"Award yourself a Hero of the Soviet Union out of petty cash"
♂. tech monkey. pet wrangler. occasional maker. recovering makerspace director/officer. gun-owning liberal, I guess. TX resident. Crypto/MLM/hustle types go elsewhere.
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"Award yourself a Hero of the Soviet Union out of petty cash"
Answer for companies/organizations: getting set up on social media is frictionless compared to even an online "business card" website. You just surrender all but notional control over your presence.
So much "we need to be where everyone is at" + refusal to run a website or messageboard learned helplessness.
Ransom note is an underappreciated style
Used to gavel an easy button that compels someone else to do something
This onramp in particular. Moving at even 40MPH along the service road visibility is crap for both exiting traffic and merging onto the highway. Chumps trundling along in the left lane are often nearly annihilated by exiting traffic.
An acquaintance once joked about working 2 fulltime (+OT) jobs simultaneously that he was once so tired trekking from one shift to the next after >36 hours of no sleep that he found himself rationalizing that it was OK doze on the straightaways so long as he woke up in time for the turns
Up to ~⅓ of the time I listen to nothing during the commute. News is depressing, FM radio is disinteresting, I can't be arsed to stream nor acquire add'l tunes to load onto USB, and I-35E *is* actively trying to kill me.
Larger pattern here seems to be the allure of the automagical - effortlessly and rapidly doing scut work with seemingly good enough levels of accuracy - then solely relying on that one piece despite the availability of multiple pieces of information.
I gather in more than a few cases the plate number was manually keyed incorrectly.
As this has an EdTech scent to it, the latter apt to be the direction it takes: tiptoeing within the limits of decorum as defined by our betters (ala LinkedIn years ago) so there's "diversity" of opinion but the plutocrats get their way without serious friction.
Mixed opinion on this. There's simultaneously the issue of Othering those with whom we merely disagree - which is poisoning normal discourse - alongside all-too-casual sanewashing of existential threats to disfavored groups.
Never not be protesting
I had one bundled for many years and used it perhaps ~quarterly. Industry stock analysts finally stopped caring about voice lines as a performance metric so bundle incentives went away and the lines soon followed.
(Aside) I work in telecom and we've been primarily an ISP for 20+ year. The landline has largely been relegated to businesses. Bundling kept residential subscribers for some time, but they rarely use those lines - some huge percentage don't even have handsets connected.
Under the right circumstances the wine will, uh, transubstantiate into urine over the course of an hour or two
~2015 a friend was concerned that the fidelity of basic facts was being lost. I fear they were but a few years ahead of their time as we watch the accelerating collapse of consensus reality.
Historiography (or at least changes in widely-held perceptions of historical events) used to take decades, if not a generation. Now it's mere years.
That Invisible Hand crap. Be nice if it worked that way. But it don't. The Hand seeks returns, and those are to be had fluffing the status quo.
I read Atlas Shrugged¹ ¹Except for The Speech². After about ten pages I couldn't handle it any more. ²If you're going to tear some pages out of the book, them's the pages to choose. There's a lot of 'em.
Problem is we want cars to be fun. Additional power and torque are damn-near free to implement in BEV vs ICE - and offset the handling compromises. 'Course we could reduce automotive dependency + implement traffic calming to inhibit these impulses. But political realities.
Every choice is a compromise with inherent trade-offs. Every technology has its strengths and weaknesses.
I could get behind a linear ton-mile rate for road tax. Yeah, OTR trucks cause orders of magnitude more damage. But lighter vehicles still demand roads. Simplicity with a degree of proportionality would be easier to roll out.
The face of counter-factuality. Longstanding "car guy" rhetorical trope: argue something they *literally* just thought of - as if automotive engineers with time, resources, and expertise totes hadn't considered nor assessed. Same thing, only it's serious unlike messageboard armchairing.
As a DFW resident I can say this is all too true
I suddenly feel like I should own this artifact
And motivated adversaries would launch a drone swarm attack - wind farm or no - if that location suited them; our ability to detect and react would be exactly the same
But of course it's a throwaway pretext because The Base™ is big mad about renewables and Trump is throwing them some ragebait to hold over the hippies. And the rest of us because that's a lot of capex pissed away and more emissions as the gas plants spin faster.
And how pray tell does one plan to spot an undersea drone with radar?
Hysterical tree fort conspiracies. Clearly the kids on the other street have assaissain weasels - therefore we must burn the greenbelt down so we'll see them coming.
So many flags that are essentially business card/brochure/letterhead/website logos
LOL. My burg is in there, among the many that resemble business card/brochure/letterhead/website logos.
Trying to figure out if ongoing AI boosterism is to prop up shovel merchant (i.e. Nvidia) stock or prop up miner (Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, et al) stock
One does not simply walk into the Costco
It's computers all the way down
Greene. So close to Wintergreen.
Rural economies have been hammered to dogsh_t for decades; they voted for notionally lower taxes and cultural affinity. As no small slice of suburban conservatives think themselves rural, small surprise they too align with this thinking.
A small D2C OEM I've dealt with has had variable availability since ~March
The thought of someone enjoying themselves surely kept the Puritans up at night, much like modern busybodies
That or they dislike other people liking anything. Disapproval is a big chunk of politics.
@vortexegg.com Concurrent with Bannon's "flood the zone" gambit, seems Trump is alternating between declaring emergencies in bad faith and just ... doing whatever he wants ... daring Congress or the courts to act, knowing they won't
I've been expecting something like this since January - albeit without paperwork, records, official recognition
> spreadsheets The world runs on these more than anyone wants to know or is comfortable admitting
(a) True for 1.0. Problem is 2.0 introduced Heritage goons with a plan. (b) Vance will be a punching bag for sure, but Thiel and co have People in place (c) More recently Biden's failure to clean house - post J6 and especially after Trump's duplicity around NDI
The entire Trump 2.0 administration has had a Weekend at Bernie's feel to it, such is Trump's apparent and accelerating cognitive decline. If he perishes in office I wonder how long it will take to announce his ... departure.
Voices other than Trump may say almost the exact same things, but the personality cult won't be as interested and will likely shrink considerably. But that rot *will* still be there unfortunately.
I sure don't miss any of the apartments I inhabited - clearly built for max ROI for the builder/owner who condescended to renting the units out to the plebs at ever-escalating lease rates.
Suspect a lot of the TX homeowner demo has experience with the awfulness that is the bulk of multifamily and the critfail that is transit so it's kinda understandable. But with coastal states real estate inflation hitting TX, that "affordability" factor is disappearing.
Minimum lot sizes are a real hindrance. But reducing them is no magic bullet. Housing scarcity is a layer cake of laws, financial models, and an electorate *very* attached to the image of the single-family home + white picket fence.
Once had a *very* young spiny lizard hitch a ride on me into the house. was a fun time locating it then releasing it outdoors lest it b unnaturally selected out of existence by the cats.
Ah. My initial searching led to this. Which had I searched a *bit* further I would have realized has been passed through the legislature and signed into law.
TL;DR - limit localities' minimum lot size zoning for single-family? If so, mixed feelings. Upside: movement towards reducing housing scarcity. Downside: more state control, token movement at best.
Stakeholder: Could you change [column number] on the spreadsheet? Me: Comrade, friend, my man - I don't remember which column number was what because the spreadsheet is a throwaway artifact to me - what FIELD NAME do you want changed in the SQL?
Or Elmo or Cabbage Patch Kids
Whatever suffering afflicts the In Group is largely a Character Building Exercise™. Out Group wickedness is so fkn bad it should break suspension of disbelief. As should the invariable the roflstomp. No one dies of dysentery, starvation, or sudden lead accumulation that didn't deserve it.
Having - unfortunately - sampled the genre, it largely seems to go as follows: • Protags established as In Group • (Disturbing Out Group trends afoot) • Disaster Strikes™ • In Group Saw It Coming™, reacts quickly • Out Group suffers, because wickedness • In Group roflstops Out Group
Disaster pr0n afficionados are maliciously ignorant to the ugliness of civil war
A goal of production is to either discover new local minimums (technology, tastes, efficiencies) or optimize for them. Distinctions exist within a given local minimum, but they can be subtle to the outsider.
Got with a takeout order recently. That ingredients list is simplicity exemplified. Basic heat in a packet.
Anyone clutching pearls over this is almost certainly fixating on whatever carnality they're imagining rather than the other ~99.99% of relationships: people spending time together
I-345's present state is problematic, yes, but "traffic (driven by people not living or working in the immediate area, whom I hold in absolute contempt) can just go elsewhere" wins no friends and I-345 is otherwise seamless transition from US 75 (North) to I-45 (South).
First encountered self-described urbanists (discussing removal of I-345) who came across as self-righteous hipsters who ultimately wanted it gone for aesthetic reasons, offering no solutions for those who depend on it. Turned me off of urbanism for a good ~decade.
Built a storage shed in 2018 start to finish of my own design. The scope shrank until it became possible to build and the execution involved numerous changes on the fly + bodges until completion.
Sure seems like it
One wonders if healthcare systems in rural America sustained by immigrants will begin to buckle as they eye the exits
No cheating, post the last pic of your pet.
For a while it seemed like the DNC was air-dropping Progressives in Cowboy Hats into rural and rural-adjacent districts - shunning locals with an actual chance of victory but were not indentured to the DNC, their favored consultants, The Platform™ - and wondering why they got roflstomped.
That future is looming on my horizon as well
Same demo was freaking the F out during the pandemic when grocery stores switched to cheaper gray and brown plastic bags from the white-dyed variety
TX is more of a shrimping state
rhymes with "corn"
As a TX resident this is already a reality for the likes of websites ending hub-dot-com; I only expect this to worsen
I did a visual C++ course a *long* time ago and a a basic "HELLO, WORLD" console app compiled down a chonking 185K. Simulating an OS with AI is going to make that svelte and minimalist by compare.
What in the ketamine haze is going on here?
garbage collection suspending tomcat isn't really an error condition
Atlas Mumbled
One of the major factions in the long-running MMO Eve Online - the Amarr - are slavers. The lore hints at the institutional brutality of the mindset with references to the rules and regulations around 'sapient livestock'.
Did some freelance work on such an endeavor ~25 years ago - wrote some technical descriptions and provided some supplementary diagrams. Made a couple hundred buxx.
Early-generation CARB nozzles were badly-designed and those faults endure in lower-end products. Slow-pouring and frustrating to use, yes, but also prone to random - often catastrophic - failure in use.
So many attempts with uncooperative camera + subject Me: tapping carefully on a dim foreground object Camera: best I can do is expose for and focus on the bright background
Your super-smart buddy that has to research nesting a basic VLOOKUP() inside IF() and still gets it badly wrong after 15 minutes
I want to say I've heard of people buying pure capsaicin crystals, doing the galaxy brain thing consuming them directly, then suffering grievous injury. Acute allergic reaction rather than chemical burn?
Did the cities in the DFW region pronounce negative tolerance for speeding this week? Is Limit-10 suddenly the effective speed limit?
The "Ima shoot at any drone I see!" thing (in the US anyway) is a weird comingling of badly misunderstanding privacy laws, *really* bad threat modeling, and posturing - so much posturing.
" That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof, waiting for one of the "lawyers" who worked passages through the cordon, he tried his first ASP machine. It was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very proud of it; he had helped hijack the truck himself. "
Or the cloud functionality through which rent is sought
... He bought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet beach. ... the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible. "
" ... sudden failures of the delta-inducer brought painfully abrupt returns to consciousness. To avoid these, he used patch cords, miniature alligator clips, and black tape to wire the inducer to a battery-operated ASP deck. Power loss in the inducer would trigger the deck's playback circuit.
About time every local TV news station had a satellite truck for live on-the-scene reporting, violent crime was on the way down. But thanks to the fallacy of misleading vividness, awareness of fewer crimes intensified thus the perception that crime was on the rise.
It was the 80s so clearcuts were common enough - right on up to the highway (seems to have been the 90s when started leaving ~100m corridors uncut along highways). I had quite the vocabulary for logging equipment as a young kid.
Ah yes, that smell. The paper mill was attached to the lumber+plywood mill that was the primary employer when the family lived in OR. Was in an unincorporated community a few miles north, as such exposure to the smell was limited to ~monthly treks along the highway.
Looking over my blocklist, appears ~½ are deactivated accounts
When the conclusion is "I spent five minutes interacting with you and enjoyed none of them"
SO's little dog, whom I refer to as Action Loaf
They allegedly detract from street life
Rabbit hole These are hated by urbanists that have seemingly never spent an August afternoon outside in Dallas. You can hate that they're privately-owned, inconsistently-labelled, etc. But Dallas is f__king hot 5+ months of the year and no one is doing sidewalk cafes May-September.
*weird posturing I've got midwestern family members that imply 3 - a hint of "we're not *those* people". Yet I also enjoy hotdish and lefse so what gives?