Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[Maj]

People are stupid if they think that someone young enough to watch Peppa the Pig will either watch unofficial episodes, or see Momo and do what it says. But I guess believing stupid shit is what happens when adults use the internet without children's supervision.

[RobbyPants]

I learned about the hoax yesterday morning when I saw some indirect meme and looked it up. Everything I could find on the first page of Google was that it's a hoax. Any video I looked up online only yielded various news organizations warning parents before it came out this was a hoax. I could find zero original videos on this.

Then, of course, my ten-year-old comes home freaking out about this Momo thing. It took a bit for me to talk her down from it and that it's a hoax, because her friend totally saw a video with Momo talking directly to the kids, despite the fact that no such video seems to exist.

[Maj]

We've been seeing the pre-hoax news articles for about a week. When I asked my son about it (he's 10, too), he just said, "Close the page, Mom. That's just creepy."

[Shrapnel]

Yeah, I was there on /x/ to see the Momo hoax evolve.

... what heinous sin did I commit that warranted seeing that?

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I have more pictures of Momo, I just can't post them here.

[Thaluikhain]

So, not connected to Momo, the Missouri Monster then. Good to know.

[erik]

This momosteria was mentioned as a topic among my gaming friends on Wednesday. There was some confusion.

[angelfromanotherpin]

For my own diabolical purposes, I'd like to see the OG video of MoMo. I suspect that this is made up/overblown a la Slenderman or the Clown Thing or that D&D is satanic cult but I figured what the hell.

My Google-fu is failing me.

This video is making the rounds on Facebook. It might be what you're looking for?

edit: Dang, that got deleted fast. Here's a version on Youtube.

[Prak]

Working on a cyberpunk game, I'm working out how corporations could start exerting control on society the level of a government, and this has led me to wonder-

Do prosecutors have complete discretion over whether to file charges or not? Could murder become de facto legal in a region if a prosecutor just never chose to pursue charges for alleged murder?

[Orca]

Working on a cyberpunk game, I'm working out how corporations could start exerting control on society the level of a government, and this has led me to wonder-

Do prosecutors have complete discretion over whether to file charges or not? Could murder become de facto legal in a region if a prosecutor just never chose to pursue charges for alleged murder?

There's still civil prosecutions - you can bring criminal charges with them, it's not just for suing people. Also while it would depend on the jurisdiction I expect most would have means to remove a prosecutor who refused to do their job.

[Blade]

One of the problem with the concept of a corp acting as a government is that corp have little reason to do so. Corps have little to gain by running (and paying for) many of the government provided services. They'd rather be a subcontractor and get paid to do it, lobbying so that the contracts allow them to do everything their way without being responsible for any failure.

[Chamomile]

A thriving middle class leads to greater growth of overall societal wealth which means a higher level of absolute wealth for the people at the top, plus great enough societal stability that the odds they will lose their to sudden social upheaval are basically nil. Yet, corporations pursue ever-greater wealth inequality and social stratification anyway, torching their own future source of skilled employees and jeopardizing the health of the society they depend upon to survive. Just because a "power"-grab would actually leave a corporation in a worse position, nailed down to assets that are actually liabilities, doesn't mean a corporation won't do it.

[Iduno]

Working on a cyberpunk game, I'm working out how corporations could start exerting control on society the level of a government, and this has led me to wonder-

Do prosecutors have complete discretion over whether to file charges or not? Could murder become de facto legal in a region if a prosecutor just never chose to pursue charges for alleged murder?

There's still civil prosecutions - you can bring criminal charges with them, it's not just for suing people. Also while it would depend on the jurisdiction I expect most would have means to remove a prosecutor who refused to do their job.

Yeah, that seems more like something the whole office (or at least the people in charge) would need to be involved in. The newbie in the office gets the job, completely unprepared, without the evidence available, and "somehow" the open-and-shut case just can't prove the person is guilty.

[Prak]

I imagine that some part of it would be something like "Step 1- build self-contained facility that's large enough to be its own city. Step 2- actually get incorporated as a city, likely primarily through bribery. Step 3- get control over the DA's office and your populace that is probably largely employed by the company to begin with, such that you can choose what get's prosecuted and prevent efforts to remove the DA."

I mean, I'm also positing that these mega corporation cities are at least partially an evolution of companies bringing back company script through loopholes (like "you can be paid in legal tender, or you can take your pay on a company card only usable at the store, but any purchase made with the card gets a 10% discount") and already diverse companies like Amazon and Walmart expanding the services available in their facilities to give their employees less and less reason to ever spend money outside the company.


I don't know what order it would need to be, but I could see large companies like Amazon, Google and Walmart doing the following-

• lobbying for fewer restrictions and less responsibility for harm and injury that occurs in their warehouses (pretty sure Amazon is already doing this)
• acquiring ever more diverse services and products, both to offer to customers, and to enhance their internal structure, like Walmart acquiring Blackwater to run its corporate security and introducing some basic habitation in its largest facilities, ranging from those sleep cubicles in Japan to actual studio apartments. (Google and Facebook are already trying to make company towns a thing again)
• issuing private currencies and incentivizing employees to take their pay in those (old idea, paying employees in company scrip is illegal, but I could see a company like Walmart trying to get it past the law by making it optional to take your pay in that manner, and with a business friendly enough government, it could work)
• building ever larger facilities, that contain some form of residential portion and a portion that supports that residential portion (Amazon's giant tower in Seattle or wherever was going to be like this, and technically still will be, Amazon just won't be using it as HQ)

With enough business-friendly legislation and shady dealing, already large companies might be able to create indoor cities that are effectively sovereign ground with what might amount to a labor force of serfs. As they do this, they can probably cook their books more easily (I don't know what the exact ins and outs of a company scrip might be, but I imagine they can issue whatever amount they want and then say that they get back whatever amount, and as it's a private currency the IRS probably can't verify that?), thus reducing their corporate taxes even more, and then still hiding profits. Tanking the actual economy even more while they consolidate their personal power and build an internal economy that probably interacts with those of other burgeoning megacorps with no real need to interact with the actual economy.

Of course this eventually leads to corporate city states and the collapse, either actual or de facto, of true government. Whether governments collapse entirely, or hang on in a vestigial form, presidents and prime ministers becoming figureheads that enact the whims of councils of CEOs, and able to enforce at best a sort of frontier justice a la the Texas Rangers in the spaces between corporate cities, probably largely depends on the whim of the companies.

I mean, this all relies on a lot of doom and gloom speculation, but, y'know, dystopias.

[Iduno]

I imagine that some part of it would be something like "Step 1- build self-contained facility that's large enough to be its own city. Step 2- actually get incorporated as a city, likely primarily through bribery. Step 3- get control over the DA's office and your populace that is probably largely employed by the company to begin with, such that you can choose what get's prosecuted and prevent efforts to remove the DA."

I mean, I'm also positing that these mega corporation cities are at least partially an evolution of companies bringing back company script through loopholes (like "you can be paid in legal tender, or you can take your pay on a company card only usable at the store, but any purchase made with the card gets a 10% discount") and already diverse companies like Amazon and Walmart expanding the services available in their facilities to give their employees less and less reason to ever spend money outside the company.


I don't know what order it would need to be, but I could see large companies like Amazon, Google and Walmart doing the following-

• lobbying for fewer restrictions and less responsibility for harm and injury that occurs in their warehouses (pretty sure Amazon is already doing this)
• acquiring ever more diverse services and products, both to offer to customers, and to enhance their internal structure, like Walmart acquiring Blackwater to run its corporate security and introducing some basic habitation in its largest facilities, ranging from those sleep cubicles in Japan to actual studio apartments. (Google and Facebook are already trying to make company towns a thing again)
• issuing private currencies and incentivizing employees to take their pay in those (old idea, paying employees in company scrip is illegal, but I could see a company like Walmart trying to get it past the law by making it optional to take your pay in that manner, and with a business friendly enough government, it could work)
• building ever larger facilities, that contain some form of residential portion and a portion that supports that residential portion (Amazon's giant tower in Seattle or wherever was going to be like this, and technically still will be, Amazon just won't be using it as HQ)

With enough business-friendly legislation and shady dealing, already large companies might be able to create indoor cities that are effectively sovereign ground with what might amount to a labor force of serfs. As they do this, they can probably cook their books more easily (I don't know what the exact ins and outs of a company scrip might be, but I imagine they can issue whatever amount they want and then say that they get back whatever amount, and as it's a private currency the IRS probably can't verify that?), thus reducing their corporate taxes even more, and then still hiding profits. Tanking the actual economy even more while they consolidate their personal power and build an internal economy that probably interacts with those of other burgeoning megacorps with no real need to interact with the actual economy.

Of course this eventually leads to corporate city states and the collapse, either actual or de facto, of true government. Whether governments collapse entirely, or hang on in a vestigial form, presidents and prime ministers becoming figureheads that enact the whims of councils of CEOs, and able to enforce at best a sort of frontier justice a la the Texas Rangers in the spaces between corporate cities, probably largely depends on the whim of the companies.

I mean, this all relies on a lot of doom and gloom speculation, but, y'know, dystopias.

Those are all a good start. See also: the original Robocop movies.

[Thaluikhain]

Do you mean companies deliberately creating their own cities? Because, sure, you can run with that, but I'd also envisage that as something that just happens.

Some place is worth investing in for some reason, so you build there, and then you need somewhere for your workers to live so you diversify, and you then diversify into services. Someone in middle management decides to edge competitors out and gets a monopoly. Nobody likes government regulations at the best of times, so kindly stay out. Only, the people that matter don't really care about that, they are looking into whatever made the location profitable in the first place, and then a city of their own they are supposed to managed appeared when they weren't looking.

The main difference being that the city's problems stem from apathy and indifference rather than deliberate malice set up when the blueprints were drawn.

[Maj]

Amazon is a great example for this. They set up shop in a shitty corner of Seattle, and totally revitalized it. Shops, offices, housing... Next came the demands of the city to expand infrastructure to the area. The city - at taxpayer expense - put in new roads and bus lines for better access.

Fast forward and Amazon owns 40% of the office space in the city. When laws that they don't like get passed, they are repealed because Amazon has that much clout. It doesn't take much imagination to extrapolate this into the formation of a corporate city.

[Iduno]

Also, Disney World, which has its own government.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/techno ... overnment/

[Stahlseele]

Working on a cyberpunk game, I'm working out how corporations could start exerting control on society the level of a government, and this has led me to wonder-

Do prosecutors have complete discretion over whether to file charges or not? Could murder become de facto legal in a region if a prosecutor just never chose to pursue charges for alleged murder?

There's still civil prosecutions - you can bring criminal charges with them, it's not just for suing people. Also while it would depend on the jurisdiction I expect most would have means to remove a prosecutor who refused to do their job.

Kill him. Defence:"HE would not have put me into jail for this!"

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Is it illegal for your boss to change your schedule without notice, or is that just folklore? State is Iowa if it's important.

[deaddmwalking]

Is it illegal for your boss to change your schedule without notice, or is that just folklore? State is Iowa if it's important.

No, not generally. If you were fired for not working a shift that you were not included on when the schedules were published, you probably could show that you were NOT fired for cause, so you might qualify for unemployment on those grounds.

If you can't work the shift they've moved you to you either have to convince them that you're valuable enough that they should accommodate your preferred schedule, work the schedule they give you, or walk.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I've got a better job lined up so my emotional investment in my current job is very low tbh. I was just curious. I was going to have my first days off for the past month in three days, today they told me I now have shifts on those days. Might take a crap on the floor and quit.

[Iduno]

I've got a better job lined up so my emotional investment in my current job is very low tbh. I was just curious. I was going to have my first days off for the past month in three days, today they told me I now have shifts on those days. Might take a crap on the floor and quit.

I know it's hard to care about your job this close to being free, but don't put your heart into it for them, do it for yourself, for your dignity or whatever. Really get invested, it like you mean it: eat Taco Bell or whatever other complete garbage you can, then take a truly nasty dump on your bosses desk. I mean, c'mon the floor? Like some kind of animal?

Also, probably don't actually do this.

[Thaluikhain]

Second not actually doing that. Can't speak for your position, but whenever I get fed up with those above me, I remember if I do a bad job it's those on the same level as me (or customers) I'm making things hard for.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Eh, I've never even met my coworkers and the older I get the more I despise customers in general.