Somewhat ironically, both of those things would actually require a license as opposed to ownership

I think that it’s an underlying Spotify issue for sure, namely that an album is often present as an explicit and censored version. But I feel like Zotify should be able to deal with this.

While songs show up in Zotify with the [E] you usually just see multiple copies of the album without any identifiers. One of these will be the “real” album, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to filter the others.

In other words, race to the bottom is race to the bottom.

Those jobs were not cruel and demeaning as you seem to imply. In fact plenty of industries still operate that way (auto parts etc.) and they served a valuable purpose, to give work experience to that underpaid teenager.

In fact if you go to a butcher shop, fishmonger, farm market etc. you will have your food handed to you by a human as well. And most people highly rate both the service and quality at such shops, with the employees usually being paid significantly more than at supermarkets, and having proper work hours and job security.

So yes, I suppose Piggly Wiggly made food margins a little thinner. But considering I get better meat prices at my butcher than at a supermarket, who do you think benefited from that move the most? Most likely the same ones benefiting from the move towards a fully automated store like Amazon tested.

science engineering

Siege engineering to be precise

The one I loved was a pancake machine at a hotel breakfast buffet. You pressed the pancake button and batter was dispensed onto a slowly rolling large heated cylinder. When your pancake made it to the edge of the cylinder, it peeled off and flipped onto another counter-rotating cylinder. Then it was peeled off and slid down a chute onto a plate. Perfectly round, perfectly cooked.

I ate a few more pancakes than I should have just to see it work. Then against the protests of my wife I lifted the hinged side panel to see how the batter was loaded and dispensed (it was squeezed out of a bag by a screw jack)

The girl at the buffet asked if I was a process engineer (yup) and assured me that I was far from the first to peek under the hood 😅

There is this thing that I feel is most prevalent in the USA, to call any attraction to a girl under the age of 18 pedophilia. Because that’s the age to star in porn. The term should truly be used for attraction to children. I think it’s an extension of the “pedo panic” where every man is assumed for some reason to be a child rapist now.

As such almost every young man could at some point be caught as a “pedophile”- 17 year olds sneak into clubs all the time, for example. 20 year old hooked up with one? Now he is considered a pedophile even if the actual age of consent is lower.

Meanwhile the porn industry glorifies “barely 18” girls as something highly desirable. It’s a little messed up to say the least.

Actual pedos who are into kids should be put in mental institutions. But I would strongly suspect that 15% stated just includes honest young men and creepy old men, none of which are truly pedophiles. That number is way too high.

Honestly it sounds like Canada (minus the transgender panic). Trump is a POS but that doesn’t mean that the declining quality of education is not a real problem.

My wife teaches college and trade school and the quality of incoming students declines every year as since Covid for some reason the public schools have had very low requirements for passing a grade level. Some can’t even add fractions. Most can’t rearrange an equation. A large fraction panic and have anxiety attacks when taking tests, and just stare at the paper like a deer in the headlights.

My daughter is now in grade 5 and they were teaching them practically nothing and not even grading them. Just “good” “adequate” or “poor” based on how well the teacher “thinks they know the material”. No discipline, no challenge. And it honestly seems true that they’re teaching more cultural topics and less core math/science/English.

Thankfully she has a teacher and an engineer for parents, is a voracious reader and we’ve taught her math and programming at home. Pulled her out of the public system this year and she’s suddenly telling us what she learned and is excited to go to school…

I wouldn’t even say “before relatively recently” as it depends where you are. Up until my daughter was like 5 or so she was just fully naked or in a swim diaper at the beach and like you say nobody considered that to be “nudity”.

But we’re in rural Canada where we don’t have the pedo paranoia that seems to have taken over America, and we just let our kids run free like we did.

Though it’s growing in the cities and small towns now, not long ago in a nearby town there was a Facebook panic over a man in a white van driving slowly around town. Unsurprisingly he turned out to be a plumber looking for the right address.

Hah you got it, I used to be a “Chevy guy” when it came to domestic trucks but this was the truck that finally made me say enough, it’s riddled with embarrassing faults and bad design decisions in every system. The Ford truck we also have is an example of new tech that works well and the Chevy just can’t compare.

Don’t forget classics like Fuck_this_shit1! Fuck_this_shit2!

Exact same thing happening in Canada. Our systems are all strained to the breaking point, no housing, no jobs, no doctors, degrading infrastructure and nobody with the skills to maintain it. Nobody is even developing these skills thanks to a stagnant education system that rewards mediocrity.

And our population continues to skyrocket due to unrestrained immigration, depressing wages and pushing unemployment to historic highs.

Canada was built by immigrants. But I don’t care what colour someone’s skin is, they will not find Canada very welcoming right now. If this country can’t even offer a future to those who were born here, how can it welcome others?

Hopefully you don’t do much driving in the dark, the backlight on our new work truck’s console display glows so brightly even with the display “off” that it ruins your night vision.

Modern would be fine if even half a moment of thought went into non-typical situations, but it’s always some stupid oversight like this. Or the 5000k LED dome lights with a visible PWM frequency. Literally painful.

I prefer to drive with old incandescent dash lights dimmed to nearly nothing, yes I live in a very dark area with no lighting and many road hazards. On a moonless night, the area lit by the headlights is literally all you can see. We run extra lightbars, turning lights etc.

More light outside the truck, not inside. That’s my rant

Without compromised hardware even igniting a battery is pretty implausible (unless the phone was on charge, and obviously these weren’t) as you’d need to basically short it out and this would be hard even with full bare metal access.

Pagers are famously hard to hack as well since all they do is display strings. And they aren’t on the public net, they don’t even have IP addresses as they communicate hub and spoke with a big slow RF transceiver.

Much more likely triggered by a message or long time fuse.

For the readers that don’t realize exactly how old school, Sam & Fuzzy has been around since the dialup era.

It’s been through just about every phase a comic can go through, he used to write decade-long story arcs, lately he seems to be enjoying drawing simple cute dog comics. I suppose a guy needs a break sometimes from a career like that!

I learned so much at school, hacking crappy computers because I was bored. Boot disks in my backpack, hex editing the typing lesson saves, packing emulators and ROMs in one floppy at time and merging them back together (I even wrote a BASIC program for this because I didn’t know that tools existed to compress and chunk large files). And just exploratory hacking for fun, writing scripts and tools and stuff just to see if I could.

Chromebooks are the opposite of that, we bought our daughter a Chromebook and on realizing that it was only a tablet with a keyboard it went back to the store. She has my old Linux desktop now and knows a lot more than her friends

If he follows through he’ll be in on round 2 of the rapture I guess

Militants specifically use these pagers for security and stealth. Everyone else just uses phones.

It’s a brilliant way to target only combatants, and also expose them to their friends and neighbours. This attack is incredibly disruptive with very little collateral damage compared to alternatives.

And yes, it’s terrorism, an attack meant to inspire terror and disrupt communication networks with a chilling effect much larger than the actual damage. However it’s interesting as unlike most terrorism it does not target civilians.

It’s also terrifying to think we are living in a world where a malicious component attack is a legitimate concern. This is one of those moments that change the world - I’m sure every industry is thinking about the danger of their foreign supply chain right now.

That’s practically all my cats eat! I only put cat food out in the winter or if they start to look slim. All summer they eat mice and sparrows and get fat. (Note that sparrows are a terrible invasive pest and removing them has a positive impact on the local ecosystem)

They are barn cats though and that’s their job so it’s a little different from the pet cat situation.

So uh yeah as we all know a lot of amphetamines have already been “open source” for a long time.

And we also know the DEA really doesn’t approve of private production… Vyvanse itself only really was created as a produg because of their control of the amphetamine market and their desire for products with lower abuse potential.

If we could get the DEA out of the way anyways, it would make more sense to just make dextroamphetamine as it’s simple, cheap and effective.

I picked up some gel airsoft guns and have been playing steady with my kid.

Anyways I just picked up a rifle which freed up both pistols we had for one person to wield. And let me tell you, dual wielding automatic pistols not only is completely non-functional but also makes you feel like an idiot just holding them. Completely the opposite of Halo.