skulblaka

Fuck sake, $300 buys me enough groceries for around two months if I’m lucky

sounds of audible American despair

Personally I feel that YouTube’s data centers need to be a public resource. Nationalize them, pay out Google appropriately for their value, and then turn it into public property. YouTube can remain just the way they are and will undoubtedly retain market share because they’re recognizable and everyone already has a YT account, but other people can spin up their own video front-end services to compete, while drawing from the same leviathan-sized backend data store which would now be publically owned.

There is just too much general knowledge available through YouTube for me to say it’s a good idea to let it all rot behind a corporate firewall. I would love to force YouTube to shut down to then in turn force the availability of third party options. But if we shut it down without a plan to recover their server data then we’ve just lost a massive international educational platform. Just think of how many people you know personally who learned to fix their car or write code via YouTube University, then expand that to encompass the entire internet-connected world.

I don’t think there’s a chance in hell this would ever happen, because Google would never open its datacenter to become a public resource no matter how many infinites of dollars you paid them to do so, and the American government (where Google is based) would never legally force them to do so. But I really don’t see any other viable path forward to dethrone YouTube and de-monopolize the video sharing industry.

If the whole family is a bunch of MAGA like the grandmother said, then yes, greater than 90% chance he is. Those two things are extremely highly correlated.

Ah. Round here we have Everclear for that. 180 proof straight grain alcohol. It’ll peel the paint off your walls at 40 paces and it mixes like shit with everything, but if you need to get a dozen people piss drunk for less than $10 it would definitely get that done.

an intensely interesting place straight out of a cyberpunk setting

It is, in fact, the actual setting of Shadowrun: Hong Kong. So the SR writers at the very least must agree with you.

Ever eaten Hot Pockets?

This is the modern evolution of the drawer full of taco bell sauces

Yeah, after a few times of that your parents get a visit from the truancy department and get threatened with prison time.

For some reason it’s perfectly legal to home school your kids (and teach them nothing during that time) , but if you register them to a public school and they don’t attend, straight to jail.

American here.

Every single one of those girls would have been sent home for “inappropriate clothing” at my school.

Even giving this sign the benefit of the doubt, if someone is actively drowning and you just call 911 and do nothing else then they will surely be dead by the time anyone from emergency services can make an appearance to help.

This does not mean you should also drown yourself trying to help them though. Ideally you throw them something long like a rope and tow them in to shore. If that’s not possible, throwing them anything that floats is a good secondary option. People who aren’t trained as lifeguards shouldn’t usually get in the water to try and save a drowning person though, that’s a very easy way to turn one dead body into two dead bodies. A drowning human is not a rational actor and they can and will also drown you trying (and failing) to save themselves.

I think LAN is still dead but offline single player works fine.

Look man, we work with what we’ve got. We just stuck to the struggle a little longer than everyone else did.

There was a time in our history when America had a very rich and robust set of independent culinary practices, homestead food adapted from whatever cuisine that particular family or community brought with them to America, cooked out of whatever you could rustle up locally. A lot of that disappeared when grocery stores and mass production of food became practical and available. But the Cajuns, being the stubborn French children that we are, just decided nah, we’ll keep cooking up the gators and the sea bugs. I don’t need to go buy meat from the butcher when I can literally take a rifle twenty paces out my back door and sight three gators with it. Hell we had to kill a gator once that I wasn’t even hunting, but he came up on our property and tried to pick a fight with my dog. Well, now we have this big old dead gator laying in the yard. What do we do with it? You skin him and cook him, obviously.

This was in 1999. I haven’t lived there in a while but I’d bet my left nut stuff like that is still happening down there.

We still like the grocery store because you can’t go hunt up a case of Pabst out of the bayou, but some combination of the fact that a) cuisine is a big part of our culture, b) hunting your own food is cheap, and c) most parts of Louisiana have been poor as hell since the beginning of recorded history - all comes together to mean that the local cuisine has remained weird for a lot longer than most other places in America. It also means these same local recipes have been being perfected for 200 years. Your meal might be gator tail garnished with frogs and topped with a sauce you can’t pronounce, but it will be god damn delicious and that’s a promise.

When I was a kid we had a dog named Monkey

Man I’m the complete opposite. I grew up in the hood, if you had nice things, you wouldn’t have them for long.

Driving nice cars and wearing name brand clothes just states “I have more money than you and I’m proud of it” which is a) universally a dick move, especially when you drive that fancy car past a dozen homeless every day, and b) makes you a mark. Oh you’re driving a Benz? You’ve probably got valuables in it, let’s take a look.

Nowadays I still drive a beat up old car and wear off brand clothes, both because I can’t afford better but I also don’t want to even look like I can afford better for the above reasons. It’s just being an ass and also putting a target on yourself.

So much so that King famously doesn’t actually remember writing Cujo

Then the rest of us will handle it and accept thank-you’s later.

Yeah, I’ll get right on that, 21 years after his death. I was 9 years old at the time.

And surely, the CIA has never ever had someone killed under suspicious circumstances…

Or engineered said circumstances…

Or blamed an obvious murder on suicide…

On December 10, 2004, Gary Webb took his own life. It is true that there were two bullet wounds in his head, which has raised suspicions that his death might not have been a suicide. However, no evidence has yet been presented contradicting the coroner’s findings, so we have to accept it as such for now.

I fundamentally disagree with the premise of this statement and you should also.

“What we are being told happened here is completely impossible, but no one has presented anything more plausible, so we must accept this as truth and move on.”

Absolutely not. Bullshit. Fuck that. You should be ashamed of yourself for even writing that in public. You’re being lied to, right to your face, boldly and unashamedly, to rug-sweep a set of extremely illegal governmental actions without any sort of culpability - and your response to this is “Well, better not worry about that then!”

How could you possibly think that’s the correct response to that?

Bit late to do something about it now, we missed that bus, but I can draw a straight line from Ronald Reagan to Contra to this to the fascist hellhole of an American society that find ourselves in in the current day. If anyone had held their government responsible for anything it has done at any point in time, we might have shifted that path just a little.

The odds are good when the goods are odd