Overzeetop

Having lived through it, it really does feel weird though. I (mostly) missed the gasoline crisis (I was a child). It’s hard to imagine gas pumps all over the US being out of gasoline, and mile long lines waiting for a tanker to show up so you could get gas. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine staple rationing (butter, sugar) during wartime in modern US. I certainly didn’t live through it - having the TP aisle empty during covid doesn’t quite match that. And the actual (1930s) depression. I suspect those folks would consider the crashes of 87 99 01 08 and 20 minor annoyances - a bad Tuesday - compared to what they lived through.

Think of this, though - you have Covid. Okay we have Covid. That’s a world-wide event with life-changing implications for so many. And, we can hope, we don’t get another pandemic event of that magnitude in our lifetimes. And a decade or two from now you can lord it over some kid who was born in the last 3 years and just “doesn’t understand” that “closing school for three days because the flu is so bad” is not a pandemic, and that they just don’t understand what a game changer Covid was. ;-)

A Bell, Book, and Chicken in a Hatbox

I mean, that’s a weird-ass AI prompt. But if fascism wins and you voted third party, yes - it’s partly* your fault unless you’re too stupid to understand how first past the post voting works.

*conditionals against massive fascist party majority states notwithstanding.

maybe get a few of those potatoes up front

It’s good to see such unbridled optimism in these dark times.

The way I read it was a ceasefire in return for some of the hostages. Nobody floats their final offer with the first contact.

• Some of the hostages for humanitarian lanes
• Most of the hostages for a 7 day ceasefire with monitored evacuations
• All of the hostages for a 14 day ceasefire
• All of the hostages and known leaders of HAMAS for an indefinite ceasefire, contingent on zero future incursions or military operations (you have to offer at least one impossible option past what you want)

Well, lucky for him he didn’t even entertain the ceasefire to see if he could have gotten them all back.

Wait until I tell you that the US is indebted to Japan for that same amount ($1.1T) and to China for nearly that amount ($0.9T). Sure it’s a bigger portion of the available funds in the developing world, but on the scale of superpowers, it’s not so much.

https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt

Its a joke - yes.

Though, realistically, an empathy test would probably filter out a large portion of the haters. It’s harder to hate when you internalize the condition of others.

Sad, but true. About the only way to control it would be to require online comments to be directly identifiable to the person. Even Republicans appear to be embarrassed - and attempt to expunge their vitriol - when their homophobic, misogynistic, and racist comments and activities online are publicized. And even that wouldn’t eliminate it, it would just push it back underground to further fester.

And we know how strict these big companies are about voluntary compliance to the GDPR. ;-) I’m glad at least someone is putting in rules against this fuckery but, sadly, once that data is sold to the first outside vendor (Cambridge Analytica, Palantir, etc.) it’s out there and lives on the internet forever, even if the big boys are brought to heel by the EU.

If you’ve ever had a contact allow a service to read their contacts, you are in their database. That then gets cross-referenced with the (relatively few) online store providers the first time you use that address - or the obfuscated emailname.store@* version that was meant to serialize or identify spammers but which the simplest script can undo. Now your shipping/billing address, phone, and partial purchase history can be linked with every social media company that weird chick who did upside down keg hits with you that one night decided to allow contact access. Or your aunt Gertrude.

And it’s not even that complicated. Are you in the contacts list of anyone who has ever used the internet? Google, yahoo, or microsoft definitely know who you are in their internal databases and can create a web of contacts and likely contacts just from a couple of emails. Heck, I remember when there were “contact synchronization” websites where you could transfer your contacts between gmail addresses, or to/from other mail services. It was free, so I can just about guarantee they’re selling all of your info, which has been checked and corroborated by however many of your contacts decided to use their services.

That “not having” Facebook or [insert nearly any other major information-based corporation] means that those companies don’t have your information and profile already completed in their database.

Marketing: We need to defend this - what’s something people are really excited about?

Engineer: Stainless steel; you can’t make a good stainless without nickel

Salesman: Oooh - I know! How about nickels? Everybody loves nickels and their worth 5 cents each!

Engineer:

Marketing:

Intern: You know, they use nickel in battery packs for electric cars

Marketing: Oh, right - everybody likes electric cars. Green and vroom-vroom, I love it!

Engineer: You know that electric cars don’t go vroom-vroom, right?

Marketing: I’m going with electric cars, it’s a feel-good use people will get behind.

I know a Wookie who is gonna have to resign from congress now.

It’s not decorating. This is a 215SF studio in Brooklyn - that’s the “parking included” feature of the listing. And he’s paying an extra $1200 a month for the privilege.

It’s worth remembering that plastic doesn’t start out as plastic - they start out has hydrocarbons which are linked together to form long chain molecules we know as “plastic”. This, if the article is correct, implies that the polyethylene they are working with is broken down from the molecular chains into the C2H4 basic ethylene, or into short chains which can be stabilized into a surfactant which naturally decomposes into plain ethylene and might be used for the normal industrial synthesis of ethylene based compounds (like detergents and antifreeze, among others). The plastic, as a macro(/micro/nano) particle, would be gone and replaced with the target chemical (again, if the process is as they describe and complete). Whether the resulting surfactant is degradable is not addressed. Again, it’s hydrogen and carbon…there’s a lot of ways that can go - good and bad.

TeamLead: Alright, I think that wraps up this zoom. I’ll check in with each of you later.
Co-worker 1: Thanks
Co-worker 2: Bye
Co-worker 3: See you all later
Me (already working on something else): Love you; bye.

First rule of finding yourself in a hole: Stop Digging.

If that’s his actual thought, she’s already pregnant.

I guess a better marketing ploy would have been

Lemmy Sez
Fuck Spez

A good rhyme and well-justified text can do a lot of hard work.