I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Marjorie Taylor Greene looks like the second or third pic from an Animorphs cover.

Well…fuck em, I guess!

If they’re charging so much that the local govt needs to pass that on in the form of a $5 fee on a $9 payment, they’re either gouging, or have an unsustainable business model.

Either way, fuck 'em.

There’s no justification from a pure convenience standpoint, but I could respect the pettiness if the electric company ran their shit like one local government office in my hometown, where there was this small annual fee they charged like $9 for…but then to pay it, you could either mail in a check, hand deliver cash or check or card…or pay online…where they added a $5 “convenience fee” to a sub-$10 payment.

You bet your ass that I paid that shit in person every year, in loose change, and requested a receipt (which they had to write up manually because they didn’t have a system to process and print one).

Which is why there should be legal mechanisms to place legal responsibility for decisions like this personally on those in leadership positions when they’re being made, even if those people no longer hold those positions.

You bet your ass the chucklefucks who came up with this little stunt would’ve thought twice about it if they knew that there was a decent chance they’d go to prison for it.

Also gotta make this shit sting the shareholders too: make the company pay the victims not only the estimated value of their data but also a portion of all profits made while a policy like this is in effect. Since there’s no easy way to tell how much money was made off their data, unless the company has the numbers, let’s say half.

Suddenly the quarterly report’s got a nice repayment shaped dent in its side and all the sudden the shareholders care about following the law and respecting the rights of customers.

LotRers.

Fans of Lord of the Rings.

I don’t care about that so much as the hyper specificity of not only “you have to be on the political left here” but “being to the left isn’t enough, you need to be this far left, and hold these specific views on politics, technology, etc.”.

And the community that is here is, amazingly, somehow even worse than Reddit, on average, when it comes to being a hive mind that is wildly intolerant of any disagreement.

It occurred to us that CrowdStrike is an absolutely terrible name. It sounds like a terrorist attack. Of course, it felt like one on Friday.

When I first heard about what was going on, I assumed that “CrowdStrike” was not the name of the software/company, but rather some sort of advanced DDOS-like attack where they used systems they’d previously hacked and had them all do the same thing at once to another target.

Philips doesn’t cam out that easily either.

I mean…that’s an inherently subjective statement.

But more objectively, regardless of how easily, it’s still the worst of the available options.

Well said.

And with the hex/Allen, it’s the small contact points as well as the smaller volume of material that needs to be deformed or removed before slippage can occur, as well as the angle of force on the contact point.

With a hex, the contact point and direction are such that the tool is effectively trying to scrape off material at an angle, and if/when it succeeds even a little bit, it’s now much more prone to fail.

With a Torx, the contact area might still be small, but it’s being applied to the lobe in a more perpendicular direction, so rather than a scraping failure, it’s more of a force that is pushing directly against steel instead of scraping. Not that it can’t fail, but the route to failure is significantly less likely.

For some reason, Ford decided to use Security Torx to hold together their hybrid battery packs. Couldn’t tell you why that was better then regular Torx.

I’d guess that was some sort of safety standard designed to protect vehicle owners from themselves.

As Torx gets more and more common, it’s presence is less and less likely to be a serious hurdle, so the security screws are a simple way for them to sort of say to the owner “don’t mess with the stuff below this”. If they want to, they still can, but it’s a specific effort at that point…so Ford can say they’ve implemented a safety measure. Might even be some sort of government standard too, where using a less common fastener style brings them into compliance without needing some sort of even less accessible design, like a sealed off system.

Because a hex key can fit (albeit imperfectly) into a Torx opening and loosen or tighten the fastener as needed.

It’s more likely to slip or strip, but it’s better than nothing.

You do you, but if I’m up early enough to have breakfast, I’m unhappy about that, so I’m not gonna get hung up on levels of processing or grams of carbs.

Give me fried pig and chicken ova. And lots of coffee.

Sausage gravy over biscuits is one of the very few things that make me appreciate the South.

Y’all have something special there.

These are not interchangeable for me.

Pancakes are a filling main item, dressed with syrup. Toast is a vehicle for egg yolk, jelly/jam, or as a sandwich foundation.

Right?

I get in the mood for some of those some of the time, but most days?

Gimme 15 cups of coffee, don’t talk to me until the third cup, and get outta my fuckin way when it’s time for the coffee shit.

Ignoring, for a moment, the inherent and fundamental differences between an individual and a state…

…in my late 20s and early 30s I bought a new car.

At the time, that car cost more than I had in my accounts plus my other possessions at the time. In fairness, my annual income was more than the total cost of the car, buuuut I also was carrying tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt as well, meaning my overall total debt was significantly higher than my annual income, or my “personal GDP” if you will.

Yet when I applied for my car loan, it came through with easy approval and I even qualified for the best possible interest rate.

Why? Because I’ve always paid on my debts adequately and promptly.

Nobody bats an eye when a couple buys a house that costs more than what they can cover with their combined income in one year. Why? Because that’s an arbitrary and unrealistic yard stick of comparison and nobody expects them to pay off a house in a year. They’re able to buy their house and live in it immediately, and pay for it incrementally, over time, as they earn over the coming years because of debt. And the bank is willing to lend the money because they’ll make money in the long run through interest.

Similarly, it’s unreasonable to imply that the US shouldn’t carry more debt than it’s GDP because the two metrics aren’t directly linked in any way. And since the US has excellent credit worthiness, that debt is far safer than the bank’s loan to the homebuyers. And the US gains access to borrowed funds by setting it’s own interest rates through the Fed, which tells lenders exactly how much they’ll make in interest if they let the US government borrow some of their money.

And since the US is a safer bet than homebuyers, that’s why home interest rates are higher than the rate at the Fed: if they were equal, banks would never lend to homebuyers since they could get the same return by lending to the government. So instead, they set their own, higher rates for homebuyers, to account for the higher risk of lending to a party who has a much higher likelihood of default.

He’s nasty!

The only cure for “unable to eat diarrhea” is to put the patient into an induced comma.

Explains the irritability.