change it. I think that’s where a lot of people are, just now seeing it for the first time as a real problem affecting their quality of life directly.

But like any other addiction, the point of turning is different for everyone. These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.

I dislike how disenting opinions get downvoted on Lemmy/technology probably more than even on reddit.

That almost makes it sound unfair, but the technology on Lemmy is doing exactly what each one of us tells it to do every time we cast a vote. It is, as far as I can tell, an exact representation of our own individual votes cast.

Certainly it’s not the technology doing the downvoting you dislike, and at least on Lemmy the totals are straightforward – as opposed to Reddit, where every part of the voting and tabulation process is openly manipulated.

If you downvote on Lemmy – and you do, though to be fair your downvotes are minimal compared to your upvotes – you are not averse to downvoting what you don’t appreciate, you are apparently only averse to downvoting when it applies to content that others do not appreciate.

This is not a problem with Lemmy technology. It’s doing exactly what you are telling it to do when you cast either an upvote or a downvote, same as it does for everyone else who votes. That’s not an example of technology not working for its users; that’s technology that’s working exactly as it should.

I could almost see your point on Reddit because of all the vote fuckery that goes on there, but here on Lemmy blaming a mass downvote on the tech and not on the users casting the votes is a misdirection of blame.

Now that you know everything on Snapchat is going through active automated filtering, consider what Snapchat has chosen NOT to flag and is allowing to flow freely, like sex trafficking and the sale of minors.

As unfair and life-changing as this event has been for this young teacher, I think the actual story of what Snapchat (and every other digital communication method) is reading/tracking yet allowing is a much, much bigger story. And dirtier. With billionaires and pedophiles and all manner of nasty allowables we do not yet know.

Of course it wouldn’t. And NLRB was one of the first agencies directly targeted by Musk’s DOGE, which by some bizarre and unrelated coincidence was also involved in a huge multi-year lawsuit against SpaceX at the time, and said to be holding information related to that suit, the same suit that was dropped this year via an interesting ruling involving the NLRB itself. Of course NLRB is still 100% trustworthy, nothing to see here.

Yeah, a number of people have been saying they can still get on but Reddit is definitely doing this. It appears to be getting rolled out in some kind of A/B distribution.

It doesn’t have to get as far as eminent domain. In at least one Georgia case the land was condemned by local authorities, the start of the legal process of eminent domain, and the family was no longer able to live in it regardless. So the use of eminent domain as a threat to force the sale of privately held land is already happening.

Every “voluntary” easement is signed in the shadow of automatic condemnation. When the company across the table can take your land if you say no, you aren’t negotiating, and attorneys representing landowners know that.

This quote is from one article of many about how non-local companies use condemnation as a tool to steal land, and how that has a very long history in the US. This particular article is about how a community in Nashville attempted to use condemnation in the other direction, condemning a property wanted by a data center so that no one could use it, but it gives the history pretty well.