I’ve got an alarming quantity. The saving grace is I don’t think I’m strong, say any of the weird shit, post the memes or have delusions about my fighting proficiency. And I’m not bald.

I used to be rather fit and I wrestled in high school. I’m fairly confident I could break free of someone roughly less skilled than me and maybe a hair stronger and flee. I’ve never been in a fight, I’ve been punched while boxing but was too disoriented to get a good hit back (first and only time boxing), and I’ve punched a friend in the face as the culmination to a funny conversation about how he’s never been punched in the face.

Flannel is really comfy, and I want to be the sort of person who goes on more hikes than I have time to.
I have no self delusions in the physical realm.

They’re also just general 4chan Internet weirdo. I take it you’re thinking there’s a particular type of racism libertarians are more prone to? Probably “we don’t need racial discrimination protections, the market will punish it if people care”?

I mean, you’re entirely correct, but there’s also racial politics as in “race relations”. Like “why are we regressing on race based civil liberty protections and seeing an upswing in racial prejudice”.

Racial groups don’t have homogeneous political opinions, but they are often the subject of political opinions.

All that to say: there are many different ways to express a disgustingly inappropriate blend of racial and political opinions in a workplace, and we shouldn’t assume they picked any particular inappropriate way.

Except that with the website example it’s not that they’re ignoring the price or just walking out with the item. It’s that the item was not labeled with a price, nor were they informed of the price. Then, rather than just walking out, they requested the item and it was delivered to them with no attempt to collect payment.

The key part of a website is that the user cannot take something. The site has to give it to them.
A more apt retail analogy might be you go to a website. You see a scooter you like, so you click “I want it!”. The site then asks for your address and a few days later you get a scooter in the mail.
That’s not theft, it’s a free scooter. If the site accused you of theft because you didn’t navigate to an unlinked page they didn’t tell you about to find the prices, or try to figure out payment before requesting, you’d rightly be pretty miffed.

The shoplifting analogy doesn’t work because it’s not shoplifting if the vendor gives it to you knowingly and you never misrepresented the cost or tried to avoid paying. Additionally, taking someone’s property without their permission is explicitly illegal, and we have a subcategory that explicitly spells out how retail fraud works and is illegal.

Under our current system the way to prevent someone from having your thing without paying or meeting some other criteria first is to collect payment or check that criteria before giving it to them.

To allow people to have things on their website freely available to humans but to prevent grabbing and using it for training will require a new law of some sort.

It really does matter if it’s legally binding if you’re talking about content licensing. That’s the whole thing with a licensing agreement: it’s a legal agreement.

The store analogy isn’t quite right. Leaving a store with something you haven’t purchased with the consent of the store is explicitly illegal.
With a website, it’s more like if the “shoplifter” walked in, didn’t request a price sheet, picked up what they wanted and went to the cashier who explicitly gave it to them without payment.

The crux of the issue is that the website is still providing the information even if the requester never agreed or was even presented with the terms.
If your site wants to make access to something conditional then it needs to actually enforce that restriction.

It’s why the current AI training situation is unlikely to be resolved without laws to address it explicitly.

The thing is a robots.txt file doesn’t work as licensing. There’s no legal requirement to fetch the file, and no mechanism to consent or track consent.

This is putting up a sign that says everyone must pay, and then giving it to anyone who asks for free.

Well, the follow up answer is pretty straightforward.
Selling power by the megajoule is silly. You want a unit that puts time in the name and the unit of power that’s on appliances. If I run a 35 watt fan for an hour I know I’ve used 35 watt hours of energy. Or I can say I’ve used 126 kilojoules.

It’s not highschool. You don’t lose points for not reducing your answer all the way. The goal is to describe reality clearly, not to use the most concise units of measurement.

If I’m running a powerplant I need to know how many joules I get from my fuel and what my customers need and what my generators can deliver. The customer needs to know the efficiency of their appliances, and how how much that costs them. These are the same thing, but life isn’t made simpler by having them be the same unit.

Take heart. You can easily remember that a stride is 5’ 3 9/25” because that’s the height of the typical Roman soldier after adjustment for 15th century English agricultural tax methodology.

Nah, highly composite number. A product of multiple primes. 10 is 2 and 5. A power of 2 is just multiple 2s. 12 gets you 2, 2, and 3. 60 adds a 5.

In traditional carpentry inches and feet make sense because of the high divisibility. We don’t get as much benefit from that now though.

We still use hex with computers because that’s what they’re made using (rather binary, but hex is just a natural group of binary digits). The usage of binary is ultimately more grounded in the objective than the usage of base 10 in the SI system. Nature dictates the relationships between the units, but we pick the quantities so it works out to a nice base 10 set of ratios.
Base 2 naturally arises when dealing with information theory that underpins a lot of digital computing.

Say what you will about the imperial system, but you can pry binary, octal, and hex from my cold dead hands.

Do you want to develop imperial measurements? Because that’s how you invent imperial measurements. Next thing you know you’ve got a cup that’s really good for measuring liquids and a couple spoons you like to scoop with…

2.2 pounds per kilogram. For a rough conversion just multiply or divide by two. For a more precise conversation do the same thing, then wiggle a decimal and do it again.

That gets you base 11, which is what we count on our fingers in now.

They counted, at least for tallying, by putting their thumb on the three finger bones if the other four fingers on the hand. One hand can count to 12, and then you lift a finger in the other when starting over. That method gives you a count of 60’on your fingers. That’s why 12 and 60 still crop up all the time.

It’s not nonsense, just old and focused on priorities that don’t matter anymore. A mile was initially a thousand paces. So you send a group of people out, one counts each time their right foot takes a step and after a thousand times they build a mile marker. Bam, roman road system. 1000 strides per mile, 5 feet per stride.

Later the English used the unit as part of their system of measurement, and built the furlong around it, which is the distance a man with an ox team and plow can plow before the ox need to rest. A mile is eight furlong. This got tied into surveying units, since plots of land were broken up into acres, or the amount of land an ox team can plow a day.
When some unit reconciliation needed to be done, they couldn’t change the vitality of oxen, and changing the survey unit would cause tax havock, so they changed the size of a foot.

All the units and their relationships were defined deliberately and intentionally. They just factored in priorities that we don’t care about anymore.

I just remember that a mile has 1000 strides in it.

Because your power is billed in kWh. Figuring out the kWh cost of a 77 watt TV is straight forward, but a lot of consumer labeling standards are about quick and easy side by side comparisons as opposed to perfect application of units. Easiest way to give a comparison that’s accurate enough and doesn’t involve odd numbers is to convert that way.

The laws are usually amongst the oldest ones in a state and only revised pretty infrequently if someone has a particular issue. The dead person constituency is pretty weak, so the matter doesn’t get a lot of attention. Basically once they wrote down that embalming chemicals can’t be explosive (to prevent the coffin torpedo and general miguided insanity) there hasn’t been much need to update them.

In a lot of ways the funeral industry is better than others, regulation wise. You don’t need to do business with anyone. You’re dead. It’s illegal to act as a funeral director without a license, and the regulations are entirely imposed in the director. If you’ve got a body to get rid of, you don’t have to pay a funeral director. The government will take care of it pretty quickly if no one else will.
We’ve got similar restrictions on barbers. Except for the government giving you a haircut if no one else will. They don’t particularly care if you’re hairy.

I do agree though, a lot more basic functions of society should be fundamentally provided by the public. “Doctors” would have been a better, but less funny, example above.

Most states have laws indicating you must involve a funeral director to ensure the.body is disposed of properly, and then define the licensure requirements for a funeral director to include the types of disposal they can oversee.
It means they don’t need to define every type of burial you’re not allowed to do, and there should be a qualified professional to ensure whatever you’re doing is okay before you do it.

The libertarian impulse to say that if it doesn’t hurt anyone it should be legal butts into the reality that every time we have that policy for body disposal things tend to go funny in unexpected ways.

Certain types of burial allow the body to potentially contaminate nearby soil. Others can leave behind a void that can either collapse and disrupt nearby graves, or in some cases lift the body back to the surface in heavy rain. (Extremely uncommon now because essentially nowhere allows you to use those methods)

Funeral pyres or other forms of open air cremation are generally not legal due to concerns of fire spreading.
Whole body water burial is probably not legal in a body of fresh water in the US due mostly to the complexity of figuring out which law applies to that circumstance in any of the bodies of water that could be used that wouldn’t be grossly undersized and unsanitary. (Basically that means the Great lakes, which are the only ones with the depth and size sufficient, but are shared between multiple states and also Canada. Usually the rule is that if it’s not forbidden it’s permitted, but body disposal is more complicated)

Oh, don’t get me wrong. It’s odd for a clock to act this way, just not inexplicable. At best it’s an example of UI standards being applied without regard to sense, which is very much in line with Microsoft.

Most other clocks will do something similar, they just do it in the background. Something that’s a lot easier to do if you’re not following a UI framework that says you’re never allowed to change something in a way that might cause the user to see a weird shift. Other things just acknowledge that clock sync should only take a few milliseconds before the clock is even visible, that a timezone DB update will rarely cause a change of more than an hour, and that a user will probably not even notice if there’s a shift.