Mossy Feathers (They/Them)

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I’d assume they’d be required to pay taxes once they’re old enough to, but I’d be willing to bet that most of them don’t unless they plan to ever actually move to the US.

    I wonder how often the IRS actually goes after American citizens who don’t live in the US, especially ones that haven’t traveled to the US in more than 5+ years.

    Edit: they might also be completely unaware that they need to pay taxes. If I’m not mistaken, the US is literally the only country in the world that requires you to pay taxes when living abroad. Logically speaking, it makes sense that you wouldn’t have to pay taxes to a country you don’t live in.



  • This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).

    Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.



  • 'member when conspiracies were relatively harmless like flat earthers and ufologists?

    'member when the main source of Christian extremism (in the US) was the Westboro Baptist Church, and most people just laughed at them because no one really took them seriously?

    What the fuck happened?

    I’m actually very confused because the US 10yrs ago was radically different than the US now. How did everyone completely lose their minds? This is a semi-rhetorical question because I’m aware of some of the contributing factors, it’s just… I feel like somewhere in the past 10-15yrs I slipped sideways into some kind of an alternate reality.

    The most extreme Christians I knew didn’t approve of homosexuality, but also weren’t yelling “god hates f*gs” at people for being gay. They believed in a 7-day creation, but didn’t lose their minds and thirst for blood at the sight of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

    The worst racists I’d met believed in white supremacy, but weren’t cruising around looking for POC to lynch (with the exception of cops, that is). They hated Hispanic people, but mostly kept it to themselves.

    Maybe I was just really sheltered, but while it seems like our level of tolerance has grown, the extremes have gotten worse. Like, the graph of tolerance is still going up, but the data point distribution is getting worse.

    Edit: to put it another way, my experience growing up in Texas’ suburbs was that people were “tolerant” in a “I don’t like you but I won’t bother you so long as you don’t bother me” kinda way. Not ideal, but not terrible either. Now though, it’s more “I don’t like you and that bothers me, so I’m gonna bother you”.



  • The alternative explanation is that the employers have investments in corporate real estate and don’t want their investments to lose value. Personally, I think that the the people at the top probably have investments in corporate real estate, while middle managers are the way you describe.

    I don’t think the people at the top usually care what the employees are doing so long as they’re making money, and being in the office means they’re keeping corporate real estate prices afloat. As such, being in office makes money for the executives, even if that money isn’t made directly through the company.

    Middle managers on the other hand, likely don’t have any significant corporate real estate investments, nor are they as likely get significant bonuses for company productivity. As such, it makes more sense for their motive to be more about control than it is money.

    That said, I do know some executives do indeed see employees the way you’ve described them; an infamous example comes to mind about the Australian real estate executive talking about how they needed to bring workers to heel and crash the economy to remind workers that they work for the company and not the other way around. I’m just not sure that many executives actually think about their workers in that much depth. I think if they did then we’d see a stark contrast of very ethical companies and highly abusive companies instead of the mix of workplace cultures we have now; because some ceos would come to the conclusion that a happy worker is a good worker, while others would become complete control freaks.


  • Imo it’s not the former (kids making content) that’s the issue; that’s something kids have been doing in games for a long time. Gmod, TF2, CS:S, Minecraft, etc. Most of those games have mods made by kids or people who started as kids, and some of them are very successful and have even led them to careers in the game industry.

    The thing that’s actually bad is the fact that the kids can make money from it, and the cut they get is almost non-existent. The result is that it encourages kids to design their games in a way that utilizes the kinds of monetization we normally associate with greedy corpos (loot boxes, true microtransactions like charging for extra lives, etc).

    If kids weren’t able to make money off it, or if the cut was larger and they restricted the kinds of monetization kids could utilize (no loot boxes, charging for extra lives, etc), then I wouldn’t see an issue with it.

    That’s where I think a lot of people miss the mark. For some reason it seems like there’s a view that’s unique to people criticizing Roblox, which is that kids making mods for games is bad; but imo it’s only bad when coupled with a monetization scheme that encourages kids to nickel and dime each other.

    Edit: but yes, kids do make content for Roblox and get shitty cuts for it. Also changed a sentence (in bold).







  • Imo expecting someone who’s done drugs to quit and never do it again, is one of the dumbest, most bone-headed things anyone has ever come up with. Like, shit man, drugs are awesome. Yeah, they can seriously fuck you up if you get addicted, and some drugs are extremely addictive. However, expecting someone to toss all those crazy experiences, the good and the bad, into the trash and never, ever even be tempted to pick up drugs again is… stupid. It assumes that drugs only create bad experiences, but that obviously isn’t true because even the most non-physically-addictive drugs can become addictive with the right environmental factors. So obviously people aren’t doing drugs just because they’re addictive, they’re doing them because they’re fun, or because they give you an escape. As such, imo, it’s better to teach people how to use drugs in moderation than to try and attempt total abstinence. Unless their body is so fucked up from drug use that they literally can’t do drugs without risking death, you should be teaching them how to use them in moderation; like as a reward for getting a promotion. That sorta thing.