rimshot

To this day I’m amazed they got that one by the censors. (Animaniacs. They’re being detectives. Yakko wears a sherlock hat, orders wakko to do one thing and then tells dot to look for prints. Dot comes back holding Prince out front of her off the ground with both her arms and says “Found him!” Yakko waggles his hands at her and says FINGERprints. Dot says “Ew!” And throws Prince down a laundry chute or a dumbwaiter or something)

I’ve seen jeans with enough dirt caked on them that they’ll stand upright in their own (I once replaced the centre support beam on a cottage built on virginia clay by hoisting it up with a bunch of car jacks) but it never occurred to me to try growing strawberries on them.

:)

60,000 Guinea pigs

you leave my end users out of this. It’s not their fault the higher ups chose a crappy software vendor

I don’t think it matters which way the blunt goes as long as nobody’s bogarting.

I could be wrong though, I’ve never actually partaken, just hung out.

Is THAT what they’re associating it with? 9/11?

I seriously thought it was a reference to the eternal september of the internet, or potentially the school year.

That makes even less sense than the stuff I thought it was about, and I was fucking REACHING.

If I recall correctly, though, you can’t just sue someone for spreading bullshit about you in the u.s.

You have to have proof that it’s actively causing you harm.

(For example - you didn’t get a job because someone said you dress up in a clown suit and goose construction workers on weekends and the allegation is the ONLY reason you didn’t get the job. Someone would have to go on record stating they heard that lie and it influenced their decision before anything can be done against the liar.)

If slander and libel were easily actionable and actually got liars in trouble, a lot fewer people would be spreading bullshit.

The ability to easily hide individual threads.

Like, I’ve seen “Wendy’s wants to go to Uber style pricing”, I want the ability to mark it as “read” and set jerboa or lemmy.world in my browser to “show unread” and still have the ability to view my “read” items later if I want to refer back to them or whatever.

It would drastically improve my mobile experience and greatly improve my PC experience as well.

No limiting consumer access to computer hardware.

Just no.

We still haven’t recovered from early crypto crap with GPU’s.

Fix the environmental rules for corpos so they can’t just stand up data farms and simultaneously wreak havoc on the grid and the environment without paying the full cost to offset the damage they’re doing.

That would require proving that the decisions to do predatory towing were made all the way up at the top and actually written down or typed out somewhere.

These are carbon-copy and cash register businesses that just happen to HAVE computers. A few with bigger fleets and GPS in the trucks run dispatch calls through computers, but most of them (from what I’ve seen myself and heard from friends/acquaintances who work in tow yards) don’t actually USE them for the day-to-day work.

Any attempt at a case stops at discovery.

The cops don’t care and there’s no real threat of meaningful punishment for the companies at fault so it’ll continue.

Thanks for the suggestion though. It’s a thought I’ve had previously and looked into.

Any attempt to regulate towing companies further that might cut into this kind of business will see another city-wide tow slowdown, though. Things were REALLY bad when our major metropolitan area started talking about passing idling laws and requiring GPS dongles.

There was a 3+ day to a week backlog of cars waiting for tow. Local law enforcement was cutting deals with individual companies just to get accidents cleared to the side. They’re all private businesses so they don’t HAVE to operate if they don’t want to.

There was a big drive a few years back to modernize the meters and some of what I suspect are the types that became 5G kills you groups fought long and hard to block these new meters being swapped in.

The kicker is that it’s HIGHLY unlikely that those meters were 5G.

It’s muuuuch cheaper to get a CAT1 LTE radio module and go 4G WITH the added benefit that 4G has better distance/signal/etc than 5G does at a trade-off of a lower speed.

Where I am in the midwestern U.S., those meters are typically in people’s BASEMENTS.

5G would be a a combination of massive overkill for a few megabytes of data a MONTH and non-starter for connectivity reasons because getting bars to a tower through several feet of earth and cinder block is notably harder in the 30gHz+ frequency range when compared to the ~6gHz of 4G (or the 850mHz-2.1gHz of 3G).

These things are streaming text files full of usage data numbers. Netflix-capable connections are wholly unnecessary. Your old 2006 motorola razr flip phone could handle the data these meters are putting out without breaking a sweat.

“DO NOT TOW OR MOVE” will deter exactly zero tow truck drivers.

Shoot, being legally parked with all of your vehicle plates/tags/registration/etc in order isn’t enough to deter some tow truck drivers.

There’s a company in my area that actively, regularly engages in predatory towing. All they have to do is claim someone called about it and be unable to produce records because of some computer issue. If they choose their targets carefully, they either get:

A: free money

B: free salvage

Even if someone DOES manage to sue and win, that’s maybe 5% or less of the vehicles they tow. They seem to deem that an acceptable hit rate for free money.

Go ask anyone who tows inside the city limits of a major metropolitan area what percentage of vehicles get reclaimed after being towed.

If a company is willing to throw ethics out the window and drown the predatory tows in a flood of legitimate work, there’s apparently extra money to be made.

Worst case scenario the company that practices such things fires someone for “making too many mistakes on the job” and they go get a tow job elsewhere because there’s a massive shortage of tow trucks seemingly everywhere.

Much of the towing industry is a half-step above organized crime.

It’s utterly atrocious for style but I still can’t wrap my brain around the legal word salad this dude threw out there.

Does anyone know what this is even for? Like…I’m pretty sure you have to volunteer for surety in any form, because it’d be pretty weird if the court could ORDER another person to shove their money into a deal they hadn’t somehow otherwise agreed to.

…and…the statutes and codes are statues and codes… Isn’t color of law is involved when an official is doing something that appears to be official but may not be?

Like, statutes and codes can’t be the SEMBLANCE of law…they ARE the fucking law?

How can you claim to not be under the law and then certify something under penalty of perjury UNDER THE FUCKING LAWS YOU JUST SAID HAVE NO JURIS-MY-DICTION OVER YOU?!?

If this was chanted in unison by a few people at once, it’d resemble a bad tv show witch’s “spell”.

…when the bishops blessed the blueshirts down in galway…

Household economics are both micro AND macro.

The handwaving that typically occurs when people try to throw a layer of obfuscation into economic conversations is both disingenuous and counterproductive to actual fruitful discussion about the current state of things.

You might as well just say “money is wealth” or “what’s good for the goose”.

The reality is we’ve been chasing a short run fallacy for a really, really long time now and there’s more and more in the way of misrepresented statistics in order to keep everyone from examining all of the indirect consequences.

Happy as in “all absolutely necessary for survival bills are getting paid on time, all outstanding debts are getting paid down regularly, and I can afford to eat at a restaurant slightly above fast food grade once a month or so?”

$308,740/yr for the first year would do it.

After that I could probably look at halving the salary and live, if not comfortably, at least without constant worry.

Maybe start putting something away so I can retire before I hit 70.

Happiness doesn’t come from money, but it sure would reduce stress.

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.

“That guy from Alias”

You said that and I was all “Oh cool! Is he getting a lot of roles, I’d better go look!”

Turns out I was thinking of Kevin Weisman, who I haven’t seen in anything since Runaways.

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.