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posted by on Sunday April 19 2020, @03:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the economics dept.

So, COVID-19 (coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, whatever you call it) sucks a bit for your health but it turns out it sucks a lot for the economy. So we're extending any subscriptions that were going to expire before then out to June first (this may be extended a time or two depending on how well our savings hold up). Yeah, we know we're an extremely small cap entity and that's not going to make a whole lot of difference but it's something we felt we should do anyway for a couple reasons.

First, we as a corporation do not have paid employees. The only people we give money to are our hosts, our registrar, our CPA, and the revenooers. Which we're going to have to continue doing regardless and which we can currently afford to do for a month or two without dire risk of having to make infrastructure cutbacks. Putting money into us during this nonsense doesn't help much in directly putting food on someone's table or keeping jobs from going poof, so we'd prefer you guys put anything you were going to send us to work where it will help at least a tiny bit in keeping the businesses that your neighbors work at afloat. Which is to say, spend it locally.

Second, we're quite fond of the folks who've chosen to financially support the site and we don't want them to get dinged because of something that wasn't remotely their fault.

Now we're not shutting down the site's subscription functionality. If you feel a desire to contribute anyway, we're happy to oblige and we're not going to tell you that you can't. We're not the bosses of your wallets and it would mean extra work for me when I don't really have time to do much of anything code/admin-wise.

Also, we're only doing this automatically for current and new subscribers; we don't want to hit people who weren't interested with an unsolicited email about subscription expiration when we have to shut the extensions down. They may have quit subscribing or even frequenting the site and it's annoying as all get out to keep getting emails from sites you stopped doing business with on purpose. We're happy to handle it manually, though, if your subscription ended any time since the first of the year. Just drop a comment to this journal entry (NOT to THIS story!) and I'll take care of it as often as I have time (at least once a day).

That's all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled mix of discussion, debate, yelling at each other, and trolling.

(Oh, and you can still submit stories, too! Hint hint! --martyb)

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 19 2020, @05:19PM (20 children)

    Well, if you insist... *bans parent's ipid*

    Seriously though, SN has a way better community than any forum I've ever seen that has anonymous posting and an unwavering commitment to freedom of speech. Without giving anyone the boot except spammers. If best in class isn't good enough for the thickness of your skin, the problem is kind of yours. I'd suggest either growing thicker skin or finding a forum that's okay with shutting down speech you find unpleasant.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @06:57PM (18 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @06:57PM (#984875)

    It's a good site if you think bigotry, racism, and general rudeness are okay. Why not ban the obvious idiots and steer this site back to its techie roots? I mean, there's freedom and then there's idiots.

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @07:48PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @07:48PM (#984886)

      Fuck you, AC. Why do you want to ban blacks and transvestites from making comments? They have as much right to free speech as anyone. Take your censorship over to SlashDot - you'll love it there since you have to submit to a full background check before posting.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @07:59PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @07:59PM (#984889)

        He has to submit to a backend probe too. The aliens have taken over /. Some people like that kind of thing though!

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @08:06PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @08:06PM (#984895)

          He has to submit to a backend probe too. The aliens have taken over /. Some people like that kind of thing though!

          You're not really here for the hunting, are you?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2020, @07:06AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2020, @07:06AM (#987222)

        You do realize that banning bigotry means banning muslims, right?

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 19 2020, @08:46PM (9 children)

      You really want me judging what's offensive and what's not? Because I guarantee you it wouldn't be what you think it should. Therein lies one of the primary problems with censorship. The other main one is that you have zero protection once that box is opened up from people saying you're offensive and demanding you be banned.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @09:06PM (8 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2020, @09:06PM (#984915)

        Not you. We've already seen what you think is okay.

        • (Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 19 2020, @09:19PM

          Yeah, like most folks who think common sense censorship is okay, you're thinking your version is the only correct one. The problem is, you aren't going to be the one in charge of it, so be very careful what you ask for.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Sunday April 19 2020, @11:20PM (4 children)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 19 2020, @11:20PM (#984951) Journal

          Not you. We've already seen what you think is okay.

          So cognitive dissonance right there. You're talking to one of the administrators. Any implemented censorship would be more likely to reflect his viewpoint than yours. Yet you're still pushing for it.

          • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday April 21 2020, @05:21PM (3 children)

            by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday April 21 2020, @05:21PM (#985488)

            Yes, but the ACs might all be different people, so it might not be cognitive dissonance, just AC dissonance. :)

            • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday April 26 2020, @02:20PM (2 children)

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 26 2020, @02:20PM (#987289) Journal
              I based it all on that single quote from that single post. Unless we have AC collectives crafting single posts now by committee or something, it's likely all written by one source. That mini first sentence "Not you." indicates all by itself that the AC implicitly approves of the censoring scheme, and thinks TMB shouldn't be running it. Cognitive dissonance demonstrated.

              It's a typical, clueless authoritarian impulse - approve of some terrible plan because you instinctively know only the Right People (TM) will enforce it while ignoring how things work in the real world. If the real world worked that way, then where did all those wrong-thinking people and their oft-elected leaders come from?
              • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday April 27 2020, @12:33AM (1 child)

                by RS3 (6367) on Monday April 27 2020, @12:33AM (#987413)

                Thank you so much for explaining. It makes perfect sense, and I completely agree with you (now, in word choices.)

                What I meant (less seriously than this discussion probably is) was: not that many ACs were collaborating, but they all have the name "Anonymous Coward" and we don't know which AC is which, how many of them there are, who's posting what, etc. Sometimes they flamewar among themselves, and for all we know, it's just 1 person wasting the rest of our time. Or 2, or 3, or...

                I didn't see it as dissonance because most people have some kind of idea of how they want things, laws, societal rules, and they want them enforced. Just not by TMB. Well, maybe TMB can be the enforcer, and others could make the decisions, like in the legal system where you have judges, and jailers.

                Anyway, I'm probably too tired to write intelligently, so if this doesn't make sense, sorry, I'll update it tomorrow. Thanks again.

                • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday April 27 2020, @05:46AM

                  by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 27 2020, @05:46AM (#987468) Journal

                  I didn't see it as dissonance because most people have some kind of idea of how they want things, laws, societal rules, and they want them enforced. Just not by TMB.

                  The dissonance comes in ignoring who will be enforcing those things. I can't help but notice that a lot of the rule enforcers are people with radically different belief systems than myself and often have deep moral failings or engaged conflicts of interest. My view is that if you aren't planning how to constrain people with interests and ideologies hostile to your own when they are enforcing the rules you want enforced, then you're doing it wrong.

                  I think that's a large part of the current hubbub surrounding Trump. There's a bunch of delusional authoritarians who want all kinds of rules for society, just not enforced by that guy. So rather than reviewing their basic axioms that helped lead to all this convenient, abusable rule creation, they're treating this as some affront to reality that will correct itself shortly and never happen again. My view is that it'll happen again and again and again - there will be more Trumps, more Obamas, more Clintons, more Bushes.

        • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @01:00AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @01:00AM (#984971)

          Unfortunately, him. Especially him. His thoughts are highly offensive. More, he speaks PERL!!1oneone!

          • (Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday April 24 2020, @12:36AM

            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday April 24 2020, @12:36AM (#986303) Journal

            To be fair you can start a speech to text recorder, drop your skirt/pants/what have you, and blast a long fart into the mic, save the output into somefile.pl and the result will likely do something. Perl looks like modem noise.

            --
            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday April 19 2020, @11:18PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 19 2020, @11:18PM (#984950) Journal

      Why not ban the obvious idiots

      Then where would you go? There's a huge sea of forums that practice such censorship. You could have gone long ago to those sites and not have to worry about "obvious idiots". Yet here you are.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by cmdrklarg on Monday April 20 2020, @05:02PM (2 children)

      by cmdrklarg (5048) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 20 2020, @05:02PM (#985142)

      That's what the moderation system is for. Virtually all of the stupid shit gets modded down to -1 pretty quickly from what I've seen.

      --
      The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday April 21 2020, @05:18PM (1 child)

        by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday April 21 2020, @05:18PM (#985487)

        > Virtually all of the stupid shit gets modded down to -1 pretty quickly...

        Yes, but so do valid opinions. And "karma scores" along with it.

        Mod system abuse has been discussed here before. I've seen no changes since then.

        I started a much longer post, but I just don't have the time nor stomach for it, and I have much higher priority things I need to be doing...

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @04:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @04:49AM (#985005)

    So you cleaned the DB and lost my fucking token. This is the big problem with internet security, how the hell a is anyone supposed to remember a PW thrown out 6+ years ago with at least 5 computers since. Fuck the whole damn bunch of you fucking Trump Zombies.