Libra00

Do they need to? I don’t think they do. They exist to make money so I get that they want to, and they’re pretty good at it, but they could try not exploiting people for profit. But the idea that ‘it exists therefore anything is justified in order to make a profit’ is absurd.

You’re right, I missed it the first time, my bad.

I take “the first 90 days” to mean the first 90 days they’re there working

That does seem to be one reading of the information available, yes. My point, though, was that it’s ambiguous, so it can also be read as they work for free for the first 90 days of the program, then get offered a job where they work for $10/hr for 90 days, then get raised to a decent wage.

Re:bad faith/disparaging - yeah maybe. I’ve been through/around several recovery programs myself, and they always give me a scummy vibe so maybe I’m just looking for nits to pick. But 90 days free labor (if that’s what’s going on) is a lot less obviously-scummy than the year I initially thought it was, so. Though again with no mention of counselors or anything this still doesn’t seem like much of a ‘recovery program’, but rather more of a ‘get away from the triggers that caused you to drink’ program. shrug Either way it does seem to be giving people a second chance and if there’s nothing scummy going on then that’s unambiguously a good thing.

Context matters, friend.

Stable Recovery helps the men get a job in the industry after 90 days when they graduate from its School of Horsemanship. Participants don’t have to work in the industry but the majority want to.

So it’s 90 days before the job is offered, not a year, my bad. Also you forgot to include the sentence above the one you quoted:

It doesn’t charge its participants until they start earning money once they begin working on the farm.

At that point, they pay $100 a week for food, housing, clothing and transportation. They earn $10 an hour the first 90 days, then get a raise to $15 to $17 an hour.

But still there’s some ambiguity here because it says the job is offered after 90 days, so do they pay $10/hr for the first 90 days they’re in the program, or only for the first 90 days after the job offer? Again I think it’s safe to assume no job = no pay, so it sounds like they work for free for 90 days, then work for $10/hr for 90 days, then it’s $15-17 from there. Which, fair enough, is considerably less of a grift than I originally thought.

The impression I got from the article is that they only get an offer of a job after they’ve been there for a year, and if you’re not giving someone a job for a year then I think it’s safe to assume you’re not paying them for that year. The article isn’t entirely clear about that, so I admit I’m going on a couple of assumptions here, but I think they’re pretty reasonable ones (like no job = no pay.)

Once they’re hired (if they’re hired), but the impression I got from the article is that they are not paid for that initial year. Yeah recovery programs cost money, but also I didn’t see anything in the article about counselors, so it’s more like summer camp for adults who are already in recovery on their own (they require 30 days sober to join) and need a way to stay clean. Which, fair enough, that’s a valuable service, but I don’t think it’s $35k worth of free labor valuable.

Food, housing, clothing if you’re lucky, and maybe one day a job that pays $35k, but only after a year of working for room and board. I’m not saying it’s not helping them or that it’s not worth it, just that this article heaps praise on Taylor when it seems like all he was after was some cheap help.

Except the men are working for the entire year that they’re there (if they stay that long) for, effectively, room and board? Maybe it’s worth it to them, I dunno, all I know is Taylor is getting a pretty sweet deal. Re:recovery programs - you mean the kind that provide active support, regular counseling, etc like this guy isn’t providing? And do you know how much AA meetings cost? Nothing.

Frank Taylor’s idea for the Stable Recovery program was born six years ago out of a need for help

And a desire to not pay that help, apparently. He might eventually offer them a job, but even then it only pays a decent wage after 90 days.

The goal is to keep men in the program for a year as opposed to other recovery programs that run for 30, 60 or 90 days.

Yeah I bet. Free help for a year is a pretty sweet deal.

This isn’t that uplifting after all. Maybe it helps, I don’t doubt that, but Taylor gets a shitload of value out of it ($17/hr, purportedly what that labor is worth, times 2080 hours in a year = ~$35k per person per year.)

Nope, and not even because of the current administration: this country is by, for, and about rich people, and people are getting deliriously rich off of our data right now so there’s no political will to do anything about it.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don’t give your data to companies: their executives and shareholders care more about their bottom line than your privacy.

Huh, that’s unfortunate. I see a lot of recommendations for Fennec and Ironfox a fair amount and use regular firefox on desktop, maybe I should check those out. Is there one you recommend?

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo’s browser, it’s pretty alright.

Indeed, this is like the techbro approach to nuclear reactors, which seems like the worst of all possible worlds: all buzzwords and bullshit hiding barely-concealed scams about shit that can absolutely kill you.

You lost me at this:

For this transmutation Transmutex proposes using a particle accelerator, probably because the promoter of the idea is a former engineer at CERN,

Yeah it’s definitely not that the only reliable method we have of knocking protons off of atoms involves either a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator, dude is just bringing his old job with him cause he doesn’t know any better. Right.

I hope you’ll understand why I’m not going to take my opinion on douches from the guy trying to pick apart my helpful comment with a flood of pedantic bullshit.

You ever notice how it sometimes helps to read the whole sentence to understand what some part of it means in context?

A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is.

There’s a comma after that second VPN so obviously it’s related to what follows, which is the part where I describe exactly how a VPN is a VPN: in terms of getting a different IP address. This is twice now you’ve gone way out on a limb here trying to back the play of some fucking troll who didn’t bother to explain themselves and I’m not sure if that’s where you want to be. Picking through my comment and taking bits out of context to feed back to me as ‘evidence’ to back up your pedantry and assumption that the rest of the text of that same comment shows you to be wrong about is not a good look. If you’re going to nitpick my shit to death then you should at least try to read the whole thing and understand how each of the parts relate to each other first, otherwise people might mistake you for some fucking troll too (albeit a clearly slightly more intelligent one since you can actually elucidate what your issue is with what I said, regardless of whether or not it’s remotely accurate.)

If that’s the case then both of you failed to read the part of my comment where I explicitly addressed that:

The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.)

I admit I didn’t include the possibility of the VPN operator themselves being malicious, but it seems weird to call me out for not addressing the issue of record security re:governments/LE when pretty much the entire point of my comment was to address that specific issue because no one else was, no?

lol, k, I definitely respect the opinion of someone who drops a half-assed comment like that without bothering to offer what they believe to be the correct information.

A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is. The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.) I’m not familiar enough with either service to be able to speak to that, but everyone else seems to be talking about features, prices, politics, etc when none of those directly address your questions.

Yes, I too am aware that people often misuse words. It might be safe to assume that the guy who just demonstrated that he knows how to operate a dictionary probably isn’t one of them though. Especially if you had read my comment that they were replying to, because then you would have seen that the nation I was calling an authoritarian regime (in fact, a ‘whole-ass authoritarian regime’) was Nazi Germany, so I don’t think we were in any danger of not labeling Western colonial powers as authoritarian in this thread.