“In principle, I am a fan of following the law. In practice, following the law would prevent me from doing whatever I want with no consequences, which is my right as a rich person in America”

My high school music teacher went to a Dragonforce concert circa 2008. He said they were completely wasted, didn’t sound anything like the album, and barely knew where they were. Just an absolute waste of time. He got an autograph from one of them (must’ve paid for a VIP ticket or something) and they wrote “wish I didn’t have to meet you, asshole.”

He liked them a lot less after that

“Stealing”? Am I “stealing” fat from the food I eat? Since when is retaining some components of what you consume equivalent to theft?

I first discovered this video after searching for “pregnant conan o’ brien milk,” which I swear I wasn’t doing for a weird reason, it’s just a kink I have

It must be nice being a republican governor. All you have to do is one or two un-shitty things per year and everyone credits you with traits like humanity and integrity.

Saw a teacher mugshot, saw “high school teacher arrested,” assumed something much worse.

Weed? Yeah, make her pay a fine or something

Year of Linux on the…handtop?

“average new yorker harasses women” factoid actualy just statistical error. Sexual Harassment Georg, who used to be mayor and sexually harasses over 10,000 women each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Sigh…yeah I guess I’m into that

I feel a bit of schadenfreude for this one. I was bullied harder in Boy Scouts than I ever was at school or church. None of the leaders ever noticed or did jack shit about it. There was an expectation of physical strength and ability that I was never able to meet. The uniforms were ridiculously expensive. And the higher levels of the local org were deeply cultish under the surface and intertwined with the Mormon church in bizarre ways (this was before the Mormon church stopped being an official sponsor of scouting).

I know things have gotten better lately, and the current administration is incapable of doing good things, but if Scouting goes bankrupt I will not shed a tear.

Not an answer, and I won’t get a lot of upvotes for saying this, but if your plan for saving the world is for people to change their behavior en masse, you’ve already lost. And we need population-level change in order to have a meaningful impact.

The way we get people off meat is by making the alternatives more (or equally) tasty, convenient, familiar, and affordable. The day we do that, the war is won. There will be some stragglers (of the “beef! murica!” variety) but not many.

We’ve made inroads. Indian food is delicious, way more popular in the West than when I was growing up, and vegetarian-inclined. Vegetarian burgers are more popular and varied than ever. New meat substitutes are being invented all the time. People are interested, but there’s not a well-lit path to vegetarianism for working-class folks just yet.

If you want to eat less meat, do it. But also, find some good meatless recipes and cook them for/with your friends. If they add those to their rotation and pass them along, that’s the kind of thing that can build toward change.

As my high school English teacher pointed out, they’re not all about sex. Some of them are about Jesus.

(I don’t know why there aren’t any songs about sex with Jesus. Seems like a no-brainer.)

Captured on a Pantax A11-90 pinhole camera with dual-film RAID configuration

Jack Johnson. If you hear one of his songs in public just say “oh, Banana Pancakes” and move on with your life. Not a soul on earth will be able to correct you

I worked at a company that made software for multi-level marketing companies (legalized pyramid schemes). Some of our clients sold snake oil remedies and were always getting in trouble for claiming they could cure cancer. I liked my coworkers and the job itself, but I hated the nature of what we were supporting.

I don’t think you can separate one from the other.

The company was always getting screwed over by dishonest clients, but we never sued because it would be bad for our reputation. The financial pressure grew until we started acting like a much dumber business: taking bad deals, outsourcing to cheap overseas teams, forcing everyone to work crazy hours, doubling up on the “we all have to make sacrifices” kool-aid, the list goes on. I didn’t stick around for long.

I’d do it again if I had to, to keep food on the table, but that experience taught me there’s no “right way” to operate in a bad industry. Eventually you either assimilate or go out of business.

Someone on Mastodon was saying that whether you consider AI coding an advantage completely depends on whether you think of prompting the AI and verifying its output as “work.” If that’s work to you, the AI offers no benefit. If it’s not, then you may think you’ve freed up a bunch of time and energy.

The problem for me, then, is that I enjoy writing code. I do not enjoy telling other people what to do or reviewing their code. So AI is a valueless proposition to me because I like my job and am good at it.

I got a car loan once even though I had the cash to buy outright. I didn’t want to drain my savings and end up high and dry if there was an emergency. It was worth it to me to pay a little interest so I still had a cash buffer.

If I were living paycheck to paycheck like many folks are, I imagine the logic would be similar for smaller purchases.

My buddy’s always talking about how they should build a bike path all the way around Utah Lake. It’s very scenic and the full perimeter would be about 70 miles - a great training ride for anyone who’s planning to do LoToJa or Salt to Saint (popular Utah bike races). And here Governor Cox is working on a truly amazing statewide network of bike paths that any biker would be thrilled about, but it specifically avoids connecting on the west side of Utah Lake.

My buddy’s gonna be pissed.

Wait, you mean to tell me that the billionaire machine, built by billionaires to say things billionaires like, might influence politics in favor of billionaires? Say it ain’t so

I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for you mean cows