Zagorath

Ok, I did. It said:

came to this thread exactly to make fun of this “fully-rounded labour exploiter”

So you're asserting that he exploited labour. Presumably in a way that is beyond the labour exploitation inherent in capitalism. Further up the page, in a different thread, you also said:

If some of these 35 visa dependent worked for more than 9 years, I am pretty sure he was there when they were exploited to work there. There’s no indication that these workers have less than a 5 year tenure.

Ok, so it sounds to me like you're asserting that he exploited them. How, exactly? Are you claiming the act of being employed on a foreign worker visa is itself exploitation? Because genuinely, unless the answer to that question is "yes", I cannot understand what the basis of your claim is. And I think that's probably the problem @CileTheSane@lemmy.ca is having, too.

Usually, these are closed out by paying the cash value at the end

Am I understanding this correctly?

I sign a contract with you saying "one year from today, if I decide to sell potatoes to you, you must buy them for $100". I pay you $10 as consideration for the contract. Next year, if the price of potatoes is $110, I simply decide not to exercise my right. You don't get potatoes, but you keep your $10.

If the price of potatoes is $90, then I buy potatoes for $90, and you buy them for $100. I broke even. Or more realistically, you send me $10 cash, no actual potatoes change hands.

If the price is $95, then I only lose $5, after you send me $5 back.

If the price is $80, then I made $10 in profit, after you send me $20.

And obviously, you might on-sell that contract, in which case you're up or down the difference between $10 and whatever you sold it for, and I go to them to sell my potatoes/get my cash back, if the price of potatoes ends up below $100.

Is that right? If so, I have two follow-up questions:

1. What advantage do shorts have over puts? Both have a maximum profit (I can't make more than $100 on those potatoes if I put. I can't make more than the current market price for potatoes if I short.), but one has infinite potential loss, and the other has limited loss.
2. How does this actually answer @explodicle@sh.itjust.works's question? The put still requires you to guess when it'll crash, doesn't it? If I predict potatoes' price will crash within the next year and it doesn't, I lose $10, even if it crashes 370 days from now, don't I? This contrasts with regular investing/speculating the price will rise, where if I buy potatoes today for $100, predicting it'll go to the moon over the next year, but in 365 days, if the price is now $90, I still have the choice to either cut my losses to $10, or keep on, expecting it'll rise again soon.

The advantage of the fediverse is how well it should be able to scale, thanks to its federated nature. A big part of the problem with YouTube is that its large scale but centralised nature means that they just throw AI at the moderation problem, and it is infamously terrible. Censoring important conversations and sensitive subjects, while letting through actual child abuse. And because it's centralised, users (both viewers and creators) don't have an easy option to turn somewhere else without losing the whole network effect.

It's compounded by the fact that the majority of monetisation on there is driven by advertising. Direct funding via a Patreon-like model (optional payment to receive some minor bonuses, primarily for supporting the creator), a Nebula-style model (subscription to access content), or a BATish model (forget most of the actual details of BAT, especially the crypto, but imagine a system—which could be voluntary or mandatory depending on the individual system, creator, or piece of content—in which users stick a bunch of money into a wallet, and it is automatically shared with the creators whose content they are viewing in some fair manner). Not having actual advertisements, combined with better, more local moderation decisions, would help stave off the biggest problems with YouTube.

The "making money" bit doesn't need to be imported, necessarily. It's not an end unto itself. But if we want a large amount of high-quality content, while society is capitalistic, then it does. Because high-quality content takes a lot of time to produce, and not many people can afford to do it as a hobby. The scenario you're describing means that who have the skills to do it could do it while making money on YouTube or Patreon, or they could do it for free on the fediverse while not making money (or making money in a more conventional job, creating the stuff that we love them for only in their spare time—limiting the quantity they can produce).

Honestly the best YouTube alternative at the moment is Nebula. The problem is that it's a closed system. You can't just make an account and start uploading, you have to be invited. So the range of content is fairly limited compared to YouTube. But unlike many other platforms, it is designed to be fairly general-purpose. There are some excellent individual creators' platforms, like Dropout, Viva+, Club TWiT, etc. But you only get a single creator/team's videos on those. Dropout is improv comedy. Viva+ is sketch comedy. Club TWiT is tech news. Whereas Nebula is more of a coop owned by tens of different creators with content including news, media analysis (including film, games, and music), politics, science, short films, game shows, and more. It's not federated, but it's independent and worker owned-ish.

Fishhook theory > horseshoe theory

The best source to get the PDFs is IMSLP.

Merging PDFs is pretty easy. Plenty of tools that help with doing it, if that's what you want.

If casinos want to be able to use laws like this, they shouldn’t be allowed to kick out people who are too good at the games.

Absolutely horrid feature. Supposedly it's to protect vulnerable people's privacy if they post in certain communities, but if they truly wanted that to be how it's used, they'd have limited the ability to apply the feature only to subreddits where mods have specifically coordinated with the admins to get approved as places where vulnerable people are posting. Or, and here's a shocker, they could just rely on the tried-and-tested method of using alt accounts. Instead, bots and trolls just hide their entire post history from people.

Now, supposedly, mods can see the full, unhidden history of any user who has recently posted in their subreddits. Which is good. But the number of other good-faith users being obstructed by this change is huge. It's overall a massive failure from Reddit.