They only need to overlap at the start and end, meaning the rest of the line can be way off and it’ll still start and stop at the same places. Here’s a quick graph courtesy of WolframAlpha showing three curves with the same start and end point.

Which line is more gradual or smooth really depends on what you mean by those terms.

Another way to visualise it is to imagine a string tied taut between two posts making a straight line. If you add some slack to the string so it’s no longer taut you’ll see the middle curve as it’s pulled down by gravity, but it’s still tied to the same two posts so it starts and ends in the same place as the taut one.

I don’t know about the big bang, but the elephants and turtle are Terry Pratchett. Discworld, Pratchett’s most well-known setting, is a disc shaped world on the back of four elephants on the back of a turtle.

Okay, I’ll simplify. Store advertises three sandwich. You buy three sandwich. You get one sandwich. Store says fees+taxes ate other sandwiches. You say it’s fine, you got sandwich. I say it’s not, store lied.

They absolutely can give a solid number even when a lottery runs in areas with different taxes, they simply choose not to because they make more money that way and for some reason you lack regulation there. See for instance here where the prize money may be partially subjected to income tax, meaning tax varies wildly depending on the winner’s other income:

£10,000 every month for 30 years. […] However, based on tax rules and rates at the date of these Procedures, the monthly payments will not be less than £10,000 after tax.

So there’s three obvious choices: mislead customers, calculate the correct prize after relevant taxes and advertise that, or give a fixed value and eat the cost of any taxes themselves. They chose the first one.

A lottery isn’t necessarily inherently a scam, at least no more than gambling is in general. In practice the odds of winning are pretty poor compared to alternatives but as long as they’re up front about the odds of winning I wouldn’t call that a scam. Eg, this lottery lists the odds of winning each prize, though it would definitely be better if they published those on the main page rather than in the terms. A fairer lottery is possible pretty easily by adjusting the prize values, range of numbers to select, or how many numbers the gambler selects. This would kind of defeat the purpose of most lotteries to raise money for government, but personally I’m for more progressive taxes anyway.

Advertising one prize when the real prize is significantly lower is just lying and not an inherent trait of lotteries.

You’re walking down the street and see a sign in a new sandwich place saying they have a three-for-one deal on, buy any one sandwich and get two sandwiches completely free. Sounds like a great deal, it might be a bit much but you skipped breakfast today and you can always keep one for later anyway, right? So you head inside and think about what you want, maybe you’re cutting back on red meat and you’re tired of chicken so you go with a tuna or cheese sandwich. You get to the counter to pick up your tuna+cheese sandwich, the worker hands over your two freebies and you walk out. Turns out you’re hungrier than you thought so you practically inhale your tuna+cheese, barely savouring the flavour. You reach for your second sandwich but when you unwrap it you discover it’s not the same as the one you ordered; it’s bread with a thin smear of butter, technically it is a sandwich but it’s definitely not what you wanted or expected when you ordered.

Did you get scammed? Are you okay with that since you still got one sandwich even though you chose that vendor because they advertised three?

It really shouldn’t be a controversial statement to say that lying to people to get their money is wrong. If it really makes no difference as you’re suggesting why can’t they just advertise the real value instead?

That seems incredibly scammy to me. They’re pretending the prize is double what it actually is and then claim even more of that back as taxes. If the actual prize money is only 20% of what you’re advertising that’s dishonest at best.

Where I am lottery winnings are tax-free and without an insane hidden 50% “claimed your winnings” fee. What they advertise is what you get if you win.

There definitely is already a resale market for Steam accounts, mostly used by cheaters or scammers who want a legitimate-looking account with no game or trade bans.

It’s so weird to me that there was once a “correct” hand for writing, people writing with their non-dominant hand would just be so messy. For some reason I have one really vivid memory of learning to write in school, it must have been the very first writing lesson we had. Everyone had a pencil on the desk in front of them then the teacher asked everyone to pick it up, then it was something along the lines of “the hand you just used to pick up the pencil is your writing hand, whenever you write you should use that hand”.

I remember being so anxious about that, what if I’d picked up the pencil with the wrong hand and I’m actually left-handed and forcing myself to write with the wrong hand? It definitely didn’t help that for the entirety of my school life after that my handwriting was awful, barely legible to me and completely incomprehensible to anyone else. In one maths lesson I was even shamed by the teacher in front of the entire class because my 4s and 9s looked too similar so she struggled to mark my work, that was very fun and definitely helped improve my handwriting (/s).

I really am right-handed, I’m just bad with a pencil. After school I went into software so I barely ever write on paper anyway.

I’m sure there was a point I was going to make with this story before I started writing it.

Seems reasonable enough to me if you bought a ticket for a train which doesn’t have assigned seating, which is pretty common. Just choose your seat as you board the same way you would with a bus.

That’s bullshit. You’re not absolved of all wrongdoing because you used a computer as a middle man.

Apple chose to implement AI for this purpose, they are responsible for all output.

They removed a comment essentially saying “I’m Canadian” as misinformation? Do Canadians not exist?

You’re taking it too seriously. It’s a humour comic, everything before the punchline is to set up the punchline.

Okay? If you want to “correct” people who didn’t ask you go ahead, but all you’re really doing is pointlessly derailing conversations. And if you cry about it when people call you out for being a dick that’s more than a little pathetic.

“Correcting” someone in a casual setting when they clearly communicated their ideas in a way that was understood by the majority of the audience without issue is pedantry, or more specifically linguistic prescriptivism. If their meaning was unclear you’d ask what they meant to say, when you tell someone what they meant to say you obviously understood them and are just being pedantic.

You have stated multiple times that you have a vested interest in pushing the narrative that Funko isn’t the bad guy but somehow I’m the one that’s not arguing in good faith? Yeah, sure, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.

Making a fraud claim to a DNS provider and hosting service is the nuclear option. Literally the only thing either of those providers can do is to effectively take the entire site down. They intentionally made a misleading fraud claim instead of a DMCA takedown notice so they could force it through quicker. And you’ve completely ignored the fact that they’re relying on AI to identify these “offending” pages, and the fact that they threatened the owner’s parent. The non-apology statement they made is just icing on the cake.

You disagreeing does not make it a bad analogy.

If you hire someone to do a job and the process of doing that job results in someone being killed then yes, you absolutely are to blame, but that’s not what happened here. They didn’t hire someone to protect themselves, they contracted an AI company to delete anything which could paint them in a bad light then made claims of fraud through nonstandard channels to force their way through red tape then threatened parents of their victim when they were called out.

If you hire a hitman you’re still on the hook for murder. Making someone else do your dirty work does not absolve you. Especially when you’re a corporation and literally everything you do is through people you pay.

Lucky you, you must have grown up very middle-class. The cops in the UK are just as shitty as they are elsewhere.

As a kid I was walking a friend home when some cunt came up behind us and attacked me, busted my nose open then ran away. The cops must have waited at least a week to follow up, by which time they couldn’t do anything because I didn’t have a good enough way to identify the attacker.

Some years later I’m delivering newspapers, there’s one particular street where I always get harassed in some way. It escalates until one day I’m literally jumped by three fully grown adults, absolute scum attacking a kid on the street. I call the cops as soon as possible afterwards and they actually show up, but as I’m sitting crying in the back of their car they strongly encourage me to drop it, some excuse about how they’ll all deny it so it’s not worth investigating. I’m young and naive so I listen to them, but I’ve regretted that ever since.

Yes, in a way. My understanding is that in the US instead of giving less fortunate people the money to buy what they need they get given tokens which can only be used for specific types of items. Obviously it’d be a lot cheaper to skip that extra admin cost and give the money directly instead of maintaining an entirely separate type of currency, but you can’t trust those filthy poors to know what they need. And hygiene products are one thing they don’t need, apparently.

Ah, you’re right. I think I see what happened there, I hit those links from a sidebar in a community with href="[email protected]"which breaks if you’re on a post page instead of the community page. Easily fixed though, I’ll ping the mods of that community.