Hugsbox

Sweet, I love Behind the Bastards, thanks for providing the entertainment for my next few walks :)

I'm in Nova Scotia, Canada, and we had an even more (in my opinion) egregious case about two months ago that I'm still fuming about.

Got woken up at just around 3:20 in the morning (I get up to go to work at 5) to an emergency alert blasting over mine and my wife's phones:

"WOMAN WITH DEMENTIA MISSING FROM CARE FACILITY IN [town that's an hour from us]"

What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Get up and start walking around my town to see if she's somehow walked all this way? I felt bad for the lady, but this isn't a "wake everybody up in the middle of the night" scenario, just get the cops involved and look around the area where she went missing.

Fiiiiinally just about get back to sleep (took a while because I was fucking furious), must have been about 4:30 and it starts going off again.

"FOUND: MISSING WOMAN IN [town] HAS BEEN LOCATED AND IS SAFE"

Found. They woke me up to let me know there was no emergency. Do not even get me started on the absurdity of it, I'm genuinely still absolutely pissed. Best part is? We can't shut off our emergency alerts. The CRTC mandates that there must not be a way to opt out of them.

Sorry for the rant, your story reminded me of this bullshit and got me all fired up.

My job does it weekly. It's a massive factory too, so the alarms are absolutely ear-splitting. They make a big deal out of safety, and wearing ear protection out on the production floor when I go out there, and all this other stuff, yet on a weekly basis they're absolutely shattering my ear drums. Love it.

Sorry, purely just curious here because I'm not sure what you mean - what Harry Potter fanfiction?

Because by and large they're all trapped in an "us vs them" team sport where both sides believe everybody on the opposing team is literally Satan.

I'd imagine a serious effort to invest in mass transportation would include an investment in safety. Are you suggesting Japan and Singapore are just inherently safer, without having actively done anything to make it that way?

"my family is prohibited" christ almighty

Not to mention, skiers wear sun screen. The sunlight refracting off the snow can cause sunburns.

Guess I learned something new today. I've always thought "toe the line" means something closer to "staying as close as you can to the line without crossing it", if that makes sense.

Reform is a textbook far-right party, I'm not even sure why you'd try to argue otherwise.

Brother what are you even talking about

I'd much rather read a blog post about it than watch a video. Maybe that's just my preference, but it's a better format for me.

Sure, things within the discipline of computing can be patented, but imagine if somebody just patented the entire discipline of computing.

Somehow 1 click buy doesn't quite feel like it's in the same category as humanity conquering the skies.

Author doesn't appear to be selling it, just showing it off.

In some cases yes, and they're not doing much better than I am.

You're getting downvoted, but for real this is so disconnected from what I'd say is feasible for most people. I and most of the people I know live squarely paycheck to paycheck, I can't afford to buy my friends birthday presents at all, let alone set aside that much per month just to put batteries in other peoples' houses. This feels like one of those things where the author doesn't grasp the privilege he lives with.

So far I've found it pretty good for rattlesnake-related queries. Thanks op!

Is that what people mean when they say "AI Psychosis"?

Absolutely crazy take man. People being able to fork and modify/improve projects is literally what makes open source so amazing.

So, he's representing himself, has already pissed off the judge, and is going up against a healthcare-oriented law firm. Does his case stand a snowball's chance in hell?

Yep. When I think of my childhood, I think of intensely uncomfortable boredom. Church, school, rainy days with nothing to do, waiting at the dentist's office, I've always thought boredom is one of the worst things you can possibly do to me. I hated it so deeply that those are some of my most vivid memories of being a young lad.

This is me, but for smoke breaks at work. Half the time I don't need the cigarette, I just need the change of scenery to break up the day.

I'm not positive anybody is "falling for" anything, just a younger generation is discovering that tinned fish isn't just a snack that their grandfather likes and is actually an incredibly healthy, delicious, and inexpensive thing to keep in the pantry. Given the increasing cost of living, it makes sense that something like tinned fish would catch on. Sucks that some places are having difficulty stocking them, they're still abundant and cheap in my neck of the woods.

Some people would happily eat the same thing for breakfast, dinner, and supper every single day for the rest of their lives. I don't necessarily understand it, but I've met plenty of people like that.

I'm in Nova Scotia, and tinned fish is still absolutely everywhere, and still dirt cheap.

While I agree YouTube Kids is a mess and needs to be better-curated, we as parents are always the responsible party when it comes to what our kids consume.

Seems the majority of it is just using obsolete tags, and suggesting that CSS be used instead lol

Well, if it ain't broke...

They love fish and brewis these days, too.

It would be the "being bots" that makes them bots. I know there's some nutcases out there, but not enough of them to fill a twitter-sized insane asylum, and I'm talking about accounts that make statements at both ends of the political spectrum. You spend about 2 minutes on there and nearly every post or comment you read leaves you thinking "there's absolutely no way a real, living, breathing person wrote this", unless you yourself are an absolute lunatic or very gullible. It's downright baffling.

You cannot be serious. On the rare occasion that I do open it up for whatever reason, I'm immediately stunned by the cesspit that greets me. I refuse to believe that's not like 90% bots.

I don't know if there's much evidence to support that, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. Even if I'm wrong though, some folks "abusing" a system to get more money they might not necessarily "need" to support their child just doesn't seem that bad to me, and I'm sure whatever that costs the taxpayer would be a rounding error especially compared to the ludicrous amounts the government spends on other things.

I mean, where I live there's food banks, and the only requirement to utilize the food bank is that you bring in a piece of mail with your address on it so they can know you're at the correct food bank. I know, I'm poor and I've had to use the foodbank, recently even. Besides that, you could be the richest guy in town and go and pick up a nice big haul of food every 5 weeks if you choose to. But for whatever reason, this system isn't rife with abuse, even though I'm not drug tested (I would pass) or background checked (no criminal record) or made sure I work (I do). I'm aware of a few bad eggs who don't "need" the food bank who access it anyway, but by and large the people who do need it are getting it and that's what matters.

I guess my point is, you always hear about "what if this is abused" when it comes to systems that are in place to help the less-than-fortunate, but from what I can see it's always just a veiled attempt to make it harder for people who need assistance to actually get it, for little to no actual return because the "rampant abuse" we're told to worry about doesn't seem to be such a big issue in reality.