I will always opt for a Lyft or Uber, unless I am actively dying from something that could kill me in 30 minutes or less, like a massive severed artery or something like that.

They are just as fast, and if I start literally dying in the hospital waiting room, they will most likely pay attention.

The only way it makes sense to take an ambulance to a hospital is if you literally have no other option, or if you are so seriously injured you’ve already lost consciousness or are mostly paralyzed.

You can call an ambulance, paramedics arrive, stabilize you, and then refuse to get in the ambulance.

This costs you nothing.

Then you just bite on your wallet and take an Uber or Lyft, which costs 10 to 20 dollars.

Get in the ambulance? 1 to 3 thousand dollars, for a shitty version of the care you’ll recieve in the hospital anyway, can’t avoid those costs.

Ding ding ding!

Winner winner, idiot dog barfing up your chicken dinner.

I will only use this if it uses Clippy’s animations.

Thats… what this is, right?

Clippy 3.0?

So uh, skipping a bunch of excess lore:

“Dogs are one of the most beloved pets in the world. They are loyal, friendly and make great companions. Despite their differences, all dogs share a few key traits – they are affectionate, protective of their owners, and eager to please. Dogs require proper care, including regular exercise, grooming, and veterinary checkups. In return, they provide unconditional love and can even improve their owner’s physical and mental health. Whether as a family pet or a working animal, dogs have been an integral part of human society for thousands of years.”

The chat bot is named after a dog because a dog-named chatbot is more likely to make users treat it with patience, kindness, and understand that it does silly things sometimes, but it means well.

Its marketing. PR.

So far what I have learned about what Kamala has learned is:

It is now the darkest night in America.

But…

There are billions of stars you can only see at night!

…

You know, faint, distant glimmers from long, long ago, that you can squint at and imagine they form coherent, stable, meaningful structures… which are not, and never really were there at all.

…

I do not know if she was intentionally attempting to invert/reference Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ and HW’s ‘Thousand points of light’, or if she somehow thought this was an original, meaningful metaphor.

Either would be pathetic and disgusting.

…

Anyway, quite literally that may have been how democracy in America died, to another speech of meaningless platitudes, ending with thunderous applause, congratulating that a failed struggle was worth it, because even though it failed, it played by the rules and was gracious in defeat.

I mean… basically yes?

They could prop up AM radio talk shows.

Thom (sp?) Hartmann and Sam Seder are … basically the only two left wing, ‘big name’ radio talk shows that still even exist post the 00’s.

They exist almost entirely off of small individual donations…

Do the same thing for left wing youtubers/twitch streamers.

Almost all left wing people like that with any name recognition are doing it without any big name donors, as opposed to the Republicans who have a myriad network of wealthy donors basically bankrolling them.

… and that would just be mirroring the Republican strategy.

Maybe they could actually innovate too?

But yeah, this would be like … 30 years too late.

What did the Dems do wrong?

Be unimaginably complacent by placing their faith in the integrity of norms and institutions that the Republicans have very obviously been trying to destroy for about 20 years.

Its the primary problem of being a liberal.

You just assume the rules and norms you follow apply to everyone.

It is not part if their worldview that those rules and norms can be destroyed by cleverly manipulating them against themselves.

What should they do now?

Pff, I dunno, its too late, we have now arrived at fascism.

I’ve been saying this (along with actually shift your platform to the left instead of to the right) to every mainline, Obama will save us all and everything is fixed now, standard liberal Democrat for almost 20 years.

They have all acted like I am a hyperbolic delusional nutjob when I explain that the status quo trajectory will sooner than later lead the country further and further to the right untill we end up with corporate theocratic fascism.

Well now we have that.

Its… kinda like the climate, or preventative medicine and a base healthy lifestyle vs checking into the ER as an overweight smoker who broke their leg from the pain of trying to pass a kidney stone.

Fixing the mess is orders of magnitude more costly and difficult than preventing it.

I am 35.

My entire lifetime, the way Dems run presidential campaigns, the way they push the message is heavily, heavily reliant on mainstream legacy media outfits talking about and repeating their announcements and rallies.

Meanwhile, the Republicans do the same… but they also control the vast majority of talk radio stations, and since the internet came into wide use, the number of popular internet figures with overt right wing tendencies just vastly, vaaaastly outstrips similar figures on the left, in terms of viewership and funding.

Basically, the Dems still think that dying legacy media, with fewer and fewer readers/viewers, that increasingly has to sell out by running more bombastic, shocking news, and/or cowtowing to the whims of their corpo owners…

… they still think that this nearly dead legacy media will give them the same treatment as in the 70s, when there were only 3 fucking TV news channels and newspapers op eds were far more influential.

They should have learned that they needed a real way of pushing their message after 2015/16.

Trump dominated the media without paying anything for it simply by being bombastic and saying insane shit.

That should have set off a whole bunch of alarm bells that … Dems can’t rely on news stations giving roughly equal air time to them.

But it did not.

The Republicans, through their various think tanks and foundations, funded the hell out of every one willing to repeat their message on any medium for 35 years.

Dems have never had anything like this, even though the average Republican thinks George Soros is doing something like that.

Now, combine all of the above with another trend the Republicans have manifested into reality over 35 years:

Public Education has been decimated. The average American now has critical reading comprehension skills roughly equivalent to a 6th or 7th grader.

So even if huge numbers of people were still reading Op-Eds in papers… they would not understand any moderately complex discussions of policies, or history, or economics or anything anyway.

… And this is all just a critique of how the Democrats have been at distributing their messages.

The actual content of those messages is an entirely different failure.

Goddamnit.

Are… pirogi and piroshki … basically the same thing, but from … differing slavic languages, or different dialects… or are they actually different food in some way?

I used to go to Piroshky Piroshky all the time when I lived in Seattle… it seems like the same thing?

Briefly mentions debt and rent.

No numbers though.

Rent/Housing Costs are 420% (up 320%) of what they were in 1982, assuming you live in or near a city, you know, where jobs are.

Wages are 120% (up 20%) what they were in 1982.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1raP7

Also, debt levels continue to skyrocket with approximately a third of Americans having a negative net worth.

https://www.creditkarma.com/about/commentary/americans-have-a-net-worth-problem-and-its-not-positive

But of course the article doesn’t want to get too specific.

If the goal is having less Americans living paycheck to paycheck, the solution is crash the housing market and also consumer (credit card) debt relief.

Until then, the beatings growing class divide will continue until morale improves.

Even though EAC and BattlEye have both supported linux for 3 years now, and the devs don’t actually have to do anything as Proton functionally ports the game from Windows to Linux automatically at no cost to them.

… They’re lying.

Maybe for a smaller game studio, I could actually believe they don’t know these things.

But massive AAA studios that have direct business ties to MSFT?

They’re lying.

They’re saying anything they can to slow down linux adoption, because MSFT wants to dominate as a PC gaming OS.

They used to just ignore, play dumb, feign ignorance or perhaps just actually be incompetent… now they’re just lying to our faces.

Sure Apex. Show us your stats for how many cheaters you caught who were running on Windows vs running on Linux, and show us how at least a smidgen of methodology you used to determine the bare metal OS of someone running on a VM.

Cheating software running on Linux is more challenging to detect than Windows-based kernel-level tools, and they require an increasingly higher level of attention from the Apex Legends team.

So, for starters, this is not a direct quote (of the interviewed Apex dev), so this is basically just the author’s opinion.

More to the point: Purchasable cheats that currently defeat AC on Apex are far, far more easy to find for Windows machines.

… and they defeat Kernel level AC on Windows all the time.

Also, Apex uses EAC which uh… supports linux, has for 3 years.

https://onlineservices.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-launches-anti-cheat-support-for-linux-mac-and-steam-deck

EDIT 2: The article states Apex uses BattlEye, not EAC for AC… but all the info I can find on Apex says they use EAC? Maybe there was a recent change?

Either way, BattlEye supports linux/SteamDeck as well, also for 3 years now.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3104663180636096966

https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-deck/proton-battleye-anti-cheat-support

I mean maybe there is some truth to cheat developers preferring to develop their cheats on linux…many programmers prefer to develop things on linux… but they develop them for Windows users.

Like… I obviously do not support cheating, so I won’t post the links… but a quick web search very, very easily reveals that all the cheats one can purchase… well they work on Win 10/11… no support for linux is indicated.

Granted I am no uberl33th4x0r, but I don’t see any Apex cheats which are easily acquirable which support linux.

…

EDIT: Oh right, it is probably also worth mentioning that after CrowdStrike Y2K’d half of the world’s enterprise Windows machines… through pushing a malformed update… that interfaces directly with the Windows kernel…

… MSFT is now re-evaluating giving kernel level access to 3rd parties, and is looking to create higher level APIs (above the Kernel) that are less likely to expose Windows to massive system stability errors from 3rd parties, and looks to want to at the very least have much more involvement with reviewing any 3rd party code that accesses the kernel:

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3483641/crowdstrike-backs-microsofts-demand-for-reducing-kernel-level-access.html

https://www.securityweek.com/microsofts-take-on-kernel-access-and-safe-deployment-practices-following-crowdstrike-incident/

Maybe these Kernel level AC proponents are a bit worried about their Kernel access on Windows being either much more stringently reviewed, or limited, and are making a fuss about it by scapegoating linux, you know, as a misdirect?

Just a thought.

EDIT 3:

A quote from the article I linked pertaining to BattlEye

BattlEye’s Steam Deck compatibility is great news, but its arrival on the handheld comes with small print. According to the anti-cheat solution’s clarification, developers will have to “opt-in”, suggesting that specific games could forgo compatibility. While it’s hard to think of a compelling reason why a company would want to do this, Valve’s PC competitors could, in theory, use the option to their advantage.

Pff, what an outlandish notion, that giant AAA studios (who all have massive business ties to MSFT) would exert pressure to limit linux marketshare/adoption, what a baseless and silly worry.

=P

Now now, Elon does technically have one patent to his name personally.

Its the shape of the charging port for Teslas.

He patented this with the idea that if he ever did actually build out that massive EV charger network, he would basically be owed royalties if it successfully became the USB C of EV charging ports, so himself personally would be owned royalties if other car companies wanted to use that charging port shape.

But that was like a decade ago, and last I heard he fired the entire team at Tesla dedicated to the charging network.

The problem I am aware of is moreso that the number of programmers that know COBOL is vanishingly small, it … COBOL does not seem to really be taught anymore…

…so if something goes wrong at that level, you may be SOL if you cannot find an increasingly rare programmer that knows COBOL well.

DARPA has unironically been funding a tool that purports to translate C / C++ into Rust…

https://www.darpa.mil/program/translating-all-c-to-rust

… Are the Feds aware that the core systems that many, many older companies (and government agencies) use are still based on COBOL?

Is… is that not of any concern?

I ran PopOS on linux for years, every game I had worked, and actually performed better than on Windows, once Proton got to version 7.

• with the exception of games that run multiplayer kernel level anti cheat.

** oh and almost all of those games use anti cheats that are compatible with linux/proton, and have been for 3 years, but the game devs/management just refuse to enable that support, even though its already included in their contracts with AC providers for no extra cost.

You can get a dock and plug in a mouse and keyboard, a monitor, etc…

Its fanboy/girlism.

If you pirate content from their favorite author/artist/producer/whatever, basically all of their screeching comes down to a hysterical emotional response that you are hurting a person or group that they worship as God.

They just learn rhetoric to justify their emotions as a side effect, a consequence of wanting to be able to argue against the bad mean people that are hurting their favorite creatives.

They are naive, ignorant or misinformed, immature… usually believing in some kind ‘just world’ type worldview where everything is fair and square actually if you just follow the rules.

They don’t understand that the actual ‘losses’ from piracy are far, far smaller than whatever the RIAA or game studios say it is.

They don’t understand that the people who actually create or perform the art basically get paid a tiny fraction of what their labels or corporate overlords make.

They don’t understand that some people are actually poor, and the poor deserve art as well.

They don’t understand that when a reasonable cost forma product with reasonable ownership rights exist, a great, great many will prefer a streamlined but slightly costly method over a complex but monetarily costless method.

They don’t understand that you don’t really own anything which you can’t use or view or listen to as you please without relying on some proprietary other system which may just poof that ability out of existence one day, without refunding you.

There are multiple times where Jesus breaks with the established gender norms of the time.

Telling off the people about to stone the prostitute/adulterer to death would have been utterly shocking.

For starters… men and women were not supposed to be talking to each other in public, unless they were your family.

At the time, you basically needed two women to directly witness something… to be the equivalent of one man repeating hearsay, or claiming something with rather dubious evidence.

So… throwing himself into that situation… its actually so unbelievable that it would have played out as it did, that most non fundie scholars are almost certain it never happened… because Jesus most likely would have been beaten or killed.

If it is then a fictional story… the intent of adding it was clearly to indicate … not as equal of a view of women as say a modern feminist, but a radically, radically progressive and more equal view for the time.

As to being against biased treatment of ‘other’, foreign groups of people?

Jesus again talks with a woman, in public, a Samaritan drawing water from a well.

This is an oversimplification, but basically Samaritans were viewed by many other Jews as … not really Jews, as heretics, because they did not see the Temple in Jerusalem or its Rabbis as necessary or important to their version of Judaism.

Its… sort if analogous to how many modern Christians don’t view Mormons as Christian, even though Mormons believe they are.

But its much more extreme than that. Samaritans and other Jews would often refuse to speak to each other, beat the shit out of each other, kill each other, be very very intolerant.

But Jesus just sees this ‘foreign, heretical’ woman as another person, says it does not matter whether you worship at the Temple or not, and attempts to convert her as respectfully as with anyone else.

He ‘heals’ women with bleeding disorders, in a socioreligious environment where a bleeding woman would have been seen as untouchable, who should basically either be banished from society or sequestered and only tended to by other women, who would have to ritually purify themselves after every encounter.

…

You are correct that examples of misogyny and racism do exist in the New Testament as well. Paul comes to mind for having a much more traditional view of women.

But, there absolutely are ways to cherry pick or emphasize the … not as equal or progressive as modern views of equality and progress… but astoundingly more equal and progressive things Jesus did and said.

There absolutely are progressive churches that emphasize this.

You can interpret the totality of the Bible in many, many ways.