til that "aught" is the past tense of "each"

"near" is the middle voice of "nigh"

They're probably misinformed about whether they are median or not, so you're fine.

Americans, before you have another civil war, I recommend to try having a State Convention to try reforming your constitution. but it looks like you have already listened to me, before I wrote this tumblr post. looks like 38 of the required 34 states are considering or already passed it.

I am not sold on the "fiscal restraint" part of “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, impose fiscal restraints, and place term limits on federal officials" since those cause problems in other countries (see the current debt break in Germany), but current American government is broken enough that a conventions is worth to try. (and proposals still need 2/3rds approval from the states after the decide on it)

It seems it's an open question whether a constitutional convention can be limited to certain subjects, or whether a convention can adopt proposals on any subject it pleases. So who knows, maybe we'll have a convention called for the purpose of "fiscal responsibility" but we'll end up with an amendment that changes the US government to a Westminster system.

looking forward to American 2.0: It Can't Get Much Worse!

Or monarchy. I guess they're more likely to do monarchy, now that I think about it.

Americans, before you have another civil war, I recommend to try having a State Convention to try reforming your constitution. but it looks like you have already listened to me, before I wrote this tumblr post. looks like 38 of the required 34 states are considering or already passed it.

I am not sold on the "fiscal restraint" part of “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, impose fiscal restraints, and place term limits on federal officials" since those cause problems in other countries (see the current debt break in Germany), but current American government is broken enough that a conventions is worth to try. (and proposals still need 2/3rds approval from the states after the decide on it)

It seems it's an open question whether a constitutional convention can be limited to certain subjects, or whether a convention can adopt proposals on any subject it pleases. So who knows, maybe we'll have a convention called for the purpose of "fiscal responsibility" but we'll end up with an amendment that changes the US government to a Westminster system.

Sadistic cartel hitman hiding in the shadows waiting to strangle me with piano wire but I'm on the phone with my girlfriend failing to talk her into an open relationship and he just has to sit there waiting until I'm done to avoid creating a witness

or you're already in an open relationship so it's a group chat and he has to wait to avoid creating twelve witnesses (you're trying to talk them into watching a movie they all know is bad)

(it's bad because of the cringey scene with the hitman)

Since when are aliens supernatural?

not gonna reblog that post but like. if your problem with copyright law is 'corporations can pay artists to own their art and then forbid them from using it' then you should perhaps spend five seconds considering why artists are taking that deal and whether that deal not being on the table would be a better or worse situation for them

i mean to be super cynical for a second i think many artists took that deal because they didnt know that they wouldnt be allowed to use their own work later, most stories ive heard of artist caught in that show that the artists didnt expect that and that they wouldnt have signed if they had known. but to be fair that is only of the examples ive heard, i dont know if there is a way to know if that is the majority of cases

right but you see the obvious selection effect, don't you? people who understand what it means to sell your intellectual property/how work-for-hire works are less likely to go around complaining about disney stealing their work, because they knew what they were getting into. 'the average person complaining about disney stealing their work didn't understand the contract', even if true, is a very different statement from 'the average person who chose to give disney control of their work in exchange for money didn't understand the contract'. and you need to consider the entire universe of people who choose to take that sort of deal.

sure but by your very premise neither you nor i know how many people are out there who are perfectly happy to give up their work and i dont know if we can confidently assume that they are probably more than those who regret it

it seems intuitive to me you can estimate it by looking at all the people doing it without complaint, and doing it repeatedly for different creative works, etc. which is, like, the supermajority of people who do take that deal. if you don't want disney to own any of your future creative work then stop working for disney now and don't sell them anything later, etc.

also, like, do you also take this approach to every economic transaction, assume people did them by mistake?

Almost certainly better for artists is the answer to the question in the first post.

Like, that's glib, but what in practice work for hire often gets popular because of a combination of artist and the actual copyrightable art.

If you create a Batman character that sells tens of millions in merchandise every year, you can't go, "I need to renegotiate my contract otherwise I'll start writing Harley Quinn for Disney"

Particularly in the low or pop art sphere people get attached to specific franchises, which means the owners of the franchise can say, "We are letting you write for Batman/Star Wars/Harry Potter and the moment you assert yourself we'll get someone else to write for it and it will still make a kajillion dollars."

If copyright doesn't exist, DC never hires you to write Batman and you never create a character you could then theoretically write for a competitor for more money. Primarily because DC is not a large profitable comic book publisher, because those don't exist without copyright.

Those aren't the only two options. Current copyright law is compatible with a model where creators retain ownership of their creations. Rowling did not have to give up ownership of Harry Potter in order to get Bloomsbury to publish her books, for example.

Obviously DC and Marvel operate differently than traditional book publishing, but that's by design, not necessity.

I am a little curious how it'd work out if you made it impossible for the original creator to transfer their copyright to someone else and the only option is licensing, but my guess is it just makes the problems with multi-person efforts prohibitive?

like, if the writer owns the rights to the writing and the artist owns the rights to the pictures they can license them to the publisher, sure, and presumably they signed contracts ahead of time saying they do. and the comic book is a separate work, but who owns that? Not a corporation, corporations can only own intellectual property to the extent the creators, which must be human beings, transfer those rights, and we've established that's not a thing the law would support. Maybe the editor who puts everything together ends up the owner? In any case it's ultimately some specific human being, which means if you infringe on the copyright on the comic book it has to be that specific human being who sues you for it, and sure if they're still working for the company they'd be able to use their legal resources to do that. but if they quit, retire, get fired, die, whatever, then coordination to sue gets much dicier or impossible.

plus of course a competitor who wanted to get a license need only negotiate with the specific human being that owns the rights, not with the corporation.

it'd be an interesting legal regime, but i'm pretty sure it'd make it much harder to profit from creative works that are collaborative efforts between multiple people, and therefore also limit the availability of jobs hiring for that. much like abolishing copyright entirely would.

idk, maybe you can tinker with it to fix those problems, but my expectation is that the possible outcomes are a) you end up with wherever we are now with all the same problems, except with a much more complicated set of legal theories why or b) you end up with corporation's rights so weakened, and creative works so much harder to profit off, that they produce much less creative work and thus hire much fewer people for it, which is not really a win for creative workers. maybe you can thread that needle though.

You can see an example of creator-owned publishing at work in Image Comics. It was founded in 1992 by comic artists who were driving huge sales at Marvel but felt they weren't being treated fairly by the company. I don't know the details of how their system works and I'm sure it isn't perfect, but they're still around 33 years later, so it's clear they are dealing with the complexities you mentioned well enough.

Today (and every day) is an excellent day to show Ukraine that Donald Trump isn't America:

If you could chose any movie to have a Muppets adaptation of, what would it be?

The count of monte cristo.

Galaxy Quest.

[Link]

You cannot alter, modify, or discharge the batteries in any way. They come straight out of a pack of new batteries and into your mouth.

I like these polls where the OP has made too many options, and we haven't yet found the one psycho who goes "I would eat 28 batteries; not one more, not one less"

The first one should pay for the surgery to get batteries removed from your stomach. After that it's all gravy.

wikiquote clearly the worst of the wikimedia projects. if someone said they edit wikipedia i'd be like tough work but it needs to be done. secretly id be thinking they could be one of the bad ones but i wouldn't say it. if someone said they edit wiktionary i'd be like ayyyyy. if someone said they edit wikibooks id be like not sure why ur doing this on a wiki but im sure whatever you're writing is interesting. if someone said they edit wikimedia commons id be like have fun categorizing enjoy your categories. if someone said they upload for wikimedia commons that would be different i would probably not think of them so much as a wiki person and more of a general public domain enthusiast type which is outside the scope of this post. if someone said they edit wikispecies id have a warm feeling towards them that i would not express in words; if i already found this person attractive that attraction would increase significantly. if someone said they edit wikifunctions honestly ive never heard of wikifunctions its some programming shit im sure its fine. probably not the best free code repository but i dont know much about the subject. if someone said they edit mediawiki i would be standing there as if i had met god himself id be scared tbh what if i piss them off and they destroy one of my favorite templates. if someone said they edit wikivoyage i would politely change the subject but it wouldn't change the way i think of them as a person. if someone said they edit wikinews i would be confused why do you do that when you could just have a blog no one reads. if someone said they edit metawiki i would ask them for more information on the subject before forming an opinion because i still dont understand what metawiki is and i've looked at it for like two minutes while researching for this post what exactly is it that you do over there. but if someone said they edit wikiquote i would laugh at them. straight up laugh in their face

very sorry to wikidata editors i couldnt come up with a joke for you. i respect it i just dont have any jokes

That last bit is why I edit wikijoke.

Trump's foreign policy seems to be based heavily on a belief that foreign nations aren't grateful enough to America and those fuckers need to be put in their place and I have no idea why he seems to believe that so strongly.

Because he considers the US to be an extension of his own ego, and obviously everyone should be grateful towards him.

not gonna reblog that post but like. if your problem with copyright law is 'corporations can pay artists to own their art and then forbid them from using it' then you should perhaps spend five seconds considering why artists are taking that deal and whether that deal not being on the table would be a better or worse situation for them

i mean to be super cynical for a second i think many artists took that deal because they didnt know that they wouldnt be allowed to use their own work later, most stories ive heard of artist caught in that show that the artists didnt expect that and that they wouldnt have signed if they had known. but to be fair that is only of the examples ive heard, i dont know if there is a way to know if that is the majority of cases

right but you see the obvious selection effect, don't you? people who understand what it means to sell your intellectual property/how work-for-hire works are less likely to go around complaining about disney stealing their work, because they knew what they were getting into. 'the average person complaining about disney stealing their work didn't understand the contract', even if true, is a very different statement from 'the average person who chose to give disney control of their work in exchange for money didn't understand the contract'. and you need to consider the entire universe of people who choose to take that sort of deal.

sure but by your very premise neither you nor i know how many people are out there who are perfectly happy to give up their work and i dont know if we can confidently assume that they are probably more than those who regret it

it seems intuitive to me you can estimate it by looking at all the people doing it without complaint, and doing it repeatedly for different creative works, etc. which is, like, the supermajority of people who do take that deal. if you don't want disney to own any of your future creative work then stop working for disney now and don't sell them anything later, etc.

also, like, do you also take this approach to every economic transaction, assume people did them by mistake?

Almost certainly better for artists is the answer to the question in the first post.

Like, that's glib, but what in practice work for hire often gets popular because of a combination of artist and the actual copyrightable art.

If you create a Batman character that sells tens of millions in merchandise every year, you can't go, "I need to renegotiate my contract otherwise I'll start writing Harley Quinn for Disney"

Particularly in the low or pop art sphere people get attached to specific franchises, which means the owners of the franchise can say, "We are letting you write for Batman/Star Wars/Harry Potter and the moment you assert yourself we'll get someone else to write for it and it will still make a kajillion dollars."

If copyright doesn't exist, DC never hires you to write Batman and you never create a character you could then theoretically write for a competitor for more money. Primarily because DC is not a large profitable comic book publisher, because those don't exist without copyright.

Those aren't the only two options. Current copyright law is compatible with a model where creators retain ownership of their creations. Rowling did not have to give up ownership of Harry Potter in order to get Bloomsbury to publish her books, for example.

Obviously DC and Marvel operate differently than traditional book publishing, but that's by design, not necessity.

Always assume the delivery trucks are doing some sort of stacking-block puzzle with packages, that's why one day they'll be "out for delivery" but nothing happens and the next day it'll deliver just fine. Some days your package makes up a crucial support block in the package tower.

It’s a little more complicated than that, but good enough for a first understanding.

Hi I work in shipping and receiving and the reason the status of your package is "out for delivery" but nothing happens is that it wasn't really on the truck. Your driver spent five or ten minutes at the curb ransacking the entire contents of the truck while cursing at the loaders, but your package wasn't there because it got scanned as loaded but didn't actually get loaded. Happens all the time.

A circle partakes in the essence of shape more deeply than just about anything else

I'm fairly certain that a square or triangle is much more of a shape than a circle is. A circle is only technically a shape; it is almost entirely a form

Circles are all about maximizing symmetry. Squares and triangles are about limiting symmetry in certain ways to highlight other relationships. These are all valid ways of doing shapehood.

currently seems like a bad time to start a career in the public service in America. This may make America's public service less effective in the future.

Some would say that's the point.

anonymously message me (3) things you want to know about me.