I know that COVID isn’t regarded to be a serious disease if you’re vaccinated and reasonably healthy, but I had mental fogginess for about 2 months after my infection.
I mostly seemed outwardly okay during that time, but it was a tremendous effort to just do the bare minimum.
I hope he ducks out if there’s even a fraction of those types of symptoms.
There you have it.
When I’ve been in OP’s situation, I filed a complaint with the FCC, performed a whois lookup on their site to send emails to the abuse/spam emails of their DNS registrar and host and inspected the email headers to email their email provider’s abuse/spam account(s). I’ve not yet had cause to reach out to my attorney general’s office when I’ve had a company violate CAN-SPAM, but it’s an option.
I also make sure each company knows there’s a pending CAN-SPAM complaint. I keep it convivial, but serious. “Hey, just letting you know that one of your clients is violating your terms of service and the law! A complaint has already been lodged with the FCC. Toodeloo!”
That bit of knowledge tends to shift the interpretation of your complaint from “annoyed nerd” to “someone politely informing you that you’re going to get skull fucked by the long dick of the law if you don’t fix this ASAP”
It may sound sort of excessive, but I’m a bit of a consumer rights absolutist.
It’s also deprivation of rights under color of law, a federal offense.
The fun thing is that this bill would give any president that power.
…. Oh.
But maybe that’s what they want. A president that can shut the border for political points would decimate industry. These tend to be industries that employ a lot of salt of the earth people, and the owners give a lot of money to Republicans. Republicans use this as a wedge issue and have spent years whipping their base into a frenzy. Giving them the authority to hurt themselves.
A stupid Republican president would shut down the border and harm industry. A smart Republican president would not fall into that trap, but be paralyzed until a new talking point arises.
The base would support populist moves like shutting the border. Donors wouldn’t. Farmers with rotting crops would not.
Shrewd.
Wow, he really slammed him.
Joking aside, I really appreciate that Bernie is speaking up. (And to a lesser extent that the headline doesn’t fall back to that overused descriptor.)
Yeah - it’s about regional control, and defensive positions.
This comment is sort of a continuation of this one, but not exactly. (Sorry about the link to my instance, I’m new and don’t know how to do the thing.)
The U.S. has long needed a bully in the area to prevent the Middle East from being too unified, so the west can get relatively inexpensive access to its oil.
The state of play right now is that the U.S. actually produces enough petroleum for its own needs, but our western allies do not, and supplying them with enough oil will raise the cost to an unacceptable level/a level where they’ll have to channel money to the Middle East (which hates the U.S. for its meddling, or to Russia, which also hates the U.S.)
In about 10-15 years, technology and renewables will advance to a point where oil demand is going to have decreased to the point where the U.S. can supply all of its needs and those of its western allies without jacking the price up.
That means the U.S. won’t need a bully. But it will mean that the U.S. will cut funding to Israel, and more or less stop coming to their defense. Israel’s plan is to push out every non-Jew, using Zionism as an excuse for awful statecraft, and they’re going to push their borders to easily defensible geographic areas.
Once they do that, they’re going to basically become North Korea of the Middle East - armed to the teeth and hard to get into. Because if they don’t, everyone they’ve been bullying for the past hundred years (yes, this started before the declaration of statehood), is going to wipe them from the map - potentially leading to them launching the nukes they keep pretending they don’t have, so they don’t have to undergo international monitoring.
Assuming, of course, the plot by other countries to destabilize the U.S. fails and U.S. is still major player by the time Israel’s plan is accomplished. If the destabilization effort succeeds, we may see a full scale war against Israel before their aims are achieved.
That’s my take on it, anyway. They won’t stop because they don’t think they can stop, due to how horrible they’ve been. (At the behest of the U.S., who will begin dropping them once their usefulness has ended.)
Mind you, the complaint from Israel is not that Adidas is engaging in the revival effort/advertising campaign. Their specific complaint was that Adidas picked Bella Hadid as the face of it.
Bella Hadid, who has not publicly said anything negative about Israel. Whose only “offenses” are that she’s half Palestinian, and that she’s shared messages on social media that condemn all murder, (which explicitly includes condemning the murder of Israelis in that statement).
Sure, she supports the right to a homeland by Palestinians, but that’s not explicitly a dig at Israel. It seems like she’s taken great pains to not condemn an eminently condemnable country that has personally wronged her family, and now, her personally.
It seems like Israel is throwing their weight around to harm her career and erase the achievements of yet another Palestinian. Much harm to her, for no harm mitigation to themselves.
lol. They want folks to step aside so they can seize power and then use that power to subjugate the people they’re threatening violence against. But, you know, later it’ll be institutional violence.
Those fuckers deserve a drink. A Molotov Cocktail.
Heh. “On the house!”
A lack of understanding interpersonal interactions.
And it’s more of a feeling than it is any single behavior. You just… know it when you see it. They simplify too much, think values/morals/rules are shared, obvious, and uniform, and that getting along with others happens solely on their terms. They kind of act like everyone but them is an NPC - not realizing to everyone but them, they’re the NPC.
Honestly kind of excited for the company blogs to start spitting out their disaster recovery crisis management stories.
I mean - this is just a giant test of disaster recovery crisis management plans. And while there are absolutely real-world consequences to this, the fix almost seems scriptable.
If a company uses IPMI (Called Branded AMT and sometimes vPro by Intel), and their network is intact/the devices are on their network, they ought to be able to remotely address this.
But that’s obviously predicated on them having already deployed/configured the tools.
As a (very dumb) teenager, I went through security at Logan in March 2002 with a pair of handcuffs in my jacket.
The women who saw it on x-ray dug them out of my jacket pocket and sort of flamboyantly asked “What’chu need theeeese for?!”
I gave her a shit-eating grin and responded with the same energy that I was visiting my girlfriend.
After a beat, she said “Well alright. Go get your freak on! But put ‘em in your bag next time!”
The truth was that I had actually forgotten they were in that jacket. They just lived in that one pocket my senior year of HS because I was an edgy teenager. I was actually returning from visiting her. We didn’t even use them, and they didn’t get flagged on my departing flight.
I’m glad it was before the DHS militarized the TSA. I do not know how my idiotic teenage self would have dealt with a non-playful encounter.
It’s kind of weird that you can get 30 years for lying to a credit union once, but only 2 for stealing someone’s identity for 30 years.
If the victim is a federally insured financial institution you get a huge jail sentence.
But if the victim is a person with no safety net, it’s a comparative slap on the wrist.
Skewed priorities.
I actually have all of the materials to build a motion activated smart light that interfaces with my home’s automation system for my dog’s food/water dish, but the ADHD goblin stole my fixation on the idea before I could design/print an enclosure for the circuit board and sensor.
Ironically, I got focused on building more storage because the parts were cluttering it up, but one delay led to another and then the weather changed. I don’t have an indoor space for woodworking projects, so now parts from both projects are just more clutter.
They’ll learn to meet people in person so they can’t record them, and coach their HR reps to be more dismissive faster.
Interesting.
I signed up for GD with a semi-throwaway email account - not an actual throwaway, but it’s not tied to my real identity, not used for anything but spammy sites where I didn’t want to give them my info. Every site got a made up name.
Wonder what name they’ll slap on the account when they try to farm “my” data from a broker.
Having a “smarter” car has made me a bit of an angrier driver.
My car has adaptive cruise control, so it automatically paces the vehicle in front of me at a predefined distance. I use it extensively on the highway, and I often have it set for a bit higher than most other drivers go. This means that I know how fast the vehicle in front of me is going and has been for the entire time they’re in front of me.
This has lead me to realize that most other drivers seem to unintentionally (or intentionally) drive in infuriating ways.
Most folks in the left lane don’t maintain a constant speed, even when the lane in front of them is clear. They often go just slightly faster than the speed of “prevailing traffic” - which means they slow down when passing vehicles (often as slow as 10mph under the speed limit), and speed up quite dramatically when vehicles do get tired of them and move to pass - very often blocking would-be passers.
At best, I view these drivers to be inattentive. At worst, I envision them to be wannabe cops, enforcing their vision of highway traffic on others.
I wonder if they feel the same sense of satisfaction expressed in the above meme?
I feel like I fully lack the words to describe what I mean here, although I’m confident in my understanding of the idea. (Which is to say, please give me charity when untangling my rambling.)
I share your sentiment and I’ve been thinking about this the past few days.
I’ve read in a few places that Musk is trying to turn twitter into a ‘one-app’ in the same way that WeChat is. The common pushback against that is that we already have that - it’s the web browser. The web browser isn’t going anywhere.
But turning the browser into a closed ecosystem that Google gets to set the standard for, harvest the data for, advertise through, and ensure that users are locked in to their version of the experience/data that they collect essentially makes Chrome the one-app.
In much the same way that google killed XMPP, Microsoft used its weight to hamstring open document formats - this seems like an effort to thread a rope around the neck of the open internet and use google’s considerable market share to close off the open internet.
Somewhat ironically, we may find ourselves in search of a ‘new, open internet’ if corporations continue to define our current internet.
Maybe we’ll call it “Web 1.0.”
I knew something once. It was awful.
My mom used to talk in code a lot for no fucking reason. She’d throw out the weirdest segues and irrelevant stories. When I (barely) graduated from a gifted kids high school, she jumped from telling me she was proud of me, to telling me that when my sister was little, all her teachers told her that she should be “tested” - heavily implying it was for learning disabilities - and added that “none of [her] babies are retarded.”
2 things - that sister had dyscalculia and never got beyond an associates degree because she kept failing math. And it took until my mom died to figure out she was also talking about me - and every one of my siblings.
When going through my mom’s things, I found out that she ignored the advice of several teachers and school counselors to get me tested for ADHD. Because she didn’t want a ‘damaged’ kid.
That sounds completely awful. He has my sympathy.
At some point before the healing brush and patch tools were available, I saw an entire porn gallery (heh, remember when porn came in galleries?) of pixel perfect stitches where someone had joined waists to waists, to create a bunch of concatenated top/top, bottom/bottom images in front, back, and front/back configurations of a naked woman.
Because this was the early days of the internet, all I’d seen was gross, taboo, or unsettling stuff. I was sort of immune to it, but this was definitely my first “confused boner” situation. I still remember my absolute bewilderment. I was way more unsettled by that than goatse or whatever.
He maintained that Republicans are “still the majority party,”
Are they?
I’m not questioning the numerical advantage, but more the insinuation they’re a single party and somehow capable of governance.
Don’t get me wrong, the democrats are also just a bunch of affiliated ideologies in a trenchcoat, but their body politic isn’t being steered toward a flight of stairs by a few wayward feet in this baba yaga political trenchcoat.
Good thing T-Mobile just upped my bill, so they can afford to buy up their competitors!
Can’t wait until it’s only 3 companies that just charge the most they can possibly charge.
They have teeth. But half of the people who decide whether or not they pursue charges against someone are republican appointees.
So, you know… teeth, but corrupted leadership.
And the Democratic Party needs to pull its head out of its ass and embrace its base, rather than smugly scheme in ways that are ruining lives.
I have no problem with Biden’s job as president. In fact, I got into a big argument with someone a few weeks ago because they keep parroting anti-Biden propaganda from astroturfed pro-Palestine social media groups.
Biden has been doing a great job for the most part, on a number of fronts.
But I’m sort of bittersweet on that, because the harder I look, the more I see the illusion of choice, and an intentional effort to barely keep up with the will of the people.
2016, Bernie vs Clinton. He had the votes, but the party pulled some superdelegate shenanigans to give it to Clinton. And with the same confidence of someone who had just been handed a layup in the primary, she managed to smugly fumble the presidency by a tiny margin.
Post 2020 - Democrats had a majority, and instead of doing things the populous wanted, they wrung their hands about two candidates the Democratic Party had helped elect - Sinema and Manchin - and whether or not they were going to block bills.
The other day I did a deep dive into Elissa Slotkin - a candidate so unlikeable she had to move to a much more certain democratic district when districts were redrawn. When the senate seat came up, the Democratic Party cut deals with more liberal candidates who are vastly more likable, to get them to not run in the primary. So now Michigan is going to wind up with an unwanted centrist that used to be an ‘analyst’ for the CIA during the Iraq war. She’s going to pretend to be a democrat while being the same sort of heel the Sinema or Manchin was.
That’s just the people. In their post 2020-majority they could have done so much legislatively that they didn’t even bother considering - like campaign finance reform or expanding the courts, or even changing the rules around judicial nominees to prevent future shenanigans, but that would impact their bottom line or their ability to inspire panic at election-time. They could have strengthened the ACA, but that hurts some of the corporations that donate to them. Or do things to help people so that their rights wouldn’t be at risk - like codifying Roe, instead of allowing it to continue to be a wedge issue that destroys lives, but gets people to vote.
The Democratic (and Republican) Party is playing us all.
I’m not disaffected with Biden. I’m disaffected with a political party that nakedly fucks around to preserve the status quo, rather than embracing their base and winning with an encouraged and engaged populous. They lack the mandate to lead because they only desire to govern. (In contrast to the Republicans which lack the mandate to lead, are unable to govern, and only desire power and to abuse the government for personal gain.)
So go ahead, give me the downvotes.
This wouldn’t be an issue if we had ranked choice and a coalition government instead of this ‘winner take all’ nonsense that just incentivizes entrenchment rather than inspiration. But, you know, that doesn’t help the businesses that are political parties, so they ain’t gonna vote on it.
The ruling happens after the act. Who knows what justices we’ll have by then.
My wife shared this with me yesterday, but I didn’t see it:
Somebunny is gonna learn those things aren’t windows-based today!
I’m so disappointed this didn’t go to trial.
Trial would have meant discovery, and public disclosure of findings, along with potentially more discovery and/or charges if the trial process reveals anything more to look into.
I wonder what secret they have that’s worth a quarter of a billion dollars.
(High confidence they will try to appeal in one of the Trump judge districts. The verdict might get lowered to $1 or something dumb.)
My new big fear is not that the democrats will fumble this, it’s that they will not anticipate that republicans are trying to make it so election officials (read: election deniers) can refuse to certify the election. If neither candidate gets to 270 votes, the Republican controlled house picks the president.
We need the name of those officers and the contact information for every relevant ethics/review/legal committee that can fuck up their lives.
I’m all about ACAB.
But here’s my understanding of it:
U.S. Marshalls (not local PD) were sent to apprehend a man that had weapons when he shouldn’t have. They had not yet reached his house, because he was in his front yard when they approached.
The man opened fire on them from the front yard, and they shot and killed him. They were fired on by someone in the house.
They called for backup, and retreated while the house occupants barricaded themselves. 3 hours later, unable to resolve the situation, they used armored vehicles and ended the standoff without killing additional people.
I guess I don’t think these officers did anything bad in this situation, even though they represent a horrible system.
I wonder if he’ll later say he only implanted people who were already dying with the devices.
I learned recently that in engineering there’s a saying that anyone can build a bridge that will stand, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands.
Which seems dark, but bridges are built on budgets while adhering to aesthetic, material, and site/traffic (on, under, and sometimes over) requirements.
And besides, that ship was between 210 to 257 million pounds, traveling at whatever speed it was going. I’m not a physicist, but I recon that’s enough force to knock down a bridge. (As evidenced.)
A chemical that can’t target cancer cells can be triggered to vibrate in such a way that it destroys cell membranes by a light source that attenuates by about 90% over 1mm of flesh (down to 1% of the original strength at 2mm).
If they could target just cancer cells, it would work for some skin cancers.
Infrared and near infrared transmit a good amount of heat. I imagine that even if they figure out the targeting issue, unless the light to vibration process is highly efficient, the point at which the light source is just burning the patient’s flesh will be reached long before there’s anything but a limited use case.
I guess the mechanism is good to know about, but it’s unlikely to turn into a cure for cancer.
That’s great in theory.
If the Supreme Court chooses to hear the case before the election.
The U.S. has had numerous elections in the past few years held with maps deemed to be unconstitutional because the courts either decided ‘too late’ or did not require those drawing the maps to adhere to a deadline.
In North Carolina, after the 2020 map was tossed, they used it anyway because the state republicans did not offer a new map. When they won big under the illegally gerrymandered map, which included changing the makeup of their state Supreme Court, they redrew the maps to be even more discriminatory - with no normal recourse for citizens to fix them. A federal panel adopted the issue last year, referring it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which despite hearing arguments 8 months ago has so far not issued a ruling.
My confidence level in the rule of law is incredibly low right now.
I have ADHD, anxiety, and trauma.
A solid 75% of everything I’ve ever attempted to do takes more time to do than regular folks because it has to be perfect. And then I may not tell anyone about my efforts because I don’t want the attention. Or if the work is too hard or I’m too scared of revealing I can’t do it all myself, I give up. Assuming, of course, I don’t forget about what I’m working on until the relevance has passed.
It sort of depends on the impact and stupidity of the problem.
If it’s a first time call, and I don’t really know if the problem is me or the company, the voice gets “I need a human” followed by “representative” if it pushes back. If it pushes back a second time, I start scatting and speaking gibberish into the phone, with random pauses built in, so the phone system has no hope of understanding anything I say.
If it’s a multiple call, dumb issue that’s clearly their fault, I immediately begin insulting the automated voice and demand to talk to a human. “I bet you’re running on a Pentium 2, you dumb fuck. Get me a human. You’re not qualified to open doors, let alone answer calls. I want a representative. You can be hacked with a cereal box whistle, you inadequate and poorly executed excuse for taking jobs away from people with families! Speaking of, get me a human, you scab!”
Usually I’m speaking with a raised voice, throwing ever more deranged statements at the bot. I don’t know if it helps, but I enjoy it.
But you’re not. You’re disagreeing with the person while asking leading questions, then arguing against the answers to the questions you asked.
It’s almost like you’re intentionally wasting their effort and mental energy to deal with your gish-galloping.
They have to use STEM cells because other kinds of cells are bad at math.
Maintaining a policy of radical annoyance, I see.