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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • gila@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you dislike HR in workplaces?
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    1 month ago

    In the startup I worked for, the HR lead was the CEO’s significant other. They had made fundamental contributions to the operations of the company since its inception and relatively humble beginnings. Once it had grown beyond a certain size, there wasn’t really any particular executive position within a logical company structure for them to fill. The individual departments were run by people more qualified in those areas. I think it made sense for the company to continuously recognize their contributions (and obviously the boss isn’t going to fire their partner), but HR ended up being mostly just a cushy job for them to fall into.

    It was one of those companies that likes to say its “like a family”, but really there’s an in-crowd (i.e. the founding staff) and everyone else. I was part of the former, so I could be honest and open with them with regard to HR issues and be supported, and that was nice. But on the other hand, I witnessed HR actions related to incidents involving other staff that caused me cognitive dissonance, because it would’ve been handled differently if I were the staff member involved. More than anything else, because I had found myself in the right place at the right time. Because I was a part of the landed gentry, as it were. That’s fucking bullshit, and the experience made me realize that they weren’t actually different from other companies like I had thought.





  • The groups forming the roots of digital media piracy established ‘the scene’, which holds itself to rules and has particular distribution methods. For example Usenet was popular for many years. https://scenerules.org/

    By P2P I’m meaning these are ‘non-scene’ releases, just something a random person on the internet cooked up and released somewhere, in these cases by feeding some prior standard definition release through an upscaler and creating a torrent from the output, which involves certain considerations.

    We can’t exactly determine the pedigree of these files, but we can say they are lossy transcodes, that is they first existed in a compressed format and later were re-encoded by the upscaler to another compressed format.

    While the upscaled may look sharper to your eyes, data from the files as they were before that process was inevitably lost due to this transcoding. If we define “quality” as the amount of information from the original presentation that was retained in the output, then the standard definition versions are definitely higher in quality than the upscaled ones.

    I’m not meaning to use the term in any perjorative sense, but it’s useful information to have. If an official HD presentation is ever made from the original film, it would certainly get a ‘scene release’ that would look better than these ones.












  • gila@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlvaping
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    5 months ago

    They aren’t concerned with deaths, this legislation positions the most harmful and most physically addictive nicotine option as relatively more accessible.

    They aren’t concerned with nicotine addiction, else NRT gum wouldn’t be allowed to stock within reach of children in retail outlets.

    They’re just NIMBY’s, there’s nothing else to it.


  • gila@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlvaping
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    5 months ago

    In Australia our tobacco strategy was to effectively ban vapes and price cigarettes out of existence.

    The impact to date has created two totally new black markets: one for vapes after people realised anyone could just hop on AliExpress to buy them in bulk and resell for a 2000% markup. They are banned for import, but nicotine is a colourless odourless liquid and there are no rapid tests for it, no capacity to do expensive GCMS testing on all the random freight entering the country from China (our biggest trading partner by far).

    The other new black market is for “chop chop”, the colloquial name for unprocessed tobacco illegally grown and sold by gangs for cheaper than regular cigarettes / RYO tobacco.

    There’s also been a big increase in violent robberies at tobacco outlets and even gang turf wars over sales of illegally imported or stolen cigarettes. The excise tax is so high that the gangs can extract enormous sales margin and still undercut the market.

    Predictably (and contrary to the rest of the western world) tobacco use has gone up nationally over the past couple of years following a significant downtrend lasting several decades. I’m confident that this strategy, which has been bipartisan amongst our 2 major political parties, will be used as a future case study in why prohibition is fucking moronic. It has continuously demonstrated to be a net detriment to public health, in this case related to a totally preventable yet leading cause of premature death and public health spend.

    There is literally no logic to it beyond Lovejoy’s Law, except for some false manufactured statistics parroted by our leaders which blatantly ignore scientific consensus.