palordrolap

To me it seems about as likely an Iranian would spy for Israel as an Afghan would, i.e. not very likely at all. They’d be highly atypical compared to the majority of people in their home country, that’s for sure.

There’s a simple solution to dine-and-dashers and I was happy to deal with it as a customer when one of my favourite eating places implemented it: Have the customer pay up front before the food arrives.

Heck, they may have implemented that for my group specifically because we clearly had a few drinks in us and we might have looked like the sort of group who’d try it. The meaning was clear, but we weren’t bothered. We paid. We ate. We thanked. We left. In that order. Perfect.

Of course, it would turn a tipping system like the US one on its head because the service charge would have to be baked in to the price, but anyone unhappy with service could be given something back after the meal. That is, once the customer’s story of woe has been confirmed, and how much food they ate has been noted.

(If the manager still comps the meal and punishes the server, that’s a different problem entirely. Let’s face it, a terrible manager would have done that anyway.)

POTS isn’t quite dead in the UK, but it’s very much on the way out. The transition is slated to be complete by the end of January 2027.

Silliness aside, phantom pregnancies are a thing, but you generally don’t get a placenta without something else besides. If there didn’t seem to be anything, it was probably so non-viable that it dissolved or was reabsorbed, kicking off the rejection process.

Most don’t even get to that stage though. Super early miscarriages are said to happen incredibly often and the carrier doesn’t necessarily even know that they’d conceived in the first place. A big hint is a delayed, heavy period, but most people who get periods won’t bat an eye at things like that happening. That’ll happen for a number of - occasionally hard to explain - reasons even without being sexually active.

Then you find out the genie uses a signed data value and you now owe him a wish. You’re not granted magic. You’re compelled to grant the wish. The only restrictions on the genie’s wish is that it must be within your (soft, squishy) mortal power.

I can imagine you being reset to the point of the genie’s wish every time you die (naturally or otherwise) without succeeding. This could well turn into a Groundhog Day type situation.

New fear unlocked: What if babies are only born as babies because the people delivering them expect to be delivering a baby?

Someone with sufficiently strong will (or magic) or who has been completely convinced otherwise could change the outcome. Like this.

… wait. Maybe it only applies to placentas. Let’s hope it’s only placentas.

Next of kin don’t take up debts unless they’re co-signatories. The assets of the deceased generally go to the creditors first, yes, nullifying any inheritance the next of kin may have been in line for, but the inheritance doesn’t then run in reverse if those assets aren’t enough to cover the debt.

That won’t stop the creditor from trying any trick in the book to get the next of kin to pay, including lying about it, but I’d like to hear of a jurisdiction where the next of kin are legally liable.

Heh. That’s also my “reason to believe”, but I was trying to get an unruly comment under control and trimmed that part.

Namely, I once took an account right back to no watch history and no likes - either that was a feature at some point or I did it manually - and still got suspiciously familiar suggestions.

There are problems with this. Firstly, people might let their kids watch videos on their “adult” accounts. YouTube’s detection would have to be incredibly fine-grained and be able to flip-flop depending on what’s being watched.

The second one is a “damned either way” kind of deal: Consider the deletion of watch history; Should it forget you’re an adult if you do that? If yes, then you have to go through a different process or watch a load of videos that are not blocked but still sufficiently adult to get your account reidentified. If not, they’re storing metadata that you implicitly requested the deletion of.

I have reason to believe that they do keep such metadata and that they may have been taking steps to hide that fact. A permanent “user is an adult” flag would blow that wide open. As such, I reckon this will be the first, “forget” option. And users will have to suck it until the algorithm works out the user is an adult again (or else never delete their watch history; something that would suit YouTube’s advertising algorithm just fine).

And those who didn’t expect this joke to be interpreted as base 3.

I dunno, some people get confused beyond 11111.

Your company will be forced to make you redundant.

This is literally the opposite of counterpart to an observation made in an episode of The Simpsons where a Christian Rock artist breaks down and admits that their songs are just regular rock songs with “Jesus” substituted in for “baby”.

Edit: better words

This whole thing smacks of the “anyone who has a sexual proclivity I claim not to share must have all sexual proclivities I claim not to share” logic. i.e. the logic that got gay people flagged as child molesters back in the bad old days. And occasionally still today.

Such logic might actually be rooted in projection, which is a deeply disturbing thought. Deeply closeted people desperately clinging to heteronormativity and traditional gender roles because they think that if they don’t they they’ll do something abhorrent. Maybe even to someone who can’t consent. Or they already have and they desperately want to hide away from it.

Yes, for the love of all that’s holy and secular too, ban the games with apparent child sexual abuse. Children can’t consent. Leave everything else the hell alone.

I don’t even play video games with sexual themes, but I do play ones that contain 18+ violence. I assume those will be next on the chopping block.

Secondary shock from this: Popeye was a redhead?! How have I gone this long without knowing that?

Sure, later media has him keep his hat on or else he has only a few wispy hairs if any at all, but I feel like I should have seen this at some point in the past few decades.

I would have put IP address access restrictions on that at the very least. I may have even done something like that more than once for various tools in the past.

That way it acts completely open to people (or other servers) in the right places and denies all knowledge to anything else.

Which ventriloquist did this nightmare escape from?

Edit: I may have got a hold of the wrong end of the stick on this one. Leaving it for posterity.

eBay lets you search previous sales of items so in theory, if you search for things you already have, you could get some idea of their worth. Other sites may have similar features.

As for where to post them, it’s pretty common here in the UK to parcel things up and take them to the nearest Post Office. I’m sure I’ve heard people on YouTube talk about doing the same sort of thing in (parts of?) the US, so it might be a common thing wherever you are too.

Some delivery services will pick up from your premises but I’m not 100% sure of the process there. i.e. where the delivery labels come from, whether you’re supposed to print them yourself or whether the driver turns up with something to slap on a parcel, etc. I presume their websites outline the steps.

“We are the People’s Republic of China. But not those people, obviously.”

That immediately makes the Internet basically free for the rich and only partially accessible for the poor. Maybe you’re OK with that, but business models like that are partly what’s wrong with the world. In fact the Internet already has this problem. This would almost certainly move the boundary between who’s relatively rich and who’s relatively poor in the wrong direction.

Also, hosting providers would immediately crank up the prices so that they get as much of that sweet page-visit money as possible ensuring the site owner doesn’t.

The prices would find a level eventually, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as low as half a cent. We’d be lucky if it was a dollar.

There’s also the question of what constitutes “a page”. What if only part of the screen refreshes? What if you refresh an existing page because it didn’t load properly, or just because? Is that a new payment?

Data caps and charges would be the “better” way to handle all this, but let anyone tell you who’s on a plan that has those, that they’re awful and the money never goes where it needs to. Good luck getting legislation changed so that some of that money goes to the sites that the data ultimately comes from.