American (and many other countries) penal system is about suffering, not rehabilitation.

I am of two minds on the subject.

On the one hand, I am a bleeding heart liberal who figures that they have definitively made it clear they can do the job so let them do it.

On the other hand, firefighters (less so the wildfire fighting variety) are often in incredibly tense people centric situations. If we had a penal system that at all cared about rehabilitation I would be all for it. As it stands… background checks exist for a reason. And I still think there needs to be much more thought rather than just “You have a record, get out”.

Regardless: Fucking pay them for the job while they do it.

Facebook got FBI_README.txt at the root of their DC++ share.

And now ableist bullshit.

Well. I guess this is what we get when people leave reddit. Oy

No link, a one week EA period (?!?!?!), and HTML everywhere.

You REALLY screwed up this advertisement.

There isn’t money in physical mail and cranking that up will just push people even farther into digital correspondence.

Amazon has spent years (well over a decade now?) trying to cut out the USPS. The reality is that they can’t. Their gig delivery driver model works for some regions but not for “rural america”. And there is a lot of money in being the only lifeline many households have while being able to offload the high cost low frequency deliveries to a different company (USPS).

Five or ten years ago? Yeah, amazon wanted that. Now? It is actively not in their interest and would hurt their business model for the USPS to die.

Destroying the USPS has almost nothing to do with “good business” or even privatizing it. It is all about controlling information. It kills vote by mail almost instantly but it also removes the ability for informational mailers to be sent out. And an isolated populace is a stupid populace and a stupid populace is a republican populace.

Its the same reason social media was so compromised. Because then all the useful idiots tell people to “just unplug and enjoy your day to day life” and then they never hear about protests or human rights violations or…

Last mile is what let’s them sell. If people can’t buy online they go back to brick and mortar and start questioning if that shoe horn is really worth a twenty minutes drive.

Not just mail.

Most (all?) of the package delivery services rely heavily on USPS for last mile deliveries. So expect UPS and Amazon to be sending people to the golf course to scream at fuckface

Okay. Rhetorical question because we all are historians with internet boxes but what did the Arizona do? How many Japanese planes did it down or sailors did it rescue or what? And is there anything touchy that shouldn’t be mentioned?

Again. That is not something anyone other than an SME should be expected to memorize. It IS something that should be provided as part of the briefing before you go there. Which is the fundamental difference between “ha, he is so stupid” and “he is just a fucking prick who doesn’t care”

As an example that nobody is going to read: I used to have a job that resulted in having to go to a bunch of military bases on the regular. And we would inevitably end up at a memorial or talking to a totally famous unit that we all totally cared about (the irony being that I actually do enjoy reading military history and STILL had no idea who most of them were due to military culture building up everything in the past to indoctrinate people into thinking they are part of something greater than themselves). And you learn REAL fast that just using context clues and winging it with a platitude ends REAL bad when a marine gets pissy that you didn’t properly show deference to the guys who were in that unit 20 years ago because you accidentally implied they didn’t try hard enough or they fled sooner than they did or something else.

And you know how we handled that? Googling the base and what units were stationed there at the airport while we waited for our flights. It had nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with caring enough to at least pretend to care. And the cooler folk (funny enough, almost exclusively Navy) figured out our bullshit real fast and loved to read the cliff notes while we were getting drinks after the meetings.

The point is he is a prick who didn’t even care enough to pay attention to the briefing someone was reading him in the car/helicopter ride over.

But we see this time and time again where people watched too much House or West Wing growing up and want to “gotcha” people for not having an encyclopedic knowledge of every single topic they are ever going to run into. And that is a fundamentally stupid mindset that discourages people from ever admitting “I don’t know, let me get back to you”. I mean, just look at the person who is naive enough to think people know ANYTHING about 9-11 just because they lived through the early 00s.

But there IS a very big difference between quickly memorizing some bullet points (Pearl Harbor was bad. Japan attacked us but be cool about that because they are our allies… for now. These ships sustained damage so make sure you talk about how awesome they were. Etc) and remembering off the top of your head the exact number of planes a given pilot downed after heroically getting into the air. People think everyone needs to be President Bartlet with the power of an entire writer’s room behind you.

Which, ironically, lines up with a lot of the anti-intellectual bullshit that fasacists the world around have been pushing for decades. The villain with twenty PhDs is actually stupid because they don’t know one bit of trivia that the hero, and by association you the viewer, do.

Okay. How many people actually know WHY 9-11 happened? What events led up to it and what the motivations and knock ons were? At best you get a borderline meme response of “it was actually the saudis”.

Similarly, how many people living through the 00s were tricked into thinking invading Iraq had anything to do with 9-11? Similarly, how many people understood the human rights horrors that were mostly ignored in favor of “Dey got WMDs!!!”

History and propaganda are a hell of a linked thing. But, again, that is why leaders should actually read the briefings their aides make for them.

Workers are trained to follow orders.

In another life, my job required me to have a fancy ID. As part of the training when receiving that ID I was specifically told to never give it to anyone or even let it out of my sight if it was not in a secure and controlled location.

IMMEDIATELY after signing forms saying I had completed that training, the person at the badge desk told me to give them my ID so they could do things. I made a half hearted joke of “This feels like a trick” and was immediately yelled at with a guard (who I am pretty sure wanted to bang said desk lady) getting in my face and telling me that it is a privilege not a right to have one of those and he is sick and tired of people not respecting the flag and blah blah blah. I need to get back to work and didn’t feel like having someone wave an assault rifle in my face so I handed over the badge and decided to not care.

So yeah. When your boss says “just do it”, you… just do it. And your boss is saying that because they were told to and so forth up until a shitweasel who wants to curry favor with the new administration. Because, if you don’t, you will be made an example of and fired for completely unrelated reasons. And while it is easy to say “Obstruct them, get fired”, that doesn’t really help when you need to provide for your loved ones.

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That’s the thing that the person in the made up story doesn’t understand:

Even the majority of “made in america” products are actually “assembled in america”. Just like the majority of “chinese knockoffs” are after hours runs at the same factories that make the real thing. Sometimes crappier and sometimes actually better because they sourced better materials from a different factory.

And… that is why we are so fucked. Because there will be the “Well, product A costs more because of tariffs so product B can sell for more too”. But also? Product B’s profit margins will go down because they are paying for tariffs too. Which gets passed on to the consumer.

I just wish Tuta put more effort into their product than their marketing.

I noped out because of them not letting me have any control over my emails outside of asking them for a dump. But reading the support reddit is just brutal.

Wait for it…

Every generation wonders when the old one will die off and we can get what we want.

And then they become the problem. There are a lot of reasons for that but they don’t really matter. Because if you actually look at current polling: genx is basically the only generation that still likes trump.

The other thing to understand is that red counties stay red. Because anyone who manages to get out to go to college or even sell their bodies to the military? Yeah, they tend to realize that what they grew up with is stupid. And then they don’t come back (or they do because they liked the racism). And, because of gerrymandering, they don’t even need significantly large populations to dominate the state.

Because, contrary to what the tech bros fleeing California claim, people don’t move to red states because of the cheap property and turn them purple. They move because they actually agree with those politics. Even if it is just “I don’t want to pay property taxes”. The states that HAVE shifted purple have been a heavy push to empower the lower income demographics (aka “black people”).

They won’t care.

They’ll insist it is actually Obama’s fault because economies don’t change on a dime. And they’ll continue to be content so long as they see brown people or women or even just queer folk who chose happiness suffer more than they do. Because they are miserable bastards who want to make sure everyone else is just as, if not more, miserable than they are.

Ah, my deepest apologies. I was not aware there was absolutely no issue or threat to anyone because you didn’t connect a kindle to the network either.

And Kindle supports mobi files? It is just that those tend to get preprocessed into azw or the other one files. Much like Kobo tends to work best if you preprocess those epubs into kepubs.

The issue is that Amazon has repeatedly changed their mobi variants to fight against de-drm tools as well as increasingly locking down their apps and even devices to make it harder to get data off (and now on) to them.

There is absolutely nothing stopping Rakuten from doing the exact same with Kobo. And people should be aware of that rather than just stanning their favorite company.