I was once on a farm, laughing at something, and a horsefly came up and bit me on the tongue.

I had no idea why it happened, still don’t, but it was one of the worst things that had ever happened to me at that point in my life.

South pole

And after that, citizens of the US. This all has nothing to do with deportation, it just happens that starting with the “other” is convenient because it lulls US people into thinking it won’t happen to them. The fact that ICE was already full-on into Gestapo tactics made things a little smoother, too.

Please accept our apologies, our country is trying to die though. It’s kind of all we can think about.

1. Because they want to know who you are
2. Because what are you going to do about it? They’re going to make money regardless

One or the other

There’s usually one of the buttons you can hold down to mute the ads, near the bottom right in the little phalanx of buttons all around the screen.

If you find it, label it “MUTE” in marker or something, spread the word.

If the logistics of the trip make it realistic, trains are infinitely better in every respect.

Real human-sized tables. Plugs for charging. No security, no entering a whole other little authoritarian world where people make you take your shoes off and throw away your water. Get up and walk around. Go get a sandwich! The world is your oyster. Watch cool stuff going past (this one can also be true on airplanes but is more intermittent). It’s just better.

No idea about tools although I hope you find something.

Two related suggestions that will change your life:

1. Grunt Fund if you are making decisions about equity
2. Have people estimate the total time for a task, rigidly enforce that every man-hour spent on a project has to be allocated to one of those tasks (including the elusive but vital “oh shit we forgot” task), keep track of the coefficient between the two. It’ll be different for different people sometimes. When estimating a project, have people come up with estimates and then multiply by the coefficient. Be transparent with everyone about this system. It’ll revolutionize your project management life once people get used to it. I tried to find a blog post which explains more detail, but honestly, it’s not complicated, and Google is too shit now to find it.

The mom of a friend of mine did this when he was growing up. She was a single mom, she asked him about a guy she was seeing, he said “He’s a little weird, not sure I like him” not really meaning anything by it other than an honest answer. The guy was gone from their lives within a few days. He said he might not have given that answer if he’d realized what she was asking, it was just a snap answer based on not really knowing the guy that well.

The guy had money, seemed otherwise like a fairly decent person, but she dropped him without a second thought after that one conversation. Just gone. She did a lot of things wrong in her life but pretty much the one and only thing she was unerringly on the money about was loving her kids and making them the center whatever else was going on. She pretty much DGAF about what else was happening if there was ever a conflict.

My take on it: You can’t find a date with your brain. It just doesn’t work that way.

Speed dating works. It’s more or less the only thing that does without a huge mountain of crap to sort through. Here’s your /r/shittymilliondollaridea: Be the Uber of speed dating. Let people filter by either one or two variables. Age, height, credit score, cup size, educational level. But put strict limits on it so that people really are just getting themselves into the desired ballpark. Then, run a big matrix operation so that when 12 people of the appropriate genders have all matched, pop up a notification that they all have reservations at X restaurant / bar / whatever that weekend, and the ladies need to switch tables whenever their phone dings.

Best of both worlds, and you don’t have to rent a venue.

If you want to make changes without dealing with update hassles:

• Make a child theme to your current theme which inherits from it.
• Add a functions.php to your child theme, which only includes specific overrides for functionality you want to override.
• Presto change-o you are immune to stuff getting ruined with updates. (Aside from API changes and things but those are relatively rare in my experience, for the most part it all just works.)

Hugo is nice if you want extensive customization and you’re okay fighting with Go code and templates, a little bit.

archive.org

tubitv.com

Probably there are others but it’s a little bit rare that I haven’t been able to find stuff on one or the other

Can you name three incidents since 2020 where the cops have not been charged? I know of one, and even that one has an asterisk next to it. Before 2020 it was multiple every year, there used to be these massive walls with names written on them.

It absolutely has. Before Rodney King it was always fine. From 1992 to about 2014 it was mostly fine. From 2014-2020, it was a debate, and after 2020, they’re pretty much always guilty. There’s a whole interesting conversation to be had about why it was that all kinds of riot and peaceful protest had basically 0 result until 2014-2020, and then in 2020 it all of a sudden starting working significantly.

Anyway, now under Trump, some of the reform is going backwards. There were some outlier departments that were still in the 1992 mode, and the feds were doing some things to try to come down on them, whereas now it’s the opposite, Trump is actively pardoning dirty cops. Great stuff.

The circa 1990 nature of American society has been erased so completely that it is hard to believe how drastically it has changed.

Movies used to depict child molestation (Indiana Jones) or outright rape (Revenge of the Nerds) as normal and to be celebrated when it was done by the heroes. A lot of crimes got viewed through the lens of whether it was “our people” doing them. The thinking features in a lot of old movies.

The cops who beat Rodney King were found not guilty by a jury, in the first trial. After all, they’re the cops, they’re allowed. Drunk driving was fine, as long as you were one of the right kind of people. The cops would beat the fuck out of people and it was fine. The factory in town could be polluting the river and it was fine as long as dad had a job. And so on.

The uniformity of thought that TV enforced, before the internet, is really not well understood. If you thought Israel was bad, then you and Noam Chomsky were literally the only ones. Even as late in the arc as the Iraq War, I would say about 95% of the people who didn’t get their news from the internet supported the war. Watch one of the debates where Ron Paul was speaking against the war with everyone else (except the audience) just weirded out and confused by it, or the “Media-Opoly” short that aired on SNL once and then never again, to get some idea by contrast of how airtight the lock on narrative used to be. TV and newspapers are still kind of that way, but they don’t have the media monopoly they used to. It used to be that someone probably would live their entire adult life without ever hearing the kind of political viewpoints you see every day on Lemmy as normal things.

On the other hand, along with the expectation that everyone was kind of a piece of shit and that’s how life is, came a kind of backbone for resistance that I feel like is missing today. Woodstock ‘99 would be a pretty normal “yeah they robbed us” badly organized festival today. It was way better than the Fyre Festival, and people at Fyre just took it, or called their lawyers. At Woodstock ‘99, the kids threw bottles and batteries at Kurt Loder, broke in the ATMs and stole their money back, and then ripped the venue apart with their bare hands and burned it all to the ground.

• Librewolf is also quite a good browser
• Piefed seems like it’s shaping up to be better than Lemmy in a few different ways and it’s compatible with all the Lemmy people

Yeah, or just find some grad student. Watching 1000 videos to get a quick sense of how it can be categorized as “justified” vs “not” vs “debatable” would take some time, but it wouldn’t be all that hard. Lots of research things take time. Requesting all the footage would be hard, dealing with all the holes in the database would be hard, basically the biggest of the underlying problems is that no one really cares enough to try to make any of this easy. But yes, having the reality to base the conversation on would be a very nice thing to have.

I think that’s more of a cultural thing. The cops who were faced with the Boston bombers were still chasing them when they were throwing homemade explosives out the window trying to blow up the pursuing cruisers. It was mostly just city cops in the big gun / explosive / car chase battle, it wasn’t like some kind of elite FBI counterterrorism force, and they did fine. Some of the reporters who were following along said they actually didn’t realize how much danger they were in because of how calm the cops were about it. I have seen cops on YouTube react with far more fear and takes-hours-to-approach-the-car caution to one random unlicensed driver who refused to stop than cops in the Northeast will generally do for genuinely life-threatening situations.

Small-town Texas cops from conservative areas, yes, they’re cowardly bullies as a rule in my observation. That actually applies to a lot of parts of the South / Midwest of the US. I mean it is hard to generalize but here are my stereotypes of regional variation in US cops based on observing bodycam videos on YouTube which as we all know makes someone an expert:

• Deep South, Midwest, Southwest: Authoritarian, often react with extreme almost comical levels of caution to any threat real or perceived, also tend to be low-level violent once the perceived threat doesn’t materialize and it’s just some hapless person they can be violent against. Putting the cuffs on after a tense situation? Better grab that person’s wrist and fold it hard so they’re in a lot of pain, that’ll help make the whole process go smoothly.
• California: Just poorly trained, just in general a shit show if anything real is happening.
• Florida: Unfazed by fairly extreme levels of wildness or violence, fairly qualified at dealing with it, also often dicks but not to an extreme level
• Northeast (urban): Unfazed by anything and generally qualified, often pretty humane and reasonable, although NYPD is an exception
• Northeast (rural / suburbs): Mostly as for urban, but some are more as in the Deep South

This is one among a few different problems with this data. To some departments, “armed” means a firearm. To some, it means a bottle or a stick nearby. To some, it means the officer lied and put something in their report and no one follows up to make sure it’s accurate.

The mishmashing together of all the different incompatible datasets (which do not cover all of the shootings that actually happen) and then the presentation as if it’s a complete picture is just a big lie to make it look like people can make sense of what’s going on. The total lack of even the slightest attempt to disambiguate justified shootings from unjustified is probably an even bigger problem. Pretty much all this chart can tell you is roughly what the total number in an average year is, which isn’t real useful.