Yup. I’m old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that it was ad-free. Then, of course, they started adding ads. And then they sold us premium channels that didn’t have ads. Now those have ads, too. You just can’t get away from them.

I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don’t have to see them. It’s double dipping.

Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: “Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn’t it? If you don’t pay me more money, I’m going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I’m going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I’m going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I’m even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??”

Man, Ivan. You really suck at your job. You must be new here. You’re way too obvious about it.

I think you’re severely overestimating the average intelligence of the population.

True, the weather was really bad in that area, but he was traveling in a 3-helicopter convoy, and only his helicopter crashed. Now, I’m not saying that it’s impossible, or even improbable that it was an accident, but we can’t really rule out sabotage at this point, especially considering how big of a target he had on his head from both the US and Israel. Personally, I really hope it was an accident. I mean, I shed no tears for that son of a bitch, but the ramifications if this was an assassination are unsettling.

I think you’ve got some very mistaken ideas about who Democrats are if you think that a supermajority of them would be totally up for implementing a slew of progressive policies. They’re way more progressive than the Republican party is, for sure. But that’s such an incredibly low bar that it’s laughable. Democrats will do things like make Cesar Chavez day a holiday, or fly BLM and LGBTQI flags, but expecting them to actually pass legislation that addresses the root inequities in a meaningful way is an uphill battle.

Oh hey - catturd2; isn’t that that sycophantic piece of shit who fawns all over Elon Musk every chance he gets? Maybe it’s a different catturd2 on bluesky.

Edit: Actually, yeah; it does look like it’s a different person entirely:

I recently read Neil Stephenson’s book called “Fall”, in which a significant chunk of the novel is set about 30 years in the future. At that point in time, large swathes of America are referred to as “Ameristan”, because they are break-away territories ruled by evangelical warlords. It feels surprisingly prescient.

I think if I hadn’t dropped Netflix when they did a 180 on their stance on password sharing, I would drop them now.

And nothing of value was lost.

“X” isn’t publicly traded. When he bought it, he took it private, so you can’t short it. The ticker symbol X is for the United States Steel Corporation. You could definitely short that, though; it’s entirely possible that it’ll tank just the same because people confuse it with Xitter. Like when that Chinese company that had the ticker symbol ZOOM shot to the moon at the start of the pandemic because people thought it was the video conferencing app (whose symbol was ZM).

Well, as dumb as this was (and it was very, very dumb), I found myself distracted by just how… weird he looked. Not just his face, which reminded me of Lady Cassandra from Dr Who (“Moisturize me, moisturize me!”), but his weird, jerky movements, and just his general vibe. He’s like the personification of the uncanny valley. Eggar-from-MiB “get me sugar water” lookin’ ass. If someone were to come out with a tell-all saying that Musk had been secretly replaced by aliens, I wouldn’t even be terribly surprised at this point.

Ooh - very cool. A. baumanii is a really nasty little fucker. It’s the A in ESKAPE, a list comprised of the 6 most virulent and antibiotic resistant pathogens out there. A. baumanii is also sometimes referred to as Iraqibacter because of its prevalence in US military personnel returning from Iraq. It’s a soil-borne bacteria that was local to the middle east, but has now been spread around the world by hitchhiking in people. One of the main reasons why it’s so difficult to kill is that it is gram negative, which means that it has both an outer and inner membrane, which makes it difficult for existing classes of antibiotics to penetrate into the cell. Some of the other notable gram negative bacteria are E. coli, Y. pestis (the bacteria responsible for the black plague), and C. trachomatis, the bacteria responsible for chlamydia.

This study is pretty significant because, in addition to targeting a nasty little fucker, it’s possible that the approach used could be repurposed to target a number of that nasty little fucker’s nasty little family, too.

Oof. Been there, done that, 0 stars; would not recommend.