Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of Theranos. She was sentenced to prison for defrauding investors. She started making claims that she could do exactly what the headline says. She claimed that current blood panels (which usually require a vial of blood for each test) were insufficient and outdated, and that her company could predict or diagnose a ton of diseases and disorders with only a pinprick of blood. She said that her company was already in the final stages of the research, and used those claims to entice investors. She said that her company was going to be on the forefront of a medical revolution, and investors were clambering to get in before they hit the market.

It turns out she was full of shit, was lying through her teeth, the technology didn’t exist, and they couldn’t diagnose anything with the tiny amount of blood she claimed. Medical professionals had been screaming about the fraud for a long time, but techbros and billionaires were happy to continue jumping on the bandwagon because she kept promising results in the near future. When the fraud finally came to light, Theranos’ valuation went from ~$9B to $0 basically overnight. It was a massive “she stole from billionaires, so we’re making an example of her and actually prosecuting the white collar crime that never gets prosecuted” court case that started way back in the mid 2010’s. It only recently wrapped up a few years ago (I think in late 2022 or early 2023?) and she’s still serving time.

Or alternatively, companies can bribe a few local politicians to stall, then start building anyways when the deadline hits.

It’s mostly an issue when you have them sharing boot drives via partitions. If you keep them isolated to their own separate drives, Windows doesn’t tend to muck with things. It’s because Windows is bad about killing bootloaders, and automatically setting itself as the default in the boot order. So if you have it sharing a drive, it’ll nuke your boot. But if you don’t have them sharing a drive, and boot via a loader on the Linux drive, there is no boot loader on the Windows drive to nuke.

$30k was an expensive car… 10 years ago. The average price for a new car topped $50k last month. $30k in my area would maybe get you a used car, probably two or three years old from a car rental company dumping old inventory with too many miles. The used car market still hasn’t calmed down after the component shortage that nearly halted new car production a few years ago. And since used car prices are still astronomically inflated, new cars can sell for whatever the hell they want and they’ll still have wait-lists.

Bruh, what? Mine is $2000 for two cars. Full coverage on both, and both of us have spotless driving records. Not even a single parking ticket in over 15 years (since we both started driving). My car is $1200 per year, and my wife’s is $800. Her car is 3 years older than mine.

FWIW, my area (North Texas) is notorious for bad drivers and uninsured drivers. Even if my driving record is spotless, the rest of the idiots on the road make my premiums go up.

Remove the laugh track, and Ross is a full blown narcissistic sociopath… The only person he seems to genuinely care about is his son, Ben… But even Ben seems to vanish in the later seasons. There are fan theories that Ross completely abandoned Ben (or that Carol and Susan took full custody because Ross was always such a prick) after Emma was born.
Phoebe is a manipulative bitch who uses quirkiness as an excuse to toy with people.
Rachel is a spoiled disorganized mess, whose need for attention compelled her to constantly keep Ross on a leash without letting him get too close. She broke up with a dude, got her feelings hurt when he had a rebound, then constantly held it over his head after they got back together. When he got tired of it and found someone else, she crashed their wedding in the hopes that he would leave his fiancée at the altar.
Chandler regularly uses sarcasm to poke at his friends’ insecurities and belittle them, and masks all of his insecurities with self-deprecating humor instead of actually working to better himself.
Monica’s obsessive need for control regularly leads her to manipulate or bully others, and consistently overshadows her empathy.

Joey was too good for the rest of the characters. His only real emotional flaw was that he never really had any deep romantic connections. But that was largely because he was more into the hookup culture, and he reserved his attempts at deeper romance for the few partners he really got along with. He never tried to hide the fact that he was a playboy, even around the women he was sleeping with. He was an idiot, but he at least cared for and about the other main characters, in a way that none of them ever seemed to reciprocate.

Also, the show was ultimately about six rich white people, who occasionally cosplayed as relatable lower middle class folk. In a city as diverse as NYC, you would have to work to find a city block so completely deprived of melanin. The series was 10 seasons long, and black people only had speaking roles in like 25 episodes… And a lot of those were because Ross and Joey dated the same black woman for like 10 episodes in the last season. They also very clearly lived in a nice part of the city, (some have estimated that Monica’s apartment would run for ~$3-4M when the show was airing) and their financial struggles were only ever superficial to make them more relatable.

I mean, this is a textbook example of statutory rape. He paid an underage girl $400 to show up to a party with the implication of sex, gave her cocaine and ecstasy, and then had sex with her. The state recognizes that rape can occur even if the victim was otherwise willing. The “statutory” part of statutory rape means the prosecutor is required by statute to assume a rape occurred, even if the victim does not agree with the prosecution.

The state acknowledges that there are circumstances where a reasonable person would determine that a victim wasn’t capable of consenting. To be able to prosecute these cases, the state passes statutes to assign a penalty on the assaulter for statutory rape. This statute allows the prosecution to charge for rape, even if the victim was enthusiastically consenting and/or does not feel like they have been assaulted.

For example, if a cop detains someone, then has sex with them in the back of their cruiser. A reasonable state would recognize the unfair power dynamic in this situation, and a reasonable jury member would acknowledge that the detainee was under duress when the sex occurred. Even if the detainee was enthusiastic and willing, they were legally unable to consent because of the power dynamic that was present during the sex. There’s no way of factually proving if the detainee was/is actually willing, or just playing along because the cop held an inordinate amount of power over them. And thus a reasonable state would assume the latter, and statutorily assign a penalty to the person who held the power (the cop, in this example). And this statutory penalty would be enforced by prosecuting the cop for statutory rape.

And “being too young” is one of the biggest and most (in)famous reasons that someone can’t consent. The state sets an age limit on when children can begin consenting to sex with adults. Otherwise willing children below that age are assumed to be groomed (like a 30 year old “dating” a 15 year old) or under some other kind of unfair power dynamic.

If you’re trying to say that it’s unfair that Gaetz was tricked into sex with a minor, that’s a separate discussion. He took that risk when he knowingly paid a homeless person for sex. He knew there was an inherent power imbalance. If he wanted to avoid the power imbalance, he could have used a legal brothel that has a hiring and vetting process designed to preclude underage children from being hired. Hell, he could have worked as a lawmaker to decriminalize sex work and make brothels legal in his area. He could have ensured that people (including himself) didn’t feel the need to pay streetwalkers for sex, because legal brothels were accessible.

But he didn’t do that. He sought out a sex worker who looked young, fully knowing and accepting that there were no systems in place to stop her from lying about her age, and he was willing to take on the risk of statutory rape by choosing to sleep with her.

Depends on the amount of compression you’re trying to achieve, the water’s temperature, and your definition of “easy”. Near freezing, ice is compressible. Because the increased pressure causes the freezing point to rise, which causes it to melt. And liquid water takes up less space than ice.

This was the very first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. I literally thought to myself “oh so she sounds like a pedophile.”

Yup, by step-dad is in the second group. It’s honestly wild what kinds of mental gymnastics he has gone through to justify his vote. We had a surprisingly calm discussion about it the other day, and he genuinely doesn’t believe Trump was involved in any of it.

He thinks Trump was, at worst, just running in some tangential social circles. He believes a lot of the revelatory stuff (like in this post) has been faked from other heads of state to try and discredit him. Like all of the “yeah the DOJ confirmed this is real. The FBI has been sitting on this for literal years or even decades now, as part of their international child trafficking investigations. Multiple news sources have also independently confirmed the validity of the sources” stuff doesn’t matter to him, because he simply chooses not to believe any of it.

God Himself could descend from the heavens with a choir of angels, bust through my parents’ living room window, and slap my step-dad around while screaming that Trump is a pedophile who raped children on Epstein’s island. And my step-dad would defiantly look God in the eyes and tell Him that He’s wrong. There is no threshold that will make the proof believable for him. The goalposts will always be moved to require some new criteria before proof can be valid. And anything that does manage to meet the strict criteria for proof is too perfect, and obviously had to be manufactured in some grand worldwide conspiracy to discredit Trump. As Orwell wrote, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

But what if bias was not the reason? What if your face gave genuinely useful clues about your probable performance we just agreed to redefine “bias” as something else, despite this fitting the definition of the word perfectly, just so I can claim this isn’t biased?

Cool. Literal Nazi shit, still powered by IBM.

Yeah, the malicious compliance was what should have been regulated instead. Ban the annoying cookie popup and require sites to make it opt-in by default. At most, sites should be allowed to have an option in a burger menu to allow cookies, and clicking that button would open the popup to specify which cookies you wanted to allow.

I used to date a fairly popular camgirl. Like “she made more money in a 4 hour stream than I made in a month” popular. She eventually grew to hate the work, but the money was too good for her to pass up.

The “it’s not dating if you’re paying her” jokes got old pretty quick.

Yeah, the prosthetics have always been campy, but the miniature models are gorgeous even by today’s standards.

Yeah, the behind the scenes stuff for that movie is wild.

They had to keep reshooting the fire swamp scene, because Cary Elwes (Westley/Dread Pirate Roberts) kept panicking every time Robin Wright (Princess Buttercup) got lit on fire.

The R.O.U.S. scene had to be delayed, because they had to go bail the dude in the rat suit out of jail. He had apparently gotten too drunk the night before, and was in the drunk tank on the morning that they were supposed to shoot the R.O.U.S. scene.

Yup, it was lauded for its amazing CGI when it came out, but the vast majority of the movie was shot with puppets and practical effects. It’s also a great example of “less is more” in the sense that the movie is over two hours long, but only has like 15 minutes of actual dinosaur footage. That meant they were able to focus their time and resources effectively, to make the few bits of CGI as good as they could be.

Hell, one of the first things you can look into hosting is Obsidian, (or maybe AnyType? I have seen some people recommend it for better sync integration, but I haven’t personally used it), with SyncThing to keep your notes synced across devices.

Yeah, the first movie pretty clearly lays out why he didn’t want to call the cops. Also, IIRC, the snow storm knocked out the phone lines. His parents mention that they can’t get ahold of him because the lines are down. So he couldn’t have called them even if he tried.

The second movie though? He was a predator stalking his prey. He wasn’t just a victim of a break-in. He actively lured them to his twisted funhouse, and didn’t call the cops until the very end when he wanted them to get caught red-handed.

Welp…