Honestly, even for twenty bucks, you can probably get a cheap rechargeable vape kit.

It’ll just be another avenue through which Huffman can put his thumb on the scales and tune the content to his own liking.

Today is a good day to Fry.

“Right to work” refers to the “right” that workers have to be employed without joining a union.

The states that have laws against union membership as a condition of employment are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Edit: I am frankly surprised to not see Ohio on that list.

In these states, if a union has presence in a workplace, you are not required to be a member of that union to be employed there. This can mean that your compensation, benefits, work hours, overtime availability, rest hours, safety considerations, etc., are different from (read: worse than) the union member next to you doing the exact same work.

Obviously, the employer isn’t going to make those things too much worse, else they would drive more of their workers into the union, which means that even non-union workers in a workplace where a union operates benefit from that union, and they receive that benefit for free.

Thank you, unions.

I’d also like to see some more details about:

In the U.S. “at-will” employment is permitted by law in most states.

In which states is at-will employment not “permitted”?

My understanding of at-will employment is that both employer and employee - in the absence of an employment contract - have the right to terminate the employment agreement at any time, for any reason, or none at all (with the exceptions being employers cannot terminate someone for illegal reasons, many of which are spelled out in the Civil Rights Act of 1964).

If the employer decides to terminate for any legal reason which is not “for cause” (where the employee committed a terminable infraction), the employee is entitled to receive unemployment insurance benefits, a good portion of which comes out of the employer’s pocket.

Let me guess, they’ve “summoned” the ambassador to an important meeting in a 9th floor hotel room with an ample balcony and no awnings.

I used “microblogging” earlier as a stand-in for “Twitter-like,” and I shamelessly pulled that terminology from the kbin interface. It’s accurate, but I don’t know that the term is sufficient to gain popular traction - and I certainly do not pretend to be the person to dictate what the terminology ought to be.

Now that I think about it, the core of social media of all types is “someone posts a thing” (whether that thing is a link to something else or original text content), and other people comment on it. YouTube, Xitter, Reddit, slashdot, fark, etc etc. The display format, post and comment organization, tagging options - those are all ancillary.

Federation via ActivityPub introduces a wholly new aspect to social media by separating the client application from the content accessed therethrough. I, from kbin.social, can see and interact with content posted by someone originating from mastodon.social. Content is one thing, and client application another.

People do have familiarity with that kind of separation in at least one other internet functionality: email. People generally already understand that their web interface to their email provider allows them to send and receive email both within and without that provider, and that their mobile app is just a different way to access that same content. But SMTP email is old. Since then, the aim of content providers on the internet has been to capture and contain users, using existing protocols, which causes people to consider the provider and the content to be the same thing - because in so many cases, it is.

ActivityPub is a new(ish) protocol. Functionally, it is much more like email than it is like an internet forum of any kind. Extending this comparison, SMTP email is one-to-one (yes, there can be multiple recipients, but they are all themselves “ones”); ActivityPub is one-to-many. Yes, this is similar to traditional walled-garden forums, which are also one-to-many, but those walled-gardens restrict the “many” to “those who have accounts inside our garden.” Perhaps ActivityPub is more accurately described as one-to-very many or one-to-all.

It probably seems that I am avoiding your clear and plain question. Maybe I am, but I also think it’s important to consider the details of these as-yet-unnamed things in order to arrive at an appropriate and effective way to market them. Federated social media is a public forum in a way that previous internet forums have not been since Usenet. “Forumnet” seems like it could be workable. It’s definitely more descriptive than “fediverse” (a name I have never been very pleased by).

While it gets closer, that continues to avoid your specific question. I will need to put a good deal more thought to this, and must now direct my attention elsewhere. Watch this space.

… without mentioning Twitter.

That seems like a pretty arbitrary restriction. At this point, a basic knowledge of “what Twitter is like” is a pretty general-knowledge thing.

HERE COMES AN S

I am large, I contain multitudes.

Why?

Three more than you.

Pay no attention to the people who don’t have kids. You’re doing just fine. The fact that you’re asking honestly makes you a better parent than many.

Kids, as you well know, are gonna figure out unimaginable ways to get themselves in trouble. I’ve had to tell more than one of my kids, “I’m gonna let you make all the mistakes you want, and I’m gonna be there to pick you up, but I am not going to let you make permanent mistakes.” When it comes to advertising, microtransactions, OnlyFans (yes, OnlyFans), the lesson is “these things exist for one purpose, and that is to separate you from your money as much as possible.” If you are paying for something, stop and consider whether you can get a substantially similar thing for free, or at least for a lot cheaper.

From reading your other comments, it sounds like you and the other parents all agreed together to drop the hammer on all the kids at once. That is a good idea, and it’s great that you have lines of communication open to your kid’s friends’ parents. That’s going to be important when they’re older and driving cars, and having access to intoxicants and mall ninja shit.

To your actual question - I saw someone mention Minecraft, that is a fantastic choice. There are “skins” and shit that can be bought, but the game itself it absolutely fully playable and enjoyable without anything beyond the initial game purchase. Running a private server is pretty easy, and I would recommend it, so that the friend group always has a place they can go where the annoyances of the internet-at-large are excluded. Besides that, a kid who is motivated to modify his own Minecraft server is going to be driven to figure out how to do it, and that kind of skill will be super useful for oh so many things throughout life.

If they like arena combat games, Crossout is pretty fun. World of Tanks is okay, but the grind curve is steep. War Thunder is fun for planes and ships, but I am not a fan of their tank play mechanics. All of those are free to play, yes you can buy stuff, but you absolutely do not have to.

There’s a single player game that I have to mention: The Long Dark. Winter survival, and there’s also a storyline mode. The storyline is really good, and the map is absolutely vast. While it’s not one they would be able to play together, it’s a great exploration and survival game, and I would be remiss if I didn’t point it out.

Says the person with no kids.

So good to know that anyone who wants to can buy our PII and leave it vulnerable to mischief.

The color codes and symbols aren’t at all propagandist.

The article refers to ActivityPub-based “microblogging” by assuming that Mastodon is the only client application available for that purpose. It is not. Mastodon is certainly the most popular client application for that purpose, but it doesn’t have to be. Other client applications exist, and a better or more popular client application could be created.

When the point of the article is to get people to comprehend that federated social media is not a “walled garden” –

People are using open, free Mastodon, but in their minds, they are still in a walled garden.

maintaining the notion that a single client application is the only way to read or create a certain kind of content is a big part of the very problem the article describes.

And the author seems to be aware of this:

Often, I hear about people trying to explain the idea behind Mastodon to someone, who is not on the Fediverse, they often explain it with e-mail. However, nowadays, people don’t even experience this “choice of service” even with e-mail anymore. They get their e-mail when signing up with google and that’s it.

GMail is not the only way to send and receive SMTP email. It’s certainly a very popular way to do so, but you wouldn’t describe a concern over people being blind to their choices of email providers (or, indeed, their ability to host their own email server) as

The current [GMail]-signup is only removing the confusion of users on first glance, because it either hides the server-choice altogether, or leaves them with a choice that is impossible to make at this point of their [GMail]-journey.

If the author, or anyone else, wants people to have a better understanding of the nature of federated social media, describing it wrong is not a path to that goal.

I said no such thing.

Here’s another way: stop referring to everything “Twitter-like” as Mastodon. Stop referring to everything “Reddit-like” as Lemmy. Those are both client platforms through which one can access ActivityPub content.

Conflating the platform with the provider with the protocol with the content is what’s confusing people.

What about the individual??

Flat effect no ambition misery? Or creative powerhouse and visionary?

Personal experience: I spent my entire youth and a large portion of my adulthood being amazingly preoccupied with sex, and with a fair amount of aggression towards everyone and everything.

Between testiulcar cancer, many consistent years of antidepressants, and just being old, I am finally feeling relief from those. I don’t claim to be a “creative powerhouse and visionary” by any stretch, but I am far from having a flat affect, I’m no more or less ambitious than I was before, and I am decidedly less miserable.

In hindsight, I can see that libido and aggression have always been an obstacle to my reaching my potential. Having built some bad habits over decades, they still are. None of us get to accomplish everything we want, so I’m trying not to fret about it too much.

Overall, as an individual whose life experience has changed from one extreme to the other - whether hormones have anything to do with it or not - I much prefer the current stage in my life to the former.