I’ve been saying this for literal years now. They should release a publicly searchable database of every single SSN, name, and DOB. Force organizations to stop using those as a form of ID, because they’re not secure and never have been.

Give it like a year of lead time. Like announce “March 1 2027, we’ll post the database” and then that gives institutions a full year to figure something new out.

In late 2025 and 2026 there is a huge surge in demand for hardware. There’s a shortage of hardware, and factories don’t get built out overnight. So prices skyrocket, pricing out many users to the point where demand at the new price point matches the available supply. But as production capacity increases, that will also ease.

And this is where your entire idea falls apart… The manufacturers have openly stated that they have zero interest in expanding production. They’re trying to avoid a supply surplus after the boom ends, and they know that expanding production now means crashed prices later. Why expand production, when you can simply not spend that money and charge higher prices anyways?

Yeah, the disgraced prince is still living a life of luxury, in a massive 50 bedroom estate. The dude will want for nothing.

Ah yes, the College Sophomore technique: Don’t eat all day, so the party beer gets you absolutely wasted when you’re drinking on an empty stomach. That’s just efficient use of resources.

I mean yeah, but that’s a little like saying “computers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.” It’s a pretty large limitation to place on the user’s choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.

those people have just fallen in the lies of the far right parties and are scared.

No, I’m done trying to find novel or justifiable reasons for people to support Nazis. The most likely answer is that there’s something in it for them. Not because they’re scared, but because they believe that naziism will get them something (power, control, money, etc) that they wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s an entirely self-serving ideology, so why would anyone follow it for reasons that aren’t rooted in selfishness?

Honestly, quit as soon as you can. After the two week mark, you’ll start smelling things again. At the one month mark, you’ll notice that you’re not constantly out of breath. Cravings still occasionally happen, but it shifts from “god damn it I need a donut right now” to “hmm a donut sounds good right now… But I don’t wanna bother with going to the donut shop.” The cravings never fully vanish, but they definitely change and become easier to dismiss as a passing whim.

The grand jury is an extension of the district attorney’s office. When a crime is suspected of being committed, the district attorney brings the evidence to a grand jury. Then the grand jury decides if the case can proceed to trial. It’s basically step 0 in the judicial process.

The prosecutor has a lot of discretion in what evidence the grand jury sees. They can do things like include evidence that they know won’t stand up in court, or intentionally exclude exculpatory evidence (that would prove the suspect’s innocence). Additionally, there is no defense attorney at the grand jury. Nobody has been charged with a crime yet, so the suspect can’t even defend themselves. The old joke among defense attorneys is that the grand jury would indict a ham sandwich for murder if the DA wanted them to.

The point of the grand jury is for the prosecutor to go “do I have enough evidence to go to trial?” They’re not deciding guilt. They’re just deciding if it’s even worth trying to prosecute a suspect. So the threshold for evidence is very low. On paper, the grand jury is meant to prevent frivolous charges and protect clearly innocent suspects. If the grand jury decides there is enough evidence to go to trial, then the suspect is officially charged with a crime and the entire arrest+trial part of the prosecution kicks off.

But in reality, it is often just used as a scapegoat by the district attorney. The grand jury is anonymous, which makes them very convenient as a scapegoat. As far as the public is concerned, the grand jury is just a sort of massless, faceless blob. The DA is typically an elected position, which means they need to keep the public’s wants in mind. And this can come into conflict with the job, when they have a politically inconvenient case.

For example, let’s say a cop kills someone in broad daylight, surrounded by bystander recordings. The public is out for blood. But the police union has privately told the DA that if charges get pressed, the cops will collectively stop cooperating as witnesses and won’t collect evidence at crime scenes. Functionally making the DA’s job impossible.

So the DA uses the grand jury as a scapegoat. They refuse to bring any evidence (because again, they can choose to exclude evidence), and then the grand jury refuses to indict because they were given no evidence. Then the DA jumps in front of the news cameras and goes “I tried my best, and I brought the case to the grand jury! But the big mean grand jury refused to indict! Remember that I’m fighting for you. Vote for me!” And the grand jury (as a faceless blob) can’t defend themselves and go “hey uhh, we would have indicted that cop if the DA brought any evidence…”

As he pulls it out of the drawer and it just happens to go off and also just happens to be aimed right at her.

Also worth noting that he shot her with a Glock. Glocks have a safety built directly into the trigger, which needs to be pressed before the trigger will move. It’s the blue part of the trigger in this image:

In terms of “just happened to go off”, a Glock is just about as safe as you can get. The dude 1000% pulled the trigger, because that sprung lever needs to be pressed before the trigger will even begin to move.

I wish it were made up.

For IEMs, the price difference typically goes towards comfort rather than sound quality. As a professional audio technician, a custom-molded IEM will be infinitely more comfortable than a cheap set. But not everyone can justify spending $2000 for custom molds, because they don’t use them for work every day.

Schools in the US have officers specifically assigned to the school. Like the officer’s full time job is to patrol the halls. They’re called School Resource Officers, and they are a large part of the school-to-prison pipeline, as their entire job is focused on getting kids out of regular school and into the prison system. Kids get arrested for things that could be (and previously were) handled by school discipline instead. But since school admins don’t want to deal with it, (because it would require actually making decisions on a case-by-case basis), it’s easier for them to just default to having a kid carted off to juvie by the SRO. And SROs come with all of the same problems and trappings as regular officers; massive racial disparities, being trained for violent escalation as the default, etc…

The stats for SROs are actually pretty staggering. The idea started in the 1950’s, but didn’t really become widespread until the late 90’s when the government started funding specific SRO grants and initiatives, to make them more easily accessible to schools. Columbine (and the subsequent rise in school shootings throughout the 2000’s) poured more fuel on the fire. By 2010, around 45% of middle and high schools in America had SROs. By 2020, that number was nearly 70%.

Schools that invest heavily into SRO programs see a marked increase in arrests (and subsequent drop-outs as kids inevitably end up in the prison system) before graduation. But because no public figure wants to look like they’re soft on crime, politicians keep pushing SRO programs onto school admins. Because more arrests makes it look like they’re cracking down on crime. When in reality, the SRO’s primary role is turning minor problems and disagreements into life-ruining ones.

Primaries are generally much more extreme, because everyone voting is part of the party. So the candidates will be closely toeing the party line to pick up the passionate voters.

To be clear, the individual parties aren’t actual government-funded organizations. They’re private entities, who choose to hold primaries and then put the party’s support behind whoever wins. This is an important distinction because this means the individual primaries can be run however the party wants, even if that means not having a primary and simply running a sitting president (like what happened to Biden, then later Kamala after Biden dropped out). And registering to vote with a party is typically exclusive, meaning you can only vote in one pre-chosen primary election per cycle. Like if I were to register as a republican to vote in the republican primary, the democrat party wouldn’t allow me to cast a vote in their primary.

Then whoever wins the primaries goes on to the general election. While winning the primary is only a soft requirement for the general election, (anyone can run as an independent candidate), the US’ first-past-the-post voting system means it’s virtually impossible to win the general election without the support of one of the two big parties. And if you want to get that support, you need to win the primary. Independent candidates are generally thought of as wasted votes, meme votes, protest votes, etc…

Notably, in the general election, democrats’ campaigns tend to take a strategy of “move farther right to grab the center/center-right swing voters.” Since any registered voter can vote in the general, swing voters often determine who wins and loses the general. Which means candidates tend to disproportionately focus on appeasing those swing voters. And this tends to piss off the democrats/leftists/etc who prefer the farther left policies. Especially when those same candidates have spent the past month parroting the official democratic party platform to win the primary, then suddenly about-face and cozy up to the centrists in the general.

So even if leftists were able to get enough votes for a far-left candidate in the primaries, (they can’t, because America has no notable far-left/leftist voting blocks), that same candidate would then immediately shift to the center to grab the swing votes in the general.

For the curious: Cops can charge you with murder if they kill someone while trying to stop you from committing a felony. For instance, if you rob a bank and the cops needlessly shoot a bystander, you can be charged with that bystander’s murder.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing here. They’re charging him with a felony for the break-in and attempted robbery, and they can pin the murder (that the cop committed) on him.

Yup. The cop wasn’t wrong for entering when they suspected an armed fight. They were wrong when they shot the victim.

It really depends on how low the bitrate is. A change from 320kbps (the highest “near-CD” bitrate that .mp3 supports) to 128kbps (standard .mp3) won’t make a huge difference, but a change from 160 to 75 will likely make a big difference… Bitrate tends to be a game of diminishing returns, where a difference between 96kbps and 128kbps is typically noticeable, even by laypeople… But a difference between 320kbps and 640kbps is harder to hear, (or makes no difference at all), even though it’s a much bigger jump between numbers. As the bitrate continues to increase, you get fewer and fewer benefits while your file size begins to balloon.

To be clear, there is a lot of snake oil in the audiophile world. I’m not denying that. I work in audio, (peep my username), and spend a lot of time dispelling snake oil myths as part of my job. My current audio rig is easily a quarter million dollars, and is located in an acoustically treated room, because it’s built for an entire audience. I’ve also worked in recording and system design. So I’m probably fairly qualified to speak about this specific topic…

Like lots of snake oil, the bitrate conversation is built upon grains of truth; Just enough to be convincing to someone who only has a surface level understanding of the underlying principles. And audiophiles tend to focus a lot on hardware and manufacturer’s claims, instead of studying what makes that hardware work… Which makes them particularly susceptible to snake oil myths, oftentimes perpetuated by the manufacturers to sell more expensive products to unsuspecting customers. An extreme “low vs lower” bitrate difference is one of the few things that laypeople will be able to identify when presented with an A/B test. In fact, low bitrate comparisons are often used by scummy audiophile companies as a bad-faith “here’s what our competitors sound like, vs what we sound like” example. And to be clear, reducing from ~160kbps to ~75kbps is an extreme difference.

I want you to think of the most crunchy and heavily compressed “downloaded from limewire on the family computer for your iPod” .mp3 file you’ve ever heard. Full of artifacts, absolutely no high end, sounds like it was recorded with a landline phone, and it crackles when the kick drum peaks. That was probably at least 96kbps, because that’s the lowest bitrate that .mp3 compression supports by default. And that’s after the mp3 compression algorithm has done its lossy “eh, people probably don’t care about this particular frequency” thing. 75kbps is crazy low, and you’ll undoubtedly hear the compression as a result. But again, increasing bitrates will have diminishing returns as the number continues to climb. Going from 75kbps to 160kbps will be a marked improvement, but going from 160kbps to 320kbps will be a much smaller change.

The reason audiophiles tend to have difficulty with (or even completely fail at) identifying different bitrates is because audiophiles live in a magical land where going from 1200kbps (high-end FLAC quality) to 1411kbps (uncompressed CD quality) makes a noticeable difference. In 99.9% of cases it doesn’t make any difference at all, (because again, diminishing returns) but audiophiles will swear that the 1411kbps sounds better simply because the number is bigger. Again, the snake oil is built upon grains of truth, (differences in low bitrates are immediately noticeable) but only enough to be convincing to people who don’t understand the underlying principles, (at a certain point, bitrate stops impacting audio quality and only makes your file size bigger).

All of this is to say that yes, the posted bitrate of 75kbps is laughably low. And even laypeople will absolutely be able to hear a difference between the two in an A/B comparison. Because as the bitrate approaches 0, the differences get more and more apparent. And (at least when compared to things like FLAC and CD quality) 75kbps is remarkably close to 0.

I don’t think they do, and this will probably be what changes that. I’m fully expecting the site to lose their remaining TLDs as a result of this.

You caught a downvote for that comment because some people don’t like confronting reality, but that’s literally what my late father-in-law told me on his deathbed. He had been battling cancer for about a year by that point, and was partially paralyzed around the six month mark after his vertebrae collapsed from it spreading to his bones. My wife was his constant in-home caregiver after that, while I took on a ton of overtime and freelance work to financially support both of us.

One day, I was over at his house taking care of him, because my wife needed a girl’s night for herself to just get away from things for a few moments. While I was feeding him, he broke down in tears and said he wished he had been hit by a bus instead, because at least then he would have had his dignity intact and would have been able to leave my wife some sort of inheritance. He died two days later.

I’ll never tell my wife about that conversation. She was already dealing with enough mental, emotional, and physical stress from the caregiving (and her own health issues, which the stress compounded), and I didn’t want to add to it. And now at this point, it’s better to just let sleeping dogs lie.

Fuck cancer.

Can confirm. Didn’t need a NAS before I started hosting my own Plex/Jellyfin server. Then suddenly I was considering 40TB and going “hmm this is probably way too small for actual daily use, but it’ll be a good start and I can expand on it later.”

The typical advice (from anyone who hasn’t outright drank the kool-aid) is to avoid automating things like locks or doors. If your shit gets hacked, (or if someone just shouts “hey Alexa, unlock the front door” through your window), you don’t want it to allow physical access. And automating door unlocks is an easy way to accidentally allow people into your house.

Instead, most try to focus on automation for things like lights turning off when you leave home, automatically dimming the lights when you start a movie, automatically stealing from billionaires when a new movie hits streaming services, blocking ads, self-hosting your own smart speakers to divest from Google/Amazon/et al., meal planning, hosting D&D sessions for players/DM to connect remotely or cast to a screen, etc…

Leave the locks dumb, because you can’t remotely hack a pin and tumbler deadbolt. Leave building molotov cocktails dumb, because it can be a fun bonding activity for the whole family.

And you should be using kerosene instead of gasoline. It burns slower and takes longer to evaporate when spilled, allowing more things to properly catch without creating risks of stoichiometric explosions from aerosolized/evaporated fumes. If you’re having trouble getting it to properly ignite, a little bit of anhydrous rubbing alcohol, (commonly found in any electronics store, typically used for cleaning computer parts), or just regular gasoline in the mix will help it take faster. And use a wick (in a molotov’s case, a rag in the bottle) to get it started, as the additional surface area allows it to catch much easier. If you’re making them ahead of time, seal them with a soft wax cap, so you can simply push a rag through the seal with your thumb (and briefly invert to soak the rag) when you’re ready to use it. The wax will simply add extra fuel once it is burning.