The same people who regularly give us uninspiring and insipid candidates to run against demagogues and repeatedly act surprised when they lose ground expect to gain control of a White House where the current president is treating democracy as if it’s an optional hindrance – expect to take power?

If nothing else, I admire their optimism.

This is that “when they came for ____” moment when the people of the U.S. need to do something.

Ooooh, so scary!
They hide their work behind public websites, and make their decisions in shadowy public meetings that (mostly) can be joined and participated in online. All their secretive work is hidden behind publicly accessible docket systems, hearings that anyone can attend or join as an intervenor, and open workgroups. If that’s not enough evidence of a clear conspiracy, consider this: Anyone can use the deep state’s FOIA laws to file a freedom of information act request to get more information about any topic. OoOoOoOoO

They’d threaten legal action for defamation and bury it before it was published.

That’s sort of the funny thing - I think my experience/exposure to muriatic acid sort of colored how cavalier I am about it. I didn’t check precise concentrations, but a gallon can be had for $10 from a hardware store. I’ve seen guys just pour it on the floor, slosh it around with a mop, and seem to have no care whatsoever about incidental skin contact or getting it on their shoes. (They did wash their hands after, but seemed unhurried to do so.)

Not that I’m advising cavalier behavior with hydrochoric acid, but perhaps I have a shifted baseline for understanding the caution one should take. (I mean - I’ve never worked directly with it myself, so…iunno.) Also very possible the products I’ve seen are a lower concentration than the ‘bubbling, foaming, melting your face’ concentrations of HCL we might otherwise expect.

It does come in a plastic bottle - HDPE, I believe, so I think a standard paint pen would work for it. Provided the wicking material was not organic, it would probably survive just fine.

You know, when I envisioned this, I imagined some person with a 5-gallon sprayer, like they use for yards/pesticides. I sort of assumed they’d be doing it alone, with no one around, and (presumably) with some knowledge/awareness of how those sprayers work - so like, protective clothing, a mask, goggles, and being upwind. But you’re right that it’s dangerous despite all that. And it’s sort of an obvious thing to be carrying around.

New mental picture of this activity: Jars that have been safely filled at home thrown from a distance while no one else is around.
Or for discretion, a tide pen that has had the contents replaced. Bonus: It will still remove stains (and the fabric).

Ultimately, however, it’s not something I’d actually entertain. I don’t see that as an effective outlet for any statement I’d like to make. Surely not for the risk/reward proposition. But it’s darn funny to think about.

Honestly, it would be funnier if someone sprayed them with muriatic acid. (Hydrochloride acid)

The damage to the metal is not fixable (as in, the rust can be cleaned away, but the damaged areas just keep re-rusting). It avoids the issue of insurance payments (just clean it, bro), and of burning the vehicles (releasing pollution). It basically marks the car for life, makes it unsellable, and, full offense, if someone buys one, they deserve a lifetime of annoying maintenance issues. Fuck their gleaming monument to fascism.

I’m not sure. I suspect that TextSniper predates the feature on Mac.

On Mac (and iOS, too) recognized text is just treated as text. So on Mac, you just get a text selection/entry cursor (the “I-beam”), and you can select text for whatever action (copy, lookup, etc). On iOS it’s same, except no cursor on account of it being a touch interface. It’s sort of annoying on iOS with images that have a lot of text - double clicking an image to zoom has to be done with care, otherwise it selects text instead of zooming in.

I can also do that on my MacBook.

(This comment is not as facetious as it seems. I knew you could copy text from images, but I just tried to test some limitations, and it’s a weirdly comprehensive feature - I can copy text from photos and/or videos in the screenshots app, the Preview app, the Photos app, QuickTime, and even from YouTube videos in Safari (but not Firefox, interestingly enough) - assuming that means it’s an OS-level thing. Quick search says this rolled out in 2021.)

His brain worm has measles.

It’s not quite like that. My workplace is surprisingly good on the hours, they just aren’t great on responsibilities or scope.

It’s… a lot of work in very broad specialties, with little backup.

There’s a checklist, with a box after the jury box.

I’m not in a position to type out a long comment, but this link should give you the answers you need.

Not the person you responded to, but my actual answer is that’s because all of the national political parties in the U.S. are corporations whose business is politics.
They’re basically glorified staffing agencies that invest a lot of money into marketing. Instead of stocks, the wealthy buy ownership with donations or other arrangements coordinated via PACs.

This has been the approximate state of affairs for decades and became the de facto standard with Citizens United.

Re: The reception of your comments - I think people hate to see that reality. Facing it feels inescapably hopeless. Polite fictions are far easier to maintain. But in a brief skim of your comments, your positions align with me — even if now I’m angry and sad for the reminders of how dog shit this is.

Honestly, Tesla’s quality is far less than most vehicles.
Apple has a lot of fair criticisms leveled against it, but their products are at least built as well as their competition. Unless I’m woefully out of the loop. That’s also possible.

Thank you. Things are definitely better. I can’t say I’m normal. I mean, I trauma dump on strangers on the internet in the name of interesting anecdotes, but I think I threaded a needle that few manage to thread. I’m more or less financially stable, with a solid career, comfortable prospects, and a good home life with someone who grew up under equitable circumstances, and also managed to escape the cycle, so we have a good understanding/acceptance of each others foibles.

Oooh, boy.

Shortly after my parents divorced, my mom both fell more heavily into drug use and moved us (me, and two of my sisters) halfway across the country to the magnificent town of Throckmorton, Texas.
My mom found a dealer, who became her boyfriend, and they wound up spending a lot of time together. So much so that sometimes they’d take us to abandoned houses and leave us there for hours before they came back. My mom was going through a phase - she wound up dyeing her hair so much it somehow looked orange in the sun and green in the shade. But she also was sort of falling off being around the house. Sometimes it was just a day, then a day or two. We learned she lost her job, which was a problem - the house we lived in was provided by her employer. One Friday she left.
When Monday rolled around, we didn’t go to school. The school called that afternoon, and we were honest with them. Our mom was gone and we didn’t know what to do. By Wednesday, they had managed to contact our grandma, who had extended family nearby, and they swooped in before CPS.
We were eventually mustered back “home” to where more immediate family lived, and we floated for a long time. Not quite a year, but long enough that we moved up a grade and we celebrated NYE at my grandma’s.

My mom emerged from wherever she’d been. She convinced my family to bring us back to her, to come live in a battered women’s shelter in Abilene - not far from where she’d disappeared. She was in AA, and NA, and even briefly went back to college.

She never told us believable or consistent stories about what happened. It was always a tale of woe and coercion. Once she told us her drug dealer was an FBI agent that was using her to conduct sting operations and threatened to put her in jail if she stopped helping. In another, it was kidnapping. It was never that she got strung out and tried to run away.

And that may not have been it either. Because after my mom died a few years ago, my sisters, who stayed close to the places we mostly grew up (I fled half a country away), found a weird creative writing exercise: A mother’s letter to a son she gave up for adoption. Odd, but my mom was odd and increasingly tried to get into more creative pursuits as she aged. But then they found a police report that said she got arrested for attacking her boyfriend. The report indicated that she was pregnant. Then they found paperwork from a hospital - standard pregnancy stuff, dating to the time period she was in the wind. The last thing they found was another police report, this time from him assaulting her, indicating she was about 6 months pregnant.
And that’s all we know. We don’t know if this pregnancy came to term - my mom had 6 miscarriages that we knew about. We don’t know if an adoption took place or is she left the kid with her drug dealer - who is now apparently a church alderman (one of my sisters looked him up from the info on the police report).

My mom was both very prideful, and quite racist. Our working theory on why she took this secret to her grave is that it reminded her of her failings and, you know, that she boinked someone she was racist against.

Preamble: My parents divorced when I was young, my dad died a few years later, and I never really got to know him. Plus I have childhood trauma and ADHD, so I don’t remember a lot of my childhood. My parents weren’t great people, and life was pretty rough and tumble growing up.

When I was in my early teens, I found a newspaper clipping from before I was born in some scrapbook or memory box. It was a short little crime blotter story that indicated my dad had accidentally shot himself in the face, because he had mistaken a snub-nose pistol for a lighter while drunk.
I do remember that he had a big scar on his face, but I sort of assumed it was because he liked to get in fistfights for fun.

My mom, a serial liar, confirmed the story, and it’s what I and another one of my sisters have believed for decades.

I mentioned the event in passing to my oldest sister a few months ago and she balked, and immediately began laughing. After she composed herself, she explained that she was home when it happened. The real story is that my dad had ripped someone off in a drug deal, and they did a poor job of trying to kill him. The whole drunk/lighter thing was to avoid additional questions by the police.

So, you know. Gun in a thrown shoe. Sure.

I work on a small team and recently realized my boss is falling victim to survivorship bias. Another colleague and I handle our work, which is mission critical to the org, competently and fairly opaquely, only raising issues as they arise. However some other members of our team have less critical but more visible work that they tend to bungle. The department invests hiring dollars, training efforts, and materials purchases in service of remediating those issues. But my colleague and I are both burned out, eyeing the door, and fully aware there’s no one who understands what we do or is capable of doing it within our organization - aside from each other, but our respective scope of work is non-overlapping and there’s truly not wiggle room to cross train or support each other’s work. I’ve said all I know to say to leadership about this issue but they seem willfully ignorant.

When one of us goes, I think the other will follow quickly. Hiring takes almost 2 months at my work, so the gap/lack of knowledge transfer will make for a huge shit show.

From my recent garage sale: