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Speak louder, but don't yell: Volume helps anger is counter productive. Use your diaphragm to move more air and open your mouth wider. Move your jaw more.

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Enunciate: Slow your speech down enough to make each and every sound. Really emphasize CONSONANTS especially at the end of syllables. Don't worry as much about the vowels I can usually hear those. Spit out these Ts Fs ks Ps and Ss in particular. (Listen to NPR. they have the right speed and an appropriate level of diction)

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First and foremost: When you speak point your eyes, your nose, and your shoulders straight at me. Stop doing *any* other activity when talking. Looking at a screen and typing are particularly bad things to do. Also don't keep talking after you have walked away. If you forgot to say something just come back.

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I read lips. I knew I was doing it some, but made it clear to me that I was doing it a lot more than I thought. If I cannot see your mouth I will miss 20-40% of what you say. Help me keep that number as low as possible.

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It has become clear to me that there are some people who will . If you and work in a public facing job, please read this advice from people who are hard of hearing. We need your help: (, Please share)

@Kathmandu @seachanger I don't know if you remember, but it was not until the end of April that the CDC started talking about mask - cloth ones back then. The first few weeks of the pandemic the messaging was that masks would not be effective and everyone who could should stay home.

I'm sick of seeing so much misinformation about EVs recently. I own an EV and love it, and can tell you firsthand that a lot of the FUD is false.

So if you also hate misinformation, and if reading lengthy blog posts is still a thing people do in 2024, here you go.
#EV #electriccars

geekman.ca/single-post/2024/1/

Password fields — especially password creation fields — that don’t allow “paste” are crimes that should be punishable by spontaneous cold-water bucketing. Look out, devs. Be sure your sin will find you out (with a bucket!)

Now that I have lived through an actual plague, I totally understand why Italian Renaissance paintings are just naked fat people lying on couches.

@leobm How comfortable do you feel with the general idea that type level programming limits the implementation level programming to only those programs that are valid?

One hurdle for me was watching all the type level razzle-dazzle and not understanding what the motivation behind it was. What was helpful to my understanding was starting with the question, "How is this preventing invalid code from type-checking?"

There's a lot to unpack here...

Civil trials are not criminal trials, they require only preponderance of the evidence rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt so the question asked to the jury is fundamentally different than something you could lock someone up for.

For defamation, this is a tort, not a crime. The purpose of the lawsuit isn't to fine anyone (a fine would be paid to the government rather than the victim), it is to recover damage done by one party to another, and for the most part the thing courts can grant is money. The elements of defamation are 1. That a statement of fact is said by the person, 2. That statement is false, 3. If the individual is a public figure then the statement is known to be false or is made with a reckless disregard for the truth, 4. That the false statement of fact caused damages.

Typically, the purpose of suing someone is to make yourself whole, not to get the state to punish someone for you. Therefore, for a relative nobody who is claiming to have been lied about, there's going to be a limitation on the amount of damages that can be claimed, since 5 million dollars is already more money than most people will make in their lifetimes.

There is some additional money you can ask for based on stuff like "pain and suffering", but again that's not punishment for the person you're suing, it's just that you want to be made whole and the court can't undo your pain and suffering so you pay money in recompense.

There is also a thing known as punitive damages, which is more money given to the plaintiff who is suing to ensure the defendant doesn't commit the tort again. However, even this element starts to run up against constitutional constraints because excessive punitive damage awards can go beyond what's allowable under the law.

Don't take the Alex Jones defamation case as representative of how the process works, most people aren't on trial for accusing a bunch of dead kids of lying about being dead on national television and so it ended up with an exceptional outcome.

Regardless of the size of anyone's judgement against them in a civil case, it would be a massive injustice to jail anyone over it. That's not what the civil courts are for, that's not their job, that's not how they're set up, and if you jumped from a 51% preponderance of the evidence jury verdict to jailtime that would send a lot of innocent people to jail (and even the rich deserve to be free if you can't prove they did something beyond a reasonable doubt)

As an example of the differences between criminal trials and civil trials, O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of the criminal act of murder, but was found to be liable to pay damages to the family in the wrongful death. There was enough found to pay a sum of money, but not enough to deprive O.J. of his rights by jailing him.

Another good example of the difference between criminal and civil proceedings is that the person sued may never even have to pay for the judgement in a civil case -- Insurance may not pay a criminal fine, but it can pay a civil judgement, so it's entirely possible that despite losing the lawsuit, a person who was successfully sued may never personally pay a penny. In fact, a regular homeowner may have a million dollar judgement against them but be protected by the liability insurance portion of their home owners insurance. This really doubles down on the fact that the purpose of a civil case is to make the plaintiff whole, rather than to specifically punish the defendant.

Your heart is in the right place with wanting to make sure punishments for millionaires and billionaires are calibrated such that they are actually painful in ways comparable to a poor person convicted of the same crime, but the facts in this matter are not aligned with that particular cause.

Anyway, I'm sorry... I'm always with the walls of text....

@cyberman @itnewsbot Yep, large vehicles are just hitting the market this year and there is a large demand for with more cargo capacity.

As an aside, that van repairs SuperChargers not cars, and its existence is one of the big reasons that Tesla has a market dominating position over other fast charging networks. Tesla actually repairs their charging infrastructure.

@qurlyjoe Trump is in essence the Republican incumbent. It would be most useful to compare to Reagan in '84, Bush in '92, Bush in 2004, and Trump in the last primary.

@abesamma it's the "environmentally friendly" part. Substances which kill plants are, almost by definition, not environmentally friendly. The alternatives like DDT and ethyl bromide are all far more hazardous to animals and humans.

@Hey_Beth @w7voa both parties agree on exactly one thing, There must be no alternative to the two party system no matter how bad the outcome.

@waterbear

That might help, but I don't think it is a full solution.

My observation is that the most important property of good networking events is the casual mingle. The ability to join, expand, break off and most importantly leave interactions without offense. This low social barrier is, in my observation, critical in having the right set of people find each other.

There is also the casual introduction that a formal small group setting doesn't allow. "I don't really know very much about [topic], but I was at at talk with [person on the other side of room] who seemed really into it. Let me introduce you."

I think it would be an interesting exercise to video a social mixer at one of these professional conferences and determine just how random causal encounters actually are. I suspect that they are actually quite structured on a macro level.
@Ulrich_the_Elder@mastodon.social @ktemkin

@Ulrich_the_Elder@mastodon.social @ktemkin I don't feel like anyone has really cracked the networking aspect of remote interactions. Online presentations are functional as good or better than in person, but casual meetups that are a significant function of in person gathering just don't happen the same way.

Perhaps a person wanting to address the resistance to remote gatherings should study how casual interactions happen before and after presentations and suggest how a remote gathering might supply a functional equivalent.

@John interesting. I would consider voting for her over Biden if the GOP primary voters can pull it off.

@JessTheUnstill @carnage4life I think you are both correct. I wonder however if there is a better way to do layoffs? My dad's union contract specified strict last-in-first-out rules which kept talented people out of the field because time was the only way to advance. My current gig is extremely cyclical and there are attempts to keep "good employees" through downturns, but as you say that is hard to measure and fought with bias.

What would you suggest to a plant that will need to go from <100 to >500 and back a few times each decade?

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