ilinamorato

I've seen one of those bases on a truck, too—using an angle grinder on it would be quite impressive. They're made of very thick metal, at least anywhere a human can reach.

Unlike the totally un-bombable tanker ships and pipelines we use now.

Money is the surest way to get impunity, but not the only way. You could also become a cop.

This isn't about the email marketers. I think you've got it in your head that this one guy is a scummy email marketer when he's really just trying to let people who have opted in to getting email from him know when he has more stuff for sale.

Believe it or not, there are other uses for email lists that aren't spam.

How is Amazon preventing customers from signing up? How even could they?

When Amazon scrapes the seller's website for listing information and then circumvents the seller's own storefront, they're not giving the customer the information that (1) the seller has a website at all, or (2) the seller has a mailing list. This means that the customer will just never find out that information without looking for it, despite clearly being interested in the seller's work (as they're purchasing from the seller). It's Amazon inserting themselves into the process so that they can skim some money off the top at best, or extort the seller for access to their customers at worst. And all of this while the seller has created the mailing list specifically to prevent such corporate malfeasance.

What he is saying is that he doesn’t get the customers email from the sale, to which he’d start to send marketing emails.

"customers never get to interact with my website, they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list. They have no idea who I am as an artist or what I stand for," Montes-Tarazas said."

That's not what he said.

You know, what pretty much every company does when you buy something.

Pretty much every big company, yes. Small businesses are pretty careful with that sort of thing, though, because unless they want to be dependent upon Facebook or Instagram or whatever for their entire lives, they have to not make their customers upset.

“Not being exposed to me, the ‘artist’” is a perfectly valid reason, and one I would agree with. But the mailing list excuse rings hollow to me.

"customers never get to interact with my website, they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list. They have no idea who I am as an artist or what I stand for," Montes-Tarazas said."

they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list

Democracy dies in darkness, and the oligarch running the Post bought it so that he could turn off the lights.

"Mailing list" is not "marketing." It's all opt-in. Montes-Tarazas wants his customers to be able to interact with him directly, without going through a big tech monopoly that can pull the rug from underneath him or demand a ransom at any time.

just another capitalist

He's working within the system that he lives in, and doing it ethically.

Oh, absolutely--but back then it was just normal, ordinary platform decay, not the sparkling AI hellscape of today.

Office has been Microsoft 365 for five years now. They added "Copilot" to the name at some point last year, but it's been M365 for a while.

Quite a bummer. We'll just have to go with "one-quarter impulse."

If this is true,

I'm not sure what could be unbelievable about this. The date of the last snowfall in NYC is pretty easy to track down, and you could pretty easily find the place on Street View and see if it matches the photo. This photo was taken from the crosswalk across Park Ave at 70th. Facing southwest, incidentally.

About the only thing you can't easily confirm in the photo is the date it was taken, but looking at the dirt level on the snowbanks and the state of the melt/thaw cycle of the slush on the road, I'd say it's easily been a week since the snow in that photo fell. So even if it wasn't taken after this current snowstorm (which would be a weird thing to lie about), it's certainly plausible that it was taken a week or so after some snowstorm.

I'm not the OP (I don't even live in NYC). It took me about ninety seconds to figure all of that out.

proves a ton about the new Mayor selling out.

He's made remarkable progress, actually. Every news article about him is something along the lines of "Mamdani fulfills another two campaign promises before lunch." It's been pretty remarkable to watch. Again, I'm not a New Yorker, so all of this is just the news that's made it to me; the reality may well be even greater.

New York City is huge, though, with a lot of problems; and he's been in office for five weeks (one of which seems to have been fully dominated by a state of emergency). You can't fix everything in a city of that size even in four years, let alone five weeks. And it seems like most of the problems he's been working on so far have been more directly impactful to people's survival; stuff that's lower on Maslow's hierarchy.

If he puts up a few months with no meaningful wins, or does something clearly corrupt, then maybe I'll start considering him a sellout. But in the meantime, I'd say he's earned a significant amount of goodwill.