Always has been.

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We just watched “The Trap” last night. There was a major pop concert that ended in time for family dinner time during daylight. In the concert, they were depicted having time to make multiple trips to the merch tables and concessions, and in one of those trips, they talked like it was an intermission to change the stage set between songs.

I was just listening to some interview talking about how, while it was Dems’ efforts that pushed the pandemic stimulus checks through Congress, it was Trump’s signature on the check, and that was believed to have had a big impression on demographics no one would ever expect to go with the party of billionaires.

Edit: I should add that I only expect the votes coming from more diverse sources than what might be intuitive, not that all of those voters would be persuaded to go all-out “proud boys”.

Fair point! I don’t know what I’ll do whenever I eventually have to replace mine. I was lucky (I guess) to get the last model that had a removable drive and the keyboard I ended up loving. I upgraded my storage to 2 gigs and felt that covered everything I cared to change on this one.

But I’ll have to seriously reconsider on future models, as I am enticed by the newer Apple chips but have certainly heard the uproar about the relatively small amount of ram offered. And now that we’re on the subject, I’m not thrilled about the idea of Apple dropping OS support (i.e., security updates) for older models. I want to upgrade when I’m ready for an overhaul in performance, not just because they want to sell more.

I guess I need to be more specific about “nerd.” I find it great for software nerdiness, but I have to admit the only physical use case nowadays is plebian: “just take my money and make it work.”

You’ve been waiting for this moment…

Ha! I totally agree! But I also can’t resist defending Mac a little bit.

Maybe I’m just weird, but I grew up on Commodore, then DOS + Windows, then Windows (when it became all-in-one and not just a GUI shell over DOS). I got into Linux desktops and servers in college and will only ever do a server on Linux, of course. Throughout all of this, both software consumption and development have been constants for me.

Right now, I greatly prefer MacBooks for productivity, and I have been keeping a Windows PC going for flight simming, though I’m tempted to switch that to Linux ever since MS declared it too old to run Windows even though it’s still perfectly capable of doing everything I care about–MS just insists on “trusted platform” hardware now.

Anyways, the point I’m going for is that Mac is also for nerds, especially ones who understand Windows and Linux and just enjoy a nice workstation that combines the best of both worlds. Windows is trying to catch up with WSL, but it’s still a bolt-on, whereas Mac is BSD under the hood. I’ve been hearing about nice Linux laptop options and hope it will get to an equally nice experience, but, for now, Mac, for me, is like a new car. Sure, I used to do my own maintenance and some repairs on my old cars, but now I have a job and can pay for something that usually just works, that allows me plenty of ways to tinker, and that I can pay to have fixed when I don’t want to spend my time grinding on something unfulfilling.

One of the best feelings I ever felt was laying in bed the night after a car accident earlier in the day. It was enough of an accident that I was glad to reflect on it not being any worse, but it also wasn’t bad enough to injure anyone.

When I climbed into bed that night, I was seriously doing that thing dogs do when you take them outside and they flop and wallow around on the grass with their feet flailing carelessly in the air. That bed felt so damn good that night, and I try often to remind myself that it’s the same comfy and safe bed now that it was that day.

This is exactly how I used to see things when I grew up in a conservative echo chamber.

And now that I recognize a person’s right to choose and tend to think capital punishment should probably* not be legal, I’ll add that it’s not that my underlying beliefs changed, just how I now understand things. Some people do deserve capital punishment. And innocent people should be protected. But personhood doesn’t start at conception, a person conceiving has a right to decide what happens to their body, and the state can never be trusted to administer capital punishment.

*I say “probably” because I also think it might be necessary to allow it in extreme cases. My reasoning is that if people don’t believe the justice system will adequately punish, they have incentive and no ultimate detergent for taking justice into their own hands.

Just to be really clear, too, they’re looking at local effects (they say “urban microclimate”), not overall climate.

Whether we voted is not anonymous, but how we voted is anonymous. It’s just that our political leanings are pretty transparent in our personal data.

“AI” is the new “blockchain”.

Gotta rtfa to get the full context.

Even so, at least three county jails in Florida that sit within mandatory evacuation areas have decided that detainees will ride out the storm. These jails — Pinellas, Manatee, and St. Johns counties — have a combined incarcerated population of more than 4,000 people. Recent analysis from The Appeal found that more than 21,000 people are locked up at facilities in areas with evacuation orders ahead of Milton. An earlier investigation by The Intercept found that across Florida, 52 jails, prisons and detention centers face major to extreme flood risks over the next 30 years as such climate-driven storms intensify, the most among any state.

Florida has among the largest populations of incarcerated people in the country, more than 84,000, according to federal data — exceeding the jailed populations of entire countries, such as France, Germany, Malaysia, or Venezuela.

“With that number of inmates it’s not really possible, feasible to evacuate people out of there, and it’s unnecessary because we can go up,” said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri on Wednesday during a press conference. He said the Pinellas County Jail, which has a population of about 3,100 people, is prepared to move people from the first floor cells to the second floor in the event of flooding.

“We have plenty of staff there, everything’s safe, it’s under control and I’m not concerned about it,” he said, adding that around 800 deputies and jail staff would be on hand. The jail sits within an area deemed Zone A, the most severe tier among evacuation areas, and is located next to a waterway that spills into Tampa Bay.

There are still systemic problems here, but it’s not like they just locked everyone on the ground floor and peaced-out, as the headline made me think.

Edit: I just want to add that the rest of the article goes even deeper in, in my opinion, undoing my outrage induced from the headline. It talks about facilities being weather-ready and built on higher ground, it mentions procedures for ones that aren’t, it consults a former FEMA official…

I want someone to project that map onto a globe to illustrate how ridiculous it was. The elegantly circular arcs of the north sides of those storms would look bizarrely teardrop-pinched, if I’m not mistaken.

One of them (Zoom I think) at least used to be able to pop up a request for attendees to turn on their mics. I was glad to see it required permission, and I was not glad to see the host must have clicked that request.

Are there still places that legally mandate car refueling operators? That seemed like a job that literally only existed to give some people a job.

Might have just found out about another?

Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-explosives-hezbollahs-taiwan-made-pagers-say-sources-2024-09-18/

blancat