… Effective?

How many ICE agents are in jail for their innumerable, constant violations of laws?

How many of them have quit, or been otherwise disabled as members of a violent paramilitary force?

How much has ICE’s capacity to inflict further lawless terror been actually, practically diminished?

The answer is None, to near none, basically not at all.

What you describe as effective resistance is just effective virtue signalling, not making any material difference against a hostile invading force, who is only growing in number and continuously gaining access to more funding and resources.

The elections are actively being rigged right now, MAGA bought the company that runs most of the voting machines.

They’ll either win the midterms via fuckery, or just cancel them, no matter how many people voice their concerns and displeasure.

Also, they’ll just do a false flag or massively trump up an actual event, to justify violence, if they are not met with actual violent resistance.

They have in fact already been doing this, in many, many different instances, but the news cycle moves so fast that apparently few are cognizant of this.

Guys wouldn’t it be funny if Luigi had a brother named Mario?

cough

Latest news is that Xbox Games Division had been required to aim for a 30% profit margin for the last several years.

Thats why everything sucks and blew up.

Thats a fucking insane baseline target.

Line for next quarter profit must go up, therefore, cut costs.

This is obvious self destructive in the long run, but that doesn’t matter, what matters is C Suite’s golden parachutes.

… Basically nobody in software development has done QA in about 15 years, aside of basically the last ol timer server admin types, who are now being replaced with … whatever Microsoft is calling Tay or Cortana now.

There’s always a few who try, and then corporate beats that out of them because it slows down ‘productivity’, you can basically only resist this for more than a year, two tops, if you are literally the only person on the planet who knows how to do what you do.

… which is also why those same old timers tend to … seemingly intentionally not document anything usefully: job security.

What?

Has this person never tried to optimize volumetric fog on low end hardware?

No no no no no.

That is a succesful render., assuming your uh… perception of time hasn’t massively slowed.

If you start getting z fighting and notice a few windows and cars with flipped normals, lod pop-in… now thats a rendering error.

Huh.

Well of course I know that beard on the left!

It’s on me!

Same length and growth pattern, was actually going to trim it a bit this weekend, but uh, despite my head hair being basically the same as Ewan’s (color, waviness), my main jaw line and sideburns are jet black like Pedro, as are my eyebrows… but my moustache is about the same color as Ewan’s.

… So clearly what that means is I as attractive as both of them combined =p hahaha! /s

… Can you plug an external battery/powerstation into it, and thus have it charge more than just itself when its not being used?

I… would guess that you could figure out how to do that with what the article mentions as a similar concept, but as a general addon kit for any EV:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/12/10/expandable-solar-roof-rack-adds-1-kw-of-off-grid-charging-for-evs/

So, if you can charge things beyond the car itself, well, in a grid down or extended brownout or black out scenario, you now have a solar setup that can either run parts of your house, or, can move with you as you set up somewhere else.

Maybe its a hurricane or earthquake or wildfire, and you’re over at another friend/fam’s home that didn’t get fucked, and… now you have a solar power backup system, on wheels.

“The best career advice is to just not get fired or laid off, idiot, duh.”

Wow, why didn’t I think of that.

On the ‘bright’ side:

I imagine this thing from Aldi’s is probably a lot easier to hack into and figure out how to jail break, than something from Amazon.

It also has a port for an sd card… the actual product listing does not mention being paired with some kind of app or software, so… ???

Also it is just a 480p camera, so, its basically a 20 year old webcam.

Welcome to hyperreality, enjoy your stay!

Also, there is no way to leave.

Oh I’m not saying its all 100% bad.

Having a reasonably healthy, similar tasting alternative is good when it is a good deal cheaper.

I’m just saying it doesn’t cross my bar of ‘real cheese’.

Used to be a bit of a brie and wine snob, and I still have the strong opinion that basically all pizzas should be 3 cheese blends, not just one.

Used to be that parents and grandparents would teach the kids how to cook something a bit fancier for a holiday.

But we’re all too atomized and busy and politically polarized these days for that.

Thank you, I’d seen something like this before, did not manage to snag a copy that time =D

The pasta is real, the seasoning is real, the cheese basically is not real.

For example, regular Cheeseburger Hamburger Helper contains trace amounts of blue cheese, which is absent from the Deluxe Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper. The “Deluxe” product also contains parmesan cheese, palm oil, and lactic acid. These can all impact the texture and taste of the dish.

In an email to the Daily Dot, an Eagle Foods representative wrote the following: “The difference between the Double Cheeseburger Mac and the Cheeseburger Mac products are that, for the Double Cheeseburger, the ingredient ratios are slightly different and there is double the amount of cheese powder in the seasoning packet.”

https://www.dailydot.com/news/regular-deluxe-cheeseburger-hamburger-helper/

Its only ‘real cheese’ if you consider a dehydrated powder that you have to add butter or milk / water to, and then prepare with heat as a ‘cheese flavored sauce’ to be ‘real cheese’.

Yep, the tiny trace amounts of ‘100% Real Cheese!’ it contains are indeed tiny denydrated crumblets of real cheese… but I am fairly sure that by that metric, Cheetos are also ‘real cheese’.

For most Americans under the age of 40, the idea of making an actual cheese sauce out of… an actual block of actual dairy cheese from their refrigerator… that is literally a foreign concept, nobody has time to be that fancy, or even knows that is a thing you can do.

I figured it out we were poor once I hit middle school, and me asking about this and further realizing the truth of it… well of course that sent Republican dad further into an insecurity/rage/alcoholism loop.

Being honest would have been too difficult, I guess.

I mean, you’re not wrong.

I grew up poor, in the US, mom had 0 cooking skill, mac and cheese and sliced hot dogs was pretty common.

I can try to spin that positively as ‘at leasr I have more experience being broke than most people who are new to being broke’, lol.

Gunshots By Computer, Saul Williams / NiN.

Welcome to Year Zero.

That’s unironically already been happening in Gaza for years now, and will now happen everywhere Palantir is used.

Most people simply are cowards and fools.

Victims, yes, but also still cowards and fools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_Days

Set in British Burma during the waning days of empire, when Burma was ruled from Delhi as part of British India, the novel serves as “a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj.” At the centre of the novel is John Flory, “the lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better side of human nature.”[1] The novel describes “both indigenous corruption and imperial bigotry” in a society where, “after all, natives were natives—interesting, no doubt, but finally…an inferior people”.[2]

To be clear, that last bit of that last sentence is meant to be read as hideously haughty and privileged… it is dripping with irony, a self-cariacature, as the novel showcases the craven nature of characters in all kinds of social positions, from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.

The whole thing is meant as an unflinching critique of how colonialism ruins everyone involved.

I guess we could also maybe ask Orwell what he was doing in Spain in the 1930s, but at the time, he would again have difficulty telling you.

Turns out that when you join an internationalist anti fascist militia to go personally shoot fascists yourself, well, sometimes they shoot back, and sometimes they hit you in the neck.

… thankfully, writing exists.

I find it absolutely incredible that George Orwell, a man who has likely personally shot more fascists than probably anyone you’ll find on the internet… somehow doesn’t clear the ideological purity test these days.

And that is because Orwell, while literally shooting at fascists in Spain, also found himself as the target of a pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin smear campaign, which tried to paint him and his outfit as Trotskyists and also as fascists.

Apparently, this smear campaign remains quite influential, to this day.