Hope everyone had a good week!
Hopefully this didn’t effect you too much:
Microsoft, CrowdStrike outage disrupts travel and business worldwide
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/19/windows-outage-crowdstrike-cancellations-computer
Twelve more Democrats, including two senators, call on Biden to drop out
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/19/democrats-biden-withdraw-clash
Stonks!
Dow tumbles more than 370 points, S&P 500 posts worst week since April as investors dump big tech: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/18/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
Sprots!
At WNBA All-Star Game, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese go from rivals to teammates
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/07/19/wnba-all-star-game-angel-reese-caitlin-clark
#RIP
Laura Coates shares her personal admiration for Rep. Jackson Lee
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/19/politics/video/sheila-jackson-lee-dead-74-coates-digvid
Today in fun!
Have a fabulous weekend!
You know, I was going to vote for Biden. But all of these Reasonable People keep telling me he should drop out of the race. Plus, Trump seems so Presidential since the shooting. So I guess I’ll vote for him instead.
That’s how these assholes really think it’s going to play out, don’t they?
My stab in the dark is the PR battle is whether to depict a switch to Harris is a move out of desperation or a move of strength. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reality is it started out as the first but is increasingly the second.
Yeah, I keep reading things that suggest that Biden will step aside but they’re working to time it as carefully as possible to give Harris a boost. “Democrats in Disarray” is a persistent PR gift to Republicans, so if Biden did drop out it’s got to look like it’s part of a plan, not an “oh fuck oh fuck” move.
…not sure I quite grok the plan nancy has if she’s for the open convention option…if they had some road to damascus moment & everyone was ready to agree in the first round & there’s an option other than kamala that can overcome the shortfall in funding…maybe it’s a masterplan…but it seems like an invitation to a piss-up at a brewery…which proverbially is not a good point of comparison?
I was just reading how that Microsoft/Crowdstrike catastrophe stranded the RNC in Milwaukee. Apparently it’s pretty easy to get to Chicago. I think they have commuter trains. But then once in Chicago they were trapped. No flights, no information, no nothing. And if you’ve ever been to O’Hare (shudders)
Apparently the United Airlines desk people were handing out vouchers for a local Holiday Inn. Problem is, that Holiday Inn has been closed for months to the general public as it is now being used to house migrants. The delegates shared their thoughts.
It reminded me slightly of 9/11. BH happened to be in Atlanta. He took his rental car to the rental car agency and said, “I’m going to hang onto this, if you don’t mind. I’m going to try to get back to New York.” “Keep it for as long as you need to.”
So he did this epic road trip. Eventually he made his way to the five boroughs but all the bridges and tunnels were sealed off. He went up to the George Washington and a cop took pity on him and let hm cross. Once on the Manhattan side he joined hundreds of fire trucks and EMS vehicles and police cruisers and they all headed downtown. He arrived home at 3:30 am on Thursday, 9/13.
O’Hare is the absolute worst on a normal day. That said, it amuses me no end that Republican fucks got stranded there.
“oh wow, great that we landed 20 minutes early, let’s now take 30 minutes to just slowly drive around the ginormous tarmac” – every experience I’ve had at O’Hare.
It’s interesting how some things about air travel have changed enormously since 9/11 and some things have barely changed at all.
Security is an obvious one. Customer service was a mess before and it’s still a mess. Flight safety has gotten even better, though. The last major incident in the US was 2009 when 50 people died in a crash near Buffalo. It feels like they peaked about 8-10 years ago in terms of fees, weird fare fluctuations, indecipherable pricing, and other forms of making ticket buying a nightmare. They haven’t gotten better but they seem to have squeezed about as much out that as they can. Airport food is better as airplane food has disappeared.
When we…this seems like something out of a fever dream. So we had our little bolthole in Miami/South Beach and used to visit LA really frequently. Pre-9/11 we’d show up like 20 minutes early, check ourselves in, hand the luggage over, and be on our way. And the flights were always on-time and there were plenty of them. I think the AA JFK -> LAX route had a dozen on any given morning. Now they’re down to one. Who knows why. There still must be plenty of traffic between NYC and LA. Maybe everyone just got fed up and is flying private.
I remember flying to Salt Lake City back in the 90s and there were, I kid you not, like 35 people on the flight. Almost the whole plane was empty. I rarely see an empty seat now, much less an entire airplane.
Their used to be more strict rules about flight having to operate regardless of load back in the day. Also, pre-internet it was much harder to sell last minute seats. When I worked for an airline, I flew on an almost empty 747 & slept in an entire middle row from DFW to HNL.
i swear if yous…….twats…vote in trump again….im disowning yous
sorry…there may be good americans….but not enough to worry about
but you know…..i dont take myself to seriously….and yous probably shouldnt either
That’s fair.
Nobody was impressed.
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Trump’s acceptance speech at the RNC was not well-received
I read more than once that at 93 minutes his acceptance speech was the longest in history. I find that hard to believe. From the Civil War period to WWI politicians used to drone on and on for hours. To say nothing of the filibusters, which can go on for many hours. William Jennings Bryan kept his remarks brief when he was selected by the Democrats? But it looks like it’s true.
That’s approaching Kim’s Inconvenience (as in North Korea) territory. Those arrogant fucks could go on and on. Supposedly Kim Jong Un is not one for words so there’s that.
…maybe it scores top marks because the field is specifically conference speeches accepting the nomination?
…one version I heard was the bookends were about 15-20mins of solidly engineered stuff that was “on message” & the balance was him just inserting the greatest hits with zero consciousness of context?
I think RIP’s right — I think they meant it was the longest acceptance speech for a presidential nomination in history.
On the other hand, to your point, we don’t have recordings of all the other nomination acceptance speeches that were given before recording existed, and those old-time dudes were absolutely long-winded. So I’m not sure it’s a valid claim either.
Sprots!
https://www.wktv.com/news/hall-of-fame-weekend-underway-in-cooperstown/article_2256bce0-463a-11ef-b38b-1fcbd5490a33.html
Even if you have no interest in baseball, like I do, or don’t, I have no interest in baseball, I still recommend a trip to Cooperstown, especially in summer. There are loads of Victorian-era B&Bs to stay at (it’s like a landlocked Cape May) and it’s at the southern end of lovely Lake Otsego, which provides for plenty of aquatic recreation. There’s a really good restaurant on a kind of wharf jutting into the lake and it’s not expensive, especially by Manhattan standards. There are other attractions too, like arcades I think, and antique stores. And the whole place is so wholesome and all-American and kid-friendly. You cannot help but be charmed.
My niece’s family is there right now w/ one of her son’s little league teams. The boys were in the championship game but lost. My nephew hit a grandslam in the game before the championship.
Excellent! I hope they try the many varieties of ice cream. I doubt they’ll be able to avoid it.
Even in my time in Telco we never trusted MS servers with critical stuff. It was usually the late SUN or now Oracle servers loaded with whatever version of UNIX/Linux Apache. Why should we? MS Security is a damn farce. If a moron like me could hack into NT 4.0 back when then geez someone with actual talent can really do a number.
It somewhat scares me the airline/ATC system relies on MS stuff.
Definitely a bunch of people got fired at Crowdstrike. I feel bad as their oopsy made international headlines and ruined a number of peoples Friday.
Shockingly, work got knocked out as our network runs on MS Server. Night and day shift pretty much did shit all so us dumbshits on afternoons got the brunt of it. Management went into full on panic mode so we suffered all their dumb panicked decisions.
A couple of folks lost their minds and started yelling. It might surprise some (or all of you) that I was not one of them.
I was more like this guy…
Microsoft has turned into IBM with their main value at this point being people who are committed look at the cost and time of switching away and throw up their hands.
Any time people start from scratch, whether its a tablet or a complete network, want something different.
None of our applications use anything in the MS suite, but a few vendors do so we had a lot of scrambling to see just how good our resiliency plans and DR were. Turned out we were okay until the shit could get bandaided by Microsoft.
I … don’t actually disagree with a word of that.
Just remove RW. It’s the billionaires period.
I don’t know if this is true but if it is I love it!
As Trump might call it “Helter Shelter!”
The late great Charles Manson!