Yeah, shocking… People will use substances until they want to quit. Unless and until the addict makes that choice for themselves, nothing is going to change. The best you can do is change their circumstances so that they want to change their lives.

FWIW, feelings on tickling is very split; recipients seem to either love it or hate it, with no in between. Tickling, in a BDSM scene, is absolutely torture, and can be very triggering for some people. Some people can enjoy light tickling in a sensual/erotic manner, and still hate tickling as the primary form of sensation play in a scene.

I am definitely on the sadistic end of that spectrum.

If you try it, set up some kind non-verbal safe signal beforehand, because you may not be able to get words out.

Assuming consent on all fronts, and some kind of safe signal?

Tickle.

IME that ends up being strangely harder on a sub and something that can go on longer–with breaks!–than e.g. caning, flogs, etc. If you go too long with a silicone slapper, you can take skin off; to long/hard with a cane, and you’re causing hematomas. Too long tickling? No physical harm done (as long as they don’t, say, dislocate a shoulder; be careful with how you tie people up, folks!), although a sub might pee the bed, or be laughing so hard that they can’t breathe. That means that you can turn around and do it again the next day. Combine being restrained and blindfolded with sound-isolating earbuds so that a sub can’t tell where you are, and intersperse the tickling with sensual touch, and you can have a sub dreading your touch, flinching at nothing, and drag it out for an hour or more.

I’d remove the gag though; tickling combined with a gag can obstruct breathing.

(Not everyone is ticklish though. IME people that tend towards anxiety have a much stronger reaction to tickling.)

IIRC, there are ongoing experiments with organs are being grown in cloned animals; the animal is slaughtered, and the organ is harvested. Maybe someday they’ll be more readily available and renewable than they are now.

…At least for the wealthy that can afford to have farms of cloned animals.

As someone else already pointed out, if the transplant from the living donor failed or had complications, now you have two people that need livers. It puts a healthy person at risk for a very low chance of a positive outcome. If they were paying out of their own pocket, then I’d say sure, go ahead, blow your own money on it, risk your own life and health. But they aren’t.

I’ve known entirely too many alcoholics that have had too many wake-up and come-to-Jesus moments, only to go back to drinking as soon as the immediate crisis is over. Change only comes when the alcoholic wants to change for their own reasons, not due to external factors.

Livers are a limited resource. Wasting a donor’s liver on a person that us is unlikely to stop drinking–despite their protestations–means that another person doesn’t get one. It may seem like a cruel calculus, but it’s the only reasonable way to ration a scarce resource. It doesn’t matter if alcoholism is a disease, or you think that it’s a moral failing; the end result is the same.

That’s not entirely accurate. Yes, it was more than the GDP of the entire planet at the time, but that’s not the value of the entire planet. Unless they meant the amount of physical currency that existed, in which case the amount was considerably less than the 62T that the article cites, since most money is never physical.

It’s still patently ridiculous though.

I think that holding the executives and BoD in criminal contempt of court is a good place to start.

EDIT: AFAIK Telegram doesn’t use warrant canaries.

Good. They shouldn’t.

Unencrypted channels are the ones that are easiest to trace, and the easiest ones to successfully base a prosecution on.

The most correct response is to report them to law enforcement. Unencrypted channels make amazingly effective honeypots. It’s fairly easy to bust people using unencrypted channels, esp. because people think they’re anonymous and safe. It’s much, much harder to bust people once they move to .onion sites and the real dark net away from their phone. When you shut down all the easy channels, you push people into areas where it’s much harder, almost impossible, to root them out.

I would probably start with this, and then move on to this.

I think that I’ll need Rufus to help out.

Laws will persuade people that care about the risks of their actions to not take certain actions. If you know that there’s heavy speeding enforcement in an area, and you can’t afford a ticket, you are less likely to speed. Likewise, if you worry about going to prison for a few years, then laws prohibiting the carrying of weapons is likely to persuade you not to unless you feel like your life would be in more danger if you were unarmed. People that don’t care if they go to prison are unlikely to be persuaded by laws prohibiting their criminal behavior.

I believe that all states have now repealed their bans on owning gravity knives, switchblades, and butterfly knives. However, carrying them in public–depending on blade length, may still be illegal. Some states only prohibit them from being carried if you intend to use them in a crime, and actually using them in a crime is used to prove intent; i.e., it just ends up being an additional charge.

Modern sporting rifles–AKA assault style rifles–are usually not okay to carry openly in the same states that used to ban certain types of knives.

Where I live, someone that openly carries a belt knife is taken as prima facie evidence that they’ve been permanently prohibited from owning a firearm. Open carry is unusual, but not incredibly rare. Conceal carry is fairly common.

No idea. Not trying to argue about it.

No worries, just my perspective as someone that works in an industry adjacent to marketing.

I am acquainted with a few people that have struggled to monetize OF, etc. in a meaningful way, and from my outsider perspective, it seems like most people aren’t able to make it work, not without making it a full-time+ job. And then not very well. The people that make more than beer money off it seem to be few and far between.

than her marketing team is working on building an audience for paid content

That’s fairly unlikely, TBH. Marketing teams, etc. get expensive pretty fast, and if you’re just starting and haven’t yet built an audience for paid content, you aren’t going to be able to afford it for very long. (Unless you already have a Real Career and money to burn. But then doing this is risky, since it can easily kill your real life career.) It’s possible that it’s a management team trying to establish entirely new talent, but it seems like a poor bet to take someone that has no track record, and would be competing against other, established content providers. That is, you’re sinking time–and hence money–into something that has a poor probability of payoff. If you’re looking for a much more certain return on investment, then going a more traditional route–having models working for established companies–would be a far better choice.

Going through the post history quickly, I can’t see anything that indicates a paid option; no obvious OnlyFans, Fansly, etc. I’m not sure if there’s a way to pin a bio in Lemmy, without which it’s harder for content providers to build a following; potential customers would have to check through their entire post history for a link. Reddit is–for the moment, until they decide to make the whole site family-friendly–easier in that respect.

Lemmy would definitely not be my first choice if I was trying to build a personal brand; the audience is far too limited.

These leaks frustrate labels and artists and not just for financial reasons. Many musicians work months if not years on their tracks; seeing these being paraded on pirate sites, before their official release, stings.

I dunno about this. Most of the artists I give a shit about have their music up for free on Bandcamp. The ones I’ve asked point-blank about it have said that they don’t care about piracy; they see it as free advertisement for their live shows, which is where they make most of their money (and on merch sales). This might be true of some of the largest acts, where sales might make up more than a few hundred dollars in total annual revenue, but probably a lot less true for most mid-sized or smaller acts.

OTOH, given that the labels are the ones making money off sales of music, they probably care quite a lot.

I’ve personally found that I can hear a sound difference in 320kpbs .mp3s, depending on whether or not it was encoded with a constant bit rate, or a variable bit rate.

I honestly haven’t seen one in >30 years with a chain. Admittedly, I haven’t been looking too hard.

…Why the fuck would I need a chain on my lawnmower? AFAIK, push mowers are all direct drive for the blades, and riding lawn tractors use belts.

Carburetor, not ‘carborator’. And it’s mostly the most polluting engines–lawnmowers, chainsaws, etc.–that are still using carburetors. Every thing else that uses gasoline has switched to fuel injection.

And last, DO NOT LET ANYONE OTHER THAN A PROFESSIONAL CHANGE THE SPRING IN YOUR GARAGE DOOR.

You really need a critical mass to break Adobe’s stranglehold. I hope that someone can, because I hate their software-as-a-service model. But for now, I have to suck it up and deal with it.

Their refusal to pay to integrate PANTONE colors has really fucked up my workflow. :(

Nothing is going to effectively hurt their bottom line, because they own the market. There are no other viable alternatives to Adobe if you are working in the graphics profession. Everyone, and I mean everyone, in graphic design/visual communication uses Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. If you do any work with designers and receive files from them, you’ll need to use Adobe products in order to access the files and all the information in the files.

This is the sector I work in. There is absolutely no getting away from it, and until someone comes up with a product suite that is better right out of the gate, and is completely compatible with Adobe, no one is going to switch.