Only tangentially related, but: I'm a school bus driver and a very popular name for kids these days is "Rhys". I really enjoy asking them why they're named after chocolate-covered peanut butter as it drives them crazy.
And to top it all off, in order to preserve the only thing they have left - their freedom - they want to hand the country over to a dictator. It just doesn't get any more oxymoronic than that.
there would be nothing to prevent the 99% from rightfully rising up against the 1%
Except for the other 1% who are trained and equipped to violently suppress the 98%. And if for whatever reason they fail to do the job, the killer robots will do it instead.
and Trump
Lol read up on Bush v. Gore in 2000.
I'm a school bus driver, and one of my weirder experiences is listening to a middle-school boy ripping on some middle-school girl for having "only" ten thousand followers.
nor his manservant, nor his maidservant
"Slaves" in the original, but of course we can't allow any hint of three thousand year old shit not being strictly relevant any more.
He is selling himself as the new messiah.
Aka being weird in front of religious people.
No ... Wingdings.
the barrier for getting Linux to work is too high right now for a very large part of the population
My elderly (late 80s) parents have Windows on their laptops and it would be impossible for them to use it without my regular intervention. I might as well take the plunge and set them up with Linux.
I used to work for a cable company whose name rhymes with "bombast". They offer a wifi service whose name is a derivation of the word "infinity". Most of the hotspots for this wifi service are provided by the Bombast wireless routers that cable customers have in their homes. So if you're a Bombast customer, you're helping to pay the electrical bill and giving up bandwidth in order to provide Infinity wifi.
Another fun Bombast story: the founder, a man who always wore a bowtie, died a few years ago. At a memorial service in his honor, a number of vice presidents and other executives (including my boss at the time) wore bowties. Everyone who wore a bowtie to the service was fired within a week.
Plaintiff Brown not only lost a $50,000 a year gig as an electrician’s assistant, he also “became estranged from his father, who required him to leave the Brown residence,” the suit records.
"Get your racist ass the fuck out of my house." Gotta love it.
Do these people ever just stop for a moment and ask themselves why people react with such disgust when their views are exposed?
It's particularly weird because most (all?) of the racists I've known in my life are constantly looking around for other people that share their views by making dog-whistle comments (or explicitly racist comments for that matter). Like, they're never content to just keep their racism to themselves and are perpetually looking for affirmation from others - if you need that much approval from others, why not adopt views that aren't so abhorrent?
Pepperidge Farm remembers the last couple of years of the Clinton administration when we had an actual budget surplus and all the talk was of what to do with this surplus. But then the "fiscal conservatives" said "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter".
often has trouble understanding
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
God I'm so sick of Musk spa ... wait, what? Actual technology news?
Most of the climate change predictions I've heard in my lifetime have talked about stuff that would happen by 2050 or 2100. It's always been bullshit, just a way of pushing out the consequences beyond a timeframe we can actually conceive of effectively. In reality this shit is already hitting us and accelerating hard.
I used to work for a large corporation and one day I found myself in a meeting with a bunch of female vice presidents where I was the only man there. The presenter was unable to display on the big screen because she didn't have a connector; I happened to have the right kind and loaned it to her.
She said "you're pretty handy to have around." My brain decided that a clever thing to say in response would be "well, I'm pretty well-endowed in the dongle department" and I started to say that before my brain thought better of it and cut me off. So what I actually said was "well, I'm pretty well-endowed". One woman in the room actually guffawed but everybody else managed to ignore it - although I'm willing to bet this story was told later more than a few times.
There's an interesting corollary to this in the school bus world. Beginning in 2004, the EPA started imposing emissions standards on diesel engines and the standards have become increasingly stringent over the years. The standards govern the allowed amounts of NOx (nitrous oxides) and particulate matter to be emitted, but the units measured are per-horsepower-miles, meaning that an engine with twice the horsepower is allowed to emit twice the NOx and twice the particulate matter amounts, which has led to bus engines that have much more power than their counterparts from twenty years ago did - despite this added power being largely unnecessary for hauling kids around at relatively low speeds.
And importantly, the EPA diesel engine standards do not in any way govern CO2 output, so today's school bus fleet is emitting far more of it than twenty years ago.
Republicans keep their hold on power by systematically disenfranchising voters who disagree with their policies. In a perfect world, voting for a third-party candidate that has no chance to win might have some positive impact; in our world, it means you're doing the Republicans' work for them.
Just because most people don't seem to know this: Comcast's wifi service Xfinity is actually mostly fed by the routers Comcast cable customers have in their homes. So as a cable customer, you're paying the electric bill and giving up part of your bandwidth to support Xfinity.
I'm a school bus driver and I work with a few Trump-supporting lesbians. It's no mystery why: they really, really hate black people and that hatred blinds them to any possible conception of their own self-interest. For good measure they're also staunchly pro-union.
I saw my first cybertruck in person the other day. It looks incredibly dumb in promotional photos, but it's astonishing how much stupider it looks in traffic surrounded by normal vehicles.
Even if Elon Musk is putting in 100-hour weeks, he's the CEO of five companies, which means being CEO of one company is a half-time gig at most.
If you're doing business with a religious son of a bitch, get ... it ... in ... writing. His word isn't worth shit, not with The Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.
-William S. Burroughs, Advice for Young People
I'm a programmer, and this reminds me of one time when I got a support call about a bug in our app: a "State" picklist with 509 entries (for you non-United Statesians, this is a bit more than the 50 or so states - we sometimes include shit like DC, Puerto Rico and Guam in these lists - I should have been seeing), including about 20 different versions of "Louisiana" (like Lousiana, Louisiania etc.) and lots of different countries (occasionally spelled correctly). What had happened was that we originally had a table in the database for listing all the states, and one of our coders got the assignment to add a marriage license module to the app, mirroring the state's paper form that was used for this. Since the "State" line had to accommodate people from other countries, the clerks just used this line to enter whatever country they were from and insisted on the same functionality in the app. Since our database was fully relational, this coder just used the existing "States" table but added new entries in code whenever a user typed out a non-standard thing in the box. Completely hosing every place in the app that used a States picklist.
The real mystery was how this table grew to 509 entries before anyone noticed a problem.
I saw my first real Cybertruck in the wild the other day. It was absolutely incredible ... how fucking stupid that thing looked.
I used to live in Louisiana and had a friend with a house on one of the enormous lakes there. I was hanging out there one day when he decided to move a big slab of steel-sided building that had been lying in the water there for years. He wasn't doing anything productive with it, just wanted it moved 30 or 40 feet to one side, so he hopped into the water with his snorkel-equipped ATV and started fucking with it a little bit. Within ten minutes or so, about 15 of his neighbors had shown up in their snorkel-equipped ATVs (without being called or anything communicative like that) and started "helping", which amounted to everybody randomly nudging the slab from all sides without budging it even an inch. Eventually they gave up and drank beer.
I'm a school bus driver and last year someone drove around my bus on the left while my 8-ways were on and the stop sign was out and hit a student who was crossing the street after exiting the bus, bumping her in the shoulder and running over her foot. I got the plate number but the cops did nothing with it. Passing the bus in the opposite direction is something I even expect these days (although it's still illegal of course) since people are too busy looking at their phones to pay attention, but going around a lit-up bus in the same direction means seeing a stopped school bus and then consciously deciding "fuck them kids".
Fortunately, the girl was not hurt somehow, but it still made me want to fuck that driver up bad.
It's depressing to watch a thumb get old.
I (white boy) visited India in the early '90s and brought back a bunch of rolls of half-Rupee coins as souvenirs. Turns out they were the exact same weight and diameter as US quarters (even down to the number of ridges, which makes me suspect India bought a bunch of used US minting machines to make them), so I started using them at laundromats. The exchange rate at the time was 35 Rs to the dollar, so a load in the US that normally cost $1 was costing me less than 6 cents. I do feel bad for the harassment that actual Indian customers probably ended up receiving, although possibly the owners never noticed or cared.
accusations of being politically aggressive against a high profile defendant
Republicans already launch those accusations regardless of whether or not they have merit. Worrying about what Republicans are going to say is a losing game.
Translation: this story was written by AI but we sorta skimmed it to make sure it wasn't too insane.
He just couldn't handle the pressure of the job.
I told them if they stopped sending supplies that would probably help the process.
Somebody running a business actually needed to be told this?
"We've had a ... time." You're a ... douchebag.
I always say the NFL is the worst sport for athletes because their bodies get destroyed in return for relatively little money (at least for everybody except the superstars), but that's because I always forget about the UFC.
They still make Clinton/Lewinsky jokes on Fox News.
My all-time favorite database table was a table named STATE, meant to store all US states. It had 531 rows.
Fun fact about bridge load limits: school buses are legally allowed to ignore them. While this might seem insane given that the point of a school bus is to transport children safely, the posted load limit on a bridge isn't the weight which will cause the bridge to collapse - it's a weight which, if traffic heavier than that were to regularly use the bridge, would cause abnormally high maintenance and repair issues over the long term. Bridges can bear much greater loads than the posted limits without instantly collapsing.
Source: school bus driver who got a question about this on the test for his CDL endorsement and looked it up after going WTF?
And fracking wastewater.
My ancient macbook has a cd drive, but it stopped recognizing the drive years ago and of course there's no physical eject button. It Just Works!