CU and the lack of federal public funding for elections (by which I mean the state funds the campaigns of those who want federal offices) basically resulted in the US political class ending up fully in the pocket of the corporations.

That’s what absolutely destroyed our ability to elect anyone other than what the corporate doners want, and thus you end up with nothing but corporate-friendly politicians, and thus a whole bunch of people who have no problem with facism and well, here we are.

I seem to clearly remember a story from the Bible about this, but perhaps they’ve simply skipped that part during their reading?

This is also a royal pain if you’re into retro computers and want anything from like 2001-2004, because damn near every single motherboard from those eras need to be recapped, like, without exception. Either they’re dead, or they will be soon.

Super annoying to get a thing you want to play with and the first thing you have to do is replace 20 caps and spend 3 hours doing it before you can even see if it would otherwise even work, lol.

I had a discussion about using the Slashdot style voting rather than the Reddit style.

It not only has the additional tag, it has the max “upvote” display limit of 5, and the display code will expand and promote the best rated comments, while hiding the garbage.

I think comments on most forums would benefit from there being no ‘big upvote’ number to chase, as well as making the highest rated comments in a thread of say, 200, more obvious.

maybe that’s me being overly harsh

That’s actually probably fair: the M-chips are impressive, but they’re just an evolution that’s come out of the A-series stuff for their phones.

Which, of course, Apple bought and did not actually create. (I’ll let someone else argue the merits of buy vs do it yourself, especially when you give your aquisition endless R&D funds to make good shit.)

Seriously, they got so expensive so fast.

At this point, if I want a burger, I’ll go spend $11 at Chili’s and get an actually good burger, some chips, fries, and a drink.

Why would ANYONE who is not literally bereft of any other option go to McDonalds at this point?

He could sell his various parts as they fall off. What’s a trump toe worth you think?

Listen, I can’t just not use Amazon. Where else am I going to get my SYPHILICHODE nail trimmers and LEAKCROTCH underwear?

You can’t just find horrible garbage to buy ANYWHERE, you gotta buy it on Amazon.

I can live without it for a week, but man, these underwear don’t last too long so I gotta keep buying more!

(/s in case this was not sufficiently clear, but this is the ultimate problem with all these pointless little internet symbolic gestures: nobody will notice, remember, or care about them since they’re only going to be a very minor stoppage in buying things, which everyone ends up buying ANYWAYS after the week is over.)

Hey, Tesla tires and wheels are suuuuuper expesnive relative to normal cars.

Like several hundred dollars per tire (or in the case of the fatty dumpster, like $600) becauase the cars are so heavy you can’t just use ye olde normal tires on them.

I would very much like EVERY tire and wheel thief to go after nothing but Teslas and leave everyone else alone. Better money, and absolutely nobody will ever recall seeing you steal shit.

Hey if you’re near a Tesla storage lot, there probably IS a couple hundred cybertrucks nearby.

Sitting there, having their wheels stolen and rotting since nobody is buying them, but that’s still technically nearby.

Elon has always been a terrible person

The problem with Elon is he’s been provably an idiot for the past 25 years.

The first thing I ever heard about Musky is that back in 2000-ish he wanted PayPal to take their infra, throw out all the Linux/BSD in use, and move everything to Windows NT.

Anyone who was even remotely IT adjacent in that era can come along and tell you how utterly moronic that idea is.

Anytime I’ve ever heard him blather on about some stupid shit that doesn’t exist except in his delusions or talk about, well, ANYTHING technical or specialized all I was ever able to think of is that he got lucky that Thiel didn’t drain all of his blood and leave his corpse in a ditch.

Or do think, with their last gasp of breathable air, they curse the liberals and communists?

I would expect it would go something like “Dang woke DEI molotov cocktail, it’s trapped me in the master truck! Truly this is Obama’s fault.”

As a totally unrelated side note, I wonder how much thermite you’d need and where you’d need to place it to have it burn a hole through the car and into the battery, turning your cybertruck into a cyberfire.

until you were able to watch porn

You mean you never watched 3gpp encoded 240p porn over WAP sites via a java browser on your dumb phone?

…what? Stop judging me.

What’s hilarious to me is that this was totally a Thing when I was younger.

Not for measels, because we weren’t braindead dumbfucks, but for chickenpox.

You’d have whole groups of kids get together to have everyone get sick at once, instead of one kid at a time for months and months as it spreads through classes at school.

IDK if it made sense, but it was legit a thing that people were doing.

Of course, there’s a vaccine now, so if you’re still doing this you’re one of the aformentioned braindead dumbfucks.

Sounds like a fantastic plan.

The handwringing about if we’re being nice enough to the alt right is directly contributing to why we have so much mess we’re now having to deal with. The approach seems sane to find music that’s very specifically nazi rock, so they’re being extremely limited in response, imo.

Screw em, kick them out of anywhere you find them, and then nail the door they used to get in shut.

The implication seems like, “we all talk to each other and if you lie to me you lose all of your accounts”.

Well uh, yes, in some cases, that’s exactly the correct interpretation.

A lot of tracker admins DO talk to each other, because this is a fairly small world, and yeah, nobody wants a shithead around so they’ll definitely let other people know who their shitheads are so they can be handled before they become a problem.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, imo.

Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

I hate to go ‘Boy, I don’t buy it’ but, uh, I kinda don’t?

This is one of those things that COULD happen, as long as every teacher, every administrator and the state itself were all intentionally trying to make it happen.

CT has standardized tests that are required to be taken to progress through school, so how can someone who can’t read or write pass those?

And EVERY teacher she had from first grade on just accepted the fact she clearly was unable to read or write, and thus was almost certainly not doing any work, and just decided that’s a-ok and we’ll just pass her along anyways without doing anything?

Somehow feels like there’s a lot more to this story than just her side as presented by that article.

Uber-like surge pricing on electricity

We don’t really: that story you heard from a few years ago was the only company that billed like that. The customers made a bet that the pricing averages through the day (lower at night, higher cost during the day) would average out in their favor over fixed-cost billing, and frankly, it did right up until it didn’t.

They took a risk and got bit by, frankly, not understanding how the system works and basically ate the spikes.

Everyone else paid $0.09/kwh or so during that whole period, and the electric providers ate the cost because when you’re averaging out spikes across millions of kwh, it won’t lead to bankruptcy.

“Work 50% longer weeks so you can make something that’ll both make me richer AND cost you your jobs!” is not the motivational speech he thinks it is.