The thing is, I think if he would just wear that saucy Hugh Hefner meets Scrooge look he wore recently, and owned sucking horse dick. I think the nation would get over it.

Even if he owned sucking off Bill Clinton, we’d mostly go, “I mean, yeah, he’s a real charmer, who among us can say we wouldn’t?” At this point, I think being a pedo creep to kids with Epstein is the only sex scandal that could actually damage him. So few of his sex scandals have really stuck (aside from some real financial penalties in the E. Jean Carroll case).

He blew a microphone on stage when it stopped working in the lead up to the 2024 election. He’s got some instincts from somewhere.

Yeah, but honestly getting rid of coins is an admission that inflation is high relative to 40-50 years ago. When pretty much every government wants to keep that fact out of the public consciousness. Especially the current US government who wants to both claim we don’t have inflation at all, and are the ones getting rid of the penny.

I’ve been saying we should drop the penny for almost 2 decades, but I still kind of look at getting rid of the penny as a sign of our current government’s abysmal handling of inflation.

They’re just applying their business tactics to Christianity now. They realized that religion wasn’t going away as fast as they hoped, and have fallen back on the old embrace, extend, extinguish playbook. I doubt they’ve realized the power of religion to drive them certifiably insane during the “embrace” phase.

Depending on how much you have set aside it can work, if you don’t have anything set aside and break a leg in a freak accident you can get stuck making massive payments on $20,000+ of medical debt and set yourself back several years. I’m sure it’s gotten more expensive now too, that was 6 years ago, and while I don’t have the debt any more, I also have complications from the surgery that still bother me that I feel like I can’t afford to get fixed.

That said, a high deductible plan can also leave you screwed, and doesn’t save you as much money as they act like it does. The pricing is different for insured vs uninsured patients, and your insurance company has basically negotiated the rates higher so you think they’re more useful than they actually are.

Also, when donating to local food pantries, remember that donations of money go farther and feed more than donations of food. Food pantries have access to economies of scale and can buy food cheaper than an individual can. So you’ll increase your impact if you just donate your cash straight to the food pantry, rather than going to the grocery store to buy food to donate. In addition, the food pantry will be able to more accurately supply what people actually need and stock what they are short on, rather than you just guessing.

Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.

Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.

This has been a Microsoft wishlist feature since the 90s. I remember being a kid and reading articles in my dad’s copies of PC Magazine that Bill Gates wanted a computer without a keyboard that you could just talk to and tell it what to do.

So yeah, C-level intelligence is exactly right.

They’re cable, the FCC has no authority over cable. Fair point on the lawsuit front though.

If anything eventually it’ll be like gardening seeds. Where yeah, there’s a lot of hybrid seeds that might be good for certain traits, but what a bunch of gardeners really want are heirloom varieties that are more naturally-selected and therefore more reliable over multiple generations.

Not even in the Apocrypha, in Acts 12 they voted to replace Judas with Matthias. And then later in 1st Corinthians 15, Paul claimed to be an apostle. So, not even counting the apocrypha, at best Kirk would be the 15th.

My personal scores have increased by about 100 points in the last 6 months (I started getting worried about interest rates getting even worse and consolidated my credit cards under a personal loan with a definite payoff date).

At this point I really don’t care what my credit score is, but this feels like a bad time to have debt, and for once in my life I feel lucky that I’m able to be paying off debt faster than I can take on more - which really hasn’t been the case since I went to university in 2007 (and never finished for financial reasons).

I think the real reason they were hired was to give them something to do other than ask for the Epstein files all day on their podcasts. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino were both very outspoken about wanting the Epstein files released before they were given jobs leading the FBI. Honestly letting themselves show their incompetence to the world with this case may have been part of the plan all along. Make them look like the fools they are, and people will stop believing them when they inevitably decide they want to talk about Epstein again.

I would imagine they mean something like jellyfin/plex, which don’t necessarily get you away from torrents. Unless you want to go the slightly more legal route of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and re-encoding everything for yourself. I say “slightly more legal” because while you are legally allowed a backup or archival copy of your own media (in the US), you still usually have to violate the DMCA to break encryption so you can rip your archival copy.

Most of us that are younger than the Boomers or maybe Gen X don’t want to count on Social Security because we’ve been hearing our whole lives that Social Security is on the chopping block because the government is in so much debt. And at this point we kinda just expect that ladder to be pulled up behind the Boomers before we get anything, because that’s already happened in so many other areas like home ownership.

I also think people need to remember that Social Security is their own money that they paid in over their lives, and they are owed it back.

And also that even though the US government has a large amount of debt, we’ve also spent the last 50 years giving tax cuts to the rich, we’d probably be just fine if we went back to a 90% marginal tax rate on the top earners like we had in the “good old days” of the 1950s.

Grew up in the great plains/midwest around the dairy industry. Had extended family who owned a smaller dairy farm. This all sounds pretty standard. Not saying it’s right, but none of it sounds new to me.

I would imagine there were plenty of people who bought modern marketing that was designed to cruelty-wash the dairy industry. The reality is there’s no way to insert yourself between an udder and a calf without cruelty, and that’s the only way to get cow’s milk. Unless we can figure out how to get milk from lab-grown organs, which probably comes with it’s own ethical issues.

I’ve had in-person jobs where I was on the clock for 12 hours and did probably 30-40 minutes worth of actual tasks over that time. I guess what I’m saying is that it isn’t only wfh jobs that can feel almost too “easy.” Only advice I have is enjoy it while you can, because if and when it ends, getting thrown back into a “normal” job can feel overwhelming for a bit.

Problem is that even if he choked on his burger and coke at lunch, and had dinner with the devil, neither of the next two in line could pass a civics class either.

Duels are outlawed these days, but we seem to be bringing back old ideas every day lately, so maybe? I for one, think a dueling space to go with the new ballroom at the White House sounds period-appropriate.

I hate to say it, but if that’s what it takes to get Nettanyahu and his Zionist cronies turned into red mist, it might be worth it. But also in 2025 I’m not entirely sure anything would happen outside of some “condemnation.”

Unless the Vatican decides to reboot the Crusades, which also sounds about right for this Indiana Jones timeline we’re all living in.