Schwim Dandy

I’m just hopping from one shuttered instance to another.

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  • 25 Comments
Joined 18 days ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • In answer to your question, if I’m understanding it correctly, you are still being tracked as long as you use the web. Meta has profiles for people that have never logged into facebook, used their site in a browser or used an app they control.

    The profile might not have a name attached but Facebook provides a ton of websites with FB-related statistics, social widgets and more. Each of those services place FB code on the page that phones home with unique visitor information. That gets compiled into profiles that they can eventually tie to an identity when more information is compiled (as an example, your highschool friend from 15 years ago installs a Meta app like instagram and clicks ok on allowing it to dig through their contacts).

    Apps and extensions like Privacy Badger, uBlockO and Ghostery help with the tracking code but I’ve no doubt that Meta spends a lot of time finding workarounds for the blocks.


  • The issue with that in his situation is 911 does not take kindly to “Hey, can you call my dad and tell him I ran out of gas?”

    If it’s not a true emergency that they are expected to handle, emergency services frown on calling them.

    His father’s argument is legitimate regarding needing a cellular carrier unless the poster would never unexpectedly need to contact family for help.






  • I suspect you’re going to get mostly sarcasm and mockery tropes but there have always been countries that have allied themselves with American interests. When you say “when help when needed”, if you’re thinking of an actual war on home turf, invasion or something similar, that’s unlikely to ever happen due to our geographical position. If you mean financial help, we take loans from a lot of different countries. If you’re asking about assistance when we engage in war elsewhere, again, that would be all the allied nations.

    Militarily speaking, the US is still one of the superpowers just because of the mind-boggling amount of money we spend on it. There’s not many countries that can compete with just the sheer number of US things that are designed to go boom.

    Things like goodwill and assistance are currently in a downward transitional trend due to the current administration. It seems a lot of countries feel ostracized by the US due to Trump’s constant foolish and often hostile actions towards them but these types of things follow an ebb and flow, the next administration to reside in office will begin the process of patching things up and relationships will improve.









  • "developers see sales increases on both the Epic Games Store and on Steam, Valve’s competing PC game store. Sweeney also points out that the free games can be a good deal for players in developing countries where gaming may be more expensive, meaning that they help expand the global reach of some titles. And since developers get a flat fee from Epic so that Epic can offer their game for free, they make some money no matter what.

    Epic isn’t being entirely altruistic, of course. The company spends a lot of money to be able to give games away for free, and it certainly wants to offer good ones that keep people playing on its platform instead of others like Steam. And if Epic can attract players with free games from notable developers, those same players might also try out some of Epic’s big free-to-play multiplayer games like Fortnite or Rocket League, keeping them in Epic’s universe — and, again, off Steam. "

    Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/9/23630846/epic-games-store-free-weekly-giveaways-2023



  • I can’t find anything at all regarding discussion, study or opinions on the question but I can tell you that it depends on the person and most likely, they’re experience in working at leveling/setting plumb.

    Having used levels(spirit, laser, etc.) for decades, I can set an object like a stud, header or a picture for my wife and often don’t need to move it after checking with a level but my wife will often notice that a group of items aren’t leveled the same on a wall but she won’t be sure which one is off. There will usually be a few adjustments to all of them before she’s happy.



  • I agree, we had the option to sue the seller but the reality is, even if we spend a ton of money to take him to court, there’s no guaranteed payment at the end. We decided to focus on fixing the problem rather than try to get compensation from them.

    There is absolutely no system in place to protect people from something like this. The inspector didn’t find it, the realty attorneys didn’t find it, the realtors didn’t find it. We only found out about it when pulling a permit for a deck.


  • The timeframe all depends on the house. Over the last 30 years, we’ve bought three homes. The first one was an absolute breeze and never caused us heartache. The second one, was a bit of a troublemaker but we just worked our way from room to room, rehabbing the entire house a little bit at a time.

    This last one has been a nightmare for the 4 years we’ve owned it. We’ve blown through our savings and still don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Without going into needless detail, on top of a qualified home inspector, I would suggest going to the city/county permitting office to make sure permits were pulled for anything that’s been recently done. In our case, the the biggest issue with this property was that apartment over garage was done illegally and we had to completely gut and start over. Unfortunately, the entire reason we picked this house was for that apartment as it was for our daughter to live in.

    My intention isn’t to scare you but just be sure to perform due diligence and don’t be afraid to further investigate potential issues.