Yeah, pretty much. A large part of what made the face-pie so effective was simply the “we can still touch you” reminder. It’s a powerful message, because it reminds them that their bodyguards only need to fail once. It’s the old “you need to protect yourself every time, we only need to touch you once” thing. Which is why they’ve captured the courts and police, to deter attacks even when they aren’t under constant protection.

Nah, I’ve been stabbed and shot. Getting shot was way worse.

I was stabbed while fighting some white supes who were trying to take over a bar. My buddy was working as a bouncer so we were there to hang out. It was winter so we all had big puffy coats on while we hung out at the front of the bar. He had some skinheads show up and try to get in. He started to bounce them, they pushed back, and suddenly they realized that everyone outside of the bar were his friends. We got into a tussle, and the six of us kicked the shit out of the five of them.

But afterwards, when the ambulances were parked outside, my buddy was like “hey uhh… You should go talk to the EMTs now.” I had a pocket knife sticking out of my shoulder, punched through my coat. I casually strolled over and was like “hey, is this… A problem?” Two of the EMTs immediately broke away from two of the skinheads to work on me instead. It sucked after, for sure. But at the time, I didn’t really feel it. My biggest concern in the moment was the fact that they cut my favorite coat to get it off of me. Having my arm in a sling was honestly the worst part about it, because it was on my good side. So I had to learn to do a lot of stuff with my bad hand, because my good arm was strapped to my torso.

Then I got shot (in the ass cheek, of all places) while being mugged outside of a music festival. I don’t even think he meant to shoot me; I think he was just an idiot. I remember the gun going off as my back was half-turned to him, (which is how he hit my ass cheek) then him cursing and taking off in the opposite direction. That one felt like a white-hot muscle cramp. Like the worst muscle cramp you’ve ever had, combined with a super over-exerted muscle burn like you just did a massive workout. Ever had a kidney stone? Sort of like that. Docs said I was lucky he didn’t hit my hip bone, because that would have been crippling at least, potentially even fatal. I still have a massive scar on my ass from where it tracked all the way across my ass.

Given, the adrenaline probably played a large part in why I didn’t feel the knife. But I had plenty of adrenaline while being mugged too, and I sure as shit felt that bullet. But yeah, insurance denying meds is definitely an issue. For my gunshot, they refused my pain meds. So I suffered through that entire recovery period with just ibuprofen, Tylenol, and weed. Ironically, they approved the meds for my stabbing without a second thought. And the stabbing hurt way less, even without any pain meds.

Similarly, I heard a kid call the Xbox 360 “vintage” the other day. I started to argue that it’s not that old. It only released in… (Checks release date)… 2005? Oh shit it’s over 20 years old. That’s the same as child-me considering the NES vintage when I was playing my PS1.

Pretty much every supermarket near me sells prepaid phones. And yes, they work exactly as you described. You buy minutes or data to add to your account, and then it sits in your account until you use it. Before the memory shortage price gouging BS, I could go get a burner phone for like $75 at my local Walmart or Target. No clue what they’d cost now, but they’re likely still pretty cheap as far as phones are concerned. The phones won’t have great hardware, but they’ll at least be able to run Android and can do all the things that modern smartphones can do… Albeit much slower than a flagship model.

As far as privacy goes, that will largely depend on your local laws. Drug dealers have historically used prepaid phones to avoid being tracked, (buy a phone card with cash, so you never have to use a debit or credit card to pay,) so governments started passing Know Your Customer laws that require the phone companies to verify and log your ID (tying it to your prepaid phone number, the same way a regular phone bill is tied to you) before they can sell to you. That way when the cops subpoena the phone company to see who owns a specific phone number, the company can actually tell them.

This is why archeologists and anthropologists love boring people. Researching Alexander the Great is fine, but we already know the broad strokes. The actual useful “how people lived from day to day” information is almost always found in some boring person’s journal.

{Date} I walked down to the market to get more salt, flour, vinegar, and some wool thread to darn my socks. The morning walk took approximately 20 minutes with the sun at my back. The fish seller has increased his prices to {amount} due to the war. I saw an interesting flock of birds today during my walk back from the market, I believe they may be passing through the area. I decided to make my dinner bread with a slightly different recipe today. {Full recipe listed below}. It was nice, but I’ll probably only use half as much salt next time, like I normally do. The dairy cow has produced a lot of milk this year because of the heavy rain making the grass grow well. So I’ve had a lot of butter to put on my bread. The neighbor has agreed to trade some of my excess cream for fresh veggies. I’ll probably make them into a stew for tomorrow’s dinner {recipe listed below}.

“Replacing that stick of RAM will cost more than the entire original purchase price of the laptop, so just say it’s faulty and let them figure it out. Never mind the fact that we sold them a laptop with faulty RAM.”

Believe it or not, there actually was an effort to block electric lighting. Because it was someone’s job to walk around the neighborhoods and light all of the streetlights. And “protect the jobs” has historically been a really awful argument against technology.

Yup. Being the largest minority doesn’t automatically make you the majority.

Unless you’re working with funny electoral college numbers, in which case ~34% apparently equals >50%.

Yeah, the logistics behind the military were honestly staggering. There was an old joke about how the US military could get a fully operational (built, supplied, and staffed with trained crew) McDonalds anywhere in the planet within 48 hours. Except that it wasn’t really a joke. If the military wanted to, they probably could.

The sheer scale behind the military’s logistics was so vast that people have trouble comprehending it. The same way people have trouble wrapping their mind around how big a billion of something is. Conceptually they may know how big it is, but actually putting it into practice is too large for any one person to truly comprehend. It’s the old “a million seconds is 11 days, a billion seconds is almost 32 years” problem, where the human brain simply isn’t designed to comprehend the sheer scale of something that large in a realistic way. Every comparison we make ends up with people devolving back into concepts in order to keep track of it in their mind.

And we’ve seen all of it begin to unravel in only a few years, because the POTUS has surrounded himself by Yes Men instead of competent leaders. It’s the same way so many despots and dictators have historically been brought low… They surround themselves in Yes Men, and nobody wants to be the one to break the bad news. So the leader is kept blissfully ignorant, while everything crumbles around them. And then they’re shocked when they have angry mobs and/or a coup d’état.

I’ve joked about finding unopposed spots and running against them. Not because I want to win, but just because I want to force them to actually work for their spot.

It’s probably not the tech making the decision. It was probably the tech attempting to request one, (because they were out of/low on stock,) and being told by management to send it back as-is instead.

Something something “Ancient Egypt had archeologists who studied ancient(er) Egypt.”

That’s literally what it is. It was loosely based on the hells angels, but it was first and foremost a drama/soap opera. It was a decent enough drama for a few seasons, in the same way that the old CW superhero dramas are extremely campy but can be fun if you don’t take them too seriously. My ex and I used to watch it to make fun of how seriously they took the biker stuff. The same way Supernatural fans constantly riff on the show’s cheesiness and camp.

A tale as old as time hanging chads

If you see a guillotine and immediately assume it’s for you, maybe you should reconsider some life choices. Because the vast majority of people would see a guillotine and go “oh that’s fucking cool” instead of assuming it was there specifically for them.

Even calling the board “Trump loyalists” is an understatement. Trump hand-picked the board members, has the ability to remove them if they step out of line, and installed himself as chairman of the board. The board is a bunch of puppets, with Trump’s tiny baby hands shoved all the way up their asses.

And that’s a large part of the issue. The frontend doesn’t actually disclose this blocklist at all. In fact, it actively takes steps to obfuscate things and make it appear as if the blocklist doesn’t exist at all.

For example, attempting to view a blocked instance shows a generic network error, rather than a “this instance is being blocked by your frontend” error. And blocked users aren’t simply flagged and/or collapsed. They’re entirely hidden, as if they don’t exist at all. So someone using this as their primary frontend wouldn’t even know that they’re missing entire posts and/or comment chains, because anything from the blocked users is simply gone.

Additionally, the blocklist is downloaded (in plaintext, over http) when the frontend is booted, so it’s not a file that gets updated with the git version updates. Meaning the dev can silently update it even if users haven’t pulled new versions. Simply rebooting your frontend would be enough to pull an updated blocklist. This gives the dev an extreme amount of censorship power, because they can effectively change users’ configs without any action on the users’ part.

It was only originally discovered because the admin for db0 used the frontend. And notably, db0 is on the block list. They were previously using an old version of the frontend that didn’t include the hidden blocklist yet. They updated their Lemmy stack a little while ago, and suddenly their entire frontend was broken (the entire feed was completely empty) and showing a generic version incompatibility error.

After lots of troubleshooting, the db0 admin eventually discovered that the frontend was downloading a hidden blocklist and automatically blocking the instance that it was running on. Because when they updated their stack, the new version of Tesseract included the secret blocklist. So it downloaded the blocklist when it booted up, found that db0 was on the list, and silently hid every single post because they were all from a blocked instance. This resulted in a completely empty feed.

And here’s a reminder that ERs in some states are required by law to ask about your immigration/citizenship status. The cruelty is always the point.

Also, they’re not even requesting it be shared directly with the government. That apparently isn’t enough. They’re requiring that the personally identifiable information (names, addresses, diagnoses, etc) also be shared with an independent contractor. An independent contractor that these hospitals have no confidentiality agreements with, no privacy guarantees from, and no security audits to review. They’re being required to send all of their patents’ PII to this shadowy contractor, so that contractor can do throws hands up in the air and gestures around wildly with it.

In a statement, Murphy cited the recovery amount, personal payments by former executives, a commitment for $7 million to go to nonprofits and the absence of a confidentiality provision in a system where “wrongdoers too often hide their misdeeds by dangling compensation in front of those they victimized and trading that compensation for confidentiality or an NDA.”

Glad they stuck to their guns. I’ve been following this case for a few years now. This all began as an attempt by eBay’s C-level executives to bully a few reporters into silence. It makes perfect sense that those reporters would refuse to accept an NDA as part of the settlement, because reporting on things like this is exactly what landed them on eBay’s radar in the first place.

Some high profile instances were added to the blocklist alongside unrelated changes and not mentioned in the git commit message… Also apparently the error you'd get when going to the blocked instance was a generic error…

Yeah, the combination of those two issues are exactly why the hidden blocklist was noticed in the first place. The site admin for db0 noticed that their frontend was broken after they updated their Lemmy stack. But the “incompatible” version of Lemmy they had just updated to was supported. So what was causing the incompatibility? Maybe an API issue? Nope, API is fine.

After some digging, they eventually realized that it was happening due to an instance block at the frontend’s level. But they didn’t have their own instance blocked in the frontend, so why was it being blocked? Turns out, it was because they were previously running an old version of Tesseract from before the blocklist was implemented. When they updated their stack (which also updated Tesseract), the new version suddenly included the hidden blocklist code. So when they tried to start their stack after updating, the new version of Tesseract quietly downloaded the hidden blocklist (which can’t be disabled) and blocked the instance it was currently running on. This effectively broke the frontend for db0, which is what led to the investigation and subsequent hidden blocklist discovery.