Wednesday [DOT 7/12/22]

7/12/22 MegMegMcGee 32

Header image is an actual visual representation of me this week.

I’ve got a second cold, after I just got over the first one. I had a Covid test and a Strep test. Covid was negative, which I assumed it would be, and the Strep test isn’t back yet. They gave me antibiotics but I didn’t want to start taking them til the test comes back; no point in taking them if I don’t actually need them.

Hope your week is going better!

Look, I’ll be passed out in a Nyquil haze tonight but I hope Warnock wins and I can’t for the life of me understand how this is even close.

Georgia runoff election: tight contest in crucial Senate race – follow live
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2022/dec/06/georgia-runoff-election-raphael-warnock-herschel-walker-senate-vote-latest

LULZ

Trump Organization guilty of tax fraud, New York jury finds
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/06/trump-organization-guilty-verdict-tax-fraud

McTurtle standing there with his hand out being ignored is bringing me joy.

Bond Villain or Austin Powers Villain?

Musk’s Neuralink faces federal inquiry after killing 1,500 animals in testing
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/05/neuralink-animal-testing-elon-musk-investigation

Sprots?

Stonks!

Tim Cook says Apple will use chips built in the U.S. at Arizona factory
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/06/tim-cook-says-apple-will-use-chips-built-in-the-us-at-arizona-factory.html

Up in the air was the last place I didn’t have to listen to “Chads” on their speakerphones. This seems terrible!

Europe will soon allow phone calls on flights. Will the U.S. be next?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/12/06/5g-planes-phone-calls-europe/

Have a great day!

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32 Comments

  1. …the neuralink thing makes me predictably mad…mostly because it’s an error specifically made by an asshole who uses money as his primary means to prevent people gainsaying him…but also doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about or seem to have the ability to think things through

    …as the article notes other companies with more modestly stated goals have made progress further towards enabling the stuff he says he wants the neuralink to be able to do with a fraction of the zoological butcher’s bill…even if you adjust the figures to not include the ones whose demise has a straightforward linear set of cause & effects from his ignorant impatience with the people tasked with turning his conjecture into reality to their unnecessary death for a result of effectively negative progress towards the stated goal

    …bond villains are grandiose to a fault with baroque tendencies…but they also have moderately-too-extremely-competent henchmen

    …austin powers villains are grotesque parodies with absurd self-images capable of misjudging the appropriate dollar value of something by orders of magnitude who are routinely disappointed by their minions

    …he seems to have at least bond-villain-grade staff in several of these companies (including until recently twitter, even)…but he himself I vote austin powers…by a landslide

    …no way he rates bond villain levels of respect

  4. When I graduated at the ass end of my engineering class, I was greeted by several professors who were probably stunned I graduated.

    In front of my parents (to their embarrassment) and several hundred onlookers I shook most of their hands except two. Those two could go fuck themselves.

    • You did a modified Tiffany Trump!

      And I’d still like to know what’s wrong with Eric Trump’s mouth, why it always goes into a feral baring of teeth. And why does The Donald’s look like a puckering…well, you know. I went to thesaurus.com to find a euphemism and learned that one is “Gary Glitter (British, idiomatic).”

  5. …well…shit

    Twenty-five people including a 71-year-old German aristocrat, a retired military commander and former MP for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have been detained in Germany on suspicion of a terrorist plan to overthrow the state and renegotiate the country’s post-second world war settlement.
    […]
    Federal prosecutors said 3,000 officers conducted searches at 130 sites in 11 of Germany’s 16 states against the group, whose members it said adhered to a “conglomerate of conspiracy theories” including the QAnon cult and the so-called Reich Citizens movement.
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/07/german-police-raids-target-far-right-reich-citizens-movement

    …my first thought was remembering that time bannon got evicted from some sort of medieval compound in italy he was trying to turn into an academy for this brand of bullshit…but…as I’m sure we’re all shocked to hear…the german lot would appear to have tried quite hard to communicate with some russians they seemed to think might declare an interest they’d be pleased to lend a helping hand to?

    • If this is the same group I read about maybe six months ago, the purpose is not to restore the Third Reich but to restore the Hohenzollern monarchy, which met its end at the conclusion of the First World War and the creation of the Weimar Republic. If they have any territorial claims, and I’m sure they do, they would like back at least half of modern-day Poland, which was German until 1918 (the rest belonged to Imperial Russia; there was no modern Poland until 1918/1919 when it was created through the Treaty of Versailles.)

      • …I think that’s the one, yes…or at least that’s the way their version of insurrection mad libs™ (sponsored by qanon & uncle vlad) ended up?

        …somewhere there’s presumably a telegram group of middle-england-ers with a plan to roll back magna carta & reclaim sovereignty over their sovereign by taking up the stewart regency or some such bollocks…which I can only hope would be as adroitly netted by whichever of the MIs it is that does domestic stuff…ditto basques/insert disaffected minority & da vinci code grade pretext for national rule +/- potential for the state to play the good guys convincingly

        …they have some unenviable historical baggage but it can be hard not to admire that german efficiency sometimes?

  6. I don’t understand this business of bellowing into your phone while holding it a foot away from you and putting it on speaker. I don’t want people hearing my phone calls. Plus you look like an idiot.

    The latest one I saw was a middle-aged woman Facetiming in the middle of a restaurant. What the hell is that all about? Why do you have to stare at each other and yell while other people are eating?

    If I want to have an extended conversation while friends or family (maybe once a month?) I do it from my house where I can go into another room and shut the door. My wife has to yell at her mother on the phone because her mother is deaf — she goes into one of the bedrooms and shuts the door. I don’t need to hear that.

    And who talks on phones anyway? Text that shit. It makes you focus on what’s important so you’re not wasting everybody’s time.

    I’d yell get off my lawn, but I don’t want to go back to the old days. Text that shit.

    • …so…I’m sure there are other reasons…but way back when phones were mobile-but-dumb someone I knew did the hold-it-flat-in-front-of-your-mouth instead of the usual speaker-to-ear-mic-to-mouth orientation & when I asked why they said they didn’t trust the device didn’t need to have signals streaming in & out of it that might fuck with your head…not specifically microwaves cooking his brain in a chemtrail-esque way…just “it’s new so there’s no long term data yet” with a side of “better safe than sorry”
      […caveat for people of “a certain age” – there’s a degree of overlap with ways some hearing aids work which explains some cases…but in my limited experience more have to do with habit-of-lifetime stuff about landlines that never had control over the volume of either mic input levels or speaker volumes…one of which the user controls on most modern phones & the other of which a lot of clever technical people have spent a lot of time & money on making something nobody needs to fiddle with?]

      …I’m sure that’s been cooled off, simmered, boiled over a few times & generally stuck in some folks’ habits over the years, although I’ve never really gone in for it, myself

      …the other side of the thing fascinates me almost as much as it frequently aggravates me…even not on a phone there’s something about broadcasting your conversation to the point that people have no choice but to hear it seems varying degrees of unwise in light of the amount of fraud/identity theft stuff with social engineering components just on a self-interest basis…the anti-social side of it is a whole other ball of wax & my baseline arguably doesn’t suit, say, california or some of the places I’ve spent time in new york to pick two coastal bits of anecdata…but truthfully I don’t understand its appeal

      …my best guess is that it’s the aural equivalent of man-spreading…it’s a way to lay claim to an outsized “ownership” of a shared space based on a reliance that others won’t follow suit that somehow bypasses the logic suggesting that’s a solipsistic/selfish tactic to employ in several senses…but I suspect at its most benign a lot of it boils down to things related to how comfortable they feel (or, I guess, want to present to others as feeling) in whatever space it is

      …at least from the way people I’ve seen asked to knock it off seem to react, anyway…ymmv…anecdata all the way…yadda yadda…& so on & so forth?

      • You’re right that hearing issues sometimes are what’s happening.

        Sometimes it’s due to a hardware or software problem that has screwed up the sound on the phone and only the speaker/mic combo works. Or someone just screwed up their settings.

        But often it’s just a bad habit.

    • It’s what they see reality TV show “stars” doing for the benefit of the slack-jawed viewers. If Faithful Hound and I are strolling about and one is particularly obnoxious I just start laughing loudly. The speaker is always oblivious to this but sometimes this will also raise additional laughter from other pedestrians.

  7. Is there any way to convert the Deadsplinter Gofundme$$$ into a relief fund for the Trump Company?

    Recently the call for Biden to pardon Trump to heal America has grown to include Geraldo Rivera and a partner in the law firm which had another partner help out with Trump’s infamous 2020 Georgia call. But healing America won’t get Trump his precious money back. Can’t we help?

    • It’s going to be okay. There are literally millions of idiots running for their checkbooks right now. I think it best that we stand back and let them do what they do best.

      • I’m afraid, though, that 99% of those donations are being funnelled to ripoff artists. We need to make sure money is going straight to Trump. When he’s gone, who will take care of Eric and Don Jr.?

        • They can join Armie Hammer and sell timeshares in the Cayman Islands. They are real estate experts and multitalented salesmen after all. Ewww. I just imagined being in the same room with one of them and hearing, “And this is the master suite which can fit a king-size bed and the en suite bathroom features a chromotherapy rainforest shower…”

        • …the levels of concern you display for the mentally-challenged are…whilst doubtless signalling levels of virtue even someone posting tik tok videos from the driver’s seat of a pickup while wearing mirror shades could only aspire to…are…well…I’d like to say peerless example to us all…but as bryan points out…that would be wishful thinking

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