Are .gov sources still legitimate? Are we sure this wasn’t written by rfk’s brain worm?

The other day I had to use a browser without any plugins to go to a site, and it was unrecognizable with all the ads. When I normally visit it’s clean and simple. These ads pushed content under the fold. Horrible.

Many years ago I had to explain to a coworker how progressive taxation works. He was like “that’s a great idea! We should do that! It’s stupid that now your pay goes up but you take home less because you get taxed more”

I had to tell him, yes it is a good idea. It’s how it works now. You don’t get more pay and suddenly your whole income is taxed more.

He’d had no idea

On the one hand, omnipresent surveillance is bad and ripe for abuse.

On the other, I feel like the haphazard and selective enforcement of traffic laws by police officers is also really bad. Cops can selectively enforce laws so poor people or black people or whatever out-group suffers more. A machine should be impartial.

On the last hand, no traffic enforcement is probably going to get people killed. So that’s not desirable.

Also, fines are problematic. Fines should probably scale with wealth, but also it shouldn’t be a revenue source because that’s a perverse incentive.

I thought it was widely accepted that you shouldn’t use this word outside of, like, quoting old medical diagnosis from when the word was used in that context. It is not an okay insult.

Maybe I just hang out with nicer people.

Yeah, but I guess megacorps like Warner Brothers are even more obscene than elder gods.

https://shadowofwar.fandom.com/wiki/Shelob

One of the shadow of Mordor games made sexy shelob and it was bad.

A lot of those places suck and they’re not going to turn into vibrant cultural centers with social services quickly.

Just remove all violent people first

Communication aims at information exchange,

Metadata is data. Skipping small talk is exchanging less information.

One time in a game of DND the players were exploring a strange cave system, and found a strange thick goo collecting in a pool. Players being players, one of them decided to eat some.

It was, in my notes, some sort of celestial honey made by these extra planar insects that were causing some of the region’s problems. It was supposed to taste amazing, but with some drawbacks. I started to blank when trying to describe how good it was, and the phrase that came out was “it’s like… It’s like … it’s like seven pizzas!”

The player eating it, his eyes lit up and was like “AMAZING”

The other players were like “wat”

I think that adequately captured how delicious it is but also maybe you shouldn’t be eating it.

Several of my friends are non technical and just put up with the ads. I guess they never thought there was another way

If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good,

Linux is often more forgiving on hardware requirements. I recently put Mint (with xfce) on a like 2013 laptop and it’s fine. That’s not even an especially lightweight distribution.

I would not be surprised if my old coworker-friends started a separate group chat without me after the nth, “Maybe you should come to one of these protests” and “Please at least read the wikipedia summary on this historical topic before you start going off about it” message from me.

They’re fine people but they’re also kind of very… apolitical.

Just one dish and one fork, typically. Sometimes the rice cooker.

I pretty much wash as needed.

Need a fork? Take out of sink, wash it.

Need a bowl? Take out of sink, wash it.

Need more room in sink? Take stuff out of sink and wash until there’s room

Works pretty well. Never really have a big stack up in the sink. Throws me off when guests come over and just grab stuff out of the cabinets and drawers like normal people, though.

At one of my old jobs, some of the software engineers would work nights and weekends without being paid extra. I said we shouldn’t do that. Management gave me a talking to about how I was demoralizing the team and it doesn’t hurt me if they want to work extra. It didn’t seem the appropriate time to argue that them devaluing the same labor I do does hurt me.

That’s not really small town though, in my mind. I was thinking of like suburbs where people drive everywhere.

People in walkable cities tend to be hottest. Daily exercise does a lot of good for bodies.

A lot of people struggle to read, and it’s kind of sad. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ was an interesting post about it (available as a podcast and transcripts).

That said, some people really just do wallow and the slop and that’s an embarrassment.