Ah yes, the College Sophomore technique: Don’t eat all day, so the party beer gets you absolutely wasted when you’re drinking on an empty stomach. That’s just efficient use of resources.

I mean yeah, but that’s a little like saying “computers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.” It’s a pretty large limitation to place on the user’s choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.

Honestly, quit as soon as you can. After the two week mark, you’ll start smelling things again. At the one month mark, you’ll notice that you’re not constantly out of breath. Cravings still occasionally happen, but it shifts from “god damn it I need a donut right now” to “hmm a donut sounds good right now… But I don’t wanna bother with going to the donut shop.” The cravings never fully vanish, but they definitely change and become easier to dismiss as a passing whim.

I wish it were made up.

For IEMs, the price difference typically goes towards comfort rather than sound quality. As a professional audio technician, a custom-molded IEM will be infinitely more comfortable than a cheap set. But not everyone can justify spending $2000 for custom molds, because they don’t use them for work every day.

Schools in the US have officers specifically assigned to the school. Like the officer’s full time job is to patrol the halls. They’re called School Resource Officers, and they are a large part of the school-to-prison pipeline, as their entire job is focused on getting kids out of regular school and into the prison system. Kids get arrested for things that could be (and previously were) handled by school discipline instead. But since school admins don’t want to deal with it, (because it would require actually making decisions on a case-by-case basis), it’s easier for them to just default to having a kid carted off to juvie by the SRO. And SROs come with all of the same problems and trappings as regular officers; massive racial disparities, being trained for violent escalation as the default, etc…

The stats for SROs are actually pretty staggering. The idea started in the 1950’s, but didn’t really become widespread until the late 90’s when the government started funding specific SRO grants and initiatives, to make them more easily accessible to schools. Columbine (and the subsequent rise in school shootings throughout the 2000’s) poured more fuel on the fire. By 2010, around 45% of middle and high schools in America had SROs. By 2020, that number was nearly 70%.

Schools that invest heavily into SRO programs see a marked increase in arrests (and subsequent drop-outs as kids inevitably end up in the prison system) before graduation. But because no public figure wants to look like they’re soft on crime, politicians keep pushing SRO programs onto school admins. Because more arrests makes it look like they’re cracking down on crime. When in reality, the SRO’s primary role is turning minor problems and disagreements into life-ruining ones.

For the curious: Cops can charge you with murder if they kill someone while trying to stop you from committing a felony. For instance, if you rob a bank and the cops needlessly shoot a bystander, you can be charged with that bystander’s murder.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing here. They’re charging him with a felony for the break-in and attempted robbery, and they can pin the murder (that the cop committed) on him.

Yup. The cop wasn’t wrong for entering when they suspected an armed fight. They were wrong when they shot the victim.

You caught a downvote for that comment because some people don’t like confronting reality, but that’s literally what my late father-in-law told me on his deathbed. He had been battling cancer for about a year by that point, and was partially paralyzed around the six month mark after his vertebrae collapsed from it spreading to his bones. My wife was his constant in-home caregiver after that, while I took on a ton of overtime and freelance work to financially support both of us.

One day, I was over at his house taking care of him, because my wife needed a girl’s night for herself to just get away from things for a few moments. While I was feeding him, he broke down in tears and said he wished he had been hit by a bus instead, because at least then he would have had his dignity intact and would have been able to leave my wife some sort of inheritance. He died two days later.

I’ll never tell my wife about that conversation. She was already dealing with enough mental, emotional, and physical stress from the caregiving (and her own health issues, which the stress compounded), and I didn’t want to add to it. And now at this point, it’s better to just let sleeping dogs lie.

Fuck cancer.

He always looks like someone is slowly but steadily sliding hardboiled eggs into his ass, and he’s trying not to react until he can decide how he feels about it.

If they think there’s even a small chance, they will make the move, because they know if they don’t, even if that woman likes them, she will never ever make the first move.

Or in my case, I find out after the fact that she wanted me to make a move, and I was continuously dismissing her hints because I didn’t want to be creepy and/or ruin a good friendship if I was misreading the situation. My best friend of like 4 years ended up pissed when I started dating someone new, because she had been hoping I would ask her out. Like bitch, why didn’t you say that when I was single?

The given reason is that people are innocent until proven guilty, and the DOJ doesn’t want to create witch-hunts just because someone was mentioned in passing. For instance, Robin Williams is mentioned in an email chain, but only because he refused to visit the island. But if you only hear the first part of that statement, you may be inclined to start a witch-hunt against Robin Williams.

But the most straightforward reason is a coverup. That’s pretty much the only way to actually justify the massive amounts of redactions. As time has gone on and more evidence has mounted, it has become increasingly clear that the given reason is bogus.

If something smells like a duck, it could be a duck, but it could also be a goose, or a chicken, or a swan, or any other number of things that smell like ducks… But if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, has feathers like a duck, has flippers like a duck, has a flat bill like a duck, and quacks like a duck? We can only reasonably conclude that it’s a duck.

Obfuscation is part of the motorcade, but not to the extent you would think. The motorcade has two presidential limos, and the POTUS is typically put in one while the VP is put in the other. Or in this case, the second limo would simply be empty. The order of the limos is random. The idea being that if you manage to bomb one limo, you’d only get either the VP or POTUS, and you’d have no way of knowing which one you got until after the fact. And that’s assuming the bomb is even effective, because the presidential limos have RPG-proof windows and heavy armored plating underneath the body panels.

Most of the motorcade is focused on things like landmine detection, biological weapon detection, chemical weapon detection, standby security forces in case they need to fan out/circle the wagons and create a secure perimeter, on-site medical staff, monitoring local radio chatter, jamming equipment to activate in case of an attack, etc…

That’s probably some Secret Service thing, because the threat of poisoning is actually real. In America, the Secret Service goes to great lengths to vet potential restaurant stops wherever the POTUS/VP is going to be. But they don’t exactly have jurisdiction to do that when they’re in another country.

Notably, Trump’s love of fast food has made the Secret Service’s job extremely frustrating… He apparently has a tendency to just spontaneously demand a drive-thru stop, giving the Secret Service no time to actually run security checks on the staff ahead of time.

I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.

I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.

Here’s a reminder that packing the 5th circuit court of appeals with batshit conservative judges was a key step in the Southern Strategy. There’s also a county in Texas that only has enough of a population for two judges, and they made sure both of those are also batshit conservative. So any time they want to get a batshit conservative ruling, they just file it in that one specific county in Texas. And then Texas appeals go to the 5th circuit. And any circuit rulings are applied nationally (due to lower courts using precedent to set cases) unless it goes all the way to the SCOTUS. And with the current SCOTUS, they can simply refuse to see the case, and the 5th circuit ruling will stand.

Lots of times, the court cases are obviously staged. There have been cases where a plaintiff didn’t even realize they were named in a case that ruled for/against them, because the PAC that actually filed the case simply used their name to be able to file it in that county.

Yeah, self-hosting it can be a bear, especially since you need to deal with the whole “bots trying to kill it will regularly post CSAM in random channels, and if any of your users are in that channel it will federate to your own server and now you have CSAM saved on your server’s cache” stuff. It’s the same problem that Lemmy was dealing with during Reddit’s APIcolypse. You can always choose not to federate, but that largely defeats the point of the protocol existing in the first place.

You also need to set up TURN servers to get functional voice/video calls. WebRTC (like voice/video calling) tends to throw a fit without some sort of TURN functionality. That’s something the average Joe won’t know how to do, and is typically going to require a paid tier from some external host like Cloudflare.

Edit: I looked it up. Cloudflare offers TURN servers, with the first 1000GB for free each month, but then it charges for use after that. But that does mean a server that gets used for video calls more than a few hours per month could end up incurring costs. Because that TURN server would be handling all of the video streaming data, so it will quickly eat that 1000GB limit. It also means true self-hosting is prohibitively difficult, as you’d be tying yourself to an external provider unless you go out of your way to host your own TURN server.

Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.

I’m currently researching Matrix Synapse, to see if it would be worth the hassle to self-host a server.

And this is why generic EULAs should be heavily regulated, and allowed to be negotiated like any other contract. Allow me to pencil in a “you’ll allow me to uniquely watermark the scan of my ID so it can be traced back to this specific request, and agree to pay me $500M if that scan is ever included in a data breach or sold to additional third-party vendors” clause.

Oh, Discord doesn’t want to agree to that? Gee, if the company is deleting everything immediately and there’s no risk of a leak/intentional sale, what’s the harm in including it? How’s the saying go? Something about “if you have nothing to hide”?