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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: November 29th, 2023

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  • Look at history. The 2003 Iraq war and subsequent occupation resulted in at least 150.000 deaths, at the absolute lowest estimate. The biggest estimate is over a million.

    Afghanistan? 176.000

    Gulf War? 50.000

    Yugoslav war? 130.000

    Vietnam War? 970.000 to 3 million.

    And those are conflicts that the US was directly involved in with boots on the ground. Few people lost sleep over any of those civilian casualties. Could you even point to Kosovo on a map?

    What’s another 50.000 dead Palestinians you ask? A rounding error on a footnote of history. It’s a statistic. And that’s ignoring the fact that this is happening in another country with only indirect US support.

    People SHOULD care about the Palestinians. But it’s just not relevant to the day to day lives of average Americans.






  • I will definitely second that recommendation. They turn basically every shoe into a slipper.

    I was skeptical when I read about them, but gave them a go. Reason being: my feet swell during the day, which means I was constantly loosening my laces throughout the day. Which isn’t ideal.

    The Lock Laces help in that they’re always perfect: they flex with my feet and always have just the right tension.

    They are popular with a wide range of people. Triathletes like them for fast transitions since you don’t need to retie your shoes. Marathon runners also love them since it means no more laces getting undone. And yes, they’re obviously great for old folks and people with disabilities.

    I like them so much, I now put them on every new pair of shoes that I buy.



  • I still have PTSD from the era of the ‘polyphonic ringtone’ hype. Those were the ‘fancier’ ringtones that weren’t just your usual beep or bell.

    Usually you’d buy them by sending a text message to some expensive number and it would be sent to your phone. If you were dumb, you could get basically scammed into a ‘subscription’ so you’d get sent these expensive ringtones frequently. Many a teen got yelled at for that mistake in the late 90’s.

    If you were a tech savvy lad, you could hook your phone up to your Windows PC and upload shitty ringtones yourself as well as wallpapers and such.

    These days, who gives a shit? My iPhone ringtone is still the default ring. I honestly don’t care what it is, as it’s usually just annoying anyway.












  • It’s really in the tech sector’s best interest to do that anyway. Because as a consumer, I’m now quite hesitant to buy a thing without knowing if it’s going to be properly supported.

    We’ve all been burned before. My Sonos webradio lost functionality for a while after some backend streaming service was defunct. They did manage to fix that but it meant installing a new app, new account that sort of thing. It’s annoying- but at least the manufacturer did the right thing to keep it working. I can only imagine how frustrating it would’ve been if the entire thing stopped working with no support…

    Basically, that experience is why I’m no longer willing to buy things that wholly depend on outside servers and the like to keep working. There’s too much risk of ending up with an expensive paperweight.


  • Exactly. I can’t control where other people find news, and if they choose poor sources, well, that’s on them. All I can do is be the best, most reliable source for them if they choose to read our news.

    Our newspaper community is smaller than you might think. People frequently move around from company to company. I’ve worked in radio, TV news as well as newspapers for the past 20 years. I have a lot of former colleagues who work at other companies within our regional media. And us journalists are a gossipy bunch, as you can imagine. If someone actively tries to undermine my trust, they wouldn’t just be blackballed from the dozen or so regional newspapers that we publish, but also the larger national conglomerate that runs about 40. We take pride in good sources. Undermine that, and you’re not working for us.