Around the US, you can still find lots of buildings that have a disused trash incinerator in the basement or out in a back alley. At one time it was common, basically everywhere, to burn solid waste on site.

I think eliminating that practice was both good and bad. Good because burning waste in what basically amounts to a burn barrel with a smoke stack is nasty and produces tons of pollution which has lots of negative health related side effects, among other things.

Bad because it masked, maybe even helped exacerbate, the problem of generating and dealing with increasing amounts of trash. Now, instead of having to choke on billowing clouds of black smoke, you just throw your garbage in a dumpster where it gets hauled away out of sight and dumped in someone else’s back yard. That has consequences too. There are mismanaged landfills all over the place that cause lots of problems. But for most people, they’re out of sight and therefore out of mind.

And burying trash in the ground is cheap. So much useable stuff gets thrown away because it’s much cheaper, in the short term, to just throw it away.

It’s shameful. But I don’t know what else to expect from a society that primarily runs on greed.

I don’t know. That’s a lot of nails for a DR Horton house. There should be like 4 for the entire wall.

Happy Birthday Sandy!

Glad your head is doing better.

I also was told my house insurance won’t cover the foundation damage cause by a tornado spawning essentially on top of my house. The wind applied enough torque to twist my house slightly and it’s *beyond fucked*.

This is very serious. You need to talk to a lawyer about this asap. Some insurance companies will try to weasel out of paying claims but this very scenario is exactly why you have homeowners insurance. Major structural damage will make selling the house difficult if not impossible. If I were you, I would not let this go without a fight.

But I like my neurotypical wife. She remembers where I put stuff and is somehow OK with the army of squirrels that I call a brain.

Only time I’ve ever been written up in my career, I told the CEO – very politely – that “cybersecurity is the boards responsibility, whether they want it to be or not.” He did not like hearing that.

If there’s a problem, they can count on me to tell them about it. Always in writing. If they don’t want to act, that’s on them.

Sounds better than sitting on Teams meetings with people who are in the same room as me all day.

Well the Everclear will kill off any remaining bacteria and in a few minutes, you’ll be so drunk you won’t even care that you’re eating raw hamburger. Or remember the poor decisions that led you to this moment.

There is a certain brand of Christianity for which the current nation state of Israel is somehow magically a direct continuation of the Jewish tribes from the Old Testament and who are also somehow [now] exempt from the laws outlined therein.

Nevermind that a significant portion of the old testament consists of either the prophets railing against Israel or God punishing Israel for doing evil shit.

To borrow a phrase from King of the Hill, “If those Baptists could read, they’d be very upset.”

“A plane would have smashed through the Trump Tower penthouse, killing [future] President Trump and dooming America then and there, as Osama bin Laden intended. If not for the brave passengers aboard American Airlines flight 11 who broke down the cockpit door screaming, ‘Make America great again!!’ while they successfully regained control of the plane and diverted it into the north tower of the World Trade Center instead.”

Dad notices his son gasping for air

“Apology accepted, Captain Timmy.”

Performs Heimlich

I think I understand what you’re talking about. I wouldn’t classify the extra words I use as strictly “filler” words. My phrasing is designed to avoid speaking in absolutes. I’m sure it was intentional at one point but it’s been a habit for so long that it’s become automatic.

I’ve considered why I do this and come up with a few reasons. First, because I routinely doubt myself. Even on topics where I am an expert. Imposter syndrome is real. Second, because I often find myself having to deliver news that the other person(s) doesn’t want to hear and I feel like it helps “soften the blow.” And third, to give myself the feeling of plausible denyability; even if there really is none. e.g. “I said <X> could happen, not would happen.”

TLDR: Because I doubt myself and want to avoid conflict.

But there are times when I will drop the fillers. And it’s not really a conscious effort. If I’m talking about something I feel morally responsible for, I will drop the bullshit and get straight to the point. It happens when I’ve decided that I’m going to die on this [proverbial] hill and that doing what I think is right outweighs any potential consequences. I can coun’t on one, maybe two hands where I’ve felt I had to choose between a job or a friend and my personal ethics.

In those moments, the fillers go away because my choice is already made.

Entergy is lying through their teeth about the whole ordeal. Claiming the data center would not impact rates while fighting like hell to suppress the details of their deal with Google.

At the same time, they are currently pitching a full rate restructuring to the Arkansas Public Service Commission which will absolutely increase rates. Especially for small businesses.

Sarah Sanders administration also bears some responsibility for this bullshit. After Ted Thomas resigned as PSC chairman in 2022, the governors office began working hard to make the PSC much more friendly to utilities and much less friendly to rate payers.

In some ways, this is Arkansas voters having the day they voted for. Ya’ll wanted a governor who was “pro business” (aka pro corruption) and now you’ve got a PSC – which is supposed to advocate for ratepayers – that just rubber stamps rate increase requests.

The Brave Vengeful Little Toaster

Yes.The ability to do speech-to-text and text to-speech with a relatively high level of speed and accuracy is impressive. And it has at least a few potentially positive real world applications.

Similar tools have existed for years but the quality and user friendliness of those has generally been pretty lacking.

IKR? For what it costs and for how hard Microsoft has worked to shoehorn it into everything, it offers very little in terms of increased productivity. I would go so far as to call it an epic failure. Especially considering they spent vast sums of money on it and all they managed to produce was something that is at best marginally good at drafting emails.

As far as a coding assistant, Copilot is pathetic and produces code that is utter trash much of the time.

We have copilot at work and we are expected to use it. They recently updated the Copilot desktop app to include live voice chat, where you can have actual “conversations” with it. To be honest, that actually is kind of impressive. Unfortunately, that’s also about where the impressiveness stops. I burned up all of my daily voice chat limits, and I don’t even know how many tokens trying to get that stupid thing to walk me through making a relatively minor configuration change in Azure. It could not do it. It was consistently wrong about so many things.

You would think Microsoft would be embarrassed about selling a chatbot that can’t even tell you how to make basic configuration changes to their own products. Personally, I’m not strongly opposed to LLMs. But the value proposition that all these tech firms are currently selling is laughable at best.

“He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” --Donald Trump, RE: John McCain (2015)

Trump hates veterans and is incredibly jealous when veterans, or anyone for that matter, gets any sort of recognition for anything because he is a raging narcissist and thinks that he is the center of the entire universe.

Veterans are just cannon fodder for the GOP. Used as a political prop and immediately discarded when the bill comes due.