It’s tough to look at, but I bet it’s amazing for traffic calming.

“ehh I dont like how it feels”

Considering how well preventable STI’s still get around, I’d say that sentiment is a little too common. That or a lot of people are hot garbage at risk assessment.

Yup. That’s basically what happened with TikTok.

We’re being actively goaded in that direction by bad-faith actors all over social media, including here. Those of us with brains are keeping our powder dry since it’s obvious that these trolls can’t speak for all the steps that sit between conflict and resolution. Said trolls also don’t understand that the majority of gun owners are trained and know better. It’s not like you can buy bullets at 7-11, and having so many firearms around doesn’t automatically make this a volatile situation, hence the constant pushing you see online.

What I can say is that the political divides you’re seeing online are showing up in the real world, where people aren’t able to overcome propaganda and programming. In my experience, people generally stay off the topic of politics in public because they want to have a good day. Occasionally you spot someone wearing trump stuff, but I take that in stride along with people wearing offensive t-shirts and the like: it’s just trolling, plain and simple.

Overall, it’s not great.

Ah yes, C64 floppy drive “headbanging”.

IIRC this is because rather than ship a design with a limit switch or any position sensing at all, the drive software just rapidly slaps the read head home a bunch of times to ensure it’s properly aligned with track zero. I have a hard time believing this was to reduce part count, because the drive itself is a whole-ass 6502 computer; the sale price also reflected that. Instead, I think it’s a software fix for a “sometimes an issue” hardware problem.

Yes, but don’t use a public service for this. Use a local LLM and maintain distinct profiles, one for each online account.

They’ve basically violated every single last part of the oath. They’re 100% at-odds with the entire program as far as I can tell.

Re: vet the troop.

I had a very lucky experience in that my troop was about as secular as it gets, meeting at a local public school without any external financial support at all. There was no church involved; the parents funded everything and provided transportation and were our chaperones. The only mention of “reverence” was in the Scout Oath, and there were never any group prayers or other such things.

We also didn’t wear uniforms on outings, steering clear of any pro-military optics.

My point being: if you find yourself looking for a program that is more on the side of skill-building, outdoorsy stuff, and education, there are troops out there that may fit the bill.

It really is.

As someone that went through this program, I can’t stress enough that the takeaways here go far beyond marksmanship; the program makes sure of it. Because of merely attempting to get the Riflery merit badge I have a profound respect and safety awareness for guns, and all I used was a .22 bolt-action rimfire, which is about as basic as it gets. At the same time I’m aware that being halfway good at maintaining and using one are skills that must be cultivated and are not easy to do nor intutive. If I had to use a firearm now, I know that I’d have to use it at close range to be any good.

Besides, it’s a really bad form of ID. The numbers aren’t even unique, and up until 2011, a few digits are reserved for geographical information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Structure

If I had to reach for a hasty solution, it would be to use the IRS taxpayer ID instead. Of course, that might weaken the SSA’s importance overall, so that wouldn’t be without consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Taxpayer_Identification_Number

This kinda/sorta confirms what I’ve been suspecting. None of this debacle is recent. It’s fascist-right movement that hit critical mass, possibly during the pandemic, that has been stewing for decades if not longer.

I know that, philosophically, fascism and all its manifestations has ties into unchecked capitalism, colonialism, and slavery; stuff that goes hundreds of years back in North America. In this comment, I’m talking about the more home-grown variety that picks up before or during McCarthyism.

Ah, that’s how you do it. Get them in separate hearings concurrently. Just let that prisoner’s dilemma cook, since I doubt any one of them has studied game theory.

The content inside the notepad edit window should probably be universally sandboxed from your local box

Sadly, this was already the case when Notepad stayed in its lane and only handled plain text unicode.

It needs to happen. We’re in a situation right now where media is captive by the same forces driving EVERYTHING right now. Re-establishing a free and honest press is pretty much required at this point.

Okay, that’s kind of brilliant.

Oh, I agree. It’s perverse that the most effective way to govern is to outsource parts of it. It’s dangerous in other ways, but I will say that insurance companies can usually be relied upon to be greedy in ways that are advantageous in this particular scheme.

Another tact is to insure the police. There was an NPR journal on that a long time ago and it worked wonders where a police department was basically the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, running up all kinds of crazy legal fees for the city. Insurance compliance drove 100% of the needed departmental changes in a way that kept behavior, budget, and the city council in check. In exchange, the insurance policy was there for any mishaps or gross mistakes that would require a payout of any kind.

Foisting change politically by top-down policy was woefully ineffective in comparison. While this doesn’t fix the underlying problems with qualified immunity and how the cops can still fuck up anyone’s day on a whim, this does help.

Three times++, actually. The second attack was documented to have resumed after the third, with different payload URLs.

https://securelist.com/notepad-supply-chain-attack/118708/

As someone who is inside the IT industry, and has been for a while, I have some insight here. Yes, it’s stupidity alright, but a weird focused kind of stupidity like having a blind-spot. Money and ethics, IMO, are the only divisions that explain it.

We like to think of tech as being this rebellious, counter-cultural place. And that tracks when you start talking about “information wants to be free” and “the internet circumvents censorship”, but also “market disruption” and “move fast and break things.” But there’s this problem where that rebellion is actually multiple groups moving in a similar direction. If you look at the decisions people make, there’s a clear tradeoff of ethics in line with freedom and liberty, for cold, hard cash. The people we’re talking about went for the money. It took me a long time to reconcile this, and I’m now comfortable concluding that the rebellious spirit here is less “damn the man” and more “fuck you, got mine.” Nevermind that it’s not sustainable and always ends in a death-spiral of everything they built.

To put it another way, technohippies and conservatives agree about the broad strokes of personal liberty and rebelliousness right up until things like empathy all others get involved. Once you surrender those kinds of ethics, or figure out that having few/none is seen as an asset, bigger paychecks are on offer; its too good to pass up for some folks. It should come as no surprise that aligning one’s self with authoritarianism and even fascism is a small step from there.

And my personal experience - take with salt - there’s also a lot of people in security that are just VERY pessimistic, if not outright fearful, of their fellow man. A lot of them vote to the right, despite depending on an industry mostly fueled by left-thinking labor. They’re highly skilled, competent, and intelligent people in every other way. Once again, I think the fat paycheck smooths a lot of this over.

The way responsibility has been diffused throughout the command structure is exactly what RICO is for. That said, I don’t think it’s ever been used on a Federal agency before.