This is pretty good advice, and something I often need to remind myself of. The word "just" weakens what you're saying and is usually superfluous. Delete it.
Some, but... Certain super-addictive drugs should be limited.
It's worse than that. I live in a rural Midwestern state, and have seen huge expensive trucks outside of a tiny home in terrible condition. Their truck is probably equally expensive as their home. It's sucking all of their income and driving them into poverty.
Also near me, there was a billboard advertisement that said simply, "YOU NEED A TRUCK" with a picture of one of these monsters. I see people driving them around hauling nothing. It's about 30% of the vehicles on the road. It's a culture I will never understand.
Holy shit! This post gave me an epiphany.
I was a cartoonist for the student newspaper, and drawing a funny comic strip every day was grueling. But I did better when I drank a Coca Cola before I started to brainstorm. Later, guess what - diagnosed ADHD.
Anyway, I probably took 2-3 hours on each comic, and was paid $5 per strip. And spent some of that on soda. So, it was a labor of love and foolishness. Also, I was semi-famous on campus for edgy cartoons that were occasionally funny, most of which I am embarrassed about in middle age.
Did you read the article?
And later, Emerald Mine on the Amiga. So many hours of my life, gone.
Grim Fandango is an amazing story about life and death and love...
... Built upon an engine where the protagonist walks around at sloth speed. Manny Calavaras just sashays along, and there's no way to speed his ass up. I wish you could hit escape or something to skip him walking in and out of scenes, but nope! I'm forced to watch him drag his feet from location to location.
But the most touching parts of the story stick with me after 20 years.
Let's help PeerTube replace YouTube.
I don't think that guy over there knows.
Unfortunately, the United States is also a slave country within it's prison system.
Want a slave? Just trump up some nebulous charges about them, so to speak. Profit.
I should have made the obligatory link to http://mastodon-near.me/
Gödel's Loophole
Gödel's Loophole is a supposed "inner contradiction" in the Constitution of the United States which Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gödel postulated in 1947. The loophole would permit the American democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. It has been called "one of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law" by F. E. Guerra-Pujol.
A Republican running for an Indiana House seat was arrested on the eve of Election Day for commenting on a Facebook post made by someone who has a protective order against him, police say.
A Republican running for an Indiana House of Representatives seat was arrested early Monday morning on the eve of Election Day for commenting on a Facebook post made by someone who has a protective order against him, according to police.
GOP candidate Jim Schenke, who is running to unseat District 26 House Rep. Chris Campbell, was booked on a preliminary invasion of privacy charge at 6:10 a.m. Monday, according to the Tippecanoe County Sheriff’s Office. Records show he was released after paying a cash bond of $250.
Freemasonry around the world, featuring Masonic news, history, trivia, and more. By the author of 'Freemasons For Dummies,' Christopher Hodapp.
The very first Masonic Con New York is coming to the magnificent New York Masonic Hall on the weekend of January 17, 2025. Built around the theme Freemasonry in the 21st Century: Self and Society, this premiere Masonic Con will showcase experts discussing the urgency of Masonic teachings and the importance of Brotherhood in our lives and communities. If you are familiar with the U.S. Surgeon General’s recent study on the epidemic of male loneliness in American society, or with any of the various news reports on this problem, you may wish to hear from these speakers and glean ideas for preparing for Freemasonry’s future.
Over the last two days users from the social media service Mastodon have started a campaign which has raised over $250,000 for VP Harris. User Heidi Li Feldman started the modest campaign on ActBlue two days ago, with a humble goal of one thousand...
Over the last two days users from the social media service Mastodon have started a campaign which has raised over $250,000 for VP Harris. User Heidi Li Feldman started the modest campaign on ActBlue two days ago, with a humble goal of one thousand dollars. She did it for the dual purpose of helping VP Harris, and raising awareness of the social media site.
She has blown by her original goal — and continues to have to move the goalposts, but in a good way...
From Heidi’s initial request:
>I'm doing something I never thought I'd get to do again. I'm specifically fundraising for a woman to head the Democratic ticket and to be the next President of the United States. I want to do this with all of you here on #Mastodon, so I've created a fundraising page specifically for us: #MastodonForHarris.
>We have the chance to save U.S. democracy and rule of law, to elect the first woman President of the United States, and to send TFG packing. By contributing to Kamala Harris's campaign via this portal, we can also encourage her to create a distinct presence on Mastodon, not mediated by Threads or any other social media provider.
>Any amount donated will strengthen the #Mastodon platform as a venue for progressive political activism, as well as benefiting Kamala Harris.
Quitting Google isn't just a technical process—it's a massive project. Here's some advice on how to tackle it.
Some companies are easy to quit. If I decide I don't like Coca-Cola anymore I can simply stop drinking Coke. Sure, the company makes more than just Coke, so I would need to do some research to figure out which products they do and don't make, but it's theoretically possible.
Quitting Google isn't like that. It makes many products, many of which you depend on to live your digital life. Leaving a company like that is like a divorce, according to an expert I talked to. "It's not easy, but you feel so much better at the other side," said Janet Vertesi, a sociology professor at Princeton who publishes work on human computer interaction. "Think of a friend who gets a divorce and is so happy to be out. That could be you. That's how it feels to leave Google."
She'd know. Vertesi researches NASA's robotic spacecraft teams and also publishes work on human computer interaction. In March 2012, after Google significantly changed its privacy policies, she decided to stop using Google entirely. Vertesi also runs The Opt Out Project, a website full of recommendations and tutorials for replacing "Big Tech" services with community-driven and DIY alternatives. She is, in other words, someone who has done the work, so I wanted to ask her for some advice about how someone should approach quitting Google.
Lifehacker has already published a comprehensive guide to quitting Google and a list of the best competitors to every Google product years ago, and that information stands up for the most part. But not using Google anymore isn't just a technical process—it's a massive project. Here's some advice on how to tackle it.
The company behind one of the biggest projects in the Fediverse has migrated as an entity to the United States as a 501c3.
As a project, Mastodon has operated under the umbrella of Mastodon GmbH, a German company that benefited from non-profit status with the German government. Despite all indications that they were doing everything right, Mastodon GmbH recently had its non-profit status revoked, resulting in the team to seek an alternative.
In the announcement, CEO and founder Eugen Rochko had this to say:
> Our day to day operations are largely unaffected by this event, since Patreon does not presuppose non-profit status, and Patreon income does not count as donations. We have in fact not had to issue a single donation receipt since 2021.
Mastodon remains one of the only popular social platforms that operates out of the European Union, and Eugen desires to keep things that way. With that being said, this could be an interesting opportunity for the project: a presence in the United States may reduce friction in hiring employees there.
Zach Edey and Purdue were dominant in the first weekend of the 2024 NCAA Tournament.
Zach Edey and his Purdue teammates are not leaving anything to chance. In the first two rounds of the 2024 NCAA Tournament, the Boilermakers have blown the doors off two overmatched opponents as they attempt to erase memories of last year's upset loss to No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson. After thrashing Utah State on Sunday, Purdue is back in the Sweet 16.
Edey and Co. opened the tournament as the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Region, and hammered out a 78-50 win over Grambling. The All-American center was unstoppable in that contest, scoring 30 points and grabbing 21 rebounds. Purdue led 31-27 with 3:40 remaining in the half and decided to turn it on. The Boilermakers outscored the Tigers by 24 points the rest of the way.
Unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip leaks secret encryption keys
A newly discovered vulnerability baked into Apple’s M-series of chips allows attackers to extract secret keys from Macs when they perform widely used cryptographic operations, academic researchers have revealed in a paper published Thursday.
The flaw—a side channel allowing end-to-end key extractions when Apple chips run implementations of widely used cryptographic protocols—can’t be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitectural design of the silicon itself. Instead, it can only be mitigated by building defenses into third-party cryptographic software that could drastically degrade M-series performance when executing cryptographic operations, particularly on the earlier M1 and M2 generations. The vulnerability can be exploited when the targeted cryptographic operation and the malicious application with normal user system privileges run on the same CPU cluster.