Well the gist of the interview was that American intelligence services are in chaos right now after their top-level management got expelled and their “eye is no longer on the ball” in terms of threats from Russia, China, etc. with new personnel being brought in who have no clue what’s going on.
Correct me if I’m wrong but as an outside observer, it seems to me you have your big oil Republicans and your fuck the government solar off grid types. When they clash, I just sit back with some popcorn.
There’s a lot of that going around. My understanding is that the flu season got off to a slow start but it’s full on now.
So from what lemmy is reporting, we know West Texas has a measles outbreak and some giant fracking earthquake to contend with. Maybe toss in some radioactive exposure from a now-unmonitored nuclear facility and we’ve got the makings of a superhero origin story.
I have no first-hand experience with it either, but understand that in addition to its direct shitty flu-like symptoms and the telltale rash, it has this strange ability to factory reset your immune system so you get to go through all those other diseases your body fought off in the past again.
Oh yeah right! Mod files. I remember thinking when pdf came into being, it was to postscript like mod was to midi. A pdf is ps with fonts and whatever else embedded in it so that you could render it in a self-contained sort of way. The mod file was midi + samples to make them self-contained as well. I don’t know how accurate that is, but that’s how I pictured it in my head.
I guess my very first exposure was my brother letting me use his university account over dialup. You really had to know your way around in those days or know someone who did. He showed me how I could go to umich (U. of Michigan) and a few other places that ran public ftp servers full of games!
Then I landed a job at a small company which had accounts on CompuServe. Around this time at home, I was playing MUDs a lot on a free local BBS, and at some point, the people running the BBS decided to have a go at becoming the first commercial ISP in town. (They’re still around, in fact!)
So I approached work about opening an Internet account, arguing that it was way cheaper than CompuServe. They reluctantly agreed. I was over the Moon but my superiors were not super impressed at first. They complained that they couldn’t find anything while CompuServe was much better organized. I eventually found Yahoo which, at the time, had a sort of CompuServe-ish vibe of providing this directory that categorized most of the more popular sites by topic and that placated them. You have to remember this was long before search engines and even the www itself was still in its infancy.
I was having a blast, discovering something new every week. Usenet was so cool when I learned about that! And I found out about some sort of MIDI file format with embedded instrument samples you could play to get electronic music in a super compact format long before broadband made mp3s the way to go. What were they called again? Soundtrack files? Something like that. I played them all the time while I was coding.
Oh man, a showdown at the border: Tesla-Bot vs Mecha-Gosling!
Yeah I agree. I came across the article as I like to read up on what’s going on with BRICS countries as that seems like something worth keeping an eye on. But the lack of confirmation is troublesome. Even something like a giant trade deal with China that would give them some standing to call Trump’s bluff would lend some credibility. It could be that this was threatened during negotiations and someone jumped the gun to say it’s now policy? If I see any more about it one way or another, I will update the post.
How’s this for an obscure reference? This reminded me of an episode of Max Headroom in which the wunderkind Bryce invented a robotic fly with a spycam that could be used to literally bug a room. They send it on a mission to uncover an evil plot and everyone is excitedly crowded around the screen and heaping praise on it. Then it manages to sneak into the evil lair where it promptly gets swatted, leaving Bryce shocked and devastated.
As a Canadian, my favourite thing about the American flag is there isn’t a lot of room for a 51st star on there. It would break the symmetry.
As to our maple leaf, I’ve had mixed feelings about it. As a kid, I thought it was cute and friendly as national flags go. Then later, watching assholes in Dodge Rams with the flag whipping around next to their Fuck Trudeau stickers during that aggravatingly endless trucker rally left me less enthused. But now with Trump threatening annexation, I’ve rediscovered its beauty!
My daughter is a vet tech and says it’s brutal right now. Cats brought in with H5N1 are immediately quarantined and many are fighting for their lives. She’s pleading with owners to keep their cats indoors. She’s a proponent of this in general but especially now.
I have boomer friends with 2 outdoor cats who live next to a swamp. They refuse to keep them in. We have an immunocompromised rescue at our place and I have to shower and wash my clothes every time after I visit them. It’s aggravating.
$3.93 at the nearby No Frills. That converts to about $2.75 USD I think?
I just got back from a trip to California and the first thing I did was order a fried egg sandwich at the Sunset Grill. Oh man, that was sweet bliss! It’s good to be home.
Hans Island and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, respectively, for anyone head-scratching on this one.
This made me literally lol and I needed that today. Thanks!
Have to say I’m a little sceptical on this. In the early 2000s we had that giant power outage that hit everywhere from Ontario down to the US eastern seaboard. It’s all one giant, tightly-integrated grid. Both sides milk Niagara Falls for all its worth, for example.
If it were Quebec making this threat, I would take it seriously. They spent a lot to rebuild their grid with DC isolation and everything after a horrific ice storm took it down. If they said “we’re cutting you off”, then yeah, they could realistically do so. But this is Doug Ford in Ontario. What a blow-hard.
If he’s talking more about gas/oil pipelines, well, what’s the point? Trump’s tariffs will already cause prices to soar at the pump in the US. No need for an embargo. Talk about shooting yourself in your foot. I cannot believe he has any support, and yet here we are.
I consider myself a practicing non-Catholic and a non-practicing Anglican. I haven’t attended an Anglican service since childhood but play music with my wife at her Catholic church, so I have to attend a practice for that every week.
My favourite story like that is from my dad, who was WW2 vet. After the war, he wound up in Japan and attended a conference where someone stepped up to the podium and introduced himself as General McArthur’s Chief Advisor. Or at least he thought he did…
The word for advisor is komon. The word for asshole or anus is koumon. Basically, you just hold out the first o out slightly longer and it switches to the other word.
I used to have trouble with RPN calculators until I realized it’s better to think in Japanese.
For example, when I go:
3 enter 5 plus 2 divide
I’m thinking:
san to go tasi-te ni-de waru
It just feels more natural.
Digital services tend to be an area where the US enjoys huge trade surpluses. If that pandora’s box is opened, it’s going to be really bad for the tech giants when retaliatory steps are inevitably taken. I thought this was why Trump was trying to keep the tariff war focused on material goods?
I know in Canada, FB stopped serving news when they refused to contribute to a government fund to help the struggling domestic journalism industry which they were scraping content from with reckless abandon. Personally, I’m happy to see one less stifling algorithm-fed echo chamber. It’s like a breath of fresh air.