Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
You know, I made the exact same comment and made the exact same prediction yesterday, while watching their dumbass “first 100 days” press breifing. I would normally say that great minds think alike, however the damn book was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
I have investigated. My conclusion is: Your low approval rating is because you are a toad.
My consultancy rate is very reasonable at three million dollars per second. You owe me nine million dollars. Sign here, please.
This serves as the perfect illustration as to why whatever brand of kissing Trump’s ass anyone may be doing or have done in the past will not save you when he decides to turn on you. Rupert Murdoch is probably the number one person on Earth most responsible for getting Trump into office not only this time, but also the last time. And the fact that he did so means absolutely nothing to Captain Cheeto who is big mad at him right now. The Trump regime absolutely will attack and discard anyone – anyone – who has been deemed to have outlived their usefulness.
Business owners. Racists. Farmers. Factory workers. Proud Boys. Conservative pundits. Trump doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself. Trump will not protect you unless he thinks doing so will benefit him today. Tomorrow? The day after that? Eventually he’ll be done with you, and he’ll make up a way to declare you his enemy, and he’ll come after you. And nothing you did for him before will matter. You’ll be in the exact same El Salvadorian gulag or whatever as whoever he was mad at last week.
Fascist regimes need a constant supply of enemies to pretend that they’re valiantly fighting against, and when the run out of the last batch of enemies they’ll make up a new one. That new batch of enemies will likely contain all the people who they claimed were their allies during the last go-round. There’s precedent. As it happens, plenty of it. Absolutely oodles of examples.
To be fair, “domesticated” cats are as well and no doubt to the same degree. It’s just that due to their size they’re not in a position to do much to you.
I certainly get randomly attacked by my cats whenever they get a bee in their bonnet, or want something, or are bored, or because it’s Tuesday, etc. The rest of the time they’re chill.
And tearing. Until it is done.
Unless you’re an American Indian we’re all immigrants, eventually.
Christ.
You reminded me that I had to waste like an entire hour of my day a couple of weeks ago convincing my boss that yes, we absolutely can eBay off the four or five unopened toner cartridges we have lying around here for a printer we no longer have. It’s fine. Just let them go. We can use the money for some other operational expense. “But already paid for them and that means we’ll take a loss on them.”
Sure, genius. Versus what, exactly? Leaving them mouldering on the supply room shelf until the day the sun burns out? An 80% return is better than 0% return.
Lately (no doubt due to getting back into prosumer photography stuff) I’ve been using B&H Photo and Video. I kinda-sorta forgot I bought my drone from them several years ago and at the time they were cheaper than Amazon and also offered next day shipping for free for an order of that magnitude. Since I’m not using Amazon anymore I’ve been getting my stuff from there again.
Everything I’ve been interested in has been the same price as on Amazon or cheaper. I think they’re hamstrung by their name by this point since they seem to have a pretty wide swath of general electronics and not just camera gear.
Just don’t try to order on the Shabbat (i.e. Saturday), because you can’t. Their web site literally disables its checkout during that time.
If you specifically need yum-cha generic Chinese garbage (for instance, if you have a particular brand related to bizarre knockoff knives you need to maintain) I find going straight to the source and just getting that crap from Aliexpress is the best plan. It’s the same bullshit that litters most of Amazon and sure, maybe you don’t get it quite as fast. But at least they’re broadly honest about the inherent crappiness of what you’re getting, and the same stuff is significantly less expensive.
There probably is, but this is what I mainly use:
BoOkMaRkEd, ʀɪɢʜᴛ ᴀʟᴏɴɢsɪᴅᴇ ᴀʟʟ ᴏғ ᴍʏ ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ 𝕤𝕥𝕦𝕡𝕚𝕕 f̴͎̠͕̈́̐͠o̸̡̪̼̿͐͐n̴̞͖̒̚̚͜ț̸̺͉̔̐̐ 𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖊𝖗𝖆𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖘!
Or JuSt UsE SpOnGeBoB CaPs!!!
…That’s actually really annoying to type, though.
Reading.
Or rather, how so many people seem fear and avoid it, or can’t do it. Something like 21% of adults in the US are illiterate, and the majority – 54% – read at or below a 6th grade level.
I’ve been a sight reader probably since I was about six years old. I absolutely cannot look at any words legibly written in my native language and not understand them. You couldn’t force me to look at words written in English and not digest them if you held a gun to my head. I fear no wall of text, no matter how tall it is.
It takes some effort to wrap your head around the notion that not only can most people not do this, but statistically speaking most or at least a plurality of people have to struggle or exert conscious effort to read and many of them are loathe to do so. And roughly one in five people simply can’t. This did not sink in for me when I was younger.
I can’t imagine having to live my life that way. You nerds have seen how much bullshit I write in a day; I’d go absolutely bats.
One wonders how much of this is down to the proportion of people on here for whom English is not their first language. I know that I struggle enough to comprehend any other languages which aren’t my native one to begin with (i.e. English, in my case) so a lot of subtlety surely flies over my head in those. Can’t imagine that situation is much different for others.
Yeah, I don’t trust the feds with any of my account details for anything. They can fuck right off with that.
It’s not like Elon Musk already illegally withdrew $5000 from some guy’s bank account on a whim, or anything.
Maybe as part of those 100 new stores they can re-open one of the three around me that they abruptly closed several years ago. One of those was one of their “flagship” stores and had about the same square footage as one of the larger REI locations and seemed to be doing a brisk business right up until the end. So I’m not sure what was up with that. My nearest EMS is now 120+ miles away which is a bit silly if all I need is some chalk or something.
I did score some mega-clearance stuff back then, though. So that was neat. Like a pair of Gore Tex Ascent pants for $15 or thereabouts.
They are also the only national retailer that sells AR-15’s.
Eh, what? Cabelas/Bass Pro Shops are certainly nationwide.
Yeah, that turned into a Laurel and Hardy skit in short order. “But it’s ‘lifetime!’”
Uh-huh. You want to bet?
I had their credit card, too, for the simple expedient that you could take the rewards points and cash them out. You can’t do that anymore, because you can’t cash out membership rewards at all anymore. Which to be frank was the only reason to shop there since the pathologically sell everything at 100% full list price all the time. The dodge was you could get your discount in a roundabout way later by combining your normal membership points with the extra from the card, and then cash it out. Now that the membership points are just more company scrip, this is pointless. You may as well just buy the same stuff from somebody else for less, since there’s certainly no longer any ethical benefit to purchasing from REI to make up for paying extra.
Meanwhile, US Bank (the bank which used to issue their credit card before the transition) offers a Visa with precisely the same rewards structure as the old REI card, sans the extra couple of points on specifically REI purchases, which you can likewise cash out. So I just got one of those instead. It seems I wasn’t the only one who figured this out, because the CSR I spoke to in the process told me a lot of people were doing the same thing at that time.
I’d argue it already has. I no longer shop there and haven’t done so for years, nor does anyone else I know in any of my hiking/backpacking/rock climbing/riding circles.
Knowing full well that they measure their “success” via their membership count, I also bullied them into cancelling my membership several years ago. That was an interesting experience.
Because we came out on top at the end of WWII, but we were the main Allied nation whose country didn’t get blown to smithereens during the war due to being an ocean away. (Granted, neither was Australia but they were not and did not become a manufacturing powerhouse in the process.)
All of the European colonial powers lost a ton of their colonies either during or in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, especially the British empire. Australia is even included in that list, becoming independent in 1942. The rest looks like a who’s-who of former British colonies and protectorates, the most impactful and arguably the most famous being India in 1947. Also Jordan (1946), Myanmar/Burma (1948), Sri Lanka (1948), Israel (carved out of the British mandate of Palestine, also 1948), and many others in the intervening decades.
The Brits had to dedicate most of their military forces to fighting the war which left their various colonies undermanned. India’s independence in particular put into motion the expectation that all of these lands and protectorates could self-determine, and since Britain was A) broke, and B) imperialism was becoming progressively less socially acceptable in Europe, Britain let most of them go. Not least of which because they did not have the manpower to spend keeping those pesky natives down, nor did they have the money to spend paying anyone to do so for them.
America, meanwhile, built huge swathes of industrial capacity during the war which was all still there afterwards, owned significant amounts of debt from the various European powers from loans made and equipment provided before we entered the war fully, essentially owned Japan for a decade or two, and importantly did not suffer any damage to its own infrastructure, factories, or civilian populations due to being separated from both theaters of war by an entire ocean each.
TL;DR: Pretty much everyone involved in the war was left with a country made of rubble and ashes in varying degrees, except the US.