EldritchFeminity

@EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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EldritchFeminity ,

I really need to go back and watch the whole thing, but I remember in one of the first two seasons there's another point where his wife discovers some duffel bags that he's stashed that are just absolutely stuffed with cash. Like, tens of thousands of dollars, if not a six-figure number. And when she confronts him about it (I think she knew what he was doing and he had promised to stop?), he says that he wants to make sure that she and the kids are taken care of after he dies.

But he was lying through his teeth. What started out as a desperate attempt to save his life quickly spirals into a power trip, and his ego can't let him stop even when he has no need to keep going. The money is just a side benefit at that point.

EldritchFeminity ,

We call these people "snowbirds" where I'm from.

You also missed the part where they vote to prevent any additional funding for education and other services in the communities where their summer houses are because it would increase their taxes.

EldritchFeminity ,

I don't know about Wal-Mart, but every other site you listed is famous for being filled with Chinese companies that make cheap knockoff garbage. Yes, even Amazon. It's like the perfect blend of enshitification and consumerism.

I don't know about the tech companies, but with clothing companies you'll see the exact same companies with names like asdfghjkl on both Amazon and Temu, selling the exact same product with the exact same pictures as 3 other similarly named companies. And what you buy will only last slightly longer than the 6 months the company is around for before it disappears and the owners open back up under a new name.

For tech, you gotta do research and see what the experts are saying and find out the reputation of the brands that you're looking at. Unfortunately, it isn't as easy as just going on the website and checking the reviews.

As for your original question, I think the answer will be FOSS projects. No company is going to willingly drop the potential ad revenue of AR ads. "This dream brought to you by Underwear brand briefs!"

EldritchFeminity ,

I think they should name an airline company after him instead. Or maybe a steak company.

Those definitely won't go bankrupt, surely. No way a businessman of his caliber would let that happen.

EldritchFeminity ,

It's by the design of the Democrats, though I think our current situation is an unintentional cascade effect.

It's the result of one of the oldest election strategies in the world that remains incredibly popular for one simple reason: it's easy and it works. "Vote for me because I'm not the other guy" is a much easier policy to convince people on than actually having any policies of your own.

For many years now Democrats all over the country have been funding the campaigns of the most unhinged and extremist of their opponents to set themselves up for an easy win - there was even a lady who wrote a book about her doing it, only to lose to that same extremist in the very next election.

And that's why we find ourselves in the situation that we're in. Because the Dems keep thinking that they can court some mythical moderate Republican voting block by propping extremists up as the nominees. But that doesn't exist because the Republicans have always been voting against Dems rather than for people they like. Republicans don't care if the nominee is Bush, Biden, Putin, or Stalin himself, risen from the grave to finally put an end to capitalism. So long as they have an R next to their name instead of a D, that's who they're voting for.

EldritchFeminity ,

I'm pretty sure active shooter drills have been ongoing for over a decade at some schools at this point. There was a whole thing a few years ago about schools "putting litter boxes in classrooms for kids that identify as cats" that conservatives were freaking out about where it turned out that the schools had cat litter in classroom survival kits. They sell Kevlar backpacks for kids.

This country has been screwed for decades now.

EldritchFeminity ,

I think it boils down to the whole "we learn by doing" thing that's at the heart of a lot of play. And especially for kids, imitating what you see the adults in your life do all the time holds some mystique and new-ness that makes boring tasks seem like exciting activities. To us, filing taxes and loading the washing machine are repetitive tasks we do out of necessity, but to kids, it's a "grown-up thing" to be able to do.

EldritchFeminity ,

Democrats have been funding the most extremist and crazy of their opponents in political races for years now because it's a lot easier to run on the policy of "At least I'm not that guy" than it is to actually convince people to vote for you based on your policies and agenda. Hell, some lady wrote a book about how she did it to win a seat, only to lose to that same guy in the very next election.

It's one of the oldest and most effective campaign strategies there is, but it keeps biting Democrats in the ass and they keep trying it anyways. Democrats seem to think that moderate Republicans will vote for them over the extremist candidate, but Republicans don't care about who the candidate is so long as they're a Republican.

EldritchFeminity ,

But would it even make a difference? The Republicans haven't won the vote in about 2 decades, and in 2016, the Supreme Court said that the Electoral College doesn't have to vote the way that the voters that they represent voted when multiple representatives said that they were going to cast their votes for Trump despite Hillary winning the state.

EldritchFeminity ,

I keep meaning to buy some of those like $5 bags of 100 stickers or whatever that you can find online for this reason. I love the aesthetic of something like a phone or a laptop covered in stickers, but I don't like the idea of losing one I care about, like you. So I figure if I just get a bunch without selectively choosing them, there's likely to be a number that I don't really care about and therefore won't be worried about losing that I can use to fill the majority of that sticker space with.

EldritchFeminity ,

Isn't this exactly what happened to Toys R Us as well? Bought up by a hedge fund, saddled with millions of dollars of debt to funnel its value to the hedge fund, then bankrupted and sold off for a pittance, laundering all the profit and wiping the debt away like it was never there. All while putting tons of people out of work.

EldritchFeminity ,

I believe this was also passed after they unexpectedly closed a bunch of polling places in predominantly Democrat voting areas just days before the Presidential election, which led to lines several blocks long of people standing out in the sun with no shade or access to water or bathrooms.

EldritchFeminity ,

TIL driving to and from work is "recreational" unless you have a TV or something in the back of your car.

Consumers are so demoralized by inflation and high rates they've given up on saving for the American Dream and are spending money instead, economist says ( fortune.com )

An economist offered an explanation for a paradox that has emerged in recent data showing that spending has remained robust even as consumers report feeling pessimistic....

EldritchFeminity ,

Yeah, every single time I see one of these articles, I'm just like, "Where have you been since 2008?" The "American Dream" has been dead a long time.

It's literally why "adult" became a thing you do instead of something you are in the 2010s. Because the traditional hallmarks of middle class suburban lifestyle (the house with a white picket fence, 2.5 kids and a dog or cat) have increasingly become an impossible pipe dream for the Millennial and younger generations. When the traditional markers of the transition to adulthood become out of reach for the majority of people, what does adulthood even look like anymore.

There's a very well researched video that goes over it that I stumbled across one day called the perpetual infantilisation of millennial women. It focuses on Millennial women (obviously), but goes into detail about how "adulting" became a word in the popular lexicon and how increasingly untenable a life like previous generations is for Millennials and Gen Z despite being the most well educated generation in history.

EldritchFeminity ,

Ceramics work by redirecting the energy of a bullet into shattering the plate rather than penetrating the vest further. This allows a plate to absorb energy across its entire surface rather than just at the point of impact, but at the cost of only working once.

EldritchFeminity ,

IIRC, they were designed to be an alternative to metal plates for plate carriers. So the same size as the metal plates, but lighter in weight. Since they shatter, they need to be easy to replace in a vest, and I would imagine that they're probably fitted over a Kevlar jacket.

EldritchFeminity ,

The first thing I can think of is sample collection. Right now, all the Mars missions have been one-way trips, and there's only so much you can gain from the readouts sent by the rovers. Plus, a crewed mission would be able to bring more varied equipment with them for data collection.

It would also be a major milestone in space travel. Mars is our closest neighbor, and being able to send a crewed mission there makes a whole bevy of other missions more probable.

Why did we send manned flights to the moon when we had already sent rovers there?

EldritchFeminity ,

About 10 years ago, several Ivy League schools declared that the US could not be considered a democracy (and hadnt been for about 50 years) and should be considered closer to an oligarchy after doing studies on public opinion vs policies enacted by the government since they started keeping track of that (since the 1950s I believe?). The US has always been more of a mix between a republic and a representative democracy anyways, but that's getting off topic. They compared public opinion of bills compared to the opinion of the wealthy and found that the majority of the time, the wealthy got what they wanted. If I remember correctly, the results were that if a bill was supported by both the wealthy and the general public, it passed about 90% of the time. If a bill was supported by the wealthy and opposed by the general populace, it passed something like 60-70% of the time, and in the opposite situation, the bill would only pass about 30-40% of the time.

The system is broken at a base level, between gerrymandering, Bush Jr. letting money sway policy even more blatantly than it already had, lifelong appointments (even for a number of unelected positions), and a myriad of other issues. 60% of Americans are considered to be more liberal than the government.

But, you're right that complaining once every 4 years isn't going to fix it. One of the reasons that Republicans have such a stranglehold over the government is that they have a base of supporters who will go out and vote for every single little thing, every time. And many of them can afford to because they're retirees or wealthy enough to be able to take time off to vote whenever. As my grandfather used to say, "Im a Republican, I vote for the nominee." What we need is to create support networks to help get people to the polls so we can vote in local officials who will help to get the bigger stuff rolling. Voting in the lesser of two evils every 4 years is only a stopgap measure.

EldritchFeminity ,

May I introduce you to basically any interpretation of what dinosaurs looked like, ever (which is what this joke is about)?

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dinosaurs-art-paleoartists-mistakes

https://d29jd5m3t61t9.cloudfront.net/dinosaurhome.com/images/fbfiles/images/10_0-lrv9yu42iu_v_1492003582.png

EldritchFeminity ,

They were using the bike locks to claim that the protesters had ties to terrorist organizations, because "it's not the kind of thing a normal student has."

Despite the fact that the exact model of bike lock was part of a deal on bike locks advertised by the CU campus security on Facebook not 6 weeks ago.

EldritchFeminity ,

I remember having a Wacom usb tablet at the time, and Windows kept slapping a virtual keyboard in the middle of my screen. It was infuriating, to say the least.

EldritchFeminity ,

Not related to your point, but I would argue that computer usage is actually down today compared to when 7 was released, as computer literacy is proving to be more of an issue for generations younger than Millenials entering the workforce compared to generations older than Millenials. And that's because smartphones work differently from laptops and desktops. The UI and how you interact with your phone is fundamentally different enough to make the skills not interchangeable. I worked with kids in their first jobs for a number of years, and many didn't have a computer in their house because they did everything from their phones.

EldritchFeminity ,

IIRC, the US got involved at the behest of British Petroleum (BP).

I believe BP owned basically the entirety of the oil industry in Iran and ran it like the company towns of old. The living conditions were bad, the pay was worse, and the work was as dangerous as it was backbreaking. So when a beloved leader was democratically elected partially on the pledge of kicking BP out of Iran - which he did by nationalizing the oil industry - BP came crying to the US. Who were all too happy to destroy the biggest democracy in the Middle East in the name of oil.

EldritchFeminity ,

Multiple tanks hooked up to one valve and hose vs. multiple tanks with their own separate valves and hoses.

Obviously, it's a different kind of valve in the first setup to prevent backflow into other lines, but that's probably about the extent of it. With the second setup, you probably need to run a new line and pump for each station for each gas type, compared to just tying the tanks into the one valve and pump per station.

I'm not a plumber or anything, though, so take it with a grain of salt.

EldritchFeminity ,

I saw this exact same style of bot account years ago on Tumblr. They always follow the same naming scheme: one word or two words combined and then a string of 4 digits. I bet if you go to any of their profiles, you'll find like 4 comments that are all copied from old threads and a bunch of upvotes on completely random subs, possibly even all of them being on other bot accounts' posts and comments.

The real question is whether they're being used to fake activity on Reddit, sway public opinion by posting this sort of political slant, or will they later be used to advertise scams and this is just to make them seem legitimate.

EldritchFeminity ,

There's plenty of other reasons to do this. From scammers trying to legitimize accounts to use later to groups trying to sway user opinions on the site. This sort of thing has been going on on plenty of other websites for years. This is the same strategy the porn bots on Tumblr used, and they were so prolific there that they got the Tumblr app removed from Apple's app store.

EldritchFeminity ,

This concept reminds me of a certain browser extension that marks trans allies and transphobic accounts/websites using a user aggregate with thresholds that mark transphobes as red and trans allies as green.

EldritchFeminity ,

You can fight against it, but it's an uphill battle. The most likely responses to work will be invite only systems for account creation (something I've seen predicted happening to art communities to filter out AI garbage) and some kind of reputation/report system to weed out spammers and the accounts that invited them.

EldritchFeminity ,

See also: Republicans have repealed child labor laws, but is that really a bad thing?

EldritchFeminity ,

In the current climate, internal promotions are a rarity. They say that you should be changing companies roughly every 3 years to ensure you're getting paid what you're worth, as pay raises don't keep up with experience. New responsibilities come quickly while promotions and pay raises come slowly. The number of times I've heard somebody say that they left a job for an immediate 10-30% (or even 50%!) pay raise and reduced responsibilities for even the same job has gotten to the point where I just expect it now.

Like everything else, it varies, but company loyalty is long dead.

EldritchFeminity ,

Yeah, and there's the old saying, "It's not what you know, but who you know." Even ignoring the nepotism that that can obviously be applied to, there's something major to be said about social networking and finding a good job (whether that's a new job or a promotion within a company or even changing fields entirely).

When I was in college over a decade ago, our school had a program set up with GDC (the Game Devlopers' Convention) to send 3rd year students and put them up in a hotel for the duration of the convention so that they could meet industry professionals and see what was new in the industry. And right from the first day, our professors expressed how important going to the convention and getting to know the people in your major were because they could potentially lead to you getting your next job, whether your first year out of school or decades later. And that was years before the current climate of the job sector had really taken off. Some of those guys had been making games since the 80s or 90s.

Make a good impression on someone, and they might call you about a new job opening before it's publicly posted.

EldritchFeminity ,

A good point on the luck aspect, and you reminded me of the fact that people who already have money have "better luck" in the respect that they have more opportunities to try new things.

It's like one of those carnival games where you throw darts at balloons. Middle-class kids might get one or two darts while wealthy kids get 10. And the poor kids are the ones working at the carnival.

Something like 20% of businesses fail in their first year, and 80% are gone by year 5. If you can afford to start 5 different businesses, your odds of one surviving long enough to get bought up by Google or something are much better than somebody who put their life savings into their company.

EldritchFeminity ,

Weird tangent but me and a coworker actually had this happen to us once because the radio station at work was so goddamn repetitive that it played the same song at lunch every single day for several weeks and then started playing it at 3 in the afternoon.

Took us 2 days to figure out why we were so hungry in the afternoon.

EldritchFeminity ,

Fun lobster fact: They used to feed lobster to prisoners in Massachusetts because they were considered unclean animals since they crawled along the ocean floor and nobody else would eat them.

EldritchFeminity ,

The second one doesn't seem to be butterflied, as it would be missing a dorsal fin if it was, and the skin color is asymmetrical. They're 2 different species imo, but I'm only familiar with Atlantic salmon so I can't say for sure. Atlantic salmon normally look like the top one and get an upturned hook mouth but don't really change color.

EldritchFeminity ,

instance blocks downvotes

can neither see downvotes nor downvote posts

EldritchFeminity ,

It's not a boy who wants to be perceived as a girl but a girl who wants to stop being perceived as a boy.

Whereas crossdressing is basically playing with societal perceptions of gender roles and what clothing and traits are associated with different genders. Crossdressing isn't wanting to be the other gender, it's more like playing dress up or defying cultural expectations about what it means to be a man or a woman. Like role-playing for various reasons.

I'm gonna assume you're a dude. If you want to understand what being trans is like, instead of trying to imagine what it would be like to want to be a woman, imagine if the world treated you as a woman. Everywhere you went, you got "ma'am"ed and people held doors open for you and told you that you'd be much prettier if you smiled more. People frowned at you when you talked sports or cars or whatever because that's not the kind of stuff a woman should be interested in. They asked you when you were going to get married and have a kid when you talked about your career. You were expected to wear skirts and do your makeup every day and all the other little things that are expected of women but not men. And that's just the cultural part. Now imagine looking in the mirror and seeing somebody else's face staring back at you. Look at your hand and see how the fingers are wrong. They're too skinny and your skin feels too smooth and thin to be right. Even the way your body smells is weird. No matter how hard you try, you can just never seem to build any real muscle, and there's this literal weight in your chest that is constantly pulling on you, like a pair of tumors that you can always feel, shifting around and pulling on your spine.

Now imagine being a kid and watching this happen to your body against your will, like something out of a body horror movie. Your skeleton shifting and changing into a bizarre and foreign new form as strange new features start sprouting out of your skin and underneath your flesh. That's what being a trans kid is like, going through the wrong puberty.

EldritchFeminity ,

That's some professional modeling work right there.

EldritchFeminity ,

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy, but they may give me a tactical advantage.

EldritchFeminity ,

Fund both. With 1% of the US military budget, NASA could afford to consider manned missions to Mars.

EldritchFeminity ,

How many fingers am I holding up? If your answer is 6 or more, I have bad news for you and your data set.

EldritchFeminity ,

"Conservatism consists of one policy, to wit: There are those that the law protects but does not bind, and those that the law binds but does not protect."

Some migrants flown by DeSantis to Martha’s Vineyard qualify for victim visas, feds say ( www.miamiherald.com )

Some of the 49 migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard by the state of Florida are now able to legally work in the United States and have temporary protections from deportation — because they are considered victims of a potential crime, their attorney says....

EldritchFeminity ,

For some context, the Massachusetts state government is helping the migrants flown to Martha's Vineyard sue the airline company that flew them out there (and I think DeSantis too?). I'm assuming that those who are involved in the case are the ones who are eligible for these visas, while those who may have chosen to not pursue legal action aren't. This doesn't necessarily mean that the others haven't gotten other forms of visas or anything though. It is Massachusetts after all, and Mass is a sanctuary state on top of Cape Cod having a major seasonal migrant workforce annually for the summer. The article also says that they had legal status in the US as asylum seekers.

Some further context from the article:

Now, some of the migrants have been granted U visas, which are “set aside for victims of certain crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement or government officials in the investigation or prosecution of criminal activity,” according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. They can eventually lead to permanent lawful status in the United States.

The migrants — who were from Venezuela and Peru — were eligible to apply for the visas after Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, a Democrat, certified that they were victims of a crime.

After waiting for more than a year, some migrants earlier this month received “bona fide determinations” in their U visa petition, a status that allows them to obtain temporary work permits and protects them from deportation until their visa becomes available, Self said.

It was not immediately clear how many migrants had received that status from the federal government.

Congress only allows the federal government to issue 10,000 such visas each year. The “bona fide determination” gives the migrants targeted by the state of Florida temporary protections from deportation while they wait for the visa.

It looks like they said "some" because it wasn't said whether or not all of the migrants had received these visas in the announcement from the federal government.

EldritchFeminity ,

The short of it is that Ares dies at the end of the first game.

The game was originally supposed to be a one-off and was never intended to have a sequel, so Kratos kills Ares and becomes the new God of War at the end of the first game. The ending scene even has Kratos on Ares' throne and talks about how he, as the new god of war, is responsible for all sorts of heinous acts throughout history while footage of modern wars like Vietnam flash by.

But the game did so well that the studio execs demanded that they make a sequel, and then another, and another, and another, etc. They had to keep coming up with new gods to kill and ways to up the stakes by casting Kratos off of his throne, so by the third game, Kratos just murders the entire Greek Pantheon and causes the apocalypse. And then they had to figure out where to go from there. The "reboot" was probably one of the smartest things they could've done for the series. Don't have to keep upping the stakes with gods to kill if Kratos just goes to therapy and deals with his issues.

EldritchFeminity ,

To be fair, it was self-defense this time.

EldritchFeminity ,

I'd always heard New Hampshire referred to as "the south of the north," but on this map, at least, it looks downright heavenly compared to Maine.

What Would Jesus Do? ( lemmy.world )

"Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to...

EldritchFeminity ,

Who pissed in your Cheerios?

And that does not describe US Christianity. Most of the regressives haven't ever read the bible.

EldritchFeminity ,

TERFs stop objectifying women challenge: impossible

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