Alright, best is an exaggeration. But $5/print assumes it breaks before I print anymore. The actual value is still unknown.

I got a Lexmark business laser printer from a place that was going out of business for like $50. Best investment I ever made. It just sits there quietly, not doing anything, until I print something like twice a year. Five years in and it still works fine, I haven’t even replaced the toner.

RatGDO is a local ESP device you can hook into a LiftMaster to connect it to WiFi in a better way. Highly recommend.

At least the drug test is on brand. Stupid, but in a way I’ve come to expect. I cannot fathom what the point of the pregnancy test was.

For a long time, I’ve just assumed this was a weird way that my bipolar and my bisexuality interacted. Is this just a normal human thing?!

This feels like bad data to me. Don’t get me wrong, I support it. It’s just that if you’re going to determine if the raise in wages “took” jobs, it’s not whether there was a gain at all but rather how California fares compared to other states, right?

That is, if restaurants went on a massive hiring frenzy country-wide due to an increase in fast food consumption everywhere, but other states had a much larger increase, it would suggest though not prove that the increase in wages caused fast food restaurants to hire less actively in California.

I suspect that’s not the case, but I just don’t like passing off incomplete data as proof of something.

I was a Sega kid in the Genesis generation. A friend of mine got a Saturn and I so desperately wanted to like Nights because it was the thing for Saturn. I didn’t like it at all. It felt hard to control, hard to understand, and was just not pleasant for me.

Meanwhile, a different friend and I had a blast trading off playing Mario 64. Hands down, way better for a 9 year old me.

Nah, this one has a margin of error. It’s just that “take down a large percentage of all computers in the world simultaneously” is quite a bit outside of that margin for a security software.

We totally did try pure capitalism. It mostly led to naked children in coal mines (because their clothes would get stuck on the sides of the super narrow mining shafts, you see) and pepper with iron fillings (because scrap iron was cheaper than actual pepper). Also a lot of other horrifying stuff, but those two have always stuck out to me.

I’m so sorry to have to be the one to tell you but, based on your positions, you’re absolutely the crazy uncle. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you were drunk when you watched the 93 Super Mario.

Everyone’s like, “It’s not that impressive. It’s not general AI.” Yeah, that’s the scary part to me. A general AI could be told, “btw don’t kill humans” and it would understand those instructions and understand what a human is.

The current way of doing things is just digital guided evolution, in a nutshell. Way more likely to create the equivalent of a bacteria than the equivalent of a human. And it’s not being treated with the proper care because, after all, it’s just a language model and not general AI.

He’s always been a contrarian. It was harmless and even enjoyable in the 90s and early 2000s when, to him, that meant eating vegetarian and believing in some Hippie woowoo bullshit while being firmly against organized religion and generally distrustful of corporations.

I miss hippie Scott Adams. Weird right-wing Scott Adams is not enjoyable.

Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in “zero-tolerance” policies that do things like punish the victim because they were “involved” in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.

To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is “phones may not interrupt class.” Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what’s happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they’ve already completed their work, and that’s acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they’re supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn’t get in trouble. The parent will hear, “Brayden was using his phone and he didn’t get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me.”

If you’ve talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They’ll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher’s discretion versus an outright ban.

tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.

My city has both, and they’re decorated the same. I just wonder whether a really good burger place did this first and then crappy ones showed up to copy the decor and forgot to make the food good.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it and I think many of these people are bi, not closeted gay. Hear me out…

• To a bi person, being gay is literally a choice. You could just ignore your desire for the same sex and probably be perfectly happy with the opposite sex. That explains why these people always frame it as a choice.

• But, when you deny something about yourself, you make it more present in your life. It’s like being told to not think about breathing (sorry), suddenly your breathing is top of mind. This explains why it is such a present thing to them.

• When you constantly fixate on something, because you’re trying not to, and it’s something you find sexy… Well, you’ve just fetishized it. Which explains why they can’t just occasionally look at some gay porn or whatever and be happy, they always eventually get caught doing something extra freaky.

• Finally, when you deny it all your life and go through your midlife crisis and decide you can’t take it anymore, you realize you don’t have the skills or knowledge that people who weren’t bottling it up have. Which is why so many get caught with staff members or prostitutes.

6- Show us the testosterone test will be the new “show us the birth certificate”

Are we so bad we need corporate sponsorship of our lanes?

So in 16 years, they produced two games and a remaster. Am I missing something? Of course you can’t keep a business alive when it doesn’t actually make anything.

Yeah on a second read it’s more explicitly sexist than I initially thought. I still stand by what I said tho.

Look, I’m basically a communist most of the time, but I don’t think this is a good take. I’ll admit I don’t actually know the numbers but I know air travel is expensive and not great for the planet.

It could be better, sure, but I would argue that cramming people in and offering the barest of amenities is a good thing when it comes to air travel. Yes, it sucks to be in a plane but it sucks to pollute the air too. It’s good that more people have more travel options now, and it’s good that we can get more people to more places with less fuel than ever before. We shouldn’t bitch about that, we should accept it as a necessity for getting what we want: to arrive someplace far away in an amazingly short period of time, allowing us to see more of the planet than any of our ancestors, while minimizing the harm as much as we can.