Tired of those annoying cookie banners? They’re not just frustrating—they're a lazy response to GDPR.

They’re not lazy, they’re maliciously compliant. The sites know how to comply with GDPR, but wanted to throw a fit instead. So they came up with the annoying cookie banners, to make users hate GDPR instead of hating the sites that were stealing and selling all of their data. And the worst part is that it worked. Many people wholly equate GDPR with the cookie banners, instead of the massive leap in privacy rights that it represented when it was passed.

One of the most difficult parts of veterinary medicine is the fact that your patients can’t directly communicate. Oftentimes, issues go unnoticed simply because the animal masks things like pain. Luckily, the vet immediately knew this hedgehog had something wrong, because it kept exploding into a bunch of golden rings.

Their “apology” actually admitted that they knew about the potential for rendering differences. They say they knew that certain symbols could render as Nazi icons, which is why they specifically excluded those symbols from the email they sent to German accounts.

But if we extend that same “we didn’t send it to Germany” thing to the logical conclusion, it means they intentionally sent it to everyone else even when knowing the potential for issues.

Soft tissues can also become fossils under the right conditions. For an example, here is the fossil used for the B. markmitchelli holotype:

It’s the single most detailed and complete soft tissue fossil ever discovered. It took the technician six years to extract and separate the fossil from the surrounding stone. The technician’s name is Mark Mitchell, and the species was named after him.

And here’s a reminder that it’s actually illegal to volunteer at the same company you’re employed at. Specifically to prevent situations exactly like this, where employers attempt to pressure their employees into volunteering, so they don’t have to pay overtime. If you’re working for your employer, you’re required to be on the clock.

Given, that only works if the rules are actually enforced. And this administration has done a good job of dismantling agencies that would be enforcing this.

He has literally said that the MS Paint doodles aren’t meant to be super descriptive or helpful. He started doing it in his meetings at Blizzard, because he found that any visual aid was good at keeping executives’ attention. Whenever he had to do a presentation, he’d use MS Paint every few minutes to keep them focused.

And now he does the same with his viewers. He busts out MS Paint every few minutes, just to refocus the viewers and keep them engaged. It’s not to help with whatever he’s describing; it’s just to keep the viewers engaged, so he keeps making money off of them.

To his credit, at least he admits this. It’s not like he’s hiding his strategy. He just does whatever will push him to the top of the algorithms and keep viewers engaged.

I’ve said from Day 1 that the entire arrest smelled like “accidentally” disabled body cams and planted evidence. The amount of shit they found him with was just too perfect to be real. This dude supposedly evaded a nationwide manhunt for an entire week, then got caught with the (easily disassembled) ghost gun and a hard copy of his manifesto?

You’re telling me this supposed criminal mastermind had an entire week to break apart and scatter his 3D printed gun, so it would never be traced back to him… And he didn’t? He chose to keep the entire thing in his backpack for cops to find?

And he had a manifesto in his bag ready to go, just in case he got caught? People who write manifestos do so because they expect to be caught, and want to make a statement. So why is this dude fleeing for an entire week before getting caught with his manifesto?

No wonder Americans don't use public transit, even when the system exists it's ridiculously difficult and expensive to use.

Here is my daily commute to work:
The Public Transit option is literally greyed out, and Google goes “lmao get a fucking car, peasant.”

If I were going to minimize my car usage and strictly use public transit, it would be a ~20 minute bike ride (in the opposite direction of where I work) to the nearest bus station, to get to a public transit service that doesn’t even cover where I work. Then I’d take a bus to a train station, and ride it south through two cities. Then I’d make a transfer to a northern line, and ride it back north through those same two cities (and a third additional city) in order to get near another rail line. Then it would be another ~20 minute bike ride to transfer from one rail system to another, because the public transit in the southern cities doesn’t service the city where I work. Once I’m transferred to the service that covers where I work, it’s another ~20 minute rail ride, followed by a ~10 minute bike ride after getting off the train.

All in all, it would be about 2.5 hours of public transit riding, (and about an hour of riding my bike in +100°F/38°C weather), just to avoid driving 10 minutes. It would also require maintaining two separate transit passes, because the southern and northern transit systems don’t work with one another. Yeah, it’s no wonder I take my car to work.

Probably worth noting that castle designs at the time basically screamed "this is a trap". Castles were designed with a courtyard inside of the first gate. Then there was a second gate on the other side of the courtyard. Attackers would be funneled into the courtyard, where they would be surrounded by archers on the tall palace walls. Notice this palace has several courtyards arranged in series, with gatehouses between each one:

Sima Yi's fear was that if he had his army enter the gate, it would be closed behind them and they would be trapped in the courtyard. It wasn't just a sarcastic "Hey come on in" signal as a Hail Mary. It was a very clear "My hidden archers are going to chew you up as soon as the gate closes behind you" signal.

They don’t just read license plates. They analyze faces/pets/distinctive clothing to ID people, scan nearby WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track devices, scan distinctive features of vehicles (dents, scratches, bumper stickers, etc) to track them even without a clear license plate, etc… Calling it a license plate reader vastly downplays their capabilities.

It’s like someone calling a fully automatic high-powered machine gun “a rabbit-hunting gun”. Sure it could be used to shoot rabbits, but that’s vastly understating the capabilities.

Yup. The holocaust was legal. Slavery was legal. Hiding Jews (to help them escape the holocaust) was illegal. The Underground Railroad (to help slaves escape the south) was illegal. Legality often aligns with morality, but legality cannot be used as a basis for morality. Because throughout history, people have used laws to justify heinously immoral acts.

Yeah, her entire page is wild. She’s always one of my favorite creators to see come across my feed.

For the curious: She has a bait account where she edits her photos to make herself look like an ultra-conservative white woman. When creepy dudes inevitably message her, she trolls them. Usually by cranking the conservative conspiracy theories so far past 11 that they loop back around to liberal again, to see if she can get them to agree.

Here’s a reminder that the Olympics was held in Nazi-controlled Berlin, and a team of 18 black athletes from the US thoroughly trounced Hitler’s “master race” talking points by sweeping the medals.

The black athletes then had to return to the US, where segregation was still the norm; many of them struggled to support themselves afterwards, because racism kept them from being hired into any decent jobs.

My dad had a story similar to this from when he worked at a bank. Someone brought in poppyseed muffins for the office, the same morning that the office got randomly selected for drug tests. The higher-ups were really confused when the entire office tested positive for opiates.

Swalwell was incorrect to say that Padilla was arrested. As the senator clarified at his own press conference, he was handcuffed but not arrested or detained.

My brother in Christ, what do you think detainment is? You were pinned to the ground and handcuffed by federal officers. That’s the textbook definition of “detained”.

Reminds me of what an EMT once told me. She mentioned that every EMT inevitably learns two very important questions to ask whenever you encounter someone who is naked in public:

1. Do you know you’re naked?
2. Do you want to be naked?

Those two questions will shed a lot of light on the current situation, and will let you gauge how the next 15 minutes is going to go.

Aleshire said it’s not unusual for government agencies to tap the common-law privacy exception in an attempt to withhold records from the public. But he’s used to it being cited in cases that involve children, medical data or other highly personal information — not for emails between an elected official and a businessman.

Until proven otherwise, I’m assuming the emails include details about Musk’s ties to Epstein.

Those are hazardous chemical markers. You commonly see them on tanker trucks as well.

The numbers range from 0 to 4, with higher numbers indicating more risk. The red top corner is flammability. The right yellow corner is instability; How likely it is to react with other things around it. The left blue corner is risk to health; Even if a chemical isn’t unstable or flammable, it can still be hazardous. The bottom white is for special markings. In this case, one of those chemicals is marked with a W, meaning it reacts to water.

So if there’s a fire at the warehouse, this tells the responding crew “hey just so you know, there’s some nasty shit in here. One presents a severe health hazard, becomes potentially explosive when heated, and reacts with water… But at least it isn’t flammable. The other is flammable and can present a moderate health risk. Because of the one on the left, it would be a bad idea to use water to fight this fire.”

I’ve said for a while that the SSA should do basically this exact thing. In a more controlled manner, but still the same result. Announce something like “in two years, we’ll make our database public. Every single name, DOB, and SSN will be publicly searchable.

It sounds radical, but SSNs were never meant to be a secure form of ID. Old cards even said something like “do not use this as ID” on them. But organizations quickly latched onto it because they wanted to have a way to identify individuals with the same name and DOB. And SSNs were convenient because people already had them.

It would force organizations to develop their own way to ID people. It would be a huge step towards making an actual secure form of ID. And the warning time would give people enough time to design the new system and roll it out, while still giving a hard deadline for when it needs to be done.

I was a freelancer for about a decade, and only ever walked off of one job site. It was because of safety concerns and one asshole. I was a stagehand, setting up lighting, decking, and audio gear for a musical in a local megachurch. I was in charge of a crew for this job, through a local labor company; Church hired the company to provide labor, who hired me as a subcontractor to make sure things went well, track workers’ time, etc... The load in was set to last three days, with them rehearsing in the evenings. Then they’d open that weekend.

I ended up attaching myself to the lighting crew for the first day, because decking and audio crews already had people who knew what they were doing. Plus if I’m in the catwalk, I can usually keep a pretty good eye on what is going on around the room. Some catwalks are easy to get to. They’re designed thoughtfully, with the expectation that crews will need to access them regularly. Other catwalks are… Not so easy. Maybe it was designed to be easy at one point, but then engineers added more structural beams, HVAC installers added air ducts, electricians added panels and conduit across doorways and walkways, architectural lighting got added in walkways, etc… Basically, the construction was a bunch of different crews, and none of them talked to each other to keep the catwalks accessible.

This church’s catwalk was unfortunately in the latter group. Getting to it involved a combination of a six-story-tall spiral staircase, army-crawling under an air duct, climbing over some electrical conduit, and squat-walking on a steel mesh grid to avoid some overhead beams. Needless to say, we made the trek up there once, and immediately decided that we weren’t going to be carrying our lights the same way we got up. Hell, lots of our lights wouldn’t even fit the same way we came up, due to the army-crawling section.

So we throw a rope down from the catwalk. Our lights are heavy, and it’s about a 7-story-tall lift to get from the audience to the catwalk. But many hands makes for light work, right? I ask who knows their knots, because we need someone on the ground to tie the lights onto the rope. One of the newbies (who I had never worked with before) raises his hand, so I send him down to act as ground support. His job is simple. We send the rope down from the catwalk, he ties the light to it, and then we haul the light up while he watches from the ground, making sure we don’t knock into anything or scratch the ceiling of the theater. Lather, rinse, repeat. This dude has the easiest job in the entire goddamned building, because all he has to do is tie a knot every few minutes, then watch the rest of us work.

So we send the rope down. A minute or so later, he calls back up that we’re good to lift. So we haul this light up. It’s heavy. It sucks. Many hands makes for light work, but we can only get a few hands on the rope due to the way we’re positioned in the catwalk. But we muscle this light up. One down, only 90 more to go.

But then as we set the light down on the catwalk, we realize that the “knot” we had lifted it with was basically just a bunch of loops with the tail pulled through. It fell apart as soon as the tension on the rope was released. Apparently our knot-tying ground support lied about being able to tie knots, and just went with the “if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot” method. Except his “tie a lot” part wasn’t even safe, because he ended up just making a tension knot that completely fell apart as soon as the tension was gone. So I send someone else (who I have worked with before, and actually trust) down to the ground, and they send him back up.

All of this was simply to say that we were already a little bit on edge regarding this lighting install, because if that “knot” had come undone midway through our lift, we would have dropped a thousand dollar ~120lb light onto the audience seats, from about 90 feet in the air. So I want you to keep that part in mind when I bring up this next part…

After we get thirty or forty lights lifted, we’re feeling the strain. These lights are heavy, and my guys are smoked. The catwalk is hot (because hot air rises, this is in Texas in the summertime on a sunny day, and we’re basically pressed against the roof,) and we’ve all soaked through our shirts with sweat. For every light, once we get to the edge of the catwalk, we basically have to manhandle it up and over the railing to avoid scratching the decorative ceiling panels that are below us.

In the meantime, the church’s audio guy has shown up. He is sitting in the audience, chatting with another church employee. He apparently brought his son to work today. His son was like 5 or 6, and was suddenly running around in the audience, directly underneath us as we’re lifting these damned lights. Again, we’re already worried about dropping one of these lights. Even if we have the best knots in the world, accidents happen. I have seen clamps, handles, and hard points break off of lights before. I have seen ropes break. I have seen steel cables break. So there’s always some measure of “this could all go wrong and there’s nothing we can do but watch it fall” in the back of your mind with every single hoist. We already watched a knot fall apart that morning. And now there’s a fucking child playing underneath us.

So I call down, something along the lines of “Hey, can someone get that kid out of the way? We’re working up here!”

The sound guy almost immediately shouts back “how about you parent your kids, and let me parent mine!”

Like I said, my guys were already needing a break. We had already told ourselves that we were going to take a water break soon. As soon as that dude’s response had stopped reverberating around the (now dead silent) auditorium, I called out “Okay {company name}! Make it safe, then tools down! Take 20, then meet me on the dock!” Simultaneously, all ~40 crew members got the exact same glint in their eyes as they realized what was going on, finished whatever they were doing, then walked away for a smoke break.

In that 20 minutes, I called the company owner (who I play board games with nearly every week), and let him know what was going on. This was ~90 minutes into an 8 hour day. But notably, the crew had a 5 hour minimum. Meaning they’d get paid for at least 5 hours regardless of how long they worked. The intent is to ensure every job is worth the drive; without a minimum, nobody would take a 30 minute job if they had to drive 45 minutes to get there. And he said I could give the crew a choice. They can stay for the full 8 hours, or they can take the minimum and walk away right now. Next, I talked to the church’s main point of contact, to let them know what had happened, and what I was about to tell the crew. And when my crew came back after their break, I gave them all that choice. Every single person on the ~40 man crew took the minimum and walked away for the day.

The show’s load in was delayed by a day, and the church’s sound guy wasn’t present for the rest of the week’s load in and setup.