Article 5 and Catch 22, which in this case would be formulated as, “They can do anything that we can’t stop them from doing.” One could make that argument, but who’d be listening?

I feel like this objection makes the most sense in a particular context, like a culture that views beef as some sort of prize, or a marker of being ahead in the competition for social status with one’s neighbors. (U.S. culture very much views it that way.)

If Person A eats only 1 unit of beef per month, what would make dropping to zero “unfair” is if we assume that they are too poor to afford more (“losing”), or engaging in asceticism, but holding on to that one unit as a vital connection to the status game, or a special treat that they covet.

But what if it’s just food? Person A may just not be that into beef, and probably not even miss it, just like Person B probably also wouldn’t notice a difference between 100 units and 99 units. In the sense that neither A or B really would notice a small change all that much, it’s fair

Anyway, random thoughts from somebody who thinks steak is just kind of meh.

One of the Big Lies that they repeated over and over throughout the election season was the one about the “border crisis,” where allegedly criminals and rapists were flooding into the country across the southern border by the millions. They promised to round up and deport all of them, literally millions of people. You can see where the problem arose: Lies collided head-on with reality. There simply are not millions of migrants for ICE to round up. They don’t exist. They never existed. It was all a lie.

Now, the regime has to appear like it’s Doing Something™ by actually deporting people. Stephen Miller has even given ICE a quota of 3,000 deportations a day, and it’s struggling. They have to make the numbers somehow, and the low-hanging fruit are the immigrants that they already have records on, and know about. ICE can just comb the immigration records, and go pick up people whom they know exactly where to find. Morality and logic have nothing to do with it, it’s all about throwing the red meat of performative cruelty to their base, and intimidation to their political enemies.

A rainbow appearing in the sky over Dublin on the day that Ireland voted to legalize same-sex marriage? A tornado destroying the house of Rep. Joe Harding, who authored the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida?

I don’t know how much clearer He can get!

Dammit. At least I was able to maintain the comforting illusion until I got to work.

This has got to be rage-bait. Nobody is this fucking dumb, right? Please let me believe it’s rage-bait at least until after breakfast.

You read the part about the dog’s skull, and well, you hope that the blenderizing happens slowly.

That’s the leftist ideal. (Which, true, few people fully reach.)

I’ll go extra-spicy and point out that there’s no such thing as “ownership” as we know it without government. Legal-wonkishly, ownership is enforceable, transferrable, exclusive title to property. I can “own” land that I’m only physically present on for a few days per year because my name is on a piece of paper in a file cabinet in a government office, and it’s backed up by a court system and police force that’s constituted and willing to enforce my title.

I just mention it because a lot of the deregulation whiners are the same people as the “taxation is theft” whiners.

Has it? My complaints are: I have to use VPN software for work that replaces /etc/resolve.conf with a symlink to another location, one that sandboxed snaps can’t access. There’s no way to grant them access; the “slots” that you can connect are fixed and pre-defined. You can’t even configure the file path; it’s defined right in the source code. Not even as a #define, but the string literal “/etc/resolve.conf”. That seems like poor practice, but I guess they’re not going for portability.

Also, I have /usr and /var on different media, chosen for suitability of purpose, and sized appropriately. Then, along comes snap, violating the File Hierarchy Standard by filling up /var with application software.

Minor annoyances are the ~/snap folder, and all of the mounted loopback filesystems which make reading the mtab difficult.

You’re correct, my memory took a shortcut. Thanks for the very thorough explanation!

Americans can’t buy them new because of the so-called Chicken Tax. We can only import them if they’re speed-governed, or at least 25 years old.

Even with those restrictions, lots of Americans want them, including me. There are quite a few importers bringing them over, including one that just started up in my area. They’re desirable enough that major media outlets are running articles about how people who need to get real work done covet kei trucks.

Yes, Americans would buy them. Americans are buying them.

Skill issue. Should be doing both at the same time.

In case anybody was actually wondering, the difference is sudsing agent. The manufacturers originally put a chemical in laundry detergent to make more suds. That doesn’t make them clean clothes any better, it’s just for psychological effect. Customers feel like it’s working better when they can see suds.

But too much sudsing in front-loading machines can cause leaking from around the door seals. (Same as putting dish detergent in the dishwasher.) So the HE detergents are the same thing, but without the sudsing agent. They work just fine in top-loading machines, too.

But does anybody remember those TV ads for Biz detergent which pitted a woman using it against man using “Hiz” detergent? Hooray for casual sexism!

Reminds me of a meeting my co-worker and I had with the IT staff of a company that is a customer using research instruments in our facility. The meeting was to ask us to enable data synchronization through SharePoint. (We’re a Linux shop.) We asked what the issue was with getting their data files with SFTP. They said, “It’s open source.”

Then, a few beats of silence as it sinks in for us that there is no next step in the chain of logic. That is the totality of their objection.

Only if you have installed the correct license file.

That’s amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn’t do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that’s what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we’d switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

The court thing is not universally true. I worked in a family law firm for several years, and the practice in the courts here is to start from a baseline of equal custody and placement, and I’ve heard the same about other states. The men who lost out were the ones who wouldn’t fight, because they were convinced that the courts were biased. But hell, in one case, we got full custody and placement for a guy whose son wasn’t even biologically his! (His wife cheated, and he didn’t find out until well after they’d emotionally bonded.)

I’d say that 20-50 years is generous. Maybe if they’d won every election, but that’s now how US politics goes. When one side stages a coup, and history shows they’re going to win an election again within the next cycle or two, not throwing the leaders of the coup in Gitmo by January 21, 2021, at the latest, sure seems like enabling fascism.

Willfully blind. Eastman Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975, but decided to focus on their existing, profitable product lines. Clayton Christensen describes the process in The Innovator’s Dilemma.