I know that COVID isn’t regarded to be a serious disease if you’re vaccinated and reasonably healthy, but I had mental fogginess for about 2 months after my infection.

I mostly seemed outwardly okay during that time, but it was a tremendous effort to just do the bare minimum.

I hope he ducks out if there’s even a fraction of those types of symptoms.

He can’t even unite both sides of his face.

There’s a guy on our dog walking route that put up several Trump flags last year. My wife and I actually wound up having an interaction with him because he was spying on us through his cameras and got mad that we referred to the flags as embarrassing and said that Trumpism was a cult.

By mid-April, he’d pulled down all the flagpoles and didn’t even take the flags off them, just laid the poles with flags wrapped around them in the dirt by his driveway.

In May I actually talked with him. Initially I had no intention of trying to be nice to him - he just had done something sort of shitty a few days before (encouraging his dog to bark at our dogs). I was going to be like “Look, if you wanna call me gay slurs over your ring camera, that’s fine, but don’t encourage your dog to be hostile to mine.”
But somehow he tied his dog to military service, and while I was fully prepared to connect the lack of a veteran license plate to his statement to call him a liar and a Reddit ninja, he fielded the license plate question and said that he’d suffered a TBI that resulted in an appreciable percentage of brain dying, and that made him unable to be rational when he felt any sort of threat or insult. So he didn’t use the military plates, because he’d had negative experiences with motorists while using them.
I don’t know if I believe that - it seems dumb on the part of the other motorists. But I’m not willing to keep pressing for the sake of picking a fight. I’ll throw a barb, but not over-extend myself. It’s just not worth it.
So I listened, and we chatted - for like an hour and a half. My wife left after a few minutes with the dogs. We talked about politics, the world, our community, and how fucked everything is. He supported Trump because of the 2016 (Obama) economy. He believes in women’s rights. He is conservative, anti-immigrant, and believes in stronger policing. I told him I believe in increased social support, so folks like him can get out of the VA benefits trap. I told him I think the way to stronger communities is through stronger schools and increased civic engagement - more pride, less punishment. He even asked if we’d be willing to help train his dog better, because he notices that ours don’t bark at other dogs, and don’t pull on their leads. I told him I’d have to think about it, and ask my wife, since she’s the one who really had the patience to get our dogs where they are.

We parted - not as friends - but certainly not as enemies. Just - neighbors with a better understanding of each other.

There you have it.

When I’ve been in OP’s situation, I filed a complaint with the FCC, performed a whois lookup on their site to send emails to the abuse/spam emails of their DNS registrar and host and inspected the email headers to email their email provider’s abuse/spam account(s). I’ve not yet had cause to reach out to my attorney general’s office when I’ve had a company violate CAN-SPAM, but it’s an option.
I also make sure each company knows there’s a pending CAN-SPAM complaint. I keep it convivial, but serious. “Hey, just letting you know that one of your clients is violating your terms of service and the law! A complaint has already been lodged with the FCC. Toodeloo!”
That bit of knowledge tends to shift the interpretation of your complaint from “annoyed nerd” to “someone politely informing you that you’re going to get skull fucked by the long dick of the law if you don’t fix this ASAP”

It may sound sort of excessive, but I’m a bit of a consumer rights absolutist.

They say regulations are written in blood.

Elaine Chao is a conservative government official who is famous for not enforcing safety rules or following up on safety complaints and may have violated ethics laws while Secretary of Transportation under Trump’s first regime. While in that role, she rubber stamped a sketchy driver control system implemented by Tesla that later helped kill her own sister (in addition to drunk driving).

Can the lightning bolt of consequences strike twice?

It's a rude awakening for Thakker, who may have bought into the Cybetruck's various security features

May?
They don’t know? They didn’t, like, ask him?

who shared the upsetting news on Facebook a few days ago

Oh. They wrote an article about a Facebook post without any follow-up questions.
Modern ‘journalism.’

My presumption is he’s throwing a fit because Greenland signed a mineral rights deal with the EU.

His doctor was like “Hey man, you gotta take your turban off and put on a motorcycle helmet.”
And he was like “Nah, bro, what if I just wore a bigger turban?”
And his doctor was like “Dude, you’d need a turban that’s like 100lbs to offer you the same protection as a good helmet.”
Avtar: “Bet.”

The mask really gets in the way of eating ass, though.

It’s also deprivation of rights under color of law, a federal offense.

“I don’t really want to look at my body any more,” he said, noting it was too painful to see photos from the hospital. “Every time I see myself, I have flashbacks. And every time I see cops, I think, is he after me? And I know in my head it’s not true, but it just comes up.” He said he questions whether he could’ve done something differently. “I have to keep telling myself … I didn’t deserve this.”
He added: “I just want the Department of Justice to take care of them and fix what they say they’re going to fix … I’m not trying to get attention, I just want my story to be heard because I hurt.”

Oof.

Pulled so the court case goes away. They don’t want official rulings on the limits of presidential power. Not a reason to celebrate.

The White House confirmed that OMB pulled the memo Wednesday in a two sentence notice sent to agencies and departments, but said that Trump’s underlying executive orders targeting federal spending in areas like diversity, equity and inclusion and climate change, remained in place.

I went through a rough patch awhile back that saw a lot of “yes”’s to things just to keep myself from being still enough to let my thoughts catch up to me.

A friend invited me out one Tuesday night, to a bar within walking distance of our apartments. We got a table on the patio and got deep in our cups late into the night. The vibe had gradually shifted (they put on better music and it felt like the bar slowed down – it relaxed) and I realized something – last call was an hour and a half ago. But drinks had kept flowing - just reappearing while we chatted with the crowd (that was drinking and getting high on the patio) clustered around us. But there was no crowd outside of our group. In fact, all the patrons had gone, and we were apparently just partying with the bar staff, getting to know their life stories. After a spell, I got self conscious and moved to leave. I tried to pay, and they just waved me off.
It was honestly kind of a magical experience. I never did food service or bar work (I chose the retail/manual labor early career skill tree). It felt like a forbidden peek into their lives.

Not that bizarre of an explanation. The workplace is a porn studio. She found that it improves productivity if folks aren’t distracted while working. Seems reasonable.

“I get it. I broke the law and everything, but I think this is a little severe what they’re doing to me after I paid my dues after I did my time for the offense that I did,” he said.

Okay. So he gets shot twice serving the U.S. The military doesn’t give him support for his PTSD, and he turns to drugs. He gets addicted, fights with that for over a decade before they throw him in jail because there isn’t a fucking social program to help addicts in this country, not even veteran addicts, gets clean in jail, turns his life around, and spends the next 16 years complying with the restrictions placed on him due to losing his green card because of his nonviolent conviction.

So even though he apparently is one of the few people who was rehabilitated by going to prison, he was treated as if he was a criminal for the rest of his time, even though he’s been clean longer than he was an addict. So I guess the state doesn’t believe that prisons rehabilitate people. (I don’t believe they do, but it’s clear the state doesn’t either.)

And finally, this man has a non-violent conviction. Trump has done more violent crime than him. But I guess it doesn’t count if you pay off your victims and make them sign an NDA, so the media has to say “allegedly” every time they talk about all the people you’ve raped. Trump should be deported to the nearest place that’ll take him.

The fun thing is that this bill would give any president that power.

…. Oh.
But maybe that’s what they want. A president that can shut the border for political points would decimate industry. These tend to be industries that employ a lot of salt of the earth people, and the owners give a lot of money to Republicans. Republicans use this as a wedge issue and have spent years whipping their base into a frenzy. Giving them the authority to hurt themselves.

A stupid Republican president would shut down the border and harm industry. A smart Republican president would not fall into that trap, but be paralyzed until a new talking point arises.
The base would support populist moves like shutting the border. Donors wouldn’t. Farmers with rotting crops would not.

Shrewd.

I went looking for the alt text because, well, I love the Easter-egg nature of the alt text he provides. Got chills as soon as I realized what he’d done.

So much respect for him.

Seeing headlines before reading the articles, I thought “could they be growing a conscience?”

Silly, silly me.

I’m just imagining Musk banning his account once he realizes how much he just embarrassed himself.

Followed by:

Lawyer: What brings you in today, Mr. LeCun?
LeCun: I got banned from Twitter.
Lawyer: But I’m a patent attorney.
LeCun: I know.

Beastie Boys “Sabotage” riff starts playing.

We recently had a presentation covering burnout and strategies to overcome it.

It was sort of hilarious.
They correctly identified that burnout is rooted in excess responsibilities, but neglected to mention that feeling a lack of control plays an huge part. They also covered that people can feel unrecognized for their efforts but weirdly seemed to skip over any mention of how an insufficient reward for efforts plays a part, too.
Their suggestions to address it were all employee-focused: Stay away from negative people. (What, so you all can’t talk about how much the job sucks?) Mediate. Practice gratitude. Set boundaries in your home life, so you’re not so stretched thin. (But not your work life?)
They clumsily and quite obviously avoided the question of what role the employer plays in workplace burnout.

It was a bit sad to watch the poor trainer in action. I know they’re just trying to make sure the gleaming maw of capitalism remains unblemished by the flesh of those it consumes, but woof.
I actually walked away from the presentation with a less positive outlook on my employer than I had before I attended.