Kes

Without any crime to suspect you of, they might detain you and question you. It’s not uncommon for people to turn themselves in for crimes, and there are legitimate reasons to do so especially with a lawyer, namely to get out on bail easier, avoid having the police raid your home or place of work, and perhaps used to sway the prosecution for a more favorable sentencing, but if the police have no clue what to even charge you for and they can’t figure one out, they’ll just be confused and frustrated, which is a dangerous combination for police

I pirate ebooks, especially textbooks, when I can’t get something through my library. I don’t watch enough television to bother pirating shows and movies. With video games, the circumstances that would make pirating a game worth it rarely come up for me; pirating games means losing out on updates and bug fixes, multiplayer, Steam cloud saves, and more. For new games, not getting bug fixes and updates makes my experience worse, and older games usually go on sale for cheap enough that I might as well buy it

HFCS is a better alternative to sugar for the US. Not necessarily health wise (they both are about as equally terrible for you in the amounts Americans consume them), but in a logistical way. The other sources of sugar are sugarcane, which are only farmed in parts of 3 US states, and sugar beets, which are only farmed in 11 US states. Corn is farmed pretty much everywhere in the US, and we produce a lot more of it. This ensures that we have a much more stable supply of corn, which is important for a widespread staple ingredient in most US foods. This also means the US is not reliant on foreign imports for HFCS since it’s produced domestically, ensuring US food security if a major exporter of sugar has to halt exports. This also gives the US an excuse to farm even more corn, increasing the supply of corn and making our supply more stable in the process. Outside of HFCS, corn is used in everything from animal feed to gasoline and batteries, which means running low on corn one year due to an unstable supply would devastate the US; HFCS helps prevent that. Federal corn subsidies also help make HFCS a much cheaper option than conventional sugars, keeping food prices lower which helps people afford to eat. The main argument against HFCS is the serious health effects that it causes when eaten in high amounts, but regular sugar which would replace HFCS in most foods causes the same problems in the amounts they are consumed while being significantly more problematic logistically for the US

I had 2 American style futons through most of my 20s. One had just a normal cheap futon mattress, and the other was basically just a normal mattress that has the ability to fold up. As a daily sleeper, it’s way too much effort to fold it up and down everyday, and after a few weeks I just accepted that I was only going to use it as a normal bed and rarely folded it up except for special occasions. The first mattress left my back sore everyday, but the second was very comfortable to the point that I used it as my mattress for a while after switching to a normal bedframe. All in all, I got a better sleep on a normal bed. I still have my old futon in my office that I use as a couch and a spare bed for guests, but I wouldn’t go back to it as my main bed

Trump was exposed to large amounts of highly classified information as president for four years, and has shown a willingness to sell it to the highest bidder. He’d 100% throw the US under the bus to stay in Russia, and his supporters will deny he ever did such a thing just as they deny he publicly called for storming the Capital or as they deny the current charges against him

Disney is heavily unionized, they’re one of the better companies on that list to work for. From entertainment unions such as writers and actors guilds to their theme park workers being unionized, they can’t just walk over their workers like most US companies because they will fight back

Ironically, jobs that rely on tips are some of the most inflation resistant besides CEOs, since tips are usually a percentage of the price. It’s unreliable, but very well paying. Employers are also required by law to make up the difference in pay if the tipped worker does not make minimum wage with tips, though many times the employees won’t do this since its incredibly common for tipped workers to not declare tips for taxes

It’s bad management if they do that. That employee is going to file for unemployment and will probably get it, which companies have to pay a premium for. The company also has to hire and train a new employee to replace the one they sacked, costing the company even more. I know of times that sort of situation has happened, but in my experience working for various companies most managers aren’t that incompetent to take every Karen’s word at face value and immediately fire their staff over a random person’s word about petty BS, even if they humor said Karen on the phone pretending that they will to get them to shut up

We have quite a lot of employee protections (not as much as Europe but a lot more than people realize), it’s the enforcement that is the issue. While you can be fired without notice for any legal reason, if you are fired for an illegal reason or an illegal reason played a role in their decision to fire you, you can get quite a nice settlement from that. However, if you are fired without a good reason, the employer has to pay for your unemployment, so the majority of employers will only fire an employee if it falls under a reason that makes you ineligible for unemployment like poor performance or attendance (and labor attorneys can often sniff out when an employer is lying about it to screw you out of unemployment). Contrary to several other countries, employees can just quit without notice or even informing their employer, as at will employment goes both ways

It’s called Bell’s phenomenon, and it is real unfortunately

LM Studio is an incredibly easy to use tool for downloading and running self hosted language models

Every time you blink, your eyeballs roll up into the back of your eye socket and roll back to the original spot quickly

Browsing through the global feed scratches the same itch as browsing through r/all mindlessly does and I don’t miss much from Reddit, but I really miss r/noncredibledefense, and neither Lemmy spin off community is nearly as active

Awesome. We get to save money on storing and disposing of old, surplus equipment, and Taiwan gets weapons that will prove vital should war break out. In the event of a war between Taiwan and China, US intervention is not guaranteed, and it will be significantly more difficult to send arms to Taiwan compared to how we’ve been sending arms to Ukraine, so ensuring that Taiwan has the means to defend themselves ahead of time is vital if the US wants to make sure Taiwan survives. The amount is basically nothing compared to the US military’s annual budget or the aid we’ve given to other countries, but hopefully this opens the door for further investment into Taiwan’s military

There’s not much of a point in the base Opera when Opera GX exists, besides having a less gimmicky UI. If you value your privacy, don’t use it, but if you don’t, it’s a decent Chromium based browser

I work in hospitality. There’s a lot of waiting around at my job, so I mostly used Reddit to kill time. I hopped over to Lemmy since Wefwef’s app is better and Blahaj.zone had a Lemmy instance

Team Fortress 2 with over 1,200 hours. I’ve been playing it regularly for over a decade, so the hours have added up

Steam version of Black Ops 3 with Zombie Chronicles. It has a ton of official maps, and the steam version has a near infinite amount of custom community made ones. World at War is a close second just for custom zombies

Gamepass and Minecraft Bedrock mostly. Gamepass is something that I use a lot that will never work with Linux, and my friend group is split between console and PC for Minecraft so Bedrock edition works best for us. I still use SteamOS on my Steam Deck and enjoy it, but switching operating systems on my main computer just to play games is a bit excessive

The Discord public server browser is pretty bad, Disboard.org is a better server browser that has more servers and filtering options. A lot of YouTubers and online groups will have their own discord servers as well, which you can typically find with some digging (a ton of subreddits had official discord servers long before all the current drama started for example)