I have (had?) an arms length friend that is prone to making bad choices.
He aspires to be a decent guy, but struggles with making the right choices. He made some pretty bad choices last year.

Cheated on his wife with a coworker that was, er, not someone I’d trust. Got caught. Coworker then got pregnant. A few months later he called me to ask if he could crash in our guest bedroom for ‘no more than three days’ while he cut things off with the coworker and worked on reconciling with the wife. While he was still that coworker’s supervisor and baby daddy, unbeknownst to his supervisors.
Seeing nothing but red flags there, I offered to pay for a hotel room for him for a week, and he never took me up on the offer. My wife’s eyebrows were almost at the ceiling when we got off the phone. She very much appreciated not inviting that mess into our lives. I haven’t heard from him since.

The house numbers on my block always skip one.

For example, if my block number was the 10th block, on the odd side of the street, the house numbers are 101, 105, 109, 1013, 1017. And on the even side, they’re 100, 104, 108, 1012, 1016. (Sub dividing houses is common here, maybe they wanted extra addressing space?)

Sometime last year, I caught an Amazon driver stalking through the back yard, as he tried to find one of those in-between addresses. Sadly he didn’t just leave the boxes at the map pin.

Unimpressed. It’s not 7:20.

All that engineering and they didn’t get the time right.

I made a joke recently that if I were desperate for a job I’d get hired as ICE and quit right after training. But then I realized I might spend more time filling out some of the application, failing the drug test, and attending a 6-minute long interview than I would spend in training before they tried to make me do evil shit. I’d have to quit before I got my ROI.

It does seem the gun was not in his possession when he was shot: https://imgur.com/a/ice-taking-victims-holstered-gun-before-shooting-started-NtnH5Hv

Wow. So they have the struggling man on the ground and two men approach from the left of frame. What’s shown below is not graphic, but it is screenshots from the video.

Edit: Leaving it up, but my initial analysis was incorrect. Pink jacket video is now available. First shooter was different. Man that walks off frame toward camera in this video is the one that recovered the gun. Has it in his hands as he is walking away. Link to new video.

At 17 seconds in, several of the officers have stepped back a bit, one of the late arrivals has turned to leave, and so the guy on the ground no longer has bodies and activity all over him.
The man in the green hood takes a step back, and draws his weapon.
About two seconds later, the man in the green hood takes a firing pose and a shot is heard.
All of the thugs who were attacking the unseen figure step away and reach off their weapons.
A second or two passes. The figure on the ground does not seem to move. One of the last men to step clear (black beanie) takes several shots

In the video, the two men who arrived late (including the man who opened fire first), are seen leaving the frame quickly.
Without wanting to brew conspiracies, as I know ICE is pretty ragtag. Is that weird? Their cop cosplay outfits don’t quite match the others.

You don’t even have to reference an article from a year ands half ago.

He literally suggested last week that he would cancel the midterms.

A Doobie for Ruby.

I hear you, but I would imagine that Musk would retaliate by counter-suing the city and/or state, if for no other reason than spite. And would drag the whole thing out for at least as long as the AI infatuation lasts before abandoning the building for officials to deal with.

A single citizen with a drone and a bunch of glass bottles full of petrol dropped onto the generators, however, would shut down operations immediately.

Trump is clearly fucking incapacitated. He needs to be removed under the 25th amendment. But what I see is either an utter lack of strategy, or a strategy of letting the republicans hang themselves (and all U.S. legitimacy along with it) in favor of letting things get to point where a midterm sweep seems likely. Ineptitude or callous political math. Feels like a greasy handshake from someone you know just spent all day alone.

I actually rebalanced my 401k tonight and dumped all my bond holdings and most domestic stocks just an hour or so ago. (I did keep the index funds, though.)
Swapping most of the allocations over to foreign stocks (showing about 35% yearly returns, vs the still good 14% I was netting before). I also threw a small chunk into a gold commodity index fund, which is showing 150% growth in the last year. Risky, but what am I going to do? Live long enough to grow old? In this economy?

I used to have a TCL soundbar.

In addition to being extremely mediocre, it promised to integrate with my WiFi so that music could be airplayed through it. After adding it to my WiFi, it still broadcast the open ‘setup’ WiFi network.

If you joined the setup network, you could SSH into the soundbar as root without a password and dump the dhcp.conf file, which would give anyone access to my home WiFi network. Other TCL models also allowed for root via SSH, but used 12345678 as the password. A skilled hacker could just bot these via wardriving and turn them into network listeners.

It may have still broadcast the setup network because I blocked the device from accessing the internet. I only ever went poking around on it because I noticed that the setup network kept getting set to the same channels as my home network and it was causing interference. I eventually just factory reset the device so it had no information on it at all.
After the umpteenth time of not being found by my TV, a hard reset killed it. Just got stuck booting and never recovered.

Anyway - crap brand. Sad day for Sony TV fans.

Yes!

I was just talking to my wife about, if not this idea, then the ramifications of splitting. We were discussing how someone like Putin can stay in power, or how I think it would be touchy to have joint protests against Trump in the U.S., even as his support falters across the board – because I couldn’t imagine republicans with morals, disaffected MAGA, democrats, and leftists on the same side of a picket line.

I’m glad I have ADHD and will forget about this by tomorrow, or else I’d spend my weekend trying to figure out what temperature and droplet size makes the slipperiest ice. You can probably use far less water with a mist sprayer, assuming the mist doesn’t freeze before it hits the ground. (Saving water means better coverage by the time you run out, being my thinking.)

Well, it’s likely the DOGE cuts haven’t shown their impact just yet.

Of roughly 30 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration workers dismissed in February as part of Musk’s campaign to shrink the federal workforce, many were in the “office of vehicle automation safety,” — Car safety experts at NHTSA, which regulates Tesla, axed by DOGE

Personally, I’m sort of hoping for the same karma as when Elaine Chao was secretary of transportation and let Tesla roll out an untested and confusing shifting system, which later helped kill her sister.

Having just read a comment about someone who actually went through the process of having a kid by employing stuff like cycle and fertility tracking, scheduling both sex and abstinence, as well as other not-fun stuff, your comment made me think of taking the kink to an extreme, where instead of lots of rambunctious boning, it was a couple nerds doing intense and fruitless science to find the optimal way to impregnate someone that was impossible to impregnate. (Unless they start looking at the mating habits of bedbugs, but that’s a third, separate, entirely unhinged thing.)

I mean, I’m pretty sure I know which interpretation you meant. But brains are weird and I’m sleep deprived.

As someone who isn’t going to have kids and doesn’t want them, I still get the growing old alone concern.

It’s not that I would have wanted children to take care of me, but that I don’t trust the social safety system in the U.S.
Even if things are going well, it’s still a terrifying proposition. My first job ever was as a dietary aid at a mid-level retirement home, and while some of the people there were thriving (namely the folks who somehow managed to go into the home with their partners), the majority were a study of what happens when the ability to live exceeds the will. It was a formative experience.

That’s why I’m in therapy and desperately scared that between neurodivergence and trauma, that I’m not going to be one of those really social old people with friends everywhere that care for them and keep them company. Although I think it’s not a given that kids will automatically be there for you as you age, I can see the appeal of doing what you can to hedge your bets. It’s a terrifying world out there, and we only have each other.

Her name is Juniper! We mostly call her June Bug, though.

I’m not sure if I’m sharing the link the right way, but here’s Juniper and her big brother.

Work took a meta turn today.

Someone reached out to ask if I was really in all the meetings I’m booked for, only to give up and schedule their meeting for sometime in February because I didn’t respond in a very timely fashion … because I was in a meeting.