Yeah, it’s interesting that the curriculum starts by portraying the American revolution as a just and righteous war, with ragtag bands of freedom fighters going up against a brutal and overwhelmingly powerful oppressor… And then as soon as the revolution is concluded, the messaging takes a hard turn to “but also violence is never okay and peaceful protest is the only acceptable way to instigate change!”

In the chapters about the civil rights era, Malcom X and the Black Panthers were barely mentioned in a footnote. And only really as a “oh also not all people were peaceful, and that violence only hurt the protestors’ message” warning.

And the sad part is that the propaganda works. Every time some politically-charged violence happens, you inevitably have people in the comments chanting about how violence is never the answer, and peaceful protest is the only acceptable way to change things.

Hello fellow human. I can confirm that I enjoy having soft skin which suitably covers my skeletons. From my research, nearly all humans prefer keeping their bones wet. How do you ensure your skeletons remain adequately moistened?

God I hate when apps don’t have properly marked fields. You can mark your fields as username/password/street address/phone number/etc and browsers will automatically be able to detect them. So they can suggest autofill for the respective fields. But so many sites just… Refuse to properly mark their fields?

I know autofill hijacking was a problem for a while. For instance, a malicious ad could have off-screen autofill fields. So your browser would autofill them and the ad would capture the data. It was super scummy, and is why browsers moved towards prompting for autofill instead of just doing it automatically. But this is no excuse for sites to break paste on their own fields. It adds nothing to security, and only encourages weak passwords.

Even worse, browser fingerprinting means they can track you even if you have tracker blockers. Your tracker blocker extension just becomes another unique part of your fingerprint.

Seriously? Only 5k? I have more followers than this motherfucker, and I’m just a casual shitposter.

I disagree, because the state is still operating within the bounds of capitalism. In a perfect world, state employees wouldn’t need a union. But for example, teachers are state employees. The meager protections that teachers have can largely be attributed to unions.

The bigger issue is that police largely work as state-sponsored union busters. Any job that involves union busting shouldn’t be allowed to have a union.

I think it’s just poor wording. It says they released tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. I think the punctuation and sentence structure is awkward. I think what they were trying to say was more along the lines of “they scraped millions of tracks from Spotify, and released them via BitTorrent.”

Still not technically correct, because you don’t release things via BitTorrent. But it at least clarifies that the songs were first scraped, and then released via torrent.

Why did they offer no contest at all?

Likely because contesting it would require doxxing themselves. The site’s admins survive on anonymity. And you can’t exactly be anonymous in court filings.

Similarly, ethanol can help protect you from the poisonous effects of methanol (wood alcohol). Methanol by itself isn’t actually harmful, but it gets broken down into harmful byproducts that will make you go blind and then kill you.

The enzyme responsible for breaking down methanol is also used to break down ethanol. And enzymes have a limited capacity for work. In other words, they can only break down a certain number of molecules at any given time. And the enzyme is more compatible with ethanol than methanol.

So if you suspect someone drank methanol, (it is a common ingredient in antifreeze), you should have them start taking shots. Pump them full of as much liquor as possible, as quickly as possible. Get them absolutely shitfaced ASAP, and keep them wasted until they get to the hospital. It will prevent the vast majority of the methanol from being broken down, which will prevent the actual poisoning from happening.

They’re like the difference between Patreon and OnlyFans. Patreon has stricter rules about what can be posted. So all of the people who needed to post things against Patreon’s rules ended up on OnlyFans. If you’re too extreme for Twitch, you end up on one of those alternative streaming sites. And he was too extreme even for those alt sites.

Rumble started as an alt-right streaming site, after Twitch started banning Nazis for hate speech. They got butthurt that they weren’t allowed to spew hate speech, and started their own streaming site instead.

Kick is a weird one, which basically started by recruiting established streamers. They sniped established streamers from Twitch, with the promise of better pay-per-view. They have a significantly lower user base compared to Twitch, but supposedly pay those streamers more. Aside from that, it has a lot of gambling streams. Lots of Twitch streamers tend to view Kick as a sort of morally grey area, because there is speculation that the entire site is basically a gigantic online gambling ad.

I haven’t heard a lot about Parti, but it seems to be a sort of last-ditch landing ground for people who have been banned from other platforms. Jack Doherty was one of their biggest streamers for a while, after getting banned on Kick for fighting a dude on stream. He got stream-sniped, and in response he basically sic’ed his security team on the stream sniper. They chased him down and beat him in the street, live on stream. Kick banned him, while Parti kept him on. He was banned from Parti not too long ago, though. Not sure why.

I mean, with lotto numbers you could just start trying to count. Once you can say the number, you move on to the next one. Depending on how the wish works, you could even try just sounding things out.

The meaning of life is mmmmmmmmaaaaaaaaaasssssssssstuuuuurrrrrrrrrrb-“ Hmm… What would come after the B? “The meaning of life is masturbaaaa-“… Oh. OH.

Alternatively, “was” is past tense. Meaning everything you’ve said in the past was correct. But that has no bearing on the future. The wish would undoubtedly fuck up a lot of things in the past from little daily white lies compounding (or even bigger childhood lies that could have drastically altered the world) but wouldn’t have any impact on things going forwards.

A genie would find a way to twist the wish for maximum suffering. And having your 4 year old “watch me, I can fly” lie be true would have some long lasting implications. Likely even leading up to a paradox where you were never even able to make the wish in the first place, because some childhood lie ended up getting you maimed or killed before you ever rubbed the lamp.

I think they meant that even when you have AI disabled, the top search results are still mostly AI slop.

I’d disagree with that definition. It’s a little like saying that a pedestrian who got hit and dragged by a car was “driving”. At best, it’s someone else forcing their usage upon you. In the cases you mentioned, it is someone else (usually a company looking to save on customer service) who is using AI. The users are the pedestrians in this case, and the companies using AI are the car.

The same could be said for required parenting classes or anything else. Not saying we shouldn’t do it, but it’s not nearly as easy as setting up some courses and making people take them.

Also, how would enforcement work? Not only would it predominantly affect lower income families, (who likely don’t have the money for required classes, and don’t have the time to take them even if they’re free), but what would be the penalty for refusing? There is no good answer, because every single answer will adversely affect the children that the program is trying to help.

You fine them? Congrats, that’s less money for the kid’s care, and is going to make poorer parents struggle to afford basic necessities even more than they already do. It’s going to disproportionately affect poorer people, because they’ll have less disposable income and will be hit harder by fines. It also means richer families can just buy their way out of the classes; if a fine is the only punishment, it’s only a punishment for the poor.

You jail them? Congrats, now you have deprived a child of their parents during their most formative years.

You take their kids away? Congrats, now you have flooded the foster system (which is already on the brink of collapse, and rife with abuse) and institutionalized a “poor family to rich family” child trafficking pipeline.

Additionally, lots of the “parents who don’t want to be involved” are likely too burnt out from working two or three jobs, or actively resent their kids because they had them too young. For instance, lots of teenage parents end up resenting their children in their 20’s, simply because they’re seeing all of their friends go out and party while they’re struggling to afford a babysitter. If you want to make that resentment a thousand times worse, start penalizing the parents further for not having the time to take parenting classes.

Finally… If your answer to the above question is “just make them stop having kids before they take the class…” How? I want to really think about that question. How? Are we going to surgically implant AFAB babies with fallopian tube switches, which only get unlocked after the parenting classes have been taken? Maybe every AMAB baby gets a vasectomy by default, which then gets reversed after they take the class? Because outside of mass-mandated surgical procedures, (good luck getting any surgeons to agree to this, by the way…) you can’t stop biology. The old conservative “abstinence is the only way to stop pregnancy” arguments have been disproven more times than I can count. But every other method requires active effort on someone’s part.

Fair warning, the series lives or dies based on whether or not you like the main character. He’s very divisive, so you’ll either love the series or hate it.

Also, the books make a point of listing relevant skills and abilities before they’re used. In a written format, this isn’t bad. It acts as a sort of quick reference. But in the audiobooks, (especially the early ones) it means you end up listening to the same skill descriptions like a dozen times throughout the course of the book. Later audiobooks shifted the descriptions to an index, instead of having them inline with the rest of the text. This dramatically cleared things up for the listener.

If you enjoy references, you should check out the He Who Fights With Monsters series. There have been a few unexpected references that had me full blown belly laughing.

It went from ~450 to ~700 cases. So it’s not like there are thousands, but it is still a significant increase. And still enough to argue that it’s not just a small numbers issue.

They just track billionaires’ jet transponders. Apparently they’ve spent a lot of time in France after the island was shut down.

Seriously though, you’re pretty much correct. It’s akin to the “cancer rates are rising dramatically” headlines, when the only thing that changed is our early detection methods got better. So now it is being caught more, and the number of known cases is rising.

The point of legalizing it is that it can be regulated. With legalization comes standardization. You can have legal employers who are legally required to verify employees’ ages, using established systems.

It would also allow the government to confirm that the employees are legally allowed to work in the country. Either citizens or on a valid working visa. This would add substantial roadblocks to trafficking, where one of the primary means of control is moving the victim to another country illegally and then taking their passport away. Limit their mobility, and you limit their ability to flee. But by requiring that all employees are legally allowed to work, it adds a significant roadblock to the traffickers’ MO.

When I was in high school, finding drugs was easier than finding alcohol. Why? Because drug dealers didn’t ask for ID. With alcohol, you had to know someone with a cool older sibling, or know a cashier who would be willing to sell if you slipped them a twenty. But since the latter was under constant surveillance from their employer (because cash registers are almost always video recorded for security purposes) that wasn’t very easy to find. But with drugs, you could walk up to any skater or stoner and ask if they had a connect. You’d have drugs in hand in less than 10 minutes.