Interesting Links for 15-12-2015

[andrewducker]

• Commission says council tax in Scotland 'must end'
  • Scotland tax
• The wolf that wanted to play with the dogs
  • wolves dogs
• Here's a Comic Book Guide to the Tibetan Buddhist Afterlife
  • tibet buddhism religion comic
• A French Insurance Company Signed The Stupidest Contract Ever Written
  • insurance investment contracts law epicfail viaSwampers
• The Star Trek

Comments

[gonzo21]

DRM lightbulbs. Geez. We live in very strange times.

And that's fascinating that these Youtube stars don't make much. They've finally found a way to generate entertainment products, where the people making the content don't get paid.

[andrewducker]

Well that's the thing. Nobody is paying money to watch these YouTubers, so they're subsisting entirely off of advertising.

And the advertising from 100,000 people has never been enough to pay for someone to live off of.

[gonzo21]

I wonder how much Youtube charges for advertising. Google's adword advertising isn't cheap. So I imagine the people advertising on Youtube are paying a decent amount of money for it. So that money must be going somewhere, if not to the content providers.

I also read that the content provider doesn't get a penny for the advert shown before their content unless the viewer watches the entire advert and does not skip it. Which is a scam too. Most good adverts get their branding message over to the viewer in the first 10 seconds before the ad becomes skippable.

[woodpijn]

That Christmas Muslim Challenge guy seems to struggle with reading comprehension. He and the guy he's criticising are actually in agreement that Muslims will not be offended by Christmas decorations. The original Facebook rant he quotes is complaining about corporate arse-covering, not about Muslims.

[woodpijn]

I left a comment on the post saying roughly this but more politely and less confrontationally, but it doesn't seem to have been published.

[resonant]

My company just had our Christmas party, where served halal turkey. One of my Muslim co-workers played Santa. Another co-worker (who is Buddist) won the Christmas-tree decorating contest for the fifth year in a row.

We also celebrate Eid, Diwali, and Pride, have an on-site mosque, and have vegetarian options in the cafeteria. Nobody seems to mind as long as everyone gets a chance to celebrate their things. And the company doesn't care as long as the work gets done.

[bart_calendar]

My sense is that after fans shat on Into Darkness JJ figured "fuck them, I'm just going to make a movie I want to make."

[andrewducker]

JJ didn't make this one...

[bart_calendar]

He's the executive producer and script supervisor.

[andrewducker]

True. So he has some influence over it.

(Although "Exec Producer" can mean almost anything from "I make sure the producers are doing their job and am involved every day" to "I made the previous film, so I get to have this on my CV")

The contrast between US and UK police responses to a "s

[cartesiandaemon]

I'm also confused why it all seems to be lumped into one heading. If you say "he's fallen down and hurt and can't get up", that's likely to be embarrassing and maybe expensive, but if you say "he shot someone and he's going to shoot some more people", and are convincing enough the police believe you, he's quite likely to be injured or killed. Like, both should be as at least as serious as if you did them personally, rather than tricking someone else into doing them, and "breaking into someone's house and overpowering them" is quite a serious crime (even as well as, fake calls to emergency services are often a separate crime as well). And surely they have ways of tracing these calls, so I don't know how people get away with it (or if they don't but don't care?). And I don't know why it's always reported as "harassment" or something -- yes, it's a FORM of harassment, but if they were reported as "subject to an expensive prank" or "subject to a creditable murder attempt" people would understand more clearly what was actually done.

[a_pawson]

In the american video, it does seem like a SWAT team bursts through the door. In the UK video, there is no swat team. Two unarmed police officers knock at the door and it looks like they ask if they can come in before entering the house. The approaches are different, but I would assume that is because the nature of the calls the police received are very different. I'm quite sure if there was a call that there was an armed individual in the house who had shot people - and the dispatcher believed it - then the response wouldn't be much different to that shown in the US video.