…it’s a funny thing…but when you don’t sleep properly it’s actually not that easy to wind up hung over on account of waking up before it really has a shot at getting itself established…so it isn’t on account of being hungover from yesterday…although I gave it a pretty good shot…but I don’t think I can do the full run of links I cobbled together today…partly because (as ever) there’s just too many of the damn things…& partly because I’m trying not to let this devolve into me ranting about why I don’t need to hear from tony blair about anything ever again…much less his opinion of the current mess in a part of the world he didn’t do a lot of favors
Tony Blair branded Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw “imbecilic”, while cabinet insiders suggested the president was “gaga” and “doolally” for withdrawing so fast.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tony-blair-attacks-joe-bidens-imbecilic-afghanistan-retreat-as-kabul-chaos-deepens-jw782ghxr
…what the hell he thinks he’s helping with that kind of thing is a mystery to me…& why anyone’s asking for the opinion of a man who still seems more interested in refusing to admit his own mistakes than really understanding who might be responsible for any that have been made since he ceased to be in power is entirely beyond me…but then what do I know?
It’s possible to have sympathy for some of the unvaccinated, especially workers who find it hard to take time off to get a shot and are worried about losing a day to aftereffects. But there’s much less excuse for those who refuse to get their shots or wear masks for cultural or ideological reasons — and no excuse at all for MAGA governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas and Doug Ducey in Arizona who have been actively impeding efforts to contain the latest outbreak.
So how do you feel about anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers? I’m angry about their antics, even though I’m able to work from home and don’t have school-age children. And I suspect that many Americans share that anger.
The question is whether this entirely justified anger — call it the rage of the responsible — will have a political impact, whether leaders will stand up for the interests of Americans who are trying to do the right thing but whose lives are being disrupted and endangered by those who aren’t.
To say what should be obvious, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in public spaces aren’t “personal choices.” When you reject your shots or refuse to mask up, you’re increasing my risk of catching a potentially deadly or disabling disease, and also helping to perpetuate the social and economic costs of the pandemic. In a very real sense, the irresponsible minority is depriving the rest of us of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Furthermore, to say something that should also be obvious, those claiming that their opposition to public health measures is about protecting “freedom” aren’t being honest.
The Quiet Rage of the Responsible [NYT]
[…]
Also, it’s striking how quickly supposed conservative principles have been abandoned wherever honoring those principles would help rather than hurt attempts to contain the pandemic.
…not too hard to follow…but…well…what does that say about this?
Last week, some of the world’s leading climate change scientists confirmed that humans are making irreversible changes to our planet and extreme weather will only become more severe. This news is a “code red for humanity,” said the United Nations secretary general.
It is — but young people like us have been sounding this alarm for years. You just haven’t listened.
This Is the World Being Left to Us by Adults [NYT]
[…]
For children and young people, climate change is the single greatest threat to our futures. We are the ones who will have to clean up the mess you adults have made, and we are the ones who are more likely to suffer now. Children are more vulnerable than adults to the dangerous weather events, diseases and other harms caused by climate change, which is why a new analysis released Friday by UNICEF is so important.
[…]
It finds that virtually every child on the planet is exposed to at least one climate or environmental hazard right now. A staggering 850 million, about a third of all the world’s children, are exposed to four or more climate or environmental hazards, including heat waves, cyclones, air pollution, flooding or water scarcity. A billion children, nearly half the children in the world, live in “extremely high risk” countries, the UNICEF researchers report.
…aside from how about we don’t ask tony “sincerity is a substitute for integrity” blair, for a start
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has hit the highest annual level in a decade, a new report has shown, despite increasing global concern over the accelerating devastation since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019.
Between August 2020 and July 2021, the rainforest lost 10.476 square kilometers – an area nearly seven times bigger than greater London and 13 times the size of New York City, according to data released by Imazon, a Brazilian research institute that has been tracking the Amazon deforestation since 2008. The figure is 57% higher than in the previous year and is the worst since 2012.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/20/brazil-amazon-deforestation-report-bolsonaro-climate
Rain has fallen on the summit of Greenland’s huge ice cap for the first time on record. Temperatures are normally well below freezing on the 3,216-metre (10,551ft) peak, and the precipitation is a stark sign of the climate crisis.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/20/rain-falls-peak-greenland-ice-cap-first-time-on-record-climate-crisis
A tsunami of electric vehicles is expected in rich countries, as car companies and governments pledge to ramp up their numbers – there are predicted be 145m on the roads by 2030. But while electric vehicles can play an important role in reducing emissions, they also contain a potential environmental timebomb: their batteries.
By one estimate, more than 12m tons of lithium-ion batteries are expected to retire between now and 2030.
Not only do these batteries require large amounts of raw materials, including lithium, nickel and cobalt – mining for which has climate, environmental and human rights impacts – they also threaten to leave a mountain of electronic waste as they reach the end of their lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/20/electric-car-batteries-what-happens-to-them
…in fact the list of people I could do with never hearing from again is a long one…I just wish there were a way to make it happen
Speaking of segues, Sean Hannity is at it again. If you manage to sleep at night because you say to yourself, “Well, Hannity may say many things on his show that are alarming, but at least he doesn’t use unfolding tragedies to shill for nonsense pillows,” I regret to inform you that those days are over.
[…]
“There is a stampede, not only out of Afghanistan, but a stampede away from high prices, overpriced service from the big carriers like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile. The average family making the switch to PureTalk.” — Sean Hannity on his radio show, Aug. 16, 2021“How would you like to be in Kabul today, as an American, and you can’t get to the airport? Where are you thinking your life is headed? If you’re one of those family members, I bet you’re not sleeping. … MyPillow.com. That’s where I go. I fall asleep faster, I stay asleep longer.” — Sean Hannity on his radio show, Aug. 17, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/sean-hannity-mypillow-afghanistan-radio-show/
…there’s always an angle
At a sunny anti-vaccine protest in front of the State House in Augusta, Maine, a Republican lawmaker compared the Democratic governor’s new immunization requirement for health-care workers to the medical experiments performed by Nazis during World War II.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/20/maine-heidi-sampson-nazi-vaccine/
…but
Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers and Nigerian scammers have used stolen identities to plunder tens of billions of dollars in Covid benefits, spiriting the money overseas in a massive transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers, officials and experts say. And they say it is still happening.
Among the ripest targets for the cybertheft have been jobless programs. The federal government cannot say for sure how much of the more than $900 billion in pandemic-related unemployment relief has been stolen, but credible estimates range from $87 million to $400 billion — at least half of which went to foreign criminals, law enforcement officials say.
Those staggering sums dwarf, even on the low end, what the federal government spends every year on intelligence collection, food stamps or K-12 education.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/easy-money-how-international-scam-artists-pulled-epic-theft-covid-n1276789
[…]
While the enormous scope of Covid relief fraud has been clear for some time, scant attention has been paid to the role of organized foreign criminal groups, who move taxpayer money overseas via laundering schemes involving payment apps and “money mules,” law enforcement officials said.
[…]
At home, prison inmates and drug gangs got in on the action. But experts say the best-organized efforts came from abroad, with criminals from nearly every country swooping in to steal on an industrial scale.
…does it have to be so shallow?
When Lauren Boebert, the gun-toting Republican firebrand, was running for Congress last year, she traced her income to Shooters Grill, a restaurant she and her husband own in Rifle, Colo.
She suggested her husband also did some consulting, listing “Boebert Consulting — spouse” on her candidate form, but identified his income source as “N/A.”
Only now, with Boebert not just in Congress but on the House Natural Resources Committee, has she revealed that her husband made $478,000 last year working as a consultant for an energy firm. He made $460,000 the year before, she disclosed in a filing Tuesday with the House of Representatives. Her husband, Jayson Boebert, earned that income as a consultant for Terra Energy Productions, according to the filing.
Boebert has been a staunch advocate for the energy industry during her first six months in office, introducing a bill in February seeking to bar the president from issuing moratoriums on oil and gas leasing and permitting on some federal land.
Federal law requires members of Congress, as well as candidates, to file financial disclosure statements that include the income and assets of spouses and dependent children. Boebert’s failure to report her husband’s income from energy consulting plainly violates that requirement, said Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics for the Campaign Legal Center and a former deputy chief counsel in the Office of Congressional Ethics.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/19/boebert-energy-financial-disclosure/
…what am I saying…of course it fucking does
Six months after the conclusion of the last impeachment, Republicans have begun calling for President Biden to be removed from office over his handling of the evacuation of Americans and allies from Kabul.
“If we leave one American behind, if we don’t get all those Afghans who stepped up to the plate to help us out, then Joe Biden, in my view, has committed a high crime and misdemeanor under the Constitution and should be impeached,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) said Friday on Fox News.
On Monday, Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the No. 3 Republican in House leadership, called for Biden’s ousting amid the evacuation chaos at Kabul’s airport. “Joe Biden is unfit to serve as President of the United States of America,” Stefanik wrote on Twitter, a phrase she has reiterated several times since.
Add those comments to the sentiment from GOP provocateurs who draw outsize attention on conservative news, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who announced Thursday night that she would introduce articles of impeachment related to Afghanistan.
[…]
That would be the third impeachment proceeding in less than four years — matching the total number of impeachments in the previous 228.Those first two had consequence: Johnson survived the Senate trial but was politically weakened and lost his party’s nomination a few months later, and Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, before the full House voted on three articles of impeachment against him.
The era of perpetual presidential impeachment is here [WaPo]
…but…I thought this dog & pony show had packed it in after they spent more money than they raised on one of these echo chambers a while back?
Far from Washington, and even farther from their home congressional districts, Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia found their people.
As the two Republican lawmakers spoke at an “America First” rally in Des Moines, held in an auditorium that often hosts people with presidential aspirations, up was down and misinformation was gospel. Ms. Greene denounced Covid-19 vaccines to applause. Both declared former President Donald J. Trump the rightful winner of the 2020 election.
[…]
The fringe of the Republican Party is sick of being called the fringe. Led by people like Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz, two upstart members of Congress with little legislative power and few allies in their party’s caucus, these conservatives believe they have assets more valuable than Washington clout: a shared language with the party’s base, and a political intuition that echoes Mr. Trump’s.In the months since the former president left the White House, Republican donors and party leaders have flocked to more established figures like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, stirring buzz for their presidential prospects. At the same time, right-wing Republicans like Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz are loudly making the case that the post-Trump version of the Republican Party won’t swing back toward the center but will double down on the former president’s most controversial qualities.
[…]
They sought to up the rhetorical ante on issue after issue, creating new litmus tests for their conservative rivals in the process.
[…]
In Washington, the two members of Congress are treated like little more than a media sideshow, a nuisance for Republican leaders. They do not have traditional legislative power, and antics like Ms. Greene’s promise to bring impeachment articles against Mr. Biden gain no traction in Congress.
[…]
At the rally, Ms. Greene called Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who is Somali-born, “a traitor to America.” Mr. Gaetz said that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the first Black person to serve in that role, “might be the stupidest person to have ever served in a presidential cabinet in America’s history.” Ms. Greene declared that the United States faced a new “axis of evil” made up of the news media, Democrats and big tech companies. They both promised to support the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters who had been arrested.Each comment drew applause.
In Iowa, Gaetz and Greene Pick Up Where Trump Left Off [NYT]
…although…again with the nothing new, I suppose
When Facebook this week released its first quarterly report about the most viewed posts in the United States, Guy Rosen, its vice president of integrity, said the social network had undertaken “a long journey” to be “by far the most transparent platform on the internet.” The list showed that the posts with the most reach tended to be innocuous content like recipes and cute animals.
Facebook had prepared a similar report for the first three months of the year, but executives never shared it with the public because of concerns that it would look bad for the company, according to internal emails sent by executives and shared with The New York Times.
In that report, a copy of which was provided to The Times, the most-viewed link was a news article with a headline suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine was at fault for the death of a Florida doctor. The report also showed that a Facebook page for The Epoch Times, an anti-China newspaper that spreads right-wing conspiracy theories, was the 19th-most-popular page on the platform for the first three months of 2021.
The report was nearing public release when some executives, including Alex Schultz, Facebook’s vice president of analytics and chief marketing officer, debated whether it would cause a public relations problem, according to the internal emails. The company decided to shelve it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/facebook-popular-posts.html
…unless this counts as new
Five Taliban websites that were key to how the militant group delivered its official messages to those inside and outside Afghanistan abruptly went offline Friday, a sign that moves to limit the Taliban’s online reach were gaining traction.
It was not immediately clear who or what took the Taliban sites offline, though all five previously had protection from CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based company that helps websites deliver content and defend against cyberattacks. The company did not respond to a request for comment Friday on whether it was still protecting the Taliban sites, which had versions in Pashto, Dari, Arabic, Urdu and English. All were offline Friday afternoon.
SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism, said numerous WhatsApp groups used by the Taliban also had been shut down by Friday. WhatsApp, an encrypted chat service used widely in much of the world, is owned by Facebook, which has banned official Taliban accounts from its services.
WhatsApp spokeswoman Alison Bonny declined to comment on whether the company had taken new action against the Taliban on Friday, but she reiterated previous Facebook company statements on the subject generally: “We’re obligated to adhere to U.S. sanctions laws. This includes banning accounts that appear to represent themselves as official accounts of the Taliban. We’re seeking more information from relevant U.S. authorities given the evolving situation in Afghanistan.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/20/taliban-internet-websites-twitter-facebook/
…which reminds me…I don’t spend a lot of time on twitter…& since they seem to have decided sometime in the last week that I can’t read threads or more than a couple of replies on my phone without logging in I don’t expect that’s going to change a whole lot…but I did come across this…& I figured if I did use twitter much I’d certainly look into it…so…for anyone as might be inclined to find it useful
…anyway…I think it’s about time the tunes hove into view
The UN might have a tad more credibility if it didn’t do things like this:
Election of the Human Rights Council (13 October 2020)
The General Assembly elected the following 15 members:
Bolivia, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, France, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan,
Russian Federation, Senegal, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.
All 15 members will serve three-year terms beginning on 1 January 2021.
What’s not mentioned is that her husband worked in the oil/gas industry as a drilling supervisor. We’re not talking the kind of expertise that oil and gas companies give almost a million over 2 years as compensation as a mere consultant.
For influence peddling, er lobbying, sure.
I think its a straight out fucking bribe done by someone (Terra) who knows what they’re fucking doing which is being undone/getting undue attention because someone (Bobo) who’s too stupid to money launder it properly.
Apparently they were also losing money on that food poisoning spreader of a restaurant of theirs (pre-CoVID.)
Also, good for Tony Blair for amplifying the useful word “doolally.”
…I may be overly averse to giving blair credit…but to be fair in this case that’s not it so much as it was some “cabinet insider” who used that term…so someone from “the other team”…albeit one that it’s been argued would have been a more natural fit for ol’ tone
…doolally deserves a better class of patron either way…not least because it’s a remarkably apt term given that it started out as a slang reference to a staging camp in india where people stuck waiting to be hauled home might exhibit “eccentric” behavior
…not sure I’d lay odds of the “cabinet insider” in question happening to know that…but I guess that don’t mean it ain’t true?
One of the things about Britain that’s so remarkable is that there are so many “insiders.” Cabinet insiders. Palace insiders. I was just reading today (American press, so maybe garbled in translation) that the Queen was “lawyering up” in advance of Harry’s “memoir” and is sending threatening notes to PenguinRandomHouse, his publisher, advising them of libel lawsuits that may be in their future. This is according to a “Palace insider.”
In America, we have the press relaying accounts from sources who “spoke on the condition of anonymity,” which is the same thing. And about as trustworthy, but the Times and the WashPo love these sources.
oh wow…i forgot about tony bland
thruthfully…im surprised americas lapdog has an opinion
tho…in this one case,,,as the uk started lifting people out months ago..as did france..he may have a point..
It’s possible to have sympathy for some of the unvaccinated, especially workers who find it hard to take time off to get a shot and are worried about losing a day to aftereffects.
over here you get time off for it…well… not exactly time off….its short leave
brb getting jabbed…back in an hour
okay cu later dont forget the 5g has a different wifi password!
A tsunami of electric vehicles is expected in rich countries, as car companies and governments pledge to ramp up their numbers – there are predicted be 145m on the roads by 2030. But while electric vehicles can play an important role in reducing emissions, they also contain a potential environmental timebomb: their batteries.
ive been saying it all along…them cheap used lectrics aint gone be so cheap…
anyways….its a moot point… we do not have the infrastructure to make electric cars viable for all….and likely never will
its a toy for middle class suburbanites
personally…i think hydrogen is the way…as that would just require installing an extra pump at existing gas stations (admittedly…still a mammoth task…but a lot easier than installing charging points for all…also doesnt take longer than gas to refuel..unlike charging)
seems like only toyota is interested in that one tho….guess its not as sexy as lectric
soo..i guess thats also a moot point
I never understood why we didn’t look at how to do solar panel cells on roofs/trunks of electric cars to charge the batteries while they sit.
Like I have no garage nor convenient outdoor power outlet. So the likelihood of me getting an electric car is basically nonexistent because I couldn’t even keep it charged easily for my daily work, let alone thinking about longer drives and no infrastructure.
…I know someone who’s been wondering for a long time why nobody tried to develop hybrids that were basically electric cars with an efficient gas-burning element that was basically just a generator…it’d allow for continuing to use existing infrastructure but consuming a lot less fuel
…I never had a good answer but it seems like an option that’s not ever been in the mix
…hydrogen always makes me think hindenburg but I know “hydrogen fuel cells” have been discussed a lot…mostly by people who seem to know a lot more thane about that kind of thing?
…& I forgot the part where I meant to start that by saying I think solar panels have got a lot better over the years but my guess is they’d struggle to provide enough charge from the available area might be why that option also doesn’t seem to be considered
I can see that, but like if solar energy can extend a 200 mile range to 300 miles without needing a charge? That would be massive.
SplinterRIP: “…I know someone who’s been wondering for a long time why nobody tried to develop hybrids that were basically electric cars with an efficient gas-burning element that was basically just a generator…it’d allow for continuing to use existing infrastructure but consuming a lot less fuel”
They’ve basically started hitting the market. Toyota has a Prius and RAV4 for sale now, and Ford is coming out with an SUV version next year I think.
They’re hybrids with an extra electric motor and battery system that can either be charged from an outlet or store up electricity as the car runs. They have a range of something like 30-50 miles off of battery power alone, and then run on the hybrid gas motor if your trip goes longer than that.
I’m seriously thinking of one in a couple of years when any bugs get shaken out. I would mostly drive on all-electric power based on where I live and go most of the time, but it would be nice for the occasional longer trip to have a gas motor backup.
…my folks have a hybrid (& at one time drove a prius) but my understanding is that those are basically a gas-based car with an electric assist (most of the time – I think the electric runs on its own under some circumstances like low speed or whatever) so overall the fuel efficiency is better than a just-gas car…but the thing I was trying to describe is sort of the reverse…where the gas-powered component doesn’t drive the vehicle at all & is solely for the purpose of charging the electric side of things…so something like a two-stroke generator rather than a multi-cylinder engine?
…it’s possible someone has developed something of the sort but I don’t think I’ve come across it…maybe I need to look harder
I’ve started looking into putting solar panels on our roof, and the short answer for cars is that you need more panels than you could fit.
They are also sort of finicky about needing direct sun at the correct angle, so if your spots are a bit shady or angled wrong, it won’t work.
What would make sense is basically roofing over a lot of parking lots with panels and then using the juice for chargers, or the building, or just pumping energy into the grid. Parking lots represent a lot of space, often acres for a single building, and they often don’t get used fully or for that many hours a day.
They’re potentially an easy location for a lot of panels, but right now we don’t really have a plan for going to big property owners and making it easy to do this kind of conversion.
I half-assedly looked into solar panels for my roof last year and from what I can tell, I don’t pay enough in my electric bills for it to be a worthwhile investment at this time. Like my top bills in the worst months of summer are still around $75/month thanks to having a small house and using gas for the water heater and stove. And keeping my thermostat at 78 degrees because the house is small (single story too!) so I don’t end up with crappy hot areas.
I think for a lot of homeowners it’s not a savings because it’s basically a roofing job, and those can get expensive.
What may make sense is some organizations are trying to put together cooperatives where, say, 100 people can sign up to pay for a solar array in some farmer’s field. The electricity gets pumped into the grid, the farmer gets a fraction, and the coop members get credit for the electricity that is generated.
Bigger projects like this tend to be a lot more efficient and cheaper than 100 separate rooftop installations. The challenge is organizing and coordinating them, though.
@brightersideoflife $75??? Our summer bills hover right around $300 a month!! We have a 2 story house with pretty poor air flow, so we have an upstairs and a downstairs a/c, and numerous fans going, just to keep it tolerable in here. Add in 4 people with fancy computer/media set-ups, an electric washer/dryer and stove and… yeah. I shut lights and things off constantly but it never seems to make much difference.
Yeah keep in mind it’s just me and I’m boring. And when I say small house, not counting the basement it’s like 720 sq ft and I replaced the 1940s windows 3 years ago which made a huge help.
Also Missouri is cheap and our summer kwh price with Ameren is about 12 cents per kilowatt hour (8 cents per kwh in winter).
It’s interesting because in peak summer my natural gas bill is like $35-40/month and my electric bill is around $75, and in winter it flips.
That article from NBC claiming that up to $400 billion out of the $900 billion in unemployment benefits have been stolen is such monumental BS that the entire reporting and editorial food chain involved should be sacked.
What they are doing is conflating improper claims — someone submitting an address that is different from what is on record, putting the termination date as 7/8 instead of 8/7 on a form — and fraud.
And they are lumping together someone saying they lost their job last month instead of last week to intentionally extend their coverage to say it is all organized international theft.
ID theft is a thing, but what these reporters aren’t saying is they have swallowed a pitch from ideological foes of UI who want to shut it down.
UI is already hard to apply for in many places, and the more complicated it becomes to apply for it, the more cases of improper claims you will get, as people struggle to deal with forms and obtain necessary information.
White collar workers like reporters and editors don’t understand that things like termination dates and even wages can be hard to pin down in food service and other industries, and people living on the edge don’t necessarily have strictly fixed residencies in just one location.
It’s incompetent and it’s ideological in a way that would result in sanctions if it was *honest* reporting on sexual assault by a female reporter who had acknowledged being assaulted.
…not to disagree…but I think I found space for that one more on the basis that the claim of fraud where benefits are concerned never seems to go away despite consistently being found to be negligible in practice…so the idea that when it does turn out to exist (very probably not 4-in-9 bucks worth but enough to be meaningful) the source wasn’t domestic
…to the extent that over the years I’ve had much interaction with claims of one sort or another I’ve always found it seems as though the processes are designed as though the assumption is that the claim is bogus & the onus is on the claimant to repeatedly prove otherwise…often for assistance that is less assistance than you might think given the hurdles needed to be overcome to reach it…to the point that I’ve always wondered if the people who never stop ringing that bell about the risk of fraud or the existence of welfare queens or whatever have just never had to fill out any kind of a claim for so much as auto insurance?
…but then I tend to think there might be something to the concept of UBI…so those people are hardly likely to listen to me?
I agree that programs go on the assumption that all applications are fraudulent, and that inflates bad applications. So you get longer forms to fill out and even more bad applications. And I agree that people making these rules rarely deal with them.
My first thought when I saw in the excerpt above that the range was $89 million to $400 billion that there was a glitch in the copy and pasting, and both should have had billion with a b.
Nope, the original article puts the lower bounds at $89 million and that’s for a program with tens of millions of applicants. And yet NBC still talks about this as a crisis instead of a potential rounding error.
Of course these systems are getting spammed by script kiddies in Mumbai and Moscow. But if the sys admins are catching it and reporting it like the article says, why does NBC think much is getting through? They can’t say.
They can’t say because they don’t actually understand the system they’re criticizing, and they’ve outsourced the analysis function of journalism to the sources with conflicts who are feeding them the story in the first place.
finally made my damn curry!
https://opposite-lock.com/topic/22265/dinnertime
made the missus and monster burgers and chips…the curry’s all mine
mine i tell you!
(this irrelevant message was brought to you by exxon mobil)
I’d just like to point out, how much Baretta Barbie (Boebert) coasts on being “Tiny, Feisty, and *Cute!*” to pull much of the weight for her as she navigates the world.
Like, the woman seems to literally expect no consequences to anything, ever…
Simply because she’s “little,” at 5′ tall, and that means folks take her as “cute & feisty” rather than serious and unbalanced/unwell…
I KNOW, because 1. I’m a woman, grew up rural, and have had to deal with girls trying to rock “Cool Girl” syndrome most of my life, and 2. I also am a short woman (5’also), who can be “feisty” sometimes, and have definitely been taken as “Awwww, well isn’t that adorable!” when I was angry, faaaaaar to many times to count.🙄🙄🙄
Those of us who live in this space as short women, & who can be taken as “cute & funny,” rather than seriously, KNOW when others are milking that routine for all it’s worth.
Especially when it’s being done to avoid any & all consequences that get our taller & “Bossier” (read: “Bitchier”) sisters called out…
That’s TOTALLY the way Boebert skates through life–acting all “smol & fierce!(TM)” so that she’s *listened to* but also 100% coddled & NOT called out for any crap…
To quote Mallrats regarding the ability to work folks over & get them to *NOT* take us seriously, should/if we want to;
“….I should know, we smell our own!”😉😈