If you happen to use Firefox, check out "Reader View" (it's a button that appears at the end of the address bar). It works brilliantly to strip away everything except the main text of the article; and present it in a font, at a point size, and with margins, of your choosing.
I think the gamification is at the core of why Duolingo has persisted even though it doesn’t work.
At any point in real learning, or in acquiring any kind of skill in anything, one hits a plateau and the thing becomes boring or dull or hard. Internal drive to learn the thing must overcome the drudgery of repetition until you exceed that plateau. And then eventually there’s another one down the road.
What’s more is that the more we learn the more we get rewarded for confronting and pushing through the boring or hard. It’s a real reward that dopamine is evolutionarily designed to encourage. In a way, learning is already as “gamified” as it needs to be.
Gamification on the other hand convinces us that we’re making progress but it’s completely artificial. It manipulates dopamine in ways that don’t encourage actual and more learning. Instead gamification rewards gamification.
We need less gamification in our world and more internalification.
He did not say that the kid was MAGA, or at least not exactly. Here’s all he said about it:
> We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
> In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this.
He then played a clip where a reporter asked Trump how he was doing. Trump said good and immediately started talking about his new ballroom.
What about any of that is misinformation? Given how they were certain the shooter was trans because he used arrows on the bullet - which were helldiver 2 codes - it did seem like people were trying to make it seem like the kid wasn’t MAGA.
Turns out the kid is neither, or both, and was just terminally online, which none of us want to admit is the real problem because we’re all also terminally online.
> with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them
Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
A lot of conclusions were jumped to early on by everyone. Things are more clear now, but still not 100%. From what I’ve seen so far he was a Trump supporter in his early teens, but did a full 180 in recent years, due to the influence on the internet, as you mentioned, and who knows what else.
If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
Why would someone have to "desperately try to characterize" someone as something that they clearly are? To me, that language is clearly indicating that it is somehow difficult to do. At that time, it was fairly apparent that he was not MAGA, at least not in any remotely common sense of the word.
> At that time, it was fairly apparent that he was not MAGA
The criticism of the "MAGA gang" was _not_ about their actions at the time of the Kimmel broadcast, it was very much about their immediate behavior as soon as the shooting hit the news .. the time when nothing was known, the time when the FBI head was making statements about suspects that were untrue, the time when the US head of state was declaring war on the left .. you know, the time when nothing was known about the political allegiance of the shooter .. or the lack thereof.
I'm an outside observer, from here it's clear that the US has fallen deep into an Us v Them K-hole and that the current administration is all too happy to turn up the heat on the divisions that render the nation asunder .. the chaos makes the heist all the easier.
I could imagine interpreting the statement that way if he had said either before or after that it turned out the shooter was not MAGA. But stating it on its own, the effect in my mind was pretty clear: to communicate that the shooter was MAGA, and that the MAGA gang was doing their best to deny it.
The current president and vice president of the United States said on multiple media channels that an entire racial demographic of people in a city were eating cats and dogs, and those same people are concerned about the minutia of a late night comedian’s informational and semantic accuracy (who they also claim no one watches, which is probably itself mostly true).
Your god-president lies every single time he opens his mouth. Huge lies. The biggest lies. He also ridicules everyone he dislikes. With hurtful language. All the time.
He has never apologized for jack shit.
> Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
No one is tuning into Jimmy Kimmell for "news", though I am quite sure that his show is more truthful on a daily basis than your Fox News & Newsmax liars.
> If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
The joke is that Trump probably does not give a flying fuck about Kirk. He cares about himself. That's it. He pivoted right to bragging about his dumb fucking ballroom.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here. Nowhere do I claim any party affiliation. Someone asked a question about why what Jimmy said was controversial, and I did my best to answer why a person might be upset. Other people who may have said similar things aren’t really relevant and it just gets into a game of whataboutism.
It was a political assassination done by someone who vehemently disagreed with certain viewpoints. The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on. Kimmel's comments were grossly inaccurate and wildly irresponsible.
> The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on.
The only thing clear about the shooter's political positions, is that it'll be presented as whatever will be most convenient to the speaker. He held views that individually map across the spectrum, allowing anyone to point to something and assign him at an arbitrary location.
> Kimmel's comments were grossly inaccurate and wildly irresponsible.
Kimmel’s comments are about the behavior of the MAGA world, and they were true: the MAGA world was trying very hard to push the idea that the shooter was not one of them.
> The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on.
I'm sorry, which details? Why does his opinion about a handful of topics mean that we can infer his entire worldview? Why do we have to assume that his views mapped neatly onto one end of the US political spectrum or the other?
I think the problem no one on either side wants to admit is that these shooters rarely fall into either side. They’re mentally unstable people who are attracted to fringe crazy ideas, regardless of the political stripes.
Their behavior indicts all of us Americans.
But of course admitting that and doing something about it means working together, which is a much harder solution than pointing fingers at the other side and doing little else.
To each their own I guess but I think this is a beautiful home. My home was built at the same time (1965) and seems to share a lot of characteristics to David’s home, although my house is much smaller.
You’d be surprised how hard it is find houses like this. Many of them have been gutted and rehabbed into “open” floor plans, with a lot of white paint and white barn doors.
This is unfortunate because house builders back then really knew how to create distinctive spaces.
This home has a lot of beautiful light, feels very airy and open, and yet feels very distinctive and characteristic.
Probably the biggest drawback and challenge will be, as other commenters have pointed out, that Lynch smoked packs a day and getting that out will be tough.
Otherwise there absolutely buyers who would love this home.
You may be right but it’s worth noting that many mid century kitchens - including my own - were less focused on hospitality in the kitchen and more on efficiency. In some cases this was because homes had hired help.
My MCM kitchen is large enough to host but the cooking area is like this galley. I love to cook. Having lived in a home with with a huge open kitchen, I vastly prefer this galley style. It really does save time. When you’re doing a few things at once, a large kitchen with a lot of space between stations is a liability.
I live in the neighborhood where Flock started. The three Georgia Tech grads moved into a house in the West End in Atlanta. It’s a great neighborhood but like any urban neighborhood, you often deal with car break-in’s, so the roommates built a prototype security cam.
All fine so far. Except that the direction it was pointed at was the neighborhood middle school. Which means these three notably white college students started flock by surveilled predominantly black young kids.
The neighborhood was pissed - but what are you going to do?
Eventually Flock took off and they moved out.
My point is that if your product started as surveillance on not just another age demographic but a racial and class demographic, is it any surprise that all of this is fundamentally in the DNA of the company?
It’s not just too expensive. We need to seriously ask ourselves do we want too, at all, even?
My dad worked in a steel mill all his life so that me and my siblings didn’t have to. We’re he and the other guys at the plant proud of their work? Absolutely. Does nearly everyone wish their kids would do something else? Absolutely.
Industrialism has ipso facto become the soup du jour for thr agrarian myth. The reality is that it’s long, hard, relentless, menial labor. It’s also terrible for just living in general. My dad basically turned the lights off on a steel plant. That was 20 years ago and the land it was on will be unusable for even landfills for another 100 years. It was on a river and the river still smells like chemicals, and fish routinely die when passing through that area due to chemical runoff from the land.
So, I’m sorry, why do we want that here (let alone anywhere)?
I’m not saying that I don’t complain about my work from home job or that there aren’t negative effects but good luck weighing me getting carpal tunnel or taking anxiety meds to the stuff that industrial labor does to your body and our living environments.
>We’re he and the other guys at the plant proud of their work? Absolutely. Does nearly everyone wish their kids would do something else? Absolutely.
Most office work is not terribly satisfying. It turns out that work is work. And while working in AC with a coffee maker is "better" than sweating it out over a crucible, the drudgery is the same.
I spent some time with a large group of teenagers at a summer camp where the kids do a lot of the work, including activity scheduling and such. I worked in the cafeteria kitchen, which was hot, hard work. But the kids that were doing the administration kept coming over to offer to help: mop, sweep, serve food, whatever. I tried to take a mop bucket away from one of them, and she said "I've been staring at spreadsheets all day, I want to do something."
It's not 1850 anymore; we don't have to have industry be dehumanizing quasi-slave labor. If we decide to, we can make things in America again without Triangle Shirtwaist-style horrors.
You’re not wrong on most of your points - and I’m not denying the value of hard work. And I’m also well aware of the drudgery of office work.
That said, have you worked in the kind of factory that will come back? I did a summer stint at my dad’s steel mill as a 19 year old. I’m proud of that summer but that work took a lot of me. When other friends were out doing things, I was too exhausted to hang out. The money wasn’t great either. And that’s a microcosm of most of those older worker’s lives. Many drank heavily. I’m not bemoaning them at all or their work.
I’m just saying that the early 2000s wasn’t the 1850s either.
I don’t deny there’s a better life than office work but let’s not gloss over the kind of hard - as in, really hard - labor that industrialization requires.
Absolutely it's hard work, and dangerous too. In the case of steel, in the early 2000s they would be competing more or less heads-up with foreign steelmakers--mostly Chinese--and that puts a kind of pressure on working conditions.
Most people wouldn't mind hard work if it's rewarded with home and family. It's the idea that we have to work in a sweatshop and live alone in a fifth floor walkup that makes people pause. To avoid that situation isn't easy, there are a ton of factors involved, but it is possible. In the end, a country that doesn't make things is a country beholden to others.
Let's not gloss over the other part of it too though. Not everyone is smart enough to be a doctor or a lawyer, or even a nurse or a paralegal, and those people need jobs too. It shouldn't be backbreaking soul crushing work, but they do need jobs.
One of my hopes is that we can use our environmental and safety regime to do the industrial stuff in a more humane manner. Outsourcing everything to "somewhere else" only moved the externalities to another country. But people still get hurt.
Totally agree but is more environmentally friendly and more humane part of the current political rhetoric?
And absolutely outsourcing to somewhere else hurts somewhere else. But let’s be realistic: the kind of drastic change that would require no one getting hurt is not in the American discourse.
Have you been to a current US factory? All the big-company ones I've been to have safety and environmental compliance departments focused on zero-injuries and zero-environmental incidents.
Looking at what was done in the early to mid-1900's isn't a good guide to the current state of things. We've learned a bunch since then.
Define current. My dad turned the lights off on one factory as recently as 2018, a factory that Trump visited and bragged about saving (it wasn’t saved).
It’s not the same as factories in the 1989s true, but people are still missing fingers or limbs as a result of the work. Not only that but the resentment between workers and management remains extremely antagonistic.
We really need to stop glossing over the dangers of industrial work. It’s not a triangle shirtwaist fire but it’s not some kind of imaginary industrial utopia of pristine machinery.
There could be some legacy places out there that are stuck in the 50's. Also, small businesses seem to be more likely to not have good programs for safety than large outfits. But I've been working in industrial settings for 20 years on 3 continents, and all the big places have had extensive environmental and safety programs. Having said that, I've never been to a steel mill. The workers themselves can be their own worst enemy though. Places that have a large contingent of workers that started in the 70's and 80's tend to think the safety stuff is 'gay', and forced upon them by management.
but the industrial work still has to be done. Whether it's done in the USA (with OSHA and the EPA to keep people safe) or in another "cheaper" country where they lack the safety regulations we take for granted is the question.
I am rejecting the premise that I should be happy that industrial jobs are being outsourced overseas because those jobs are dangerous and kill people. I don't want people dying in industrial accidents anywhere and I trust the US EPA/OSHA (generally). I have severe qualms about outsourcing jobs because they are too dangerous for Americans.
> So, I’m sorry, why do we want that here (let alone anywhere)?
To the second question, not everything in the modern world is going to be clean and green. If you want things like steel, plastic, computers, etc. there's gonna be some dirty manufacturing involved. No way around it.
To the first, ideally every country wants some amount of self-sufficiency, or at the very least, some amount of redundancy. Remember how badly the world's pants got pulled down during Covid?
And finally -- frankly, not everyone is capable of more than unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Supply-chain redundancy with a side-effect of employing people who might otherwise have very little in the way of employment prospects? That's a good thing!
Why was the steel mill producing a lot of chemical pollution?
Steel makes a lot of mill scale and slag, but those are generally inert. It’s a physically dirty process, but not a chemically dirty one, unless I’m missing something?
And certainly nothing I’m aware of there would make it unsuitable for even landfill.
I looked up the EPA report for the brownsite. It listed arsenic, barium, multiple chromium compounds, 2,4-dimethylphenol ethylbenzen lead, 4-methyl-2-pentanone, methlyene chloride, naphthalene, toluene, and xylene at hazardous levels. It also mentions steel, zinc, and nickel dust and fumes.
I do know that I drove by the old site a few years ago, and you can see the outlines of not just the buildings but the machinery because the dirt is a different color, and there's either no or very little grass or just stubborn weeds growing in those areas.
A lot of steel is coated with grease or oil to avoid rusting. Just by nature of working with it you also need solvents to remove it. The degreasers of the past were magically powerful and environmentally catastrophic. Never mind all the oil/grease used.
> The reality is that it’s long, hard, relentless, menial labor.
Which is perfectly fine to do for some time if the salary is great. Which it should be, considering the high productivity output from those kind of jobs.
Steel mill workers of your dad's generation had a much higher living standard and much more money than service or office workers of today's young generation.
Young people are supposed to work hard and build up their wealth so that they can change to a less taxing job when it's time to make a family. Not waste their time in academic institutions for 20 years and then work for a low salary.
> had a much higher living standard and much more money than service or office workers
I don't see how you could say this with a straight face. We know at this point that factory jobs inflict physical damage to the body, a priceless artifact that no wage could replenish. I find it difficult to address your last paragraph as it's just not based in reality. Anecdotally, many people I know who take an hourly wage at factories never shift elsewhere. There is no waiting, and often they will start their families younger than their salarymen equivalent, 30 years ago or now. Perhaps they failed by your standards?
Not unexpected that people would react strongly against any mention of physical labour on this forum – and immediately take a hostile attitude.
I've done my fair share of these kind of jobs in my life and my body is great. You can do it for some years while you are young. Yes – if you do the same job your entire life you will destroy your body. Especially if you do not take care to listen to it and adapt how you work and how you exercise.
Young people should work hard and be paid well, that's how a healthy economy functions. Not by having manufacturing based on foreign slave labour.
Anecdotally, I know many people who started on the ground floor and then moved on to management or sales with experience. Or switched jobs and careers. People switch jobs all the time, staying at the same post for life is mostly a thing of the past.
I think a better term for it is the “we’re cooked era.” I see this phrase everywhere, in relation to AI, in relation to national politics, in relation to big problems like climate change. It’s really demoralizing because it’s a passive acquiescence to systemic change as if we have no control over anything. Which will inevitably lead to entropy.
If there’s one book I could “force” everyone to read, it’d be the Dawn of Everything. The David’s (Graeber and Wingrow) describe how the fundamentally most interesting attribute of humans is how much we tinker.
I love this article because it shares those same values. It’s so crucial for us to reject abject passivity and even when things seem impossible, to tinker and play and never assume that everything is as it will be.
Big +1 to the Dawn of Everything. Best book I read last year; probably in the last 5 years.
But my own "force" recommendation is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Also a very clarifying read on how exactly we got to this Who Cares Era through the mid-late 1900s.
To add to that - if a company is not actively protecting the trademark, even in well intentioned cases, then someone can use the trademark and point to a precedent of the brand not defending its trademark, especially if it’s probable that the company was aware of the usage.
Waffle House (or any other brand) must and 100% always will send out a C&D for trademark misusage, otherwise they lose legal protection for that trademark.
> Waffle House (or any other brand) must and 100% always will send out a C&D for trademark misusage, otherwise they lose legal protection for that trademark.
Actually, I'm pretty sure their request has no trademark law legs to stand on. Trademark infringement first and foremost requires two things: a) commercial use and b) for the goods and services the trademark is registered for.
Now I just checked and Waffle House has registered its trademark for "waffles", for "mugs", for "keychains" and other trinkets and for "restaurant services", but has zero registrations for "providing information online" or similar. So they really had nothing to defend with regard to a website that sells nothing.
Basically, had he just changed the website to use the name in text, they would have had a hard time to even forbid the nominative use of the trademark to refer to the actual waffle house (referring to the actual owner of a trademark in a nominative/descriptive manner is generally allowed).
There may be other areas of law that are more pertinent, but this is no case of good faith trademark defense. There was no "must" here. Looks like BSing someone who does not know better so he backs off. Also looks like using the archaic und expensive US legal system as a tool for coercion. Even if you're right, you need to be able to afford being right...
I think you're missing some nuance in your understanding of trademarks with all due respect.
The core use of trademark protection isn't a commercial use, necessarily. Rather, it's the act of infringing on the trademark holder's commercial use. So, if Waffle House is selling Waffle House t-shirts, and a business next door is giving away free Waffle House t-shirts that they printed - then yes, Waffle House would very likely win a lawsuit against someone giving away waffle house t-shirts.
Basically if someone is giving away or, especially, selling something that causes a confusion against the original trademark, then yes, the trademark "must" be protected.
By "must" I don't mean it's legally required. I just mean you're going to have a harder time in court if you need to pursue legal action against a company or person if there's a precedent you have not actively protected the trademark in other instances.
edit: and in this case, the site was causing confusion, so they sent a C&D. Also as the other commentor mentioned, the logo is trademarked.
To make it clear: The trademark is the combination of the sign (e.g. the word or logo) and the goods and services it is registered for. If you use the same sign for different goods and services then there is no infringement and no watering down/dilution, thus nothing to defend against.
There is a difference when treating well-known trademarks (say Coca-Cola, Sony, Google), however I doubt Waffle House gets over the threshold set for that for being too local (I counted at least 20 states that do not have one) and not sufficiently known by all demographics (if you want to know more read up on the Lanham Act).
Full disclosure: I am a TM lawyer, but not in the US. YMMV and what I write here is no legal advice ;-) since only gathered from US colleagues' explanations regarding cases clients had in the US.
The notorious/well-know concept is part of an international treaty (Art. 6bis of the Paris Convention) and its interpretation is similar in most western countries, so I'd expect the US interpretation to not be that far off.
Though, I am, again not a lawyer, but I am 99% sure you can't go use the Waffle House logo to sell anything, let alone waffles. I only say that because no one is using, say, the Coca-Cola brand to sell shoes, and if they did, we all know Coca-Cola would prevent that. That goes for any trademark in the US. So perhaps trademark law is different here?
Also, Waffle House are ubiquitous as a brand in the United States - certainly not as well known as Coca-Cola or Sony, but I have no doubt they'd be able to prove national awareness in any demographic.
In this particular case if you look at the C&D, it is for the trademark usage. It's likely that this person could have simply removed the trademark from the page and it would have been fine.
edit: I think the key in other industries would be proof of brand dilution - that is, if you start using the Nike logo to sell waffles, Nike would send a C&D if not a team of lawyers because you are diluting the trademark. So I guess you're technically right, although functionally, brand dilution is easily provable.
No prob. Just some random bits I found looking around for clues whether there already were any decisions from US courts wrt whether Waffle House is a well-known trademark:
Interestingly enough, Waffle House is mentioned in a 2007 article related to a US trademark law reform as an edge case [1].
This does not seem to be the first time that Waffle House appears to be overreaching: [2]. The balls to pull this off with a straight face, kudos to the colleagues.
This logo image consists only of simple geometric shapes or text. It does not meet the threshold of originality needed for copyright protection, and is therefore in the public domain. Although it is free of copyright restrictions, this image may still be subject to other restrictions. See WP:PD § Fonts and typefaces or Template talk:PD-textlogo for more information.
What do you believe is actually covered by trademark law? Maybe, the name of the website, but clearly the location and open status can't be, that would mean Google and many other map providers are violating trademarks on a massive scale. Or another example those websites with maps of petrol stations and their prices?
This is often brought up and almost never true. No reasonable court would dump their trademark over this. It needs to be overwhelmingly out of their hands and in the public conscious. "Frisbee" for example still holds their trademark over the word Frisbee despite the fact that the vast majority of people don't even realize that it's a trademarked term. Businesses have de facto no obligation to defend their trademark to the extent that the internet often thinks they do.
I am not a trademark lawyer. I'm guessing you aren't either or you would have said so. But multiple lawyers on multiple projects with multiple brands have mentioned this to me, and we have sent C&Ds to protect trademarks. With at least two of those lawyers, sure, it might just be more billable hours. But two were pretty decent guys and wouldn't have done it if they didn't think it was necessary.
At least within my corner of the business world (and not just "the internet"), it seems this is common knowledge among lawyers.
My guess is that, sure, would a court throw out a trademark? Maybe not, but the law works on a fine line between actuals (precendent) and hypotheticals, and it's just cheaper to issue a C&D than it is to fight a prologned legal battle about predcedent.
Also, it's interesting you mention Frisbee. There's a term for that: "genericide," and it's the term used to describe that exact scenario. Frisbee is one brand that didn't actively protect against trademark erosion and now we call every flying disc a Frisbee. Retrospectively, Frisbee might have wished they'd sent more C&Ds. Nintendo is one brand that has actively protected brand erosion, which is why we don't call it a Sony Nintendo.
Exactly my point: Frisbee is subject to genericide but keeps its trademark status because courts almost never actually take trademarks from businesses. If they don't do it to Frisbee then they won't do it to Waffle House because the courts, as you say, rely on precedent.
> Waffle House (or any other brand) must and 100% always will send out a C&D for trademark misusage, otherwise they lose legal protection for that trademark.
Time to change that braindead law then. Copyright has a "fair use" provision, and trademark law could be adapted similarly.
No, you can't. If you could use it whenever yoh want, we wouldnt have the concept of “nominative fair use” as the exceptional case of when and how you are allowed to use someone else’s mark in commerce without permission.
You can’t represent yourself or product as a brand. But you can write a scathing review about them and use their name and nobody can stop you. That wouldn’t be a trademark situation, it would be defamation, not infringement.
To me this whole situation seems to be a pretty good example of what not to do if faced with a copyright claim. It's tempting to see outfits like The Onion or Cards Against Humanity doing this kind of thing and feel like you are bulletproof and can do it too. But it's pretty easy to tell when these 'open letter' responses have not received legal review.
Waffle House had a legitimate claim and acted on their obligation to their trademark.
There is a pretty good argument that Waffle House continues to have a claim.
They probably wont do anything because its, frankly, a waste of time.
This could probably have been avoided entirely if copyrights were correctly respected from the beginning.
