Since the only other likely alternative is a fascist, insurrectionist, felon, rapist who couldn't finish a thought or sentence we've got ourselves a tough spot, but a clear better choice of the two: vote for Biden.
Having our government by a gerontocracy is not going well.
No, the goal is to sleep in silence. When I'm able to put aside my worries and truly rest I don't need any noise or background hum to be completely out.
I only use a short video (under my pillow at mom volume so I can barely hear it) to get to sleep and then I'm usually out for a long time.
I've always felt that much of getting to sleep and what makes it easy to rest is training to some extent. Changing the ambient noise (especially if you move homes) can really screw things up until you get used to the normal noises of the new location. While that happens I'll use something to fuzz the ambient sounds, but I'll actively remove the white nose or background video over time so I acclimate to the new normal.
I consider it a worthwhile goal to be able to sleep without aids, if possible. Most of the real trouble is in my head (or a neighbor with fucking loud music at 2am to be dealt with), so when I have control I seek silence and a mental even keel when possible.
As a kid? Nothing. Just silence.
Today? My tinnitus, quietly humming away.
Now,.if I'm in a very weird mental spot and just can't spin down to rest, I put on The Might Jingles' World of Warships gameplay videos. His English voice just puts me out in moments.
Except the Duchy won the war against the US and brought back a hydrogen bomb. They then used that threat to make the league of micro nations. The bomb didn't work, but the threat of it allowed a tiny nation to gain leverage on the geopolitical stage.
It's a tunnel with electric trains. I volunteer my pasty white ass's house as tribute for this. My city has near zero rail service and I'll take it in a heartbeat.
Yes, the US has been using infrastructure to harm minority communities for generations, but so far this doesn't seem to be the most egregious example of that. The exhaust system being next to a school is the only concern, but only if there's a fire in the tunnel (which should be rare unless Boeing starts making trains).
Either move the exhaust or move the school while you start digging that new higher speed tunnel! Let's go for some real modern transit!
The important piece of this to me is this: She made $1 mil on OnlyFans and $42k/year as a teacher. She wants to be a teacher despite making plenty of money from other sources. This tells me that unless you have other evidence of impropriety she's someone we want in the classroom. It also reinforces my stance, along with plenty of other studies that have been performed, that a universal basic income won't stop people from working.
Pay people better and we'll just keep working because we like it. It's part of being human, but we shouldn't be suffering to survive at the same time.
Georgia apparently would rather put 10 year olds into debt than feed children. It's the best they can do as Christians.
I love the ticket systems in places like Berlin, Helsinki, Heidelberg, and Tampere. They don't use turnstiles at all, just occasional onboard ticket checkers.
It's so much faster for large groups of people to move through the stations so it keeps people moving instead of piling up at a ticket machine, even ones as fast as those in London.
You don't need officers standing guard at turnstiles, just extra onboard sweeps to keep most people honest.
Even better is a whole free system like some cities are going to. LA is having a freeway widening project happening. If the money for that went to their public transit system, they could make it fare free for 20 years at the same price point as "just one more lane, bro" of freeway that will still be a parking lot anyway.
Elections have consequences. This is just the latest step in the FAFO process for Idaho.
First, it was the clinics in the North Idaho, and now the rot is moving southward. More and more women and children will be affected by this attitude of anti humanism that focuses on declaring women property of the state.
Women in Idaho should be looking to move somewhere that doesn't consider them owned by the legislature. Good luck to you if you're stuck in Idaho. The scenery is beautiful, but the rights are contracting.
... because my purchasing power is much lower than two years ago and my wages aren't remotely keeping up with profiteering inflation? Because I have to be very careful around Christmas to not overspend and I get to explain to the kids why there's only a few presents under the tree? They'll be okay with it, but as a person who has children to take care of it, it's crushing to go backwards year to year in what you're able to provide? Because a 3/4 full shopping cart today (not much meat) was $179 today? And we have a fixed rate mortgage! I can't envision the pressures people who are renting or trying to buy a home right now are going through. Anyone saying "it's all good out there!" can get fucked.
She's decided to get to the stage with a jury, attach jeopardy, and then immediately dismiss the case on BS grounds. Because jeopardy was attached (the case was tried, even if in a perfunctory and illegitimate manner), then you can't charge the defendant with the same crime again. This way, she can essentially discharge the crimes permanently.
That does mean she needs to actually get to the trial stage of things. It also means she can use the trial scheduling to keep tripping up the other trials for his crimes in other jurisdictions as she moves her trial dates around to block progress by other judges. She's actively trying to undermine the judiciary, the rule of law, and protect an enemy of the republic.
That's how a mob organization runs. Just FYI.
Ah, so they signed onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact!
There's a CGP Grey video on how it generally works for those with short attention space and/or a need for dry government humor:
That I've had to turn down some really cool overseas job opportunities. I couldn't tell my kids that I even got the job offers because their mother (my ex wife) refuses to consider the move and how we'd need to share the kids time with them overseas.
If I told the kids (now late teens) that their dream of living overseas was stymied so far by their mother's recalcitrance they might disown her, at least for a while.
It really sucks because not only don't I get to take the jobs, but I also have to hide my excitement at even getting the offer from my own family so that I can maintain my kids' relationship with their mother.
Add in that id you don't blow it all, you get to count the interest income. A long term investment gets about 6-7% per year. That's actually more than the teaching job pay.
I've been doing a lot of using, testing, and evaluating LLMs and GPT-style models for generating code and text/prose. Some of it is just general use to see how it behaves, some has been explicit evaluation of creative writing, and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.
It's an impressive piece of technology, but it's not very creative. It's meh. The results are meh. Which is to be expected since it's a statistical model that's using a large body of prior work to produce a reasonable approximation of what it's seen before. It trends towards the mean, not the best.
And he's terrible with money! He needs more money!
George Carlin, how we miss thee.
The planet is burning. Every summer is going to be hotter for the foreseeable future and the priority of conservatives is to make it more dangerous to workers in the heat. The cruelty is the point, and we either unionize, vote, and beat them down to protect ourselves both in life and for the whole planet's environment.
I just today learned that Finland does this as well. It took a while to consider, but it would help people to get paid fair wages, detect corruption, and to generally ensure people are more honest about their finances. Overall, it's a very different approach to what it means to be in a society together.
... And does it actually get enforced by the justice system?
So far the only actual repercussions have come from civil suits, not anything from the DOJ. Between timid leaders, corrupt judges, and infinite appeals you can do anything once your wealth untethers you from the rule of law. Become and oligarch and you're able to do whatever you like as long as you don't hurt the money and power of other rich people. The nation writ large can go hang.
He’d apparently rather have his assets seized by the New York attorney general.
He can use the footage of the sheriffs locking up his properties during the seizures to fund raise. It doesn't hit the same if he declares bankruptcy for the 7th time in his life.
Brandon Sanderson
The man is a top flight book generating machine. Where he's taking the Cosmere, I don't know, but I'm gladly awaiting for the novels he'll write the in future to find out. Reading the Stormlight Archive and Mistborn is a joy.
I also really enjoyed how he wrapped up The Wheel of Time. He is much less reluctant to kill off characters than many other authors, and that series needed some serious character culling to bring closure.
Hey look, that FO stage of FAFO is well underway. Hold onto your butts people, there's going to be some serious self punishment for our generations of polluting the world for personal convenience and money.
He only cares if you actually stop him through force: take his money, his freedom, or his voice. Until then, he'll destroy you and everything around him to get what he wants. This is one of the most caustic and dangerous people to exist in the world today because people protect him and follow in his wake of destruction to their own ends.
It sounds like he needs to get the house on the market. Keep shaking those pockets out, you fascist fuck.
I just started them on Linux machines from the get go. The same reason I got good at 3.1/95/98 was to setup games, filesharing, and getting hardware to work for better games. Even with Steam, there's always some work to handle oddities. The kids are rapidly becoming reasonable basic admins the same way I did. Whether they decide to go further and learn more will be up to them.
It's never claimed to be a democracy. It's not a monolith, either. Some projects have forms of input and/or voting, most don't because it's just a few people writing software that they want to write.
Get over yourself if you think that people working for free should be required to listen to you. Just as in anything else, pay them if you want a guaranteed response.
Otherwise, recognize that the key element of Open Source is that you have the source code. If a project isn't doing what you want then fork it and build it yourself. That's the whole point of this community and philosophy.
Our family was priced out of fast food in the US about two years ago. It's both too expensive and much worse than it was in the past. We got generally priced out of family dining before that, so this was just the natural progression.
I work harder than ever and we just keep sliding down the economic scale. We lost the class war.
I was in Salzburg back in 95 with a HS exchange program. We were traveling around and having a great time. That day we went up to the castle kinda near closing time. The entry booth was unmanned so our group walked on in.
We walked around, saw lots of the castle and the views over the city were enchanting. Most of our group left, but about six of us were still in the castle later. It turns out they close and lock the main gates once all of the tourists are out. Since we didn't get tickets in, we apparently went uncounted and got locked inside.
On my my buddies came running up to me as I was sitting on a battlement being morose (summer fling issues) and declared with alarm "we're locked in!" so I jogged to the gate with him.
This is pre cell phone and we weren't great at German. I told him to rally the rest of our stragglers and stood by the gate to think of how to get out. As the group was walking down the path to me, I heard keys jangling outside the gate.
After a moment the smaller postern door opened. Standing outside was a kid about 13 years old with a sack of groceries. I said entschuldigung and blocked the door open. Our group all piled out through the gate and ran off down the road while the kid just stood there looking shocked.
That was the first time I accidentally got locked in a castle in Europe. They're remarkably effective at keeping people both in and out, both are issues I've had to deal with at various times.
This situation is just so crazy. We've had decades of the right wing frothing at the mouth against "big government" and "activist judges". Now that their god-king is reaching for absolute power they flip a 180 so hard they fall all over themselves to demand that we have a king instead of a country By The People, For The People.
I know that conservatives don't have morals or actually held beliefs: they have goals. Any time the world doesn't jive with their goals they'll take any position required to achieve the goal of the moment. I grew up with a right wing in the US that demanded liberty or death, but it seems that was all just a veneer over a goal to end democracy, topple the republic, and enshrine a king to rule over us all. The mask is off and a vote for Trump demonstrably makes you an enemy of the republic.
We had an ongoing project studying network communication structures within social media groups. The primary goal was to identify patterns of misinformation dissemination. We lost our ability to poll the API and pull messages to build up our data sets to work with. The cost to hit the API used to be free for a limited rate for researchers, but the new doofus in charge demanded a massive rate to get even a reasonable quantity of data so we had to fold up shop. We just routed the students to other projects, but it's one more way to isolate and control the network so the dictator can be in charge however they like.
Faced? Several have been disbarred, with more in the pipeline.
The court system could just follow our ex president around. Anyone and everyone he talks to more than a few seconds should immediately be investigated because the odds that they're committing notable crimes is really high. They're just all criminals because no one else will give this traitorous sex offender the time of day.
There's all kinds of wacky taxes, regulations, and barriers to prevent the US industry from having to compete with the world. One such example is the Chicken Tax:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/chicken-tax.asp
That one keeps the Toyota Hilux out of the US.
Damn. Fuck cancer. I have all kinds of issues with royalty and especially the British royal family, but I wouldn't wish cancer on anyone.
One thing to keep in mind is that in the US, there's very few people or companies that actually own the land that they're on. Most of the time you have the rights to use the land for certain types of things, but not actually own it. The US government (federal on down) has various ways of seizing property for its own purposes.
There's only a handful of people who actually own the land they live on. Most of them were granted the land by prior governments (mostly Spain) before the US was a country. Their ownership was grandfathered in and has passed via inheritance through the families. Several of those family plots are in Texas and Florida. Everyone else is just allowed to stay as long as they play ball with the rules.
Good. Keep it up, everyone. Flexibility in working from home is golden. The vast majority of office work does not need to be in person.
All adult citizens should get to vote every election.
If we have so many citizens in prison that their voting block swings an election or pushes through a referendum, then it most definitely means we have too many people unjustly held in prison.
I'm a die hard Linux user. I don't spend much time telling people about it outside of actual tech conversations that should include the topic. I did raise my kids with a lot of Linux desktop use on their machines. They uniformly find the Windows 10/11 experience to be horrible, so I guess I've managed success on that front.
For some Christians, a piece of toast that looks like a face means the second coming. Just like any cult, there's plenty of crazy ideas sincerely held by its members.
That's been a continual strategy to try to deter and block RCV. They argued that in front of the courts in Maine when the state moved to RCV.
In the end, I feel there's one big defense: no matter where my vote ends up, I only get one for the last candidate standing that I voted for.
The other voting systems where you rate candidates on a scale, it's a bit muddier as to what a "vote" is. A vote should be your voice that's the same as anyone else's in the electorate. As long as all humans get the same voice, it should be able to take any form.