From the photo, they look pretty easy to swim under. Just a waste of money, plastic and rusting metal for posturing more culture wars.

The only free alternatives are dogecoin or WSB? Wtf? Who the hell decided this… oh yeah. We all know who.

This looks like an illustration or AI, did you put a filter on it?

I wasn’t directly attacked but my friend and I had the same experience in our 60% Trump area.

We weren’t together when each incident happened, but they’re so similar I’ll describe them together.

We were just at the checkout: me at a convenience store; my friend at a major grocery store chain.

So, we couldn’t reasonably move away. We had to stand there to pay for our purchases.

An old man encroached my space; an old woman encroached my friend’s space. We both politely asked them to step back for social distancing, and they refused.

I wish I had my friend’s ability to think and speak on his feet. After he checked out, he told the old lady “I asked for you to do something, that cost you nothing. All you had to do was take a few steps back. I hope in the future, if you ask someone the same, they treat you like you did to me.”

As for me? Even though I just said my request and didn’t respond further, the guy was a huge jerk who tailgated me for several miles in his huge pickup truck. Like headlights in my mirror tailgating… during the day.

Who tf cares that much? Honestly… just take a few steps back. Doesn’t cost you anything, like my friend said.

The day after the 2016 election, I sent an email to the guy who contracts most of my services. He’s also one of my best friends. It was in response to a job we were working on, so I cc’d his assistant.

Basically said I was disappointed about the outcome of the election, then got into the job specifics.

From his response, I knew I fucked up. He just said he was glad the election was over.

I never liked his assistant anyways, but I looked up her voter registration and she’s Republican. And she’s totally the Trump type, though I hadn’t thought about it before.

She’s been pretty much on the warpath for me ever since. I provide a great service at a good price, so she keeps me around. Plus some clients know me and would possibly revolt if I were taken off their jobs. I think she’s been disparaging me to them for any misstep that I make.

I suspect she asks me for quotes and gives projects out to anyone who bids lower.

This was never the case with my friend; if I made a bid too low or too high he’d ask me to requote it. Yes,** if he thought my bid was too low, he’d tell me to charge more.**

Not so with this monster. She’s nickle and diming me for everything.

And now my friend’s health has taken a turn for the worse, and she’s in charge.

God I wish I never sent that stupid email.

To ensure the authenticity and security of the program, contributors will need to provide verification information, including their email addresses, personal details, and tax and bank account information.

Love it. Last sentence especially.

Wtf is uber ambulance?

And thanks for your service.

Christie is on the warpath for Trump. Trump gave him covid while Christie was helping him prepare to debate Biden; Trump didn’t tell anyone he had tested positive.

Christie was hospitalized and in intensive care for a week. Iirc he was in the hospital for a month total. He was so sick, at one point he said his goodbyes to his wife.

When Trump finally called Christie in the hospital, he didn’t ask how he was doing or anything, he just told Christie not to tell anyone he gave him covid.

So now Christie is PISSED and wants to tear Trump down.

(Source: James Carville on the Hacks on Tap podcast, 6/27/23)

Christie is horrible, especially for supporting Trump in the first place, but he can think on his feet and whip out some zingers. Pass the popcorn, I’m here for it.

Does anyone else remember that this data can be bought in bulk, and then sifted through to find individual people? What ever happened to Colbert threatening to release the data of members of congress unless they fixed this bs?

If you’re into podcasts, the series “Sold a Story” is really good.

The way I remember it is that the first part of “their” is “the”.

You can also remember it because “they” starts with “the”.

I don’t know if that’ll help but I hope so!

Full text:

To our users, AMA guests, and friends,

You may have noticed that, in spite of our history of past protests against Reddit’s poor site management, this subreddit has refrained from protesting or shutting down during the recent excitement on Reddit.

This does not imply that we think things are being managed better now. Rather, it reflects our belief that such actions will not make any significant difference this time.

Rather than come up with new words to express our concerns, I think some quotes from the NYT Editorial we wrote back in 2015 convey our thoughts very well:

Our primary concern, and reason for taking the site down temporarily, is that Reddit’s management made critical changes to a very popular website without any apparent care for how those changes might affect their biggest resource: the community and the moderators that help tend the subreddits that constitute the site. Moderators commit their time to the site to foster engaging communities.

Reddit is not our job, but we have spent thousands of hours as a team answering questions, facilitating A.M.A.s, writing policy and helping people ask questions of their heroes. We moderate from the train or bus, on breaks from work and in between classes. We check on the subreddit while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the D.M.V.

The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.

We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site.

Amazing how little has changed, really.

So, what are we going to do about this? What can we change? Not much. Reddit executives have shown that they won’t yield to the pressure of a protest. They’ve told the media that they are actively planning to remove moderators who keep subreddits shut down and have no intentions of making changes.

So, moving forward, we’re going to run IAmA like your average subreddit. We will continue moderating, removing spam, and enforcing rules. Many of the current moderation team will be taking a step back, but we’ll recruit people to replace them as needed.

However, effective immediately, we plan to discontinue the following activities that we performed, as volunteer moderators, that took up a huge amount of our time and effort, both from a communication and coordination standpoint and from an IT/secure operations standpoint:

Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts

Moving forward, we’ll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn’t mean we’re allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you’ll need to pay more attention.

Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.

Thanks for the ride everyone, it’s been fun.

Sincerely,

The IAmA Moderator Team (2013-2023)

I stopped going to a dentist because her office looked like Trump campaign headquarters. Signs and shit everywhere. She otherwise seemed nice and competent but hell no.

Uh… it’s ok sir, you can just keep the money.

This probably won’t be popular here, but I recently listened to the audiobook Spare, Prince Harry’s autobiography. I’m not a fan of the monarchy, I think the whole thing is weird and awful.

However, there’s no denying Prince Harry has lived a unique life so I was curious. I thought it was pretty good overall. We’re only getting one side of the story but god his family is fucked up.

Their nicknames for him and his brother, growing up, were Heir and Spare. He was told from a young age that if his brother ever needed an organ or anything, he was expected to step up.

He also grappled with his mother’s death for his whole life and missed her dearly. He made up different conspiracy theories that she was somehow still alive to deal with the trauma.

And the queen seemed kinda ok overall, which surprised me a bit. She had her stuffy downsides but she seemed much better than the fucked up messes that his father and brother were.

Also, being famous from the time you’re born sounds terrible. He inherited a lot of amazing things, but not all sound great.

While it wasn’t the best book ever, it was interesting and I’m glad I checked it out (literally from the library, lol).

I’m using Connect for Lemmy on android and I’m fairly happy with it. I’ve been seeing people say Liftoff is good too. I’m just waiting for the developer of Reddit Sync to finish his app.

If you’re on ios, I’ve been hearing good things about wefwef.

Glad you asked.

Short answer: gambling

Long answer: us kids were starting high school and he knew college was after that, so he needed to figure out how to come up with some money to help us. He was good at math, so someone suggested he play the stock market.

He started off investing “fake” money (just his own personal ledger) and did pretty good. So he invested small amounts and continued to do well. He finally decided to borrow money from the bank, which is how the story came about.

He actually did REALLY well; paid off the loan, got a bigger one, paid that off, etc, until he had enough of his own money to keep investing. He beat the S&P every year, he had a talent for it.

But he really didn’t enjoy it, he said it was a lot of work to keep up with the markets and how they interacted with each other. He kept it up for a few years after we finished college until he had a comfortable nest egg and quit.

He only paid for half our college, as a matter of principle he wanted us to come up with the other half. I still have loans to pay off but it was a huge help.

Now he hates capitalism and doesn’t do any investing at all. He used to have some safe mutual funds but he’s jaded about the state of the world, he doesn’t want any part of the system.