Here’s a thread with basically the same question that has references to some specific laws: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/1cbyw91/can_my_employer_mandate_where_i_shop_as_a/

That thread is in reference to Ohio. Replies call out Ohio labor provisions, and laws regarding rebate.

Here’s someone on Bluesky who does regular “three wins today” posts. But those are mixed with less positive news. https://bsky.app/profile/ariellaelm.bsky.social

I’m not a lawyer either. But going off the company store insight, maybe we can look to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It prohibits paying wages in scrip, or “similar devices”. Scrip can take a couple of forms; one is an internal company currency that can only be spent at the company store. That provision in the FLSA was specifically intended to shut down company store scams.

It seems that an implied condition of your work is spending some portion of your wages at certain stores. Since scrip is money that can only be spent in certain places, it might be argued that if you are required to spend a portion of your wages in certain places, that has the same effect as paying a portion of your wages in scrip.

Unfortunately after a bit of searching I haven’t seen this specific argument made. But again, I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know how to research case law. It sounds like they’re trying to claim this program in optional, so it might be challenging to prove that participation is de facto mandatory. I’m guessing if you could get someone to tell you a number for how much they expect you to spend in this program that would help with such an argument. On second thought, I don’t actually know how helpful a number would be, and I don’t want to get you in trouble.

The article doesn’t suggest using Control+C. It talks about dedicated copy and paste key codes, and you can program your keyboard to map those codes to whatever keys you like. They suggest Fn+C.

That’s a good point! The string is in there, and I can see it with strings. But in my research so far it’s looking like making a simple string substitution might not be an option. The replacement string would be a Nix store path which would be longer. That would shift over subsequent bytes in the binary which it sounds like would produce alignment issues that would break things.

Apparently it’s ok to change the length of the ELF header, which is what patchelf does. But shifting bytes in the ELF body is a problem.

Now what I haven’t verified yet is whether the embedded binary is in the body or in the header. If it’s in the header - or even if just the interpreter string is in the header then I might be good to go.

My ten-year-old is a big fan of the books - and honestly so am I. I hope the series does them justice!

I’m still working on the character voices for our reading. There are a lot of them so I have to keep coming up with new ideas. I think some accents help to give character to the different dragon factions. I’m doing IceWings as Russian, RainWings as Alabaman, Outclaws as Western movie cowboys. I could throw Minnesotan in there, but I’m not sure which group would be best for it.

I was also thinking Nestlé before I clicked through. They want to corner the market on water. WTF!

I’m not positive I’m correctly matching the title to the episode, but I’m sure I remember this one.

Whether or not an unsecured human poses a direct danger to another human in a crash, there are negative externalities to self-harm. One is that family members may be deprived of an important source of income and emotional support if you are killed in a crash. But the most directly-measurable cost is hospital expenses. At first glance medical expenses are another factor that affect only yourself. But in reality in the US emergency room care is guaranteed regardless of ability to pay, so plenty of ER costs are paid by hospitals or by governments. Emergency and non-emergency healthcare costs may be covered by Medicaid or Medicare - in other words, paid for by taxpayers. Maybe you can afford whatever treatment you might need, but policy must take into account people who cannot. That means that a personal choice not to wear a seatbelt, in aggregate, puts measurable costs on people who are not you.

Societal medical costs are discussed most prominently in relation to smoking. A study from last year estimates that healthcare made necessary by smoking costs an average of $2700 per person per year. That’s a major part of the justification to tax cigarette sales. Healthcare costs caused by not wearing a seatbelt aren’t as high, but are still substantial. Here’s a study that found that hospital costs are 84% higher for people injured while not wearing a seatbelt vs wearing a lap & shoulder seatbelt.

Cost savings from seatbelt requirements might be smaller than savings from reduced smoking. But on the other hand the measurable burden of wearing a seatbelt is tiny. Policy should be based on the measurable costs & benefits of its requirements, and seatbelt requirements are a very clear-cut example of a net-benefit analysis.

You made an argument about the violation of personal liberty. When thinking about cost vs benefit there are two ways to look at this:

1. Intrinsic value of liberty: I don’t know of a measurement of harm from restricting personal liberty in the specific case of seatbelt use. We have to draw a line somewhere on where personal liberty must be restricted to prevent obvious, unacceptable harm like murders. Considering the data, and the low burden of compliance seatbelt requirements seem to me to be an obvious case where restricting liberty as a worthwhile cost of harm reduction. Until there is some metric that shows that restriction of liberty may be more harmful than cost savings in this case I have to say, that’s like, your opinion man.
2. Individuals are the best judges of their specific situation: Policy needs to consider the inevitable outcome of people exercising their right to implement bad judgement. If this were a case where a reasonable analysis could conclude that not wearing a seatbelt in some situations is a good decision then it would be a different story. But it’s not. Data overwhelmingly shows that seatbelt use is the right decision in every case while driving. And data also shows that a high proportion of people make the wrong choice, likely due to a highly-inflated sense of their own invulnerability. Here’s an analysis of how seatbelt requirements influence good judgement in several states.

I don’t want to dismiss personal liberty. I think it is important to be able to make our own decisions. But it’s also important to prevent extraordinarily-problematic decisions in certain cases. With seatbelts (I’m assuming we’re not debating the cost of building seatbelts into cars at the moment) the measurable cost as far as I’m aware is the time taken to put the seatbelt on, which is negligible. Maybe there is a real cost to one’s self of individualism to be required to put that seatbelt on. If the cost is real, there must be some way to measure it. Maybe that could be evaluating happiness, or creativity, or lifetime earnings, or some such thing. If we want to take this factor into account in cost-benefit analyses we have to have a measurement. We can’t apply some arbitrary value because some people are going to say “infinite”, and others are going to say “zero”, and every value in between. Not only are those subjective opinions - those are self-evaluation estimates which humans tend to be bad at. I’m going to speculate that self-evaluations of the importance of liberty in the abstract is one of those areas people tend to get wrong. We need some kind of objective metric.

Edited for clarity

Write a NixOS module, publish it in a flake in the nixosModules output, import that flake in your flake-based NixOS configs.

I use obsidian.nvim. It’s a Neovim interface to my Obsidian vaults, so I can work on my knowledge base in whichever app works best in the moment.

Less is not an editor, it’s a “pager” which is a read-only viewer for files, or for command output that doesn’t fit in a single screen, or whatever. Generally to control which you want programs use you set the PAGER environment variable.

The old grandaddy pager was called “more”, as in “there’s more text than fits on the screen”. The successor is called “less”. For most purposes, less is more.

Oh, this is a good tip!

I heard Superman gained the ability to fly during the first TV series because doing the special effects for flying was easier than for jumping.

It sounds like you’re including NixOS in this category so I guess I have switched.

I also tried Fedora Silverblue a bit, and it seemed to me that ostree distros are built on a cool idea supported by compromises I didn’t like:

Some stuff doesn’t work in Flatpak sandboxing - at least not yet. One example that comes to mind is Firefox integration with the desktop 1Password app. Maybe I could make this work by tinkering with Flatseal, but when install the native packages in NixOS this interaction just works.

I don’t want my CLI tools in a container running a different distro. For example if I’m using Distrobox to set up a dev environment that’s installing a distro with traditional package management to get around not being able to install packages natively in the host OS. I get that Distrobox enables isolated dev environments for different projects. But for that use case I think Nix devshells are more flexible, robust, and performant.

Nix also has its problems - in particular the usual complaint that the documentation is not comprehensive enough to match the complexity of the system.

This is a big reason for me. Also because if anything breaks - even if my system becomes unbootable - I can select the previous generation from the boot menu, and everything is back to working.

It’s very empowering, the combination of knowing that I won’t irrevocably break things, and that I won’t build up cruft from old packages and hand-edited config files. It’s given me confidence to tinker more than I did in other distros.

This is a lovely write-up! I have one nit to pick: I think “Mary was fucked by John” is a passive-voice use of the transitive verb. OTOH “This guy fucks.” is unambiguously intransitive.

Thinking out loud, I think the reason those salons became famous is because the participants published, and their publications got a lot of attention. An example that springs to my mind is the Vienna Circle. But maybe a better example is Madame Geoffrin’s salon which hosted French nobles and Enlightenment thinkers. In that case too the attendees either published, or were powerful figures in society.

The format is a smallish group of people discussing ideas, probably with some connecting theme. It seems like historically those themes were broad, like “philosophy”, with a focus on debate. If some of the people involved turn out to be important to society you’ve got yourself a historically-significant organization. If not then hopefully everyone had a good time.

Existential Comics continues to be amazing! I enjoy it to such a degree that I’m going to drop the Patreon link in here: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=249109&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fexistentialcomics.com%2Fcomic%2F597

“By and large” is a weird one. It’s meaning is along the same lines as “all other things being equal.” Is it a reference to large sample sizes?

It’s made weirder by the fictional corporation name in Wall-E, “Buy 'n Large”