I thought this was the onion. This is real? What's the opposite of eating the onion? Crying?

Anyone else read Roadside Picnic?

The title of the novel derives from an analogy that is proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic:

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.[7]

In this analogy, the nervous animals are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors have left, discovering items and anomalies that are ordinary to those who have discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to the earthlings. The explanation implies that the Visitors may not have paid any attention to or even noticed Earth's inhabitants during their visit, just as many humans do not notice or pay attention to insects and wildlife during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena that are left behind by the Visitors in the Zones were garbage, which are discarded and forgotten without any intentions to advance or damage humanity. There is little chance that the Visitors will return again because for them it was a brief stop, for reasons unknown, on the way to their actual destination.

Because I want to interact with them, but don't want to be on Instagram.

It's hard to get other people off the bad parts of the Internet.

It's very hard to get businesses to stop exclusively posting stuff on Instagram.

I thought (but not very hard) that by not paying the workers taxes, they would be denied their full social security payout , or be on the hook in some other way. But you're probably more correct than I am.

Jail time is unusual for wage theft, but heavy penalties are probably the only way to get people to stay in line.

Read the book. It was okay. Heard nothing about this movie.

I do feel like advertising is kind of self sabotaging though. Ads are so invasive and aggressive that I make heavy use of ad blockers.

It's a big multiplier on incompetence. It lets someone who's kind of bad at their job produce a lot more bad than they could before.

I hope OpenAi is found liable and people get criminal convictions.

Good. The fewer people drive, the easier it is for the people who have to.

Now if only NJ transit was competitively priced...

Things like this, when the legal system does not provide justice or restoration, make vigilantism appealing.

I remember when I was a toddler, the neighbor toddler girl hit me in the face with her shoe. When I hit her back, I got in a lot of trouble and was told not to hit girls.

Would have been a lot more sensible if they said "no one should be hitting each other"