Carl

Anyhow the world is changing very quickly and nowadays not doing business with the united states or not using the dollar, is less and less of a problem.

While I agree on the surface, these sanctions also include any American companies. You can’t use most email providers, because most are based in the US. You can’t use any debit or credit cards, because MasterCard and Visa are both American companies that will block your access. You can’t use any cloud storage providers, because they’re all American. You can’t have a Google account for your phone. You can’t even use a Microsoft account to log into your Windows PC.

And sure, lemmings will say that all of those are good things. We’re happy in our little “self-host everything, delete all the cloud accounts, avoid being tracked by any means possible, etc” bubble. But the average person barely even knows how to open a web browser, and panics when their password needs to be reset.

It basically forces you to live as a Luddite, because the vast majority of the internet, modern banking, etc will (at least tangentially) touch American commerce in some way. And the average person isn’t even close to being well-enough prepared for that kind of upheaval.

While I agree on the surface, that would be giving them free reign to do whatever they want. They should still cover the press releases, but do things like mute the person at the lectern and add their own “the White House banned reporters from the news room, so we’re only releasing a summary of press briefings until that is changed” type of voiceover to it instead. Literally remove their voice and dub your own instead.

Have every reporter in every briefing only ask when the banned reporters will be allowed back. You just released a briefing on the situation in Iran? When will the banned reporters have their credentials reinstated and be allowed back inside the press room? You just released a briefing on gas prices? When will the banned reporters have their credentials reinstated and be allowed back inside the press room? You just released a briefing on Israel? When will the banned reporters have their credentials reinstated and be allowed back inside the press room? The question doesn’t change until they address it, and if the answer isn’t “we’re allowing them back in” then the exact same question gets repeated by the next reporter. It would require a massive act of solidarity on the reporters’ side, but it would be extremely effective at forcing them to address it.

Have every reporter make their reports outside the White House next to the banned reporters. If the White House wants coverage, they either move everything outside or allow everyone inside.

There are definitely more effective ways to protest than simply “don’t cover them.”

They were probably referring to the whole “DiCaprio is afraid of women over the age of 25” thing. The man has historically broken up with women as soon as they’re nearing 25, only to start dating a new 18 year old a week or two later.

I believe his current girlfriend actually holds the record for his oldest, at ~28 years old.

Literally just reading the headline, I thought to myself “I bet that lady with the long G middle name is one of them…” And yep, here she is.

There’s a comedian (I can’t remember their name) that has a bit about how they refuse to give their cat any kinds of beef-based food or treats.

Salmon? Cool. Chicken? Great. But my cat’s ego is already big enough. There’s no way my cat could take down a cow, and she’d be insufferable if she ever thought she could.

I bring this up to say that a six foot cat probably could take down a cow. I say this as someone who has a cat: cats are only cute because they’re like fifteen pounds soaking wet. If they were the same size as us, they would 100% consider us prey.

Mine is a triple-press then hold on the third, but yeah same.

Kind of? They were indicted in Romania a while back, but those charges were quickly dropped because the investigators fumbled some key evidence. This is a new set of charges, supposedly with new evidence that isn’t mired in procedural issues. They are already trying to fight their extradition to the UK for rape charges, so this is another set of charges to add to the list.

While I agree, the way the article is worded makes me suspect that is the name of the crime they’re accused of.

Sort of like how Trump was found liable for “sexual abuse”, because the jurisdiction it occurred in strictly defines rape as penis-in-vagina sex. And since he “only” (ugh) used his fingers, it wasn’t technically rape as far as the law was concerned. But the judge who oversaw the case later had to clarify that it would colloquially be referred to as rape, even though that wasn’t the technical term that the lawsuit used. Because Trump was trying to use the “well I wasn’t found liable for rape, so she can’t say I raped her” argument in his defamation lawsuit.

The em dashes always give it away tbh. Anything “coded” by this user would 100% be slop. If they can’t even be bothered to think of a pitch for it, why would they think of the code?

I’ve said that taxes should increase drastically after you own two residential properties. Allow two for the people who own things like a home and some separate farmland, or maybe a lake house. The point is that companies shouldn’t be able to buy and sit on vacant properties, just to drive up costs. We’re not targeting the people with two houses, we’re targeting the people with two hundred.

After those two allowed properties, taxes increase at a scale, so nobody will want to sit on dozens of homes for long periods of time. And (here’s the important part!) if an owned house is vacant for more than 4 months (120 days) in the calendar year, the taxes on it skyrocket. Hell, make it exponential. This Vacant Property tax should fucking hurt. It should be the thing that keeps Zillow executives awake at night. This will encourage people/companies to sell or rent their vacant houses, instead of sitting on them indefinitely and passing costs onto the few people who they’re renting to. And that “owned property” count used for the property tax calculation should also include residential properties owned by subsidiary companies, shell corporations, etc… Don’t allow companies to spin up a thousand shell corps just to hold two properties each.

This will drive down purchase prices and rent prices, because it would be financially smarter to have a cheap renter when compared to paying the exorbitant taxes on a vacant property.

And then take the funds collected from these additional property taxes, and put it towards firsttime homebuyer incentives, rent assistance programs, homeless/displaced/battered/etc shelter funding, etc…

Yeah, there is no such thing as an accidental discharge. Only negligence. Unless the weapon can fire without the trigger being pulled (some old guns can, but basically every modern firearm has mechanisms to prevent that) there is no such thing as an “accident”. You were negligent in handling the firearm, and your negligence caused it to fire.

And if you hit someone with that negligent discharge, your negligence caused them to be shot because you were negligently aiming it at them. It wasn’t an “accident” that they got shot, because it wasn’t fully preventable and you should have prevented it. The only reason the “accident” occurred is because your negligence directly allowed the chain of events that led to the gun being fired, and led to the person being shot.

We should treat “accidental” discharges as if the person intentionally ignored the safety guidelines that they undoubtedly knew to follow. And if you’re intentionally ignoring safety procedures, then you’re causing a dangerous situation due to willful negligence. And willful negligence can be a criminal act when it involves injuries and death.

Even in cases of a child getting a gun and playing with it, it’s not an accident when the child discharges the firearm. Maybe it was an accident on the child’s part, but it was the parents’ negligence that allowed the child to access the firearm in the first place.

I used Google Timeline to prove I was at work one time. This was back when I was freelancing. My client tried to say I was stealing time, because I had an off-site meeting that ran long. They were threatening to withhold a few hours of pay, even though I was at the worksite the entire time. I pulled up my timeline and used it to prove that I was, in fact, at the meeting site for an extra few hours. Being able to de-Google that functionality has a lot of value to certain people.

A few reasons.

First is testing the response times, locations, scale, etc… If you intentionally violate air space, you can measure how long it takes for your future opponent to scramble their own response. You can see what kind of equipment they send to respond. You can see where the response comes from. You can see how many combatants they send to respond. That is all valuable info if you’re planning potential attacks in the future.

Second is creating a “boy who cried wolf” situation. Repeatedly violate their airspace, and they’ll begin to see the violations as routine. They’ll stop treating them as genuine threats, and will simply start treating them as just another annoyance. None of the violations ever result in an attack, so why would this one be any different? Then when the actual attack comes, your opponent is caught with their pants down because they weren’t fully responsive.

Third is money. In the grand scheme of things, flying a single drone around is a drop in the bucket. In contrast, a sudden scrambled response costs a lot. It’s a lot of sudden manpower and logistics to coordinate. Especially when the violation turns out to be a nothing-burger. If you want to begin straining your opponent before a war even begins, make them start counting pennies before you attack.

Fourth, it could be posturing. Look at how weak our enemy is! They can’t even patrol their own border. They’re afraid of us and let us into their airspace. Etc…

Fifth could be intimidation. Remind them that they’re within poking distance. Especially since they’de supporting Ukraine. Want to discourage that support? Encourage them to circle the wagons and bring their support home instead.

He actually did a market study and realized that his videos with that smile on the thumbnail got more views. Like, a lot more. So he quietly started adding it into every thumbnail. He even went back to old videos are replaced the old thumbnails with ones that had that smile.

As for why that stupid smile makes his videos more popular? No clue. Kids are weird, and he does well in that demographic. So maybe it’s just a meme at this point. But the reason he’s known for that smile is ironically because it makes him more money.

That’s actually surprising, because lots of admins end up lumping the entire anarchist block of instances together.

If F-18’s aren’t meant to be in the water, why does the navy keep throwing them into the ocean?

Also, you can’t afford time off work to do anything actionable. And even if you could afford it by using accrued time off, the lack of worker protections means you’ll be unemployed as soon as you start doing anything too controversial.

It’s nice to say “just get into the streets” but the vast majority of Americans are one missed paycheck away from homelessness and food scarcity. The average American is basically living hand-to-mouth, (many are even putting groceries on credit) just to survive. Regime change sounds nice, but a revolt would take months or even years, and your kids will go hungry in a few days. The only Americans who really have the time and means to effect meaningful change are retired or rich enough to not need a job. And those two demographics overwhelmingly support the current regime, because they’re old and rich.

It can be difficult for Europeans to properly grasp just how dire the situation in America is. The average American would need to travel for at least three days just to reach the capitol. That’s a solid 3 days of driving, only stopping to eat and sleep. All while not being able to take time off of work. Saying “just go protest” is like telling someone in Madrid, Spain to travel to Warsaw, Poland just to protest against their “local” leadership.

“Oh but you can protest at the state level” I already hear some people typing. Great, my state capitol is 450 miles away. That’s not even an exaggeration, it takes a solid 8 hours of driving to reach my “local” capitol building. It’s not something the average person can just do on a whim, nor can they do it regularly. It’s not like the average person can just pop over to the capitol for a protest, then be back home in time for dinner.

Maybe go make some noise at the city level. But that’s not going to do anything at the national level (or even at the state level) because they’re far away and easy for the lawmakers to ignore.

Lastly, good luck revolting against the federal government. I’m sure the average gun-nut’s AR-15 will be extremely effective against drone strikes. Oh wait…

It’s because of the recent explosion in bot traffic. Bots are largely run on Linux, using basic desktop user agents. So when studies like this look at desktop traffic, they see a disproportionately high number of Linux desktop users. But in reality, the vast majority of those “users” are actually just bad bots and scrapers who aren’t properly flagging themselves as bots (because they know sites will block them for scraping content).

Piefed has a built-in blocklist that is controllled by the dev. db0 is on that hardcoded list, after the db0 admin called out the dev for something. So the answer to OP’s question is a resounding “yes, piefed is blocking them” but I think my instance is also on that list. So they won’t be able to see this comment.

This is why archeologists and anthropologists love boring people. Researching Alexander the Great is fine, but we already know the broad strokes. The actual useful “how people lived from day to day” information is almost always found in some boring person’s journal.

{Date} I walked down to the market to get more salt, flour, vinegar, and some wool thread to darn my socks. The morning walk took approximately 20 minutes with the sun at my back. The fish seller has increased his prices to {amount} due to the war. I saw an interesting flock of birds today during my walk back from the market, I believe they may be passing through the area. I decided to make my dinner bread with a slightly different recipe today. {Full recipe listed below}. It was nice, but I’ll probably only use half as much salt next time, like I normally do. The dairy cow has produced a lot of milk this year because of the heavy rain making the grass grow well. So I’ve had a lot of butter to put on my bread. The neighbor has agreed to trade some of my excess cream for fresh veggies. I’ll probably make them into a stew for tomorrow’s dinner {recipe listed below}.