I love how the design is so bad now we’re missing the days when shutting down the computer required the “Start” button.

Why shoot substation for free when ICE will pay them to shoot minorities and their supporters instead.

They don’t just blindly use whatever water comes from the lake and put it directly into the loop.

They’ll have treatment, filtration, and cossosion-resistant parts, and probably separated loops where the only liquid that directly interacts with anything important is completely isolated from the intake and outflow water.

When I was a preacher I did a sermon based on that episode. It’s such an accurate picture of a teenager finding a social group that happened to be at church. And Hank accurately calls out how shallow that kind of social faith is.

At the end of the episode, Hank pulls out a box of crap from fads Bobby had been into and talked about how he didn’t want Bobby’s spirituality to end up in that box.

For millions of people, church is basically a club where they meet with their friends, and since the church is still the most racially segregated place in America, that’s a problem.

The “Christian Club” mentality is what allowed the rise of the religious right, when churches should be vocal about justice for the the sick, the poor, and the foreigners.

Fun fact: the “walkie talkie” was the backpack radio (scr-300) in WWII, and the smaller handheld (scr-536) was the “handie talkie”, but the former became the common phrase phrase used for handheld radios.

Was it “The News”?

Was looking for any kind of context that would somehow make it even slightly less-outrageous than the headline indicated.

It was worse.

They’re both excellent at being different kinds of evil.

Winn is prideful and ambitious above all else. She sides with good and evil both at different times in service to her own goals. She deludes herself into believing anything that pursuit of personal power is also what serves Bajor.

Winn commits evil in service to her ambitions.

Dukat has the same vices, but with added elements of narcissism and wrath. He briefly tries being good, and almost reaches it when he finds genuine love for and from his daughter, but when his actions lead to her death he lashes out at the universe and becomes entirely consumed by wrath and megalomania.

Dukat’s ambition in the end is to commit evil.

I loved my S10. It was the best vehicle I ever had.

I bought it in 2005 for $3,000 with 42k miles on it because the previous owner’s dad was a drunk and kept rubbing the side of it pulling in and out of the driveway. I didn’t care that the paint looked bad, and I drove that truck for 11 years. I sopd it when the engine gave up the ghost, but kinda wished I’d just paid for the repair instead of buying the Colorado, which I was never really pleased with.

I’ve loved the NV200 though. I teach scuba as a side gig and it makes a great dive gear hauler.

Correct. I meant the Colorado, which they took off the market for the 2013 and 2014 models to redesign as a larger truck. Ford did the same thing.

That was a particularly dumb error on my part, BTW. I owned a 2001 S10 and 2012 Colorado. Now I own a 2020 NV200.

If I buy a car, it apparently gets discontinued soon afterwards.

In 2012 the federal fuel economy standards were changed to no longer consider the classification of vehicle, but just its footprint. So suddenly a Corolla had less-strict fuel economy requirements than a small truck.

So the Ranger, Dakota, S-10, etc were all discontinued, and manufacturers learned that the easiest way to meet fuel economy standards was to make the vehicles bigger every time the requirements increase.

It’s also why around 2022, every small cargo van (NV200, Transit Express, ProMaster City) stopped being produced. It’s also why the Maverick has the “standard” model as the hybrid while the one you can actually find at the dealers is the “upgrade” traditional engine.

Not in the US. I’ve never had May 1 off unless it was a weekend when I wasn’t having to work.

Why shouldn’t we kill political dissidents and use their bodies for research and medicine? Some people really benefit from those organs!

Yes, but there also is a legitimate issue related to staffing.

Everyone should be in unions, but unions ARE going to fight this level of automation to the bitter, as it will result in job cuts. In this particular instance, I think if you cut the CRO compensation to 0 they’d still be in trouble against some of these factories that automate almost the entire process.

This is the kind of “machines coming for your jobs” that’s realistic. AI may be a bunch of vaporware, but this stuff is different.

Given the friends that came with me and their college year overlaps, it would have Fall 2003 or Spring 2004 in San Marcos, Texas.

When Inwas in college, I saw that the local high school was putting on a performance of “The Secret of Monkey Island.” My best friend and I loved the games and were excited to see it, so we bought tickets.

I cannot express how bad it was. I’ve sat through some awful shit, but we just couldn’t take it. We walked out of a high school play because it was that bad.

Yeah. This is something I’ve been trying to explain for a while. Between the Steam Deck and the declining overall market share of PCs, there’s a huge jump in Linux as far as percentage of users goes, but it isn’t actually making significant waves in general usage. Regular users are sticking with Windows and Mac, but now there’s 1 Windows or Mac laptop in a household shared by everyone now versus multiple laptops and a desktop a few hardware cycles back.

My favorite example is the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act, which requires manufacturers to honor warranty on products that you or a third party have worked on in the past unless the manufacturer can prove that the specific malfunction for which you’re seeking warranty service was caused by the previous repair or modification.

Those “warranty void if removed” stickers are illegal.

It also prohibits manufacturers refusing to repair a product due to unrelated damage.

It’s compact, but difficult to spend. The cashier isn’t gonna be able to make change for that, which is a huge part of counterfeiting. If you deposit a bunch of fake money at the bank, you’ll get caught. But if you buy something cheap with a fake $100 or $20, the change from the register launders that money for you and you can deposit the real cash and say you made it selling knicknacks at a craft fair or some bullshit.

$100s and $20s are popular because they’re valuable enough to be worth the effort to duplicate while still being easy to use.

Microwave imaging is used militarily, and in 2025 the US military did a public test of the Leonidas microwave weapon system to simultaneously knock out nearly 50 drones.