I wonder how much of the state of the place upon that inspection was DUE to:

The plant has been shut down since late July

Like, did they say “we’re shutting down” and everyone just fucked off and left the place in a state?

Or was it just that bad ALL the time?

Yes, but they have to keep associating “person of color” with “poor” and therefore “crime”. If they don’t keep lumping all non-white people in with other “undesirable” things, some of their followers might look around and realize that non-white people can achieve things on their own too, and that makes non-white folks start to resemble actual human beings a bit too much for their liking. If she was single, he wouldn’t be lauding any of her achievements. The unspoken belief is that women are as incapable as non-whites when there’s no husband involved. The dehumanizing and belittling narrative has to be constant with them or some of their followers might start thinking for themselves.

For those wondering about the upswing here:

If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.

Yeah, I’m no marketing guru, but I feel their actual point would have been better conveyed by a pile of all of the things the iPad replaced slowly gathering dust, spider webs, and eventually archaeologists.

For anyone else wondering, it’s

github.com/Mr-Wiseguy/N64Recomp

They forced cloud on us so they could do the same nickel-and-dime billing that webhosts used for cpu cycles/ram/storage…

…because it’s lucrative as hell when taken to a grand scale.

But there are sometimes side benefits for us.

I, for one, am over the moon levels of happy that I will never spend another weekend patching Exchange servers.

Okay, can someone explain THIS giant load of seeming bullshit to me?

In 2023, the U.S. economy vastly outperformed expectations. A widely predicted recession never happened. Many economists (though not me) argued that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment; instead, we’ve experienced immaculate disinflation, rapidly falling inflation at no visible cost.

By every marker that matters to the POPULACE (costs of food, shelter, energy for shelter, cars, gas for cars, and medical insurance (required)) inflation has gone WAY THE HELL UP, shows no signs of abating, and jobs (in the tech sector at least) are taking a dive. Wages are not keeping pace with costs of living, and people I knew who were on the low end of “rich” are now starting to be as scared as the upper middle class.

Everyone keeps saying the economy is fricking awesome, but rent is astronomical, groceries are bonkers, gas prices are still at “I DID THIS” sticker stupidity levels, few people can get a home, used cars are going for 5 to 10 times what they’re worth, and everyone I know around the country is running a much tighter ship than they were during COVID LOCKDOWN.

All of these “new jobs” we keep hearing about are just a small percentage of positions vacated by layoffs. Companies let tons of people go in one fell swoop and hire new people for 1/10th to 1/5th of the positions at lower wages with worse “total compensation” packages.

The recruiters have COMPLETELY stopped hitting up myself and my employed friends. Not a single fricking “you look like a great blahblahblah” for almost a month when it was previously multiple hits a day.

As far as I can tell, we’re IN a recession, we’re just calling it a recovery for some reason.

Yeah, so they changed it so it defaults to the “new” way where quotes and -UnwantedTerm don’t function the way they used to, but when you fill out the search box, hit “Google Search”, and it fails to perform the way you want it to, once you’re on the results page, go to “Tools” click on “All Results” and change it to “Verbatim”.

Neat!

Is there something like this for Android?

The way I heard it, it wasn’t so much that the site itself was one wing or the other, it’s just the site that people were getting recruited FROM to eventually BECOME right wing… operatives?

I’m not completely certain which domestic or foreign group is responsible for hiring all of them, but it’s clearly deliberate positioning of less-than-successful actors/models into noisemaking/visibility roles.

They must be paying well because at least one of those people used to ostensibly be a liberal.

Outside of eliminating all PAC-type “contribution” organizations, all shell company sorts of situations AND forcing all pundits to disclose their financing like a publicly traded corporation has to, we’re not going to stop bad money from funding horrible behaviour.

It sure would be interesting to get a few of the worst of these folks hauled into court for the handful of harmful statements they’re making that constitute actual crimes and get their funding exposed, though.

So… Her last good movie was Silence of the Lambs, right? Oh, that was her first one, too.

If you haven’t seen “Contact”, I highly recommend it.

Looking at IMDB I’ve seen a grand total of six movies she’s in and while the ones I saw were all enjoyable at the time, some even worth re-watching, Contact definitely stands out for me.

After looking through a bunch of synopses of Asimov’s stuff, I wonder if it might be this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Troubles_of_the_World?useskin=vector

Okay, so this topic is moderately amusing to me. The truth is we still don’t actually know for sure, but it’s WEIRD.

He had a long and apparently well-documented history (letters he wrote) of multiple relationships with adult women. So much so that his family attempted to cover it all up because, by victorian standards, it was absolutely fucking scandalous. Like, wreck the surname for generations scandalous (which admittedly didn’t take much by victorian standards). This makes it look like he had NO relationships with adult women, because being an oddball that way was LESS of a freakshow publicly than sleeping around was.

The victorians also had this weird thing (by today’s standards) about nude children being the very symbol of innocence. Like, so much so that you’d wonder if they thought the mere sight of naked babies restored an adult’s innocence or something.

And these people had WEIRD hangups about sex.

We’re talking they supposedly covered the legs of tables and chairs in cloth so they would less resemble actual people’s legs, lest someone accidentally think of what’s at the TOP of legs on people. (genitalia! scary!)

The schism with Alice’s family may just have been that SOME people were POSSIBLY gossiping behind closed doors about the man and they refused to be associated with even the POSSIBILITY of scandal, especially if that scandal was that he slept with multiple women. There’s also mention that he was interested in Alice’s older sister, and something about a maid.

The whole thing is just straight up odd, but apparently most of the pedo rumors didn’t start until after his death. I’m not sure what, if anything, that means.

So, who knows. an oddball dude in a SUUUPER sexually repressed society, it honestly could go either way on coin flip odds.

palling around with Alex Jones on Infowars, dropping alt-right buzzwords in interviews

That saddens and actually kinda shocks me.

I would have expressed ZERO surprise to news of him going so far to the LEFT that he ended up miles beyond hippie dippie new agey and founded his own Heaven’s Gate cult (The central belief of the which was that followers could transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings by rejecting their human nature, and they would ascend to heaven)…but this is…honestly weirding me out.

Wasn’t he going so far into eastern spirituality that he was recording himself reading the entirety of the Bhagavad Gita at one point or something?

That reads like a Joni Mitchell lyric.

I mean that in a good way.

If they make one of them look and speak like Morbo the Annihilator, I might actually watch.

Like, with the anti-human sentiment and everything.

First Anchor: And today, a local law firm files the first lawsuit in a series over a deadly salmonella outbreak linked to cantaloupe.

Morbo: Next time, we will put the salmonella in more than just the canteloupe.

or maybe:

Morbo: Canteloupe tonight, Bridegroom has the runs!

I’m working to overcome a particularly troublesome piece of technology right now and enjoying a cold, refreshing, Diet Dr. Pepper, so I guess the sentiment stands.

I’m far less worried about churches paying sales, property, and income taxes than people making tens of billions of dollars a year.

We’ll get WAY MORE social benefit out of properly taxing the ultra-ultra rich than we will out of the hundreds of thousands of mini-churches who have volunteer receptionists twice a week or even the few hundred mega churches with jet-setting pastors.

Turn your ire on the bigotry and hypocrisy of a church that attempts to profess love and hate at the same time and out of the same mouth to your heart’s content, but when it comes to money, we need to deal with the robber barons. They’re the ones causing the economic problem.

Few seem to care…including those who will one day be there themselves.

What are those of us who care supposed to be doing?

Amidst deciding which bills get paid each paycheck, trying to find nutritional variety out of food banks (canned fish intake should ideally be less than 10 cans a month per person, for example, and even rinsing canned vegetables/beans isn’t doing wonders for sodium intake compared to fresh), trying to decide which medical and dental issues we can afford to address and which just get to be endured, and watching debt go to collections because food, insurance, automobile fuel, home energy, rent, and everything related to cars has gone up, what are we supposed to be doing?

In what way can we unite as a people and fix this?

shrug

I’m okay with unobtrusive ads as long as the place serving them up has a modicum of common sense sensibilities about their impact and has a rigorous enough vetting process that they’ll never be used as payloads for malicious software. Ads can be a way to find out about products I might otherwise never know about. I’m not outright against all ads as a concept. Hell, sometimes it’s an actual art form in rare cases.

I’m just against them taking up more space than the content itself, impeding my access to the content in any way, hijacking my property, or getting hijacked by malware which then hijacks my property.