In Australia, there is a strong presumption towards keeping left as a pedestrian (and overtaking on the right - e.g. etiquette on escalators is to keep left, but if you are walking up the escalator, overtake to the right).
In some particularly busy places (especially on shared footpath / bike lane zones) there are even arrows on the pavement to ensure tourists know what side to keep to.
There are always a few people (probably tourists) who don’t follow the local etiquette.
Or at least the other way around. Reddit is banned from me.
to lose 100% of the court cases where they try this defense
I don’t think the litigants actually know this. The shady characters they are paying for the information probably know that, but represent that it will just work if they do it right.
Imagine you have some kind of legal problem, and you go to your lawyer, and your lawyer tells you they know what to do that will let you win. You’ll probably do it. Now for the litigants, it is the same thing, except instead of a lawyer, it is some person with an Internet and/or in real life following, who dazzles you with lots of fake formality that aligns to your preconceptions of the legal system based on TV. Of course, it is all just pseudolegal and a scam, but you don’t know that.
Now you might except that some critical thinking and/or research of authoritative sources like case law, or consulting a real lawyer might let the litigant see that it is a scam, but critical thinking skills are not as common as you might hope, and secondary education in many places doesn’t cover much about the law or how to do legal research.
Consider that 49.8% of voters in the 2024 US Presidential election voted for Trump, even after seeing the first term. Many people are easily hoodwinked into acting against their own best interests, especially if they are convinced there is a community of other people like them acting the same way (SovCit like groups do have some numbers), that people who endorse those theories get a lot of recognition / are influential (the leaders of the groups can create that impression), and that their theories have a long traditional backing (usually they make up a historical backstory).
Easy! Why do you think it happened? Inadequate food regulation? Underfunded healthcare? Insufficient regulation of pollutants that can impact health and cause chronic disease?
I don’t know your individual circumstances, but given the state of the world right now, I’d bet it’s a combination of all three.
IANAL, but it is an interesting question to consider whether it would be illegal in Australia (if anything, as a test to see if the right laws are on the books to block this kind of thing). The laws are likely different in the US, and it might vary from state to state.
The Fair Work Act 2009 (Commonwealth), s325 provides that:
An employer must not directly or indirectly require an employee to spend, or pay to the employer or another person, an amount of the employee’s money or the whole or any part of an amount payable to the employee in relation to the performance of work, if:
(a) the requirement is unreasonable in the circumstances; and
(b) for a payment—the payment is directly or indirectly for the benefit of the employer or a party related to the employer.
I think you could imagine the employer arguing a few lines:
So I think it would probably be contrary to s325 of the Fair Work Act in Australia.
Another angle could be the right to disconnect under s333M of the Fair Work Act:
An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, from an employer outside of the employee’s working hours unless the refusal is unreasonable.
If someone has a work and a personal phone, and has the app on the work phone, but refuses to use take the work phone or install an app on their personal phone so they can respond to tracking requests from the employer, then maybe this also fits.
I also wonder if in Australia this could also be a form of cartel conduct - it is an arrangement of where purchases (other than those the company should legitimately control) are directed centrally under an arrangement by an organisation.
Under s45AD of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010,
(1) For the purposes of this Act, a provision of a contract, arrangement or understanding is a cartel provision if: (a) either of the following conditions is satisfied in relation to the provision: (i) the purpose/effect condition set out in subsection (2); (ii) the purpose condition set out in subsection (3); and (b) the competition condition set out in subsection (4) is satisfied in relation to the provision.
So the purpose condition has several alternatives separated by ‘or’, one of which is:
(3) The purpose condition is satisfied if the provision has the purpose of directly or indirectly: … (b) allocating between any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (ii) the persons or classes of persons who have supplied, or who are likely to supply, goods or services to any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding; or
It sounds like there is a solid argument the purpose condition is met - they are allocating where people who are part of the arrangement (employees) shop.
They’d also need to meet the competition condition for it to be cartel conduct. For this to be met, the arrangement might need to include the clients of the company:
(4) The competition condition is satisfied if at least 2 of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (a) are or are likely to be; or (b) but for any contract, arrangement or understanding, would be or would be likely to be; in competition with each other in relation to: … © if paragraph (2)© or (3)(b) applies in relation to a supply, or likely supply, of goods or services—the supply of those goods or services in trade or commerce; or
So it could be argued that this is a cartel arrangement between the company, its clients, and its employees, and so attract penalties for cartel conduct.
To save on costs, QAs could be paid in exposure.
I believe nothing in the podman rm family worked because the container was already gone - it was just the IP allocation that was left.
Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story from the 2nd century - although even that is a parody of existing stories. So the origin dates back a long time!
This slowly degrades the power of the union and ultimately reduces wages and benefits of the workers
I’m not sure I buy into that - but that said I live in a country where unions are popular, but unions are not allowed to force people to join (but unions do have a right of access to workplaces to ask people to join / hold meetings).
Firstly, it doesn’t take that big a percentage of an employer’s workforce to strike before a strike is effective… companies don’t have a lot of surplus staff capacity just sitting around doing nothing. And they can’t fire striking union workers for striking.
Secondly, if all employees have to belong to one particular union, that also means the employees have no choice of which union, and hence no leverage over the union. Bad unions who just agree to whatever the employer asks and don’t look after their members then become entrenched and the employees can’t do much. If there are several unions representing employees, they can still unite and work together if they agree on an issue - but there is much more incentive for unions to act in the interests of their members, instead of just their leadership.
A lack of guaranteed employee protections, on the other hand, is inexcusable - it’s just wealthy politicians looking out for the interests of their donors in big business.
By population, and not land area, certain more remote geographic places are well known but have quite a low population. ‘Everyone’ is a high bar, but most adults in Australia would know the following places (ordered from smaller population but slightly less known to higher population):
Self-hosted Gitea or Forgejo. It’s pretty easy to host, and if you’ve got a reliable Internet connection and an always on computer, you can host it from home without too much effort.
Stargate SG-1, Season 4, Episode 6 has a variant of the loop trope, but everyone (including most of the protagonists, and everyone else on earth) don’t remember what happens, while two protagonists remember every loop until they are able to stop the looping.
They debrief the others who don’t remember at the end (except for the things they did when they took a loop off anyway!) - but they didn’t miss too much since everyone else on earth missed it.
Another fictional work - a book, not a movie / TV show / anime - is Stephen Fry’s 1996 novel Making History. The time travel aspect is questionable - he sends things back in time to stop Hitler being born, but no people travel through time. However, he remembers the past before his change, and has to deal with the consequences of having the wrong memories relative to everyone else.
IANAL (and likely neither is anyone here) - and I think the answer would be “it depends” on other details if you asked a lawyer to make a decision on what you’ve shared. So I think that is the only route if you can’t get YouTube or the blogger to do the right thing.
Some relevant things this might hinge on:
Some potential causes of action that your lawyer could consider if they apply:
Modems also make noises when connected. However, the noise of them connecting is more distinctive because they go through a handshake where you can hear distinct tones, but then negotiate a higher baud rate involving modulation of many different frequencies, at which point to the human ear it is indistinguishable from white noise (a sort of loud hissing). If you pick up the phone while the modem is connected at a higher baud rate (post the handshake), you’ll hear the hissing, and then eventually you picking up the phone will have caused too many errors for the connection to be sustained (due to introducing noise on the line), causing both ends to hang up. You’ll then hear the normal tone you hear when the called party has hung up the line.
Tip for increasing the life of your next battery:
Li-Po batteries degrade far faster when their charge level is at the levels the manufacturers call 0-15% or 85-100%; the exact minimum and maximum charge levels are a manufacturer decision that trades off total battery capacity when new against battery life. Manufacturers make the decision by thinking about what is most profitable for them, which is the biggest possible advertised (brand new) battery capacity, while dying quite fast (within a couple of years) to sell more, but not so fast consumers can claim it is faulty.
So they will happily make the battery last 1/5th of the life it otherwise would, for +30% brand new battery capacity, even if that 30% will be gone in a year of typical use.
Those decisions are aligned to the manufacturer’s interests, but they are seldom aligned to a consumer’s interest. Most consumers would be better off with 30% less battery capacity, but a phone battery that lasts 5x as long - many people for example charge every day, and only get down to 80% or something anyway.
The way to re-align to your interests are to: stop charging above 85%, and shut down at 15% instead of going down to 0%. You can do this manually, but it is a real pain; you can’t just plug it in, and leave it until it is charged, you’d need to micromanage charging. Some more responsible manufacturers (e.g. some Samsung devices) have features that will do this for you if you set preserve battery mode. Others, including Google, however, really don’t want you to do this, because it hurts their sales. They don’t provide standard APIs available to unrooted devices that would allow apps that do this.
If you are willing to root your device (and ideally install a third party Android distro like LineageOS), you can install ACCA (https://f-droid.org/packages/mattecarra.accapp/) on a rooted device, and set it to stop charging at 85%, and shut down at 15%. This will increase your battery life very significantly, and drastically slow the decline in capacity you’d otherwise see. Unfortunately, many manufacturers hate people taking control of their own devices this way; Google has unfortunately convinced major banks etc… to use their so called “Play Integrity API” to check that your device is “secure” (where secure is defined by Google as including a phone no longer receiving security patches, with known vulnerabilities that let someone trivially install a keylogger over the wifi, but excluding the same phone rooted by the owner, with a highly secure up-to-date LineageOS install, with extra security software like firewalls that stock Android wouldn’t allow, and with ACCA installed; it’s almost like “secure” means toeing the Google line, and the banks have been conned). There are sometimes ways to pass the Play Integrity API checks even when rooted, but Google is constantly battling users to try to break them. But it might be worth it for better security and battery life.
I believe it is what Americans call what might be called an Owners Corporation / Body Corporate / Apartment Owners Association / Management Company in other parts of the English-speaking world.
Generally speaking optometrists measure the core measurements of how your vision is and make the prescription.
However, to make glasses as well as the prescription they need the interpupillary distance (IPD); how far apart the pupils in the centre of the eyes are.
The IPD rarely changes much / at all in adults (so saving for certain conditions, once you know it you could keep using that value), and measuring it is not that hard if you have another person to do it (read how to do it properly on the Internet).
I don’t know the law in Canada around what they have to disclose. I believe Canada has privacy legislation that says that people have access to private information about them held by companies in at least some cases, so that might be something to look into, and then request all the information they hold on you if you ever need the information again.
No
On economic policy I am quite far left - I support a low Gini coefficient, achieved through a mixed economy, but with state provided options (with no ‘think of the businesses’ pricing strategy) for the essentials and state owned options for natural monopolies / utilities / media.
But on social policy, I support social liberties and democracy. I believe the government should intervene, with force if needed, to protect the rights of others from interference by others (including rights to bodily safety and autonomy, not to be discriminated against, the right to a clean and healthy environment, and the right not to be exploited or misled by profiteers) and to redistribute wealth from those with a surplus to those in need / to fund the legitimate functions of the state. Outside of that, people should have social and political liberties.
I consider being a ‘tankie’ to require both the leftist aspect (✅) and the authoritarian aspect (❌), so I don’t meet the definition.
I’m looking into it using data from my instance to check it isn’t an abuse issue.
What I know so far:
I think it was a 18th century British fad that spread to America - for example, look at the date on this London newspaper from 1734:
It didn’t make it into legal documents / laws, which still used the more traditional format like: “That from and after the Tenth Day of April, One thousand seven hundred and ten …”. However, the American Revolution effectively froze many British fashions from that point-in-time in place (as another example, see speaking English without the trap/bath split, which was a subsequent trend in the commonwealth).
The fad eventually died out and most of the world went back to the more traditional format, but it persisted in the USA.