TGIF! [DOT 10/5/24]

10/5/24 MegMegMcGee 31
"I've only had half of four bottles of wine."

Header image is actual visual representation of me later tonight. It’s been that kind of week.

Updates here:
Stormy Daniels wraps up testimony in Trump hush money trial
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-hush-money-trial-05-09-24/index.html

Wow! That’s amazing.

Deaf baby hears for the first time after ‘groundbreaking’ gene therapy trial
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/09/opal-sandy-deaf-baby-gene-trial

Stonks!

Dow closes more than 300 points higher, securing 7th winning day: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/08/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

This sounds super fun!

Tenacious D review – Jack Black’s daft duo are deeply schooled in rock
https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/may/09/tenacious-d-review-jack-black-ao-arena-manchester

Remember:

Have a great weekend!

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31 Comments

  2. So, what email is best if Gmail sucks now? I have been on Gmail since it was a beta, I think, (my friend made me get it), but not sure what to move to.

      • 1. It was supposed to be free unlimited storage when I first got it and now they are telling me it’s full and I have to pay (might be my fault).

        2. Read/heard there are better, just lazy and didn’t do it when I heard about it so now I don’t know what to switch to.

        • The other thing about gmail is that their data scraping is relentless. I used to do work for this company and we would gmail files back and forth. The text of the files happened to be in Spanish. Gmail would read not only the gmails but the attachments (in Spanish) and tailor Spanish-language ads for me. Sadly for them I am not actually a 20-something native speaker of Spanish, so their efforts were for nought.

          But I too have a beta gmail account and I feel like I can’t give it up because that would just create even more chaos.

        • …the storage thing isn’t really your fault…their pitch back in the day was that you’d never have to cull your inbox to make space for new mail & your allowance would expand as time went on…which it kind of did…want to say it was only a gig or two when I started

          …but 15 was apparently their limit…which is arguably a contradiction of an explicit claim they made previously & I sort of wish I had the time in my hands to be a nuisance about

          …there’s always an alternative which is to either make extra accounts & use them to back up photos/files/whatsapp/whatever & then clear that out of the primary one that should then have space for working as an email account

          …or bulk download everything to your own local copy/backup & start over with 15GB of empty space?

          [P.S. …mic righteous/fitb…forgot his first one had them drown out a line where he said “free palestine”…better part of 15 years back, too…but that was a timely reminder in a few ways yesterday…so ya for that?]

          • Not going to lie. I don’t know a whole lot about Palestinian history but that was part of what drew me to Mic righteous as that was one of the first people I ever heard talk from that perspective.

            • …that was supposed to say “ta for that” not “ya for that”

              …but…yeah…me, neither…although I’ve known a few folks from there or thereabouts over the years…along with various people who’ve either lived in or visited family in israel…so I can’t remember not having a vague sense of how much more complicated it all is/was than I really grasped

              …along with a bit of similar not-really-but-sorta understanding about why algeria was sort of the poster-child for immigrant dissatisfaction in france & why occasionally the banlieues erupted into burning cars & such

              …on balance I’m probably less about his approach off the mic than that line of akala’s about how “I’m only nice in real life” but…nobody ever tried to stab me for being out of my ends & I’m old enough now to be largely invisible to rudeboys & roadmen so I don’t know that he runs with a crowd that are any more violence-prone than some reggae crews I’ve encountered with a much more chilled sound…sure can spit a bar, though

    • She’s lucky that they were aware of her deafness at a young age. I imagine that the boy who is receiving similar treatment 11 years old will have a hard time with heard/spoken language acquisition.

      Being part of the Deaf community and culture factors into these’s kids’ quality of life. The little girl has an older sister who is deaf. So she will likely be raised bilingual (Sign language & English) which is great.

  5. I decided to take the stairs to my 7th floor office this morning instead of the elevator to see how that would go.

    Not as bad as I’d feared, but yeah I need to do that regularly if I want to be brisk about it. *sits at desk and wonders about poor life choices*

      • Technically I’m supposed to work 8-5.

        Also me trying the stairs is Canada’s fault.

        I did lots of steps last weekend including in subway stations and I was like wow I’m doing okay on all these steps, let’s try the 7 floors of them at work. Not that I counted or anything but it was 140 steps and that was definitely more than I wanted.

    • Speaking of poor life choices. I’ve been experiencing hip pain for over a month which has impacted my lifestyle (for example I need to lift my leg with my hands to get into the car, I can’t run to save my or my children’s life, etc). It finally got so painful that I went to my Dr yesterday and it turns out I’ve been hobbling around with a partially dislocated leg. Yay me for being a fucking idiot and not seeing a Dr sooner. While getting X-rays, my leg popped back into place and I’m no longer in pain. Treatment plan is PT for now. But most likely I will need an MRI and hip surgery. This isn’t a new development, rather one I’ve been avoiding for years.

      • WTF?! I can’t imagine actually walking on a dislocated leg. Whenever my knee would dislocate it was the most excruciating pain I’d ever had.  It beats broken bones, being hit by a car and shingles. I’ve got a fairly high tolerance for pain, but holy shit.

        • I blame it on the being a woman factor. Our pain tolerance threshold is higher especially in hip/lower back area not because it doesn’t hurt. We are so used to having our pain be dismissed by others that we internalize that messaging (see: menstrual cramps, endometriosis, pregnancy, child birth, etc).

      • It is the year of physical therapy, Hammie! I can’t tell you how many people I know, including myself, who are undergoing physical therapy right now. The people I know IRL are all getting older and creakier. I happen to love my physical therapist, a great motivator and source of hope, so maybe I’ll be puttin’ on the Ritz sometime soon.

        • There are a ton of kids with sports injuries if you go after school lets out. I took my son when he was recovering from a few different injuries and there were always other kids in braces and slings in the witing room.

  6. The Koch family rightwing astroturf money fountain FreedomWorks is shutting down.

    This nonsensical subhed is an example of the whitewashing going on:

    The libertarian organization couldn’t survive the populist shift in the Republican Party

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/08/freedomworks-is-closing-and-blaming-trump-00156784

    Where to start? First off, the group and the Kochs weren’t libertarian, they have always been warriors for authoritarianism. They were always enemies of voting rights and expanded access to the ballot, and warriors for moving power to shady backrooms run by the right.

    Reporters don’t care how dumb they appear by suggesting “populism” has anything to do with the group’s demise while also noting FreedomWorks manufactured the Tea Party. The political press has overwhelmingly been stenographers for their PR from the beginning and now at the bitter end.

    What’s happened is simple: Trump wants his groups to get the money, and it’s easier to dissolve a group with a technically independent board and fundraising network than it is to rebuild it.

    The Kochs could have funded and expanded FreedomWorks if they wanted. They’re going to throw their money to the new power brokers in the GOP instead.

    • We should thank MLB, the collapse of the RSN and cutting the cord for that.

      If MLB hadn’t charged massive amounts of money for MLB broadcasting rights then the RSNs (regional sports networks) wouldn’t be facing bankruptcy during the era where many people are cutting the cord thus reducing the RSNs revenue streams.

      Since Sinclair decided to buy up a number of these RSNs, they lost a lot of money and thanks to high interest rates a painful debt so they need to unload (diminishing) assets to keep themselves afloat.

      • The broadcast business is a longterm loser too. They were banking on a huge bump in political advertising in the short run but that’s not panning out either. And the fees they get from cable for rebroadcasting rights for local TV keep shrinking.

        One thing that’s interesting to me is that local broadcasters were given a huge gift with spectrum reallocation which let them broadcast multiple channels at once.

        But they never did anything with the subchannels except show 60 year old westerns and endless loops of weather radar.

    • So maternal and fetal healthcare seeing exactly the outcomes that experts said would happen when the Supreme Court was overturning Dobbs? Wow amazing how that turned out.

      I want to add another flavor of yep this is bad. Doctors often suck, primary care doctors often suck, and people who don’t have any pressing medical concerns will skip annual check ups.

      However, most women will still see their obgyn annually to keep their birth control prescription or for their pap smear or whatever else reason. In the decade I didn’t have a primary care doc due to a combo of shitty insurance and being treated like crap by the previous primary care doctor, that obgyn office had the only medical professional I saw annually. And they know people do this because my annual obgyn visit includes checking blood pressure, listening to my lungs, checking my thyroid gland, etc.

      So losing obgyns will trickle down to negatively impact overall women’s health because they’re catching other health issues when they do see women in their practices.

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