Lovable Sidekick

I don’t, I just play the thousands of mp3s I’ve collected over the years.

Too late. Social media was already the end of truth.

Same Kristi Noem who as governor spent $5 million of S. Dakota’s COVID money on a tourism campaign, saying her state was coping with the pandemic using “personal responsibility and freedom”.

A friend of mine did it in college, and that was decades ago. Instead of snipping him they put in some kind of little valves that could be turned back on. Later in life he married, had the valves turned back on and had kids, so apparently the system works.

Seems more like an “Ask a copyright lawyer” question.

I mostly don’t do either.

Never worked in banking or finance. That job was at a company that made ultrasound machines.

Funny story I like to tell: one April Fools day I started a rumor that the company was getting bought by Toshiba. I created a fake Wall St. Journal article written in their bland style and left a couple printed copies on random manager’s desks with illegible initials scrawled on them. Within 2 hours our dept (IT) had an emergency meeting to reassure us that it wasn’t true. They said upper management was VERY upset and wanted the perp to come forward (no recriminations - yeah right!) and explain the reason for it. I’ll never forget my manager, who was British and generally looked like actor Bob Hoskins, dressed as a pirate because it was April Fools Day. The jam-packed conference room was utter chaos and he was standing on a chair in his pirate costume waving his arms trying to get everybody to shut up.

I kept my mouth shut. A friend of mine who worked around a lot of managers said the tone of their conversation that week was like… why now? why Toshiba? As if there might be a grain of truth to it. Months later it turned out our company had a very secret project going with Hitachi to develop a miniaturized combat ultrasound machine for the army, because they were encountering landmines etc that threw out plastic shrapnel, which was really hard to see with x-rays. So apparently the big shots thought somebody might be teasing them about the Hitachi deal, and they were worried about the army getting wind of it and doubting their ability to keep the whole thing secret. Bonus: the device was codenamed the Tricorder, and physically modeled after the shoulder-strap tricorder on Star Trek TOS.

And the Strategic Office Presence Task Force passed into legend lol.

Suggestion: schedule regular informal zoom calls to trade news, rumors, ask impromptu questions, whatever. Wouldn’t even matter if nobody talked sometimes - people could just have it open and lurk.

Mine consisted of me countering every single one of my manager’s lame objections to remote work, including pointing out that we used contractors in fucking India and offering to change my name to Rajesh, and him simply ending the discussion with, “I can see we’re poles apart on this.”

No but the CPU load slows down processing.

I think we’re already productive enough, just not distributive enough.

I remember when you could do anything at Zombo.com. Good news, everyone - you still can!

As an internet rando with no credentials, I would say embrace it. Apparently this is something you need right now. Try your hand at publishing fan fiction.

I’m convinced that Trump won because his team changed Harris votes to Trump votes, plain and simple. The differences between their totals were statistically anomalous compared to all the downballot candidates, the variations were just below thresholds that would have triggered automatic recounts, and these anomalies were present in the 7 swing states only. Those facts alone should justify formal audits, which I hope will happen. But it all kind of depends on the fate of the one lawsuit filed so far.

So, no hiring hackers to actually change votes to Biden/Harris votes, but anything short of that? I dunno, if that were their standard they would have released the Epstein stuff. My real guess is that some Democratic politicians are also on the list. Even if it’s only a couple, they might have figured running against a convicted felon gave them such good odds there was no need to throw any of their own under the bus. And apparently none of them said, “Well but what if he hires hackers to change votes to Trump votes?”

Fair enough, good luck with that.

You’re not the only one wondering why the Trump administration has its head completely up its ass.

I’m just curious how she’s your “girlfriend” if you’re only able to have “basic interactions”. Being brutally honest it sounds like she needs a lot of professional help before she can have a truly meaningful relationship. Especially since your communication always turns into negative emotions, crying, anger, depression, and her being constantly overwhelmed. That’s not healthy, like at all. As a nonprofessional internet rando I think it would be more responsible of you to back off on the “my new girlfriend” thing and be more of a concerned friend.

Essentially I think you’re right, we are amusing ourselves. The point is that we seem to be built to do that - we come with a nice set of compulsions that give us happy feelings when we do certain things, and if those feelings are an illusion so what? They feel real.