Didn't someone have a picture of a Tesla in the wild with a bumper sticker that read something like: "I bought this before I knew Elon was a complete idiot."

A buddy of mine was injured by an IED in Afghanistan, he lost his right eye. Every year he goes to the VA for his regular checkup and the doctor has to sign some paperwork that he then needs to get notarized. Social Security says they need all that to make sure he's still disabled... you know, checking that he hasn't spontaneously regrown an eyeball miraculously and would then be cheating the system I guess. Our benefit system for disabled people is really fucking broken.

I don't get the hate this place gets. It's been really interesting watching Lemmy's growing pains over the last two-ish years and all the changes it has undergone. The whole concept of the Fediverse is fascinating to me and has been a genuine delight to explore.

Skin on different parts of the body tastes different. It also depends on how it's cooked.

An election year is a great time to blow up the only part of the government your party controls... I say let them flight.

Dude... he has a fucking Dreamcast? Tim Walz is the dad I never had.

My Nephew: "What's a fax machine?"

Me: "A landline network of low quality printers people used to use to do invoices and file for divorce."

My Nephew: "Landline?"

Isn't him doing that illegal? Like very illegal?

The infra bill was a huge shot in the arm and, based on the ads I'm seeing, he's going to run on its passing... that bill is beyond amazing, but they should have gone harder. While the ~$1.6 trillion is an eye watering amount of money, ~$4-6 trillion is what was originally asked for and what is needed. Hopefully he'll run on a Build Back Better: Part Deux. Also his appointees to the NLRB have been super progressive and aggressive, the return to Joy Silk will give the reinvigorated labor movement serious steam, but he also busted the RR workers ability to strike and he seriously shouldn't have done that. Overall, I'm not mad at the Biden WH on domestic issues... but more is needed and he should have let the RR workers strike. Like, the economy be damned, call the hedge fund's bet and end the Reagan era union busting.

Southern Georgia, USA.

This is more of a regional rationalization about occasional weather hazards. Here in coastal Georgia, we get snow from time to time, about a half an inch to two inches once every three to five years. There's a lot of people from colder climates that move here for work or retirement; they hear "a possible light dusting of snow" on the news or from a weather app and think that means nothing. Where they're from it's just normal, happens every year and there's often more. They'll even laugh at us for shutting down the schools and staying home from work for freezing rain. Here's the thing: no one here knows how to drive in snow and will likely only see black ice a dozen times in their lifetime. Further, we have no salt/sand trucks, we have no plows, we have zero civic infrastructure to meant to deal with our very occasional ice storm or light snow. It happens so infrequently that there's no way to justify spending taxpayers' money to prepare in that way for those kinds of situations. So we shut down the schools and most businesses for a day or so and everyone mostly stays home. We're not necessarily unprepared for winter weather, we just prepare in a different way that makes sense for the situation.

You couldn't make Titanic today because it wouldn't be believable... Leonardo Decaprio dating a woman his own age? Preposterous!

Can Musk do that? I would think this goes against Apple and Android app store rules right?

For a while I worked at a theme park in central Florida. Yeah, it's that one. Some of the guests went wild.

One time I was walking through a guest area on my way to the break room when a dude pushing a stroller ran into me without looking. Apologies on both sides and then the dude tried to hand me something. I put my hands behind my back as a kind of "no thanks," we're not really supposed to take things from guests. I looked down and it was a used diaper. He thought he could just hand a park employee his child's shit filled Pampers and that we'd take care of it. There was a trash can literally right behind him, but thinking on it later where did he change the diaper? There's trash cans in the bathrooms and they all have changing stations... did he just change the kid outside? Is that a thing parents do?

Another time I was helping the transportation department during a park closure. Up on the monorail platform I was shoulder to shoulder with like a thousand people. A train arrives, the doors and gates open, and people start boarding. A woman who'd been standing near me stopped at the doors, turned to face me, poked her finger into my chest and shouted "YOU RUINED OUR VACATION!" She stared daggers into my soul as she walked backwards like a Bond villain into the car and continued staring me down as the doors closed and the train left the station. I have no clue who this was or what I had done.

Finally, I had to break up a fight where grown ass adults were yelling at each other and had started spitting on each other's children (like WTF). No idea who started it or even if the two groups knew each other, but shit was looking to come to blows and the security people weren't quite there yet. Another park employee and I stepped up between them with a "come on folks" and "this is a place for families." Both of us were big guys so we made a wall between them, I'm 6'2 and was about 280lbs at the time (128cm [typo edit: 182 lol] and almost 130 kgs [edit for my fellow Americans: that's about one refrigerator in height and around weight of a Shetland pony]). Saw the parents faces drop from anger to embarrassment immediately realizing how dumb they were being when security jogged up and a manager on a Segway rolled in.

The most magical place in central Florida really brings out the strange in some folks.

I'm sure Apple will let everyone know that we're just holding the phone wrong.

Her district is germandered at like +25 Republican... she's going no where. But also, having the Republicans do a ton of party infighting during an election year is great if you don't like them. Makes them less appealing overall to voters. Let them flight.

More EVs means lower gas prices.

This drives up gas prices.

I know, it's almost as though the multinational oil corporations and their shareholders who backed all three of Trump's campaigns want higher oil and gas prices for some reason... what could that be?

I'm not "virtue signaling" I'm tired. I'm tired of the ads.

I'm tired of the algorithm intentionally fueling flame wars.

I'm tired of INESCAPABLE "meme pages," run by spam bots, that just recycle the same tired shit over and over and over again.

I'm tired of the THREE different video systems that are inexplicably not interoperable. Reels, Facebook Live, and video Instagram posts all showing up in my timeline but all are part of separate systems. Meanwhile, if I share a link to a YouTube video, it gets suppressed by the almighty algorithm. Because how dare I show my followers/friends something they'd might like to see if it takes their eyeballs away from Facebook.

Finally, I'm tired of companies selling people like me down the river to score political points with chuds.

An Acquaintance: "Oh my goodness and they said that people could actually be living on Mars soon! Isn't that just neat-o?"

Me: Having watched enough hours of "Science Fiction and Futurism with Isaac Arthur" to qualify for a doctorate

Me: "Yep. Sure is super neat-o."

Quick reminder: The Nazi German government emptied out Eastern European towns and villages taken by the Wehrmacht during various campaigns, most notably Operation Barbarossa, for resettlement of "pure" Germans to those occupied lands (called Lebensraum)... this started almost literally once these occupied towns and villages were far enough from the front lines. Also, the whole point of the US Government's genocidal forced march of native tribes, often referred to as the Tail of Tears, was to clear said native tribes out so the Southern aristocracy could seize the land for plantations worked by chattel slaves... whole swaths of what is today Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi were settled by whites as a result.

Many a "populist" (read: Fascist or proto-Fascist) operate their politics in this manner. Promise either cheap land (or, at the very least, housing) to the workers and others by committing what is, on it's face, a genocide. There's more modern examples (two in particular, going on right this minute for all the world to see), but I don't want to get the ban-hammer so I won't name them directly (I forgot to check the instance in which I am commenting before doing so, but not taking my chances).

It is still possible to buy "dumb" TV's. Tons of businesses need them for display purposes (like at fast food restaurants and corporate expos, etc, etc), but you need to search for commercial displays. Like this one.