SwingingTheLamp

I have to give it this much respect: When I logged in to office.com (for work) recently and was confronted with the Copilot chat-box, I asked it how to disable Copilot. It was honest, and told me that it’s not possible because this is Microsoft’s new product strategy. Then, I asked how I could never see Copilot again.

It (no joke!) told me to install Linux.

Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/.

I dunno, when was the last time Japan dismembered a reporter at one of its consulates?

I saw that post, and honestly, part of the issue is that the pain of messing with mode-lines in /etc/XF86Config and worrying about physically damaging your CRT monitor with out-of-spec frequencies was a very real thing 30 years ago. Hence, the idea that configuring displays on Linux is fraught and difficult has stuck around, even though it hasn’t been true since the advent of DDC, and multiple displays for most use-cases has been sorted out for at least the past 15 years. Non-Linux users will still occasionally talk about displays on Linux as if we were still editing mode-lines in vi.

It’s a sore point, I guess I’m saying, and you poked it inadvertently. When I read the post, I just kind of smiled, because a few days before, I plugged the HDMI cable from a conference room display into my Thinkpad, and it lit up with an extension of my desktop. I started LibreOffice Impress, hit ‘F5’, and the presentation appeared on the big display, and the presentation notes on my laptop screen. (Actually, I was surprised and impressed at how smoothly it went.)

It’s no surprise that issues remain here and there, though. Glad to hear that folks wanted to be helpful!

In my mind, I can’t checkout, because it’s a noun or an adjective. I always do verbs, so I check out.

I’ve settled on [REDACTED]. Everybody knows who I’m talking about, because everybody knows that they redacted him from the Epstein files.

On climate change, I gotta disagree. We have two major drivers of climate change: Greenhouse gas emissions, and land-use changes. The land-use changes go way back. We’re in the geological epoch called the Anthropocene, one in which humanity is the dominant force in shaping the biosphere. There’s some debate about it, but some scientists place the beginning of the Anthropocene as much as 15,000 years ago, driven by habitat destruction and resource extraction to support growing human populations. It takes a lot of natural resources to support each human to the standard to which we’ve become accustomed, and even the poor people in Western countries live a lifestyle that the Earth cannot sustain. It’s not just billionaires, it’s all of us.

Similarly with fossil fuels. We know that a handful of mega-corporations produce the fossil fuels responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas releases, but they’re not the ones releasing the gases. We can’t just abolish them and expect nothing to change about our daily lives. We’ve reached a point at which even working class people in the United States can order up a taxi for their beef burrito.

Instead, we can say that this wanton shredding of our natural inheritance enables flows of wealth that allow unscrupulous hands to skim criminal quantities off the top for their hoards. Even if we depose them, though, we’d still have the climate change problem to tackle.

And yet, somehow, people willingly step into it all the time!

Another question: Why do they still do natural childbirth when they have transporters?

I took the Amtrak Empire Builder to Glacier National Park, which was supposed to arrive around six o’clock in the evening. The train was already late to Columbus, where I got on, which was not a good sign given the proximity to Chicago. Then, the train had to dramatically decrease speed across North Dakota (85MPH down to 60MPH, IIRC), because record-high temperatures in July were causing the rails to expand too much, making them uneven. I got to the station at the park 8 hours late.

It was way too late to find accommodations. Luckily, I had my camping gear, so I just camped on a bench at the station until morning.

Seriously, though, Trix ads were a great example of psychological manipulation. They don’t try to convince you that Trix is desirable—because of course everybody wants Trix—instead they frame the question: Does the rabbit get any? It was an example of the Thinking Past The Sale technique.

That’s realistically the only fix for gerrymandering. It’s a powerful weapon, and I don’t foresee the two parties honoring any agreement not to use it.

There’s no shortage of unlikable cunts in the GQP. I have this pet theory that he was chosen specifically because of his fake name. Short, punchy, strong: Vance. Just like Pence.

Seriously, the fascists are all about projecting an image of strength and power.

Turns out that the movie Don’t Look Up may have been intended to satirize our response to climate change, but the portrayal of the media response is evergreen.

I don’t think that those people waiting in line to go swimming wanted to be grabbed.

Where did I imply it’s bad?

Shouldn’t official government websites be only concerned about the people actually employed at them and decision makers?

based on their collective actions for centuries, don’t deserve it.

Found the war criminal.

The War Prayer, a prose poem by Mark Twain.

IKR? The need for maintenance eventually should be foreseen! If they went to all the trouble to put a pipe through bedrock, why not put 2 pipes, so there’s a backup?

That’s not quite it. The wastewater treatment plant is located high up on the cliffs above the ocean. It has a big pipe that they tunneled through bedrock so it discharges at the bottom of the ocean 2.3km from shore. The fatberg is in the junction between the plant and the pipe. To clean it out, they’d have to stop using the big drain pipe, and y’know, just dump sewage off the edge of the cliff into the ocean, pretty much right onto the beach.