TIL! Am I crazy or was it at one point partly owned by NPR?

You're not crazy.

Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.

Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.

What is the alternative that you are proposing? When I read something like this all that comes across is a strident desire for totalitarianism.

The alternative in this case is fewer politicians. European countries don't need another layer of politicians on top of their local institutions.

The alternative to this is being also competent at leading.

What specifically does jailbreaking a Kindle get you these days? I remember the old audio player hack but once I had it unlocked the only interesting thing to do was to select my own wallpaper.

Since there are zero devices that are released that don’t indicate recording, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to outlaw modification of recording equipment to hide recording.

You know, the same way we would be rightfully outraged if Apple was allowing applications to turn on the web cam without signaling to the user that the camera is engaged.

That’s all aside from the fact that Hungary was run by authoritarian minded people. But just as I think it should be illegal for cameras installed in glasses to work without an indicating light, I don’t see how this recording light situation you are describing is really such a highlight of Orban’s excesses.

also, it's been on the books for decades... when cameras arrived to phones, they added a sentence.

right, it's just Hungary... in Germany you must ask for permission from the military to leave the country for more than 3 months.

Ah yes. A great example is how much cheaper and more efficiently our military support is since we fired all the military cooks and gave all the contracts to KBR and Haliburton.

People don’t work hard for crap wages unless you beat them with a stick. Government jobs are seen as cushy because there are actual rules and regulations being followed as to how much work should be done. Corporations just skirt that, do a worse job, and then spread your type of propaganda everywhere.

People wouldn’t be jealous of the government job holders if they could achieve a similar work life balance at Joes Tree planting service.

There’s no duration for when you’re counted out of the labor force; only when you stop looking for work. Your incentivized to report your looking for work (and provide proof) to get unemployment benefits, and those who opt out of such benefits for more than 4 weeks are not counted as part of the labor force.

I think that’s fair, since even if you are homeless, as long you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you count as part of the statistic.

And there’s good reason to count certain people out of the labor force. Retired folks, stay-at-home parents, anybody else that’s willfully unemployed—if your working in or around government trying to make labor policy decisions, including these people gives you an inaccurate picture of the labor market. If you want to help people get jobs, you need to focus on the people that actually need help.

Of course no statistic is perfect, but broadly, I think that the unemployment rate is a useful and accurate measure. If you think otherwise, I’d invite you to propose a good alternative.

Are you seriously implying that removing people from “unemployed” status after 4 weeks of not submitting a job application is not a deliberate gaming of the statistic in favor of having better job reports?

It’s not on me to invent a new statistic. It is on me to push back on ridiculous claims that minimize the fact that this statistic has been defanged over and over again in the decades since it was first introduced.

The unemployment problem is about people looking for a job and not being able to find one. If someone doesn’t even want a job though, that’s not something you can “fix” anymore.

To include people who don’t want to be employed in the labor force is counter-productive, since why would you try to find jobs for people who don’t want them?

It’s not even that these people are “lazy” like many who (wrongly) disparage the unemployed say. They just aren’t looking for jobs at the moment—stay at home parents, retired people, anybody that doesn’t need/want to work. (And by the way, plenty of homeless people receive unemployment benefits and are therefore included in the statistic.)

The unemployment rate is useful because it helps us see how many people need jobs. If you start including people who don’t need jobs, the metric just becomes less useful.

To your other point, I’m not asking you to invent a new statistic. It’s just that when people say one metric isn’t working, someone smart usually has come up with alternatives. A lot of people for example don’t like using GDP, and thus economists have come up with HDI, GNI weighted GDP, or whatever else suits their taste.

I bring this up because there are few alternatives to unemployment metrics, simply because they are not nearly as problematic as you paint them to be. Practically every competent government on Earth uses the same measures for unemployment, and specifying the labor force to only people actively looking for work is very standard; if you want to say that this nearly ubiquitous method is wrong, I think it’s reasonable to ask what needs to be fixed.

They use U3 because it makes them look better and since no one is using the more accurate U6, there is no pressure to stop cooking their books.

Edit: only people who are homeless for less than six months would be on unemployment benefits. That doesn’t sound like “plenty” to me.

They headline U3 because it's best at answering the question "who is looking for work but can't find it", but of course they use U6. It's literally one of the main metrics in the monthly unemployment report by the Buerau of Labor Statistics. The BLS created the U-# system, and was in fact the first to report a separate U6 metric.

Eurostat, the Internation Labor Organization, OECD--what incentive do all these organizations have to globally misrepresent unemployment? Of course they measure and consider U6, but they choose to headline U3 instead not because it's prettier and they want to serve national propaganda interests, but because it's just more useful.

C'mon man. I have to give up on this thread.

Are you seriously wondering why a government would want to underreport unemployment?

Edit: it must just be a happy coincidence that U6 has never been lower than U3.

Didn't we have negative unemployment rate sometime during or right after COVID? I remember people talking about how gamed and disconnected from reality these numbers were because (I think) a bunch of people stopped looking for work or filing for unemployment and were dropped from the labor force for official statistics. It really messed up the models being used.

As far as I understand, that’s (negative unemployment) not possible with the way the statistic is measured. I might be confused though as I’ve never heard of the term.

In any case, COVID was a hellish time for pretty much every economic metric, but for unemployment specifically, the catastrophe didn’t actually end up lasting that long, and the labor market in the U.S. has recovered remarkably well.

Respectfully, I would like to see a source or at least the math for that.

Here it is:

[The water footprint of a single hamburger is *significantly higher than* that of using a large language model (LLM) for a year. For example, the water used for one hamburger is primarily due to the irrigation of cattle feed crops, while data centers like xAI's Colossus 2 consume much less water overall.](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=A+person+eating+one+single+hamburg...)

States that it's significantly higher but the breakdown shows a 660gal vs 1000gal (Single Burger vs 1yr LLM Usage) water usage...

Item Water Footprint (Gallons)

Single Hamburger Approximately 660 gallons

Year of LLM Usage Approximately 1,000 gallons

Results also contain an important disclaimer: "Auto-generated based on listed sources. May contain inaccuracies."

You be the judge ;)

This is absolutely untrue. The rational actor model is no longer supported by evidence. In fact, it’s supported by no evidence.

Property tax revenue seem highly unlikely when the DC operators have been given enormous tax cuts.

A tax cut or PILOT vs vacant land in a small city with a shrinking tax base is still net positive tax increase.

If the options are 0 or 50% off some tax rate table, the 50% is still better than nothing.

You’re doing a lot of heavy lifting with this word colonist. The mass graves are either “imported criminal” (being in debt was a crime) or slave populations.

And it was much more about the horrid working conditions that these forced laborers were forced to work under.