#Regulate Business

[originalleftist]

THANK YOU for refuting the "overpopulation" narrative.

Always, ALWAYS be deeply suspicious of someone who argues that the Earth is "overpopulated". Because the moment the argument becomes "there are too many people", it opens the door for the question "Which people should be subtracted?" Now consider that the countries with the highest populations and population growth don't tend to be wealthy "developed" Western nations (which consume the most), but poorer "developing" non-Western nations... can you see where this argument is going?

Blaming environmental crises on "overpopulation" allows the rich and powerful to shift the blame onto the poor, powerless, and "foreign"/non-white. And is opening the door for eugenics, eco-fascism, and ultimately genocide to be the "solution", rather than the rich having to give up some of their wealth.

[evelynstarshine]

It's being estimated that the spaceX launch, lacking the regulation and oversight of NASA launches, might have wiped out as much as 4% of the population of the federally protected Piping Plovers who's nesting site was within the effected area of the launch blast.

But you know, privatising space is cool because billionare fanboys think it's awesome.

[halorvic]

[stealingpotatoes]

In Skywalker Apart AU. Since Luke is very much a rich kid he's the son of a Senator does he have any expensive hobbies like flying starfighters I'm sure Luke would love n-1 starfighter or does he just make models

I'm sure Padmé would LOVE it if he just made models but he's his father's son <3 she let go of him for 2 seconds while visiting Theed Palace and he was halfway through the launch sequence on an n-1

since then she's more careful and lets him learn flying the PROPER way with fancy tutors n stuff loll (cause hey, like u say, rich kid!). probably goes on some kinda summer flight camp or smthn and leaves having made every one of the instructors question their own skill

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I know that people are rarely their best selves at a funeral, but do you ever just watch your family move through the process of mourning the Patriarch and have a sudden and violent and vivid understanding of Why Everyone Is The Way They Are

[askagamedev]

Hello, I've been paying attention to Dustborn and the only actual question I would like to make is if you see anything worth dissecting on the fact that it got tax money from the EU? Games funded by a government are very rare, so I wonder if analyzing the game from that perspective provides something interesting into game development.

Getting tax breaks and incentives from various governments is actually very common. Government investment is often a lot like scholarships to university - they have bundles of money set aside for applicants that meet certain criteria. Most governments are interested in encouraging economic activity within their borders, especially tech industry growth. Tech pays pretty well, isn't large on space, and encourages secondary growth - tech workers that move to the area will buy usually houses and spend with local businesses, leading to a positive cycle of improved economic growth for the area.

As an example of this, in 2020 the Department of Community & Economic Development of Pennsylvania offered a [tax credit] of 25% of qualified expenses for the first four years of development and 10% for each subsequent year back in 2020 to game developers who spent at least 60% of their total production costs in Pennsylvania. The politicians were hoping to encourage game developers to move to Pennsylvania and they were offering tax credits as incentive.

Similarly, the Norwegian Film Institute offers funding to [audiovisual productions that meet their criteria]:

The screenplay, or the literary work on which the screenplay is based, has originally been written in the Norwegian or Sami language

The main theme is connected to Norwegian history, culture or social conditions

The action takes place in Norway, in another EEA country (countries of the European Union [EU] plus Iceland, Liechtenstein)

The work contains significant contributions from rights holders or artists resident in Norway or in another EEA country.

Dustborn ticked enough of these boxes that the NFI agreed to fund them. It wasn't a special thing, it was government money set aside to encourage the development of Norwegian-focused cultural audio visual works. That includes video games, movies, television, or any other kind of audio visual production. Lots of smaller works, games included, find funding through programs and grants like this.

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[indiesellersguild]

Attention Canadian Sellers! The government is looking to update Canadian copyright law for the age of AI-generated art, and they want your input!

Comments are open until 1/15/24.

[kebriones]

Okay so after a very long consultation with my accountant, it turns out that I'm not stupid or hyperbolic. The system in greece is actually extremely hostile to people trying to work. Want to be a freelancer or run a business? There's such crazy tax, so many conflicting and confusing regulations, so many restrictions that it's almost impossible. Oh you're an artist? You're hugely fucked. You know how in other countries you can do both freelance commissions, and also sell like, keychains and prints and have a patreon and make money off YouTube and also maybe do a gallery show if you're lucky? You literally cannot do this here legally, unless for every different thing you want to do, you go apply for it, charge the correct tax, change your type of work etc. of course nobody really checks those things so most people do them anyway, but if you're trying to be safe and fully legal it's basically impossible.

if you want to sell anything physical, you need to have a "base", a physical location that is NOT your house to do so. It's ??,. You cannot be a craftsman from your house and make a living this way. You can only offer services from your house. The tax for selling physical goods is also a whole other can of worms.

Also just the tax percentage and what you have to pay regardless of income is basically designed to make sure you cannot live off of working for yourself unless you have some insane profit.

I mean, it's possible, sure, but it's so confusing and convoluted and difficult to make ends meet if you're trying to be as legal as possible.

[cleveradjacent]

i don't often stray from the fandom theme of this blog but. this holiday season, if you are in charge of putting up christmas lights in a public space (i.e. absolutely anywhere outside of your private home where nobody else can see them), SET IT TO LITERALLY ANY OTHER MODE THAT ISN'T STROBING OFF ITS TITS. there WILL be some poor bastard passing by them who WILL get dazed, hurt, disoriented, violently sick, collapse into a seizure, or all of the above. jesus christ this isn't that hard to keep in mind.

reblogs appreciated.

[thoughtfulchaos773]

“I guess all the time, I feel like I am kind of trapped because I can’t describe how I’m feeling. so to ask somebody else how they’re feeling that just seems, I don’t know, insane?"

Inspired by an interview with Joanna Naugle, the editor of The Bear where she explains that from the first moment Carmy wakes up, the audience is taken on a journey to explore the world from Carmy's perspective.

But the dream..There's a thing here with trapped, the bear being trapped in the opening moment on screen, Carmy being trapped in the walk-in, Jimmy asking okay we get the star then what? Syd: We're dialed- Carmy: we're trapped. We hear this once again in the season 3 trailers (Syd: Why are you doing this? Camy we're going to get a star- I thought it was a trap?)

What's trapped are Carmy's feelings, and the audience experiences Carmy's released emotions as he navigates the world.

It's an adult coming-of-age story- about summoning the self by acknowledging his own feelings.

Carmy seems to live a life of self-denial and has a lot of repressed emotions. We see these feelings explored subconsciously through overlapping dialogues, and not just in overlapping dialogues but also in music choices, cinemtography, and flashbacks. This gives us insight into his mind, where we hear and see subliminal, suggestive images and conversations that relate to his unexplored feelings.

Carmy struggles to understand what he truly wants because he hasn't fully explored his pent-up emotions.

Until he releases it (the bear- the emotions)in the dream in the opening scene of the show.

The bear symbolizes Carmy's subconscious, including his grief and other emotions that he has been holding in for a long time before Mikey's passing. Returning home and working in the restaurant has triggered the release of all these raw emotions, which he needs to process in order to heal. Once he identifies and processes his feelings, he will start on the hero's journey of understanding himself, his desires, and his feelings towards himself and those around him.

[zeb-z]

my favorite thing about Samakro is how ride or die the man is, yet is so adamant that he’s not. he rationalizes most of it out as being for the greater good of the ascendency, as following his commanding officer well, but it’s really much simpler than that. you earn his loyalty, and he will die for the cause. the ascendancy has his loyalty, and now so does thrawn, personally

[paimonial-rage]

from your character analysis ask meme, for alhaitham: Are they prone to jealousy? would he be too logical to be jealous? Would his jealousy be in vain or would it perhaps be a sign that his partner has crossed the line of sorts?

Definition of jealousy:

I apologize for taking some time with this ask. I’m going to answer this in a more analytical format because I think this situation calls for it. I want to say that no, under normal circumstances, Alhaitham is not the kind of person to get jealous. In my experience, there are usually three triggers for jealousy:

1. Reader interacting normally with friends and hobbies and partner gets (unreasonably) jealous

2. Reader getting too involved with spending time with friends/hobbies not realizing they’re neglecting partner which gets them (reasonably) jealous

3. Reader specifically does things that will incite jealousy within partner by purposefully doing things like ignoring partner or flirting with others

Alhaitham would not get jealous under the first instance. Being a very independent person, he would understand and respect his partner’s need for it as well. The second instance would be the closest he’d feel to your definition of jealousy. While he’d be able to withstand it for a while, eventually he’d probably feel neglected and would pull you away to capture your sole attention.

As for the third scenario, while he would get upset and would get jealous, I don’t believe this would happen in a normal relationship. Personally, I would never flirt with someone that isn’t my partner just for fun, even if I’m close to them. I think that’s a very hurtful thing to do to someone that has feelings for you.

So long story short, no, I don’t think Alhaitham is prone to jealousy. Not that he’s “too logical” to be jealous. He just understands and respects people’s need for independence. That being said, he probably can end up feeling neglected if left alone too long.

[is-this-really--life]

I think the conversation on tariffs is a lot longer than "they're always bad news" and honestly I think cost cutting measures these corporations take to rely on cheap foreign labor is a huge problem especially if there are american alternatives in which some level of labor rights are guaranteed. Idk... the conversation around tariffs has been weirding me out. Obv Trump's incentive of "beat China and make them pay" is dumb but I've always supported select tariffs on certain goods. Especially non-essentials. Certain things are not meant to be dirt cheap. The only reason so many things are dirt cheap is a reliance on outsourced dirt cheap labor. Exploited labor. Shouldn't we be discouraging that? Ideally gradually?

[crow-talks-hockey]

oh dear guys he's being a weeping woman again

[bobwess]

Here's the thing. Disney lawyers are a different breed. There is a good fucked up chance they have an actual loophole so iron clad that they'll get this case dismissed. But it'll pave the way for the kind of legislative reform that is desperately needed to stop this crap. The McDonalds app signs away your right to sue if they injure you. Companies are doing this crap because they figured out no one reads the terms and it'd be inconvenient to go without using a lot of these services anyway. We need to be pressuring our current and arriving congressmen and senators to get their fucking shit together and put some damn restrictions on the capitalist hellscape we're in.

[ridenwithbiden]

"The Supreme Court overruled a key pillar of federal agency authority Friday, appropriating a massive amount of executive branch power to itself.

In overruling Chevron, a 40-year-old precedent, the Court decided that federal agencies no longer get to fill in the gaps of Congress’ laws with their experts’ own reasonable interpretation of how to carry them out; that authority now resides in the judiciary. It’s a power grab that the right-wing legal world has been marching towards for years — and they finally got a Court activist enough to do it.

Chief Justice John Roberts, often the tip of the spear for this movement, wrote the majority. Justice Elena Kagan, probably the Court’s best pro-agency voice, wrote the dissent, joined by her two liberal colleagues. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas wrote solo concurrences.

Roberts completed the takeover with very little humility. The thinking underlying Chevron deference is that agencies are staffed by experts who understand the technicalities of their subject matter, and are best equipped to mold often broad statutes into day-to-day regulations. Judges, on the other hand, have no special insight into, say, the Environmental Protection Agency’s calculations to find permissible amounts of air pollution, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s experience with how factories should be laid out.

“Delegating ultimate interpretive authority to agencies is simply not necessary to ensure that the resolution of statutory ambiguities is well informed by subject matter expertise,” Roberts hand-waved.

(A dissenting Kagan quipped in reply to this section of Roberts’ opinion: “Score one for self-confidence; maybe not so high for self-reflection or -knowledge.”)

In fulfilling his right-wing mission, Roberts also pretended that letting judges, rather than agencies, fill in statutory specifics won’t result in a whipsawing based on the judges’ partisan leanings — since, per Roberts, judges don’t act on them. That’ll come as a surprise to the Biden administration, which has seen everything from power plant regulations to student debt relief summarily shot down by the conservative supermajority.

“Courts interpret statutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences,” he intoned.

Gorsuch, son of an anti-agency EPA Administrator, cheered the elimination of “systemic bias in the government’s favor.” Thomas wrote that not only was Chevron deference wrong, it was an unconstitutional infringement on the separation of powers (the accumulation of executive branch power in the judiciary, on the other hand, does not seem to trouble him).

In her dissent, Kagan underscored the political mechanics underlying the majority opinion in usually bald terms for a justice on a Court so prizing comity and respect. She traced the conservatives’ recent rulings, in which they give themselves enough excuses to toss Chevron since it’s become outmoded anyway. In each, the majority grasped for novel reasons to ignore the precedent.

In a one-two punch, Kagan also pointed out that this kind of behavior, reverse engineering a string of cases to get a hall pass to overturn long established precedent, has become habitual.

“This Court has ‘avoided deferring under Chevron since 2016’ because it has been preparing to overrule Chevron since around that time,” she wrote. “That kind of self-help on the way to reversing precedent has become almost routine at this Court.”

Roberts tried to downplay the ramifications of the ruling by asserting that old agency cases decided by Chevron deference are still good law and beholden to the precedent the Court so blithely tossed away on Friday.

But Kagan countered that it was an unvarnished power grab.

“In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law,” she wrote. “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”

For this conservative Court, appointing itself “czar” of the administrative state meshes with its partisan leanings seamlessly. Particularly in the modern era, Democratic administrations seek to use agency power far more muscularly, to enact regulations more aggressively. Republican ones, concerned with unwinding regulation, have less to lose from running into a judicial buzzsaw.

Kagan lists a series of Chevron questions to show how out of their depth judges will be in their new czarist role: From the Food and Drug Administration, “When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as such a ‘protein’?” From the Department of the Interior, “How much noise is consistent with ‘the natural quiet’? And how much of the park, for how many hours a day, must be that quiet for the ‘substantial restoration’ requirement to be met?”

“The majority disdains restraint,” she concluded, “and grasps for power.”