I had a cassette player in my Saturn that would turn the tape back about 2 seconds if you stopped and re-started it. It was the best feature ever.

deleted by creator

Argentinian government debt is mostly owned by big American investment firms like Black Rock. If their economy crashes, American Oligarchs lose $$$$ so they convinced Trump this is in his best interests.

A lady standing on my neighbor’s back porch smoking a cigarette cussed me out when I let the dog out. Except my neighbor had moved out last week (I had helped) and I knew it hadn’t sold yet. A girlfriend of one of the guys up the block was having a episode of some kind and had decided to squat in my neighbor’s home. I locked the door, waiting for the next morning.

I decided to call the Emergency Line to see if they would send mental health first but they sent the cops anyway. Our local cops are really delicate with mental patients so they got her back to her boyfriend and left the homeowner to cleanup.

This was true even in the 90s I’m sad to say. It’s one of the reason I didn’t pursue fiction writing as a career 30 years ago. I don’t think AI will replace any working authors because poorly written slop and computer generated text are both a lot older than today’s LLMs craze.

The field of authorship has been in a slow decline for a long, long time. It has a lot to do with the way the book Publishing industry was run in the middle and later half of the 20th century. We stopped valuing authority and authors and it became a less valuable occupation. This happened to teachers and a lot of other thought-based fields too.

The reality is that statistically you are more likely to win $1 million in the lottery than to become an author in the US who can live on their income from writing fiction. It does still happen but the people who’s work leads them to become full time authors are extraordinarily lucky, talented, hard working, AND again, lucky.

So you have to write for the joy of writing and expect to have a day job. And if that writing makes money, that’s great and you should keep doing as much of it as you can. But please accept that it’s not going to be your income driver for the foreseeable future.

Here you go: The US Government’ 9/11 report as a graphic novel.

https://a.co/d/guTdj7L

True, but the second part was far more important. It’s not that they think they are right, it’s that they are CONVINCED that everyone else ALSO thinks they are right and are too scared to say so. So they are thrilled to force their racist beliefs on everyone because they are sure we are just victims of the “woke mind virus” or equivalent. They are sure they are saving us from ourselves and it makes them insufferable.

We didn’t do a good job in the aftermath of the Civil War cleaning up the people who caused the problem. We were too quick to pardon everyone and try to get back to normal.

That gave the losing side the idea that it was only a temporary setback everyone secretly thought they were right or else we would have been more angry with them and it’s been a huge fucking problem ever since.

Confusing, but agreed.

Doesn’t matter, either way she should have been allowed to state she was not pregnant and get her care. Having to prove it over and over is just madness.

Bro is a failed Catholic priest candidate. His entire life is trying to uphold the systems of oppression, it is maddening.

Your UPS must be different.

That’s a real treasure! Very nice.

“The Adventures Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” 1984

Great script, great cast, young Johnathan Lithgow and Christopher Llyod, Peter Weller in one of his best rolls, and bonus Jeff Goldblum as they new guy.

Whole thing is still a perfect package, looking like a B movie you’d totally skip.

That’s a bit of a misunderstanding, US Colleges have a bit of catch up period in the first year or 2 of study where you are both getting some exposure to your new topic but also ensuring your prior education is on par with everyone else. We call these “general education requirements” or “gen ed” and it’s because high school graduation isn’t well standardized across the states. Most students can test at the start of College or show their high school work and skip some of the basic writing and math classes to the next level. These “gen ed” classes ensure every student at the school has a basic level of reading, writing, and maths to base the rest of their work on. The amount of these other classes you have to take, is based on your major so for example people majoring in Teaching have more than other majoring in Engineering based on the logic a teacher needs a broader education in everything than an engineer will.

It does sometimes result in odd situations like my Uncle who couldn’t pass a general education language course in his non-native language (Spanish for him) and so was denied a Mathematics Education Degree and needed an extra semester to finish a different mathematics degree that had fewer gen ed requirements.

This all also plays into why US undergraduate degrees are usually 4-5 year programs instead of the shorter degrees tracks in Europe.

That all said, JD has a 4 year degree in Poly-sci and an additional 3 in Law School and he’s still a complete moron. Not even Yale could fix that.

You think that right up until you see and smell how much poop comes from one cow/goat/sheep. If your neighbor had one, you would have complaints.

The people who made “If the 40k Emperor had a Text-to-speech” had to give it up for copyright/trademark reasons so they moved to making World Of Darkness (Vampire the Masquerade, Hunter the Reckoning, etc.) content. Their “Hunter: The Parenting” has been hysterical so far but personally the “Norfolk Wizard Game” has me pausing to cackle like a madwoman. I have played and GMed for WoD over the years and it’s just pure gold. I especially liked the episode “1 hour of Hermetic Propaganda to Fall Asleep To”

Did you even see the earlier Popes? He did everything you say and yet this guy was liberal by every definition compared to the guy he replaced. Benedict was nasty and he knew it.

In the US, checks are still a common way to give money to people as gifts, especially birthdays and weddings and things like that. Also schools will require extra fees like trip costs to be paid by check because they are paid into older bank accounts that they don’t have online payment equivalents.

Paper checks are a pain, but they have lower fees than most other ways of giving money. Once you’ve paid for the book of papers, that’s it. Each check only costs your account the exact amount written for and the recipient’s bank gives them the exact amount you wrote. No extra percentage or flat fee on the transaction and with smartphones you can scan the check and make the transaction happen electronically between the banks in 5 seconds. Every other way to do this has a flat or percentage fee for the money to move but a paper check is free.