Yup, there’s also this idea that certain people like to posit that Nazis never laugh or attempt to make jokes. It’s not that you aren’t joking, it’s what your joke says about you.

I can understand that in a particular moment you’re not calling for the literal death of your political opponents, yet still believe you’d be pretty okay with the literal death of your political opponents, and your “joke” may well help me be more confident in my conclusion.

It’s even a little bit worse than that. Here’s a quick Youtube video with, I think, just enough context.

It’s quick and glib and is structured like a bit of political wit, but he’s pretty earnestly comparing Hasan to Hamas/Hezbollah and the “joke” is more about his comic persona (to the extent you develop one in the three seconds of buildup to being Mr. Funny on a news panel show) hoping that he and the entire table don’t get blown up by Hasan’s beeper during the show. I didn’t get any subtext or subtle implication that Hasan should be spared, except for duration of the oh-so-funny Gidursky being in the blast radius.

It’s the sort of thing that somebody might feel safe saying on CNN if, in other environments, they’d be perfectly happy wishing death on people who oppose the war. A cheap shot from a racist asshole.

So HISD is a mess, no two ways about that. But it’s dealing with serious structural issues in public education (some of them specific to Texas, like independent school districts that are too granular and allow macro inequality even if any given district is trying to do right by all its kids), as well as active malice from the state government that took over direct administration of it. They want a huge failure to point to when they eviscerate the public schools’ economies of scale by letting rich people use their tax dollars to subsidize private schools, so they’re just letting Mike Miles run it into the ground.

For this specific issue, they need lots of teachers due to the sheer size of the district and the turnover of dealing with the problems above, and it’s kinda marginal as an opportunity, given the educational and credentialing requirements, so yeah, it’s attracting grift so the underqualified candidates can get in. While you have to hold the line on competence and licensure and use any shortages as arguments for increasing pay, and you absolutely cannot tolerate shit like letting sex offenders slip through*, something tells me there’s no huge backlog of qualified teachers getting screwed out of jobs by this scheme. I also wonder how many criminally wasteful contracts and educational coverups are helping people friendly to the state government?

*-The articles are unclear whether the scheme cleared known predators to get certificates, or if two of the underqualfied teachers turned to be sex predators.

The real point, of course, is just to have a quick talking point to swat away stupid questions about “Trump says you’re low IQ. What’re you going to do about it?” He would never publicly release anything medical that didn’t come from a doctor (or “doctor”) 100% in his pocket.

Perot did have a stronger charts and graphs game than mister Sharpie, though.

Also, as bad as a Perot presidency might have been, he wasn’t openly hateful like Trump, nor as obsessed with breaking the system if the results didn’t go his way. It was kind of a Diet Populism.

Seems like they don’t work exactly the same as they used to, as they now use MTP instead of USB mass storage, but while annoying, it’s generally a pretty trivial fix and your OS may already use MTP devices with no trouble. It seems there may be some other knock-on effects with fonts not sideloading right and needing a Calibre plugin to make pagination work how it used to.

So yeah, it’s getting worse, but Amazon hasn’t figured out how to bring the hammer down yet.

Calibre has always been a small price to pay, but if sideloading goes away, I’ll certainly never “upgrade” again, and I’ll trash my 11th gen Paperwhite if they somehow make it stop working. Usable e-ink ereaders are even doable as DIY projects now, and Kobo will probably stay less closed-off than Amazon for a good while.

That said, reading the comments and the article it seems like as long as your OS (or some app) supports MTP, everything should still work more or less as it has, which is to say kind of annoying and with Amazon pulling little microaggressions like deleting your cover thumbnails, but overall sideloading should still function.

Yeah, I don’t think this goes to trial and rewrites the lawbooks or anything, but there’s enough here to litigate, and I reckon Tesla will settle to avoid going to discovery.

This is a bit different, in that it’s not a trademark claim, but rather a copyright claim. They’re saying that the still isn’t meaningfully trying to be anything other than a Blade Runner still, and Musk’s use is not protected by any sort of Fair Use. There would likely be a statue of limitations or something for the specific cause of action, but you can’t lose copyright the same way you can a trademark.

One could argue it’s an uncreative derivative work not subject to a fair use exemption, and actively used in commerce to make money for Musk, while simultaneously it damages the Blade Runner brand if, as claimed, other car companies assume Tesla and BR have a relationship, or the BR brand is inextricably linked to Tesla and Musk. The fact that Tesla and WBD hurriedly sought a copyright clearance, once Tesla realized WBD didn’t have all the necessary rights, doesn’t speak well for Tesla’s position, nor does the fact that Musk referenced Blade Runner at least twice in his presentation.

This is it, really. Fundamentally, the people placing online orders just want to exchange money for lunch, same as OP.

In the old days though, they would show up, see the line was too long, and some percentage of them would leave. Publix needs to increase staffing, implement rate limiting (I think they call it “Order Throttling” in this space), or partially prioritize the people who want their sandwich bad enough to spend their own time waiting. I assume there’s some metric that would optimize it, and even if not, some reasonable guesswork (alternate prep of in-person versus mobile orders?) would help with the physical traffic jam and angry luddites (no offense, OP 🤣).

Part of the problem may be that Pubsubs in particular occupy a weird space where they’re a much-loved quick dining option while still having the infrastructure of a grocery store deli counter, and managers from that mindset. I’m sure everything is sort of kludgey and half-assed.

Good. Modi is such an ass. Khalistanti separatism had been a political non-factor for 30 years, and even though it was not all done peacefully, the changing geopolitics of the region had left most Sikhs feeling much safer as Indians than anything else. Now, though, you’ve got some fascist asshole who needed a new hobby after oppressing all the Muslims in India, so he figured he’d take out some cringey old uncles in North America. That’s literally the dumbest way you make Khalistani separatism a thing again, but Modi being Modi, a little stochastic terrorism was probably the point all along.

So, I guess now we need a control group to do those searches without having hacked into government-owned social media accounts.

Any volunteers?

I would like one industrial replicator, please.

If cnn can’t prove it they are in deep doggy doo doo.

Not really. They came with the receipts, showing time after time that the commenter shared personal details and used indiosyncratic turns of phrase that Robinson repeated on public accounts and forums. They had a very reasonable belief that it was true, and never claimed more than that. In the US, for a public figure, that’s generally more than enough.

But I guess defamation is actually harder to prove than I thought.

In the US, absolutely. Much of the stuff you hear about people being terrified to be accused of defamation comes out of the UK, where the burden of proof is almost completely flipped.

It’s like Mad Cow Disease, except most of the Christians around here have no brains.

THE STARS AT NIGHT!

Only degreed meteorologists are allowed to control the weather, Jimmy!

Man, I wish that sweetening photo ops for political gain was the worst ting about Ron DeSantis.