Former Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan on Monday said he will vote for President Joe Biden in November, arguing former President Donald Trump “has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character.”...
Politics can be a cynical, nasty game, but it's important that everyone believes that the game's rules matter. For a football (soccer) analogy, Nixon was hoping to get away with an intentional handball or studs-up tackle, while Trump is Suarez biting people, or maybe a pitch invasion by angry ultras. None of them are within the rules and should not be tolerated, but some are not even identifiable as football and are way harder to manage than the others.
I fear that he's going to under-perform his party, but still squick out a win. People dislike him almost universally, but the GOP folks who don't respect him can still count on his vote and they know that he will kiss the ring to keep his job.
Also, I've decided "squick" is probably a good verb to use for most things that Ted Cruz does.
First, I think Ernest has done a fantastic job and I've been rooting for him this whole time. But it's becoming clear it's all too much for him without the support of a larger team....
Many of the lemmy instances have two or more front-ends available. I find https://photon.lemmy.world/ with the dark them and "List" post style looks pretty nice. There's at least one that just simply replicates old reddit.
Abandoned large magazines are being bombarded with spam and admins are nowhere to be seen it seems. Hundreds of spam bot posts have not been deleted for months, see /infosec /internet /opensource /science, etc. and there are some posts about admins not responding to reports. So whats happening here?...
I hate to say it, because I've been really pleased with kbin for the most part. I've liked being able to dip my toes into the Mastodon side without yet another account; I like the interface; and my interactions with Ernest have been nothing but pleasant. I certainly hope all is well with him personally. But whether it's legitimate medical issues or undisclosed burnout, the instance and platform are struggling.
The good thing is that everything has been federating and most of us have been interacting with Lemmy and mbin users daily anyway; it's "just" a loss of fake internet points and comment history to move. I'm trying to put that off, but the mobile site/pwa is only okay, API rollout has stalled (meaning app development has stalled as well), admin activities can't happen with Ernest, and technical issues with the instance are becoming more common.
I think the Reddit API mini-exodus last year hit at that exact "sweet" spot, in terms of numbers and point in kbin development, where one dev/admin could almost keep up with it, but not quite. Suddenly this thing he was noodling with to combine Lemmy and Mastodon has thousands of people wanting it to be production ready. I don't begrudge him anything even if it is just burnout, but if that is the case then maybe it's time to bless mbin as a successor and start migrating people off kbin.social or find someone else to admin it and ugrade it to mbin. Ernest has built up a ton of goodwill; if he's done, then he's done (and of course, if he's ill then he's ill). Who among us could stand up a minimum viable product of a reddit clone and admin two instances? Not me, that's for sure.
Edit: I checked, and Ernest's Polish-language instance karab.in is completely down right now.
We have all been very lucky that these open source projects are there as an alternative, and there are ways Ernest can step back if being the sole PM of a sprawling social network project isn't good for him. I just don't want it to happen in a way where people are left with a bad taste in their mouths for the Fediverse or him personally.
kbin.social in particular only has the one admin. I keep an eye on the two ghost-town mags that I mod so they don't become spam vectors, but there's only so much we can do without an admin/dev.
I really don’t like Lower Decks. Before you downvote, I would never tell anyone it’s bad or that they shouldn’t like it. I just really can’t figure out why most people seem to like it so much....
I like The Orville. I've watched the entire run of the show. Much like you with LD though, I don't quite get how people love The Orville. It strikes me as leftover TNG episodes with a Find and Replace, followed by a liberal coat of Seth MacFarlane's very particular set of Gen X influences. The morality is often pretty clumsy and I can almost imagine Seth and the writers being frustrated by the ambiguity that a good Trek episode can leave you with. Then, the way it had to start with a more Galaxy quest vibe to get a show order from Fox, followed by Seth wanting it to be more serious but also still be a Seth show, it's kind of all over the place. I also find some of the acting performances to be amateurish to the point of distraction.
And for all that, I still like it. It scratched an itch and has a lot of heart. On the whole, it's more than the sum of its parts, but for me it still has a ceiling. I like it about as much as I like Discovery, which I have also watched in its entirety though only once. The two shows' issues are very different though, with the exception of tonal whiplash.
I have come around on LD. I think it is a similar love letter to to Gen2 Star Trek but handles the balance of trek-to-humor better, and for all their cartoon antics, I've found the characters more compelling than The Orville's.
This article over on Hack-A-Day seemed like it would appeal here. It discusses how the physical aspects of a cheap ballpoint pen are just less well suited to cursive writing as compared to a fountain pen. Enjoy!
In America at least, The headline is just not true. Computers, phones, and tablets are killing cursive, full stop. Ballpoints killed fountain pens as a general purpose writing instrument, it's true, but that was literally fifty years ago in public schools in the US. Cursive however, kept on truckin'. Even in the 80s and 90s, we learned with pencils, and did exams and in-class writing with ballpoints and maybe a fancy-pants rollerball. By college, I was using fountain pens because I'm a dork who never found the obsolete text-generation tool I didn't find interesting, but the rest of my classmates were contentedly doing their papers with their Bics. Even the article from the 60s, cited in the story, was written by a "researcher" who worked for a private company selling handwriting lessons.
It's only as laptops became so common as to be practical and permitted in classrooms that the mindset changed. Keyboarding had a brief heyday as a skill for everyone, but now even that is fading as students are most comfortable with touch-screens of various sizes. My nine year old doesn't touch type, but merely being familiar with the location and uses of the keys on a fullsize keyboard has set her apart among her peers. Her kids will probably wonder how she managed to get along without full-time transcription. Funnily enough, her manuscript is god-awful, with so many unconnected loops and ascenders that a letter could sometimes be any of three or four, but the little bit of cursive they have learned, encouraged by her dear-old chicken-scratch dad, is more legible. I don't want to imply that's the norm, though. Most people's cursive is much harder to decipher without context than their printing. Then, as we write by hand less overall, the need to optimize for speed and comfort becomes less pronounced. Easy, legible letter forms that are just slower to make are fine.
So that being said, are fountain pens in good working order and with ink in them nicer for cursive? Hell yes, of course they are! They were generally built to last, so more thoughtfully designed for a writer, the technology allows for less pressure (though the required pressure for writing on a single piece of paper can sometimes be overstated by us enthusiasts) and more "personality." That said, 95% of people didn't care about any of that enough to want to stick with fountain pens even when ballpoints were less mature than they are now. That was doubly true because we as colelctors have some serious survivors' bias around the brands that have lasted and particularly the vintage pens that hung around. Anything cheaper than an Esterbrook J barely matters to a collector, but that the leaky plastic bananas of many a bulk-lot Ebay listing made up the vast majority of fountain pens most people were dealing with. They are literal garbage now, but they weren't far off back then.
Cursive or print, most people just want a convenient stick to put ink onto paper.
Things happen at different paces in different places, and I am about a decadeish older than you, but the broader trend has just been that long form writing will be done on some sort of keyboard, so the purpose that cursive exists to serve mattered less and less. Your experience was a bit different, but I don't know that we're describing completely different trends, neither of which has anything to do with the poor innocent ballpoints, LOL.
Yeah the article touches on that, as well as the fact that some degrees have you making less (though possibly in a position that is less demanding of your time and/or physicality) than many people without a degree. It also specifically mentions that the benefits are now small enough that the chances of making more have to be weighed against the costs of not finishing or of taking on too much debt for the bump. It then goes into all the ways that the elite schools quietly keep up social barriers (Equestrian scholarships, anyone?). The other big thing is that a sizeable percentage of Republican-leaning people now dismiss college as being nothing more than an indoctrination camp, so that skews the numbers in a weird way. But then, as you say, it remains a basic hurdle to most office jobs or of course to graduate study, hence the rise of nonsense like Liberty University and the continued existence of the University of Phoenix.
We were fortunate enough to be able to invest in a college savings plan for our daughter (yay privilege!), but if we were starting from scratch, I would tell her to try to knock it out of the park in Community College for two years, then apply to a three-tiered set of schools: 2-3 elite places that will open doors (likely off the table when transferring in from CC, but worth it if you can pull it off), the 2-3 best public schools in our state, and 2-3 reputable schools that will be cheapest due to whatever combination of aid, proximity, and in-state tuition brings the bill down. Even with our plan, I'm going to strongly encourage her to use it at a place where it will cover total cost (e.g. 4 years at options 2 and 3 above, no private schools). There is just no more room for romance in choosing your college. Taking out massive debt to go to any place other than those networking factories is just not a prudent economic choice.
While their financial models are a million times more sensible, this is kind of how Europe works already. I'm exaggerating a bit, but if you don't get into Ox-bridge or the Sorbonne or l'Ecole Polytechnique, then you go to class in an office building somewhere near your flat and you get on with life without carrying crippling levels of debt into the workforce. There's no pining for the hallowed halls of Oglethorpe University or Siena College.
Defense lawyers for convicted South Carolina lawyer Murdaugh say Clerk of Court Rebecca Hill violated her oath of office as well as their client's constitutional right to an impartial jury.
True, but there's a certain set of STEM students who resent that their BS degrees are not simply technical certifications. The idea of college is supposed to be that you come out a well rounded person who had exposure to a lot of fields of human endeavor at a sophisticated level compared to high school.
Now, can we argue that not everyone qualified to pursue a technical subject needs a well-rounded education? Sure, but I don't want to work with or for those people. Even for someone who rolled their eyes through English Comp 101, you can expect that they've been taught how to write a damn paragraph and how to engage with a narrative beyond the surface level.
I'm a mod over at lemmy.ca/c/torontobluejays, and a subscriber there who subs from Kbin mentioned in a post that they have not been able to see the bot-posted game day threads that are posted for each days Blue Jays Game. I've created an account here to confirm that, and it's the same for me as well. I also don't see any...
Certainly something in your sidebar. Then, I know /r/askhistorians doesn't spam their podcast, but the mods are very quick to plug it when relevant, so keep an eye out for opportunities. Finally, just be sensible. Most people who are still on Reddit (I still lurk my niche communities) just want content. If there's a reasonable chance to tell them where else has content, some number will respond. I'd say y'all are fairly well equipped to draw in people if you think the Fediverse is THE FUTURE.
They do provide examples of literary techniques that most modern stuff doesn't really do, so I can sort of understand using them to demonstrate allegory and metaphor, etc, but at the same time, very few people enjoy reading them and the actual messages that don't really apply today also don't get through anyways.
As an old English major, I agree that the "canon" is probably larger than it needs to be, and educators generally do a piss poor job of accepting that excellent works of literature continue to be written while the length of a school year does not change. I'll stick up for a heavy dose of the classics though. Even more than the techniques, which absolutely are present in modern literature, Shakespeare and Dickens and Melville provide a shared set of norms and expectations and feed into references and provide a vocabulary for conversation and even subconscious engagement with newer works of lit and drama.
In a lot of ways they ARE the historical context of English literature, and to that extent, yes, you should cram some of them into the brains of teenagers. Not so many as we do now, and the point is well taken that newer works can engage more readily, but school is the right time to have people read these works and to discuss why some parts are relevant, and to take a moment to explain why other parts were relevant. I'd love to see a curriculum that includes some "family tree" type stuff for themes and techniques and shows how writers have more- or less-consciously adapted and built on the DNA of previous works. Kind of a "Huck Finn begets Holden Caulfield begets Harry Potter" kind of thing. Nothing could be worse for engagement than a pure chronological lesson plan for the year.
For kid lit, absolutely. Maintain "scholarly editions" for academics and curious adults, and maybe even indicate somewhere on the copyright or title page that the edition people are reading differs from the original, but if a book is both important and problematic, then yeah, there's no reason to take the hurtful, insensitive themes and images in some of them and say, "here, junior, this is what the adults in your life think you need to internalize."
In general, I'm more for retiring dated children's literature than revising it, authorial intent and all, but some of the great touchstones would have more value in revised form than as relics. As a parent, discussions about problematic media eventually become unavoidable if you want to responsibly engage with the world, but I don't want to give a younger kid of bunch of mixed messages.
Gross. Once kbin stabilized after those first few days full of Reddit refugees, I stopped going to squabbles, but I made a point of deleting my account today. The dev was oddly secretive and non-collaborative, had a weird cadre of posters extolling his virtues, and his only presence on Reddit was half-baked shit in an entrepreneur subreddit. Now, I have to admit I was expecting a more mainstream enshittification as he tried to monetize, not a full-on (and super quick!) Voat situation.
Our Oreck XL is a bit awkward on carpeted stairs, but doable and its beater brush is not fucking around. As an aside, it's not the best vacuum in the world, but it's reasonably priced, a proven design, and easily repaired.
I assume if the transformer had blown the Californians would have had to work off the charges living in the little town, being hilariously angry for the first act month, only to come around, leave after some emotional misunderstanding, but then return just in time to save the town hall from getting bulldozed.
One should also not underestimate Texas communities’ commitment to their high school interscholastic American football teams.
Imagine all the loyalty and tradition of a local (soccer) football club in Europe, but tied directly into the local government and wrapped up in Texas egos.
$50 million USD is fairly expensive for a suburban school district’s new stadium, but it’s not breaking any records.
Awesome! I have ancestors from Newfoundland, and some more distant family and online acquaintances still there, so I try to halfway keep up with things on the Internet.
there are cousins in every corner of North America.
Oh absolutely. I had to do some investigative genealogy to uncover my roots at all, so I'm sort of cheating in that I know where EVERYBODY is, but I have "Newfoundlander" cousins in NB, ON, QC, BC, AB (of course), to say nothing of me from Florida, all the people who relocated to Boston and stayed, and then Washington state, Georgia, North Carolina. The only sad thing is the "why," I reckon.
We’re going to get a couple of minutes totality at my house. Anybody know how to pick adequate eclipse glasses or what level of welding goggles is equivalent?
Thanks. We were moving, so I took some photos when I disassembled it. That was two houses ago now, and it's currently set up in roughly the same configuration, but a bit lower and with fewer duct runs (planer, Table saw, and "other"). One of the simple PLA blast gates came apart in one of the moves, but for how simple they were they've held up well.
Our former stray is a bit of a chonk. He had the appetite of a dog that spent all day on the hunt, the metabolism of a dog that didn't always succeed, and the activity level of a dog who hated every minute of all of it. Once we saw the weird round scars hiding in his coat and heard the yelps when picking him up put pressure on the wrong rib, we just decided to let him live his life. After what he clearly went through, living to 12 (or 13 or 14 or however the fuck old he really is) as a pudgy lump is probably heaven on earth. He's still a bit sensitive, but he's trusting and comfortable. If it takes chicken nuggets to get us there, so be it.
Our younger pup was born in a loving foster home, and he is like a smiling brick shithouse bursting with light and joy, so he gets a lot more exercise and play to work off the human food, and yeah, by percent of body weight he probably eats less.
Yes, of course, but not without time and work that may not be worthwhile unless the tree has sentimental value.
There are urban sawmills and DIY sawmills that can plank out the trunk of that tree. Then, you'll need to let it dry and/or get it to kiln. This will take at least months and maybe a couple of years and has wrinkles of its own (wax/paint on the ends and "stickering" between the planks). After that, maybe it comes out really lovely. I don't know the exact species you've got there. It will likely be nicer than the Spruce/Fir/Pine construction lumber from Home Depot, but it's also still kinda likely to look like... well... construction lumber.
In the unlikely event that you desperately want to make something from this tree, and also have no desire to properly process the wood, you certainly can. It's not going to explode or anything, it just might not have a look many find desirable. I've never really known anyone to do greenwood turning with pine, but conceptually I guess it might be possible, if also sticky. Could also do some other bentwood green work, but that has a very specific look to it. Beyond that, you could try something rustic and just let it be when it inevitably warps and cracks. Or you could embed a pinecone or a little sliver of it in some resin, then turn that on a lathe.
Or you could make a great big pile of firewood, LOL.
Cordless-wise, I have B&D, Porter Cable, and Bostitch (drill and impact driver that they used to sell at Wal-Mart) because they are all electrically compatible SB&D products, requiring only a few kisses from a Dremel to interoperate like a single system. Also made an adapter for my ancient Ridgid X2 anchor, I mean DRILL; it was a gift and just sits on the shelf with a countersink in it, but it still works.
Got a little bit of everything for the woodshop, Wen jointer, Shopsmith planer, band saw, scroll saw, and Mark V, Sawstop Contractor saw, Harbor Freight Dust Collector.
I believe that "Hart" at Wal Mart is also a TTI brand, roughly Ryobi quality but of course so many fewer offerings. I think Wally World got pissed that Stanley B&D wouldn't do a DeWalt line for them and made a better deal with TTI.
I have a Matrix because at the time I was looking, it was the only way to get a corded impact driver at a reasonable price. Then of course I got a cordless and never use the Matrix, but that swiss army knife feel is pretty cool.
(copied over from the post I tried to make on lemmy.world/c/aww because I think I put it up right when they got hacked and some posts didn't federate.)
His mama was under a year old, rescued while pregnant from the worst kind of backyard breeder, and had weird scars on her back. Nevertheless, she was a lovebug who got the zoomies when we came to the foster, and she kissed her little man goodbye. We understand she's a fat and happy foster-fail now, who takes it upon herself to cuddle with any puppies that pass through the foster home.
This "little" boy is the most empathetic of the five dogs we've owned over the years, and he has never done anything "meaner" than firmly wriggling away when he didn't want to come in from barking or get the mud washed off his feet. He does crazy human shit like if his zoomies lead him to bump into somebody or step on a toe, he'll bring whatever toy was at the center of the play, drop it in the lap of the affected human, then immediately lie down next to them and get calm. He wasn't taught this, but he has an instinct for what humans and dogs need from him and just wants everyone to be as happy as he is.
Houston has been instrumental in helping our other rescue, a blue heeler mix, make the final steps from a scared former-stray to a dog that remembers what play is, is confident of his place in the family, and knows how to fully trust another dog.
I mean, Kenobi Space Jesus has a pretty direct antecedent in Mormon art. They took the Medieval and Renaissance European tradition of making literally everybody white and brought it deep into the twentieth and even twenty-first centuries.
Not at hand, but they are 1/2” plywood with simple routed grooves on hardwood runners. Two of the three have little 3d printed, scalloped pen “trays”. The third is deep enough for most brands of 50-60 mL ink bottles.
The back is just hardboard set into a rabbet, so this thing looks neat against a wall. It’s also heavier than it looks, lol, and with plenty of, umm, “character”.
Former Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan says he is voting for Biden in November ( www.cnn.com )
Former Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan on Monday said he will vote for President Joe Biden in November, arguing former President Donald Trump “has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character.”...
Ted Cruz Is Getting Nervous He's Going to Lose His Senate Seat ( www.rollingstone.com )
Unmoderated and now extremely delayed federation - is it time to move? ( kbin.social )
First, I think Ernest has done a fantastic job and I've been rooting for him this whole time. But it's becoming clear it's all too much for him without the support of a larger team....
where are kbin admins? ( kbin.social )
Abandoned large magazines are being bombarded with spam and admins are nowhere to be seen it seems. Hundreds of spam bot posts have not been deleted for months, see /infosec /internet /opensource /science, etc. and there are some posts about admins not responding to reports. So whats happening here?...
Snow Gives Him the Zoomies ( lemmy.today )
I’m cold, but he wants to run in circles
Lower Decks: Can anyone tell me what I'm missing?
I really don’t like Lower Decks. Before you downvote, I would never tell anyone it’s bad or that they shouldn’t like it. I just really can’t figure out why most people seem to like it so much....
What Is Killing Cursive? Ballpoints. Probably. ( hackaday.com )
This article over on Hack-A-Day seemed like it would appeal here. It discusses how the physical aspects of a cheap ballpoint pen are just less well suited to cursive writing as compared to a fountain pen. Enjoy!
Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That? ( www.nytimes.com )
Non-paywalled link...
Alex Murdaugh wants a new trial, accusing the clerk of court of jury tampering ( www.npr.org )
Defense lawyers for convicted South Carolina lawyer Murdaugh say Clerk of Court Rebecca Hill violated her oath of office as well as their client's constitutional right to an impartial jury.
Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That? ( www.nytimes.com )
NYT gift article expires in 30 days....
How to Enable Bot Content from Lemmy? ( kbin.social )
I'm a mod over at lemmy.ca/c/torontobluejays, and a subscriber there who subs from Kbin mentioned in a post that they have not been able to see the bot-posted game day threads that are posted for each days Blue Jays Game. I've created an account here to confirm that, and it's the same for me as well. I also don't see any...
Any advice for a large subreddit's (19 million subscribers) new lemmy instance?
I’m one of the r/futurology mods, and involved in setting up our new Lemmy instance - futurology.today...
Jacqueline Wilson says rewriting children’s books can be justified ( www.theguardian.com )
Archived version: archive.ph/WYdpt...
Squabbles, another recent reddit alternative, seems to be taking the doomed "free speech" path ( i.imgur.com )
How the hell do I clean/vacuum carpeted stairs?
I know this is a cleaning request than a home improvement one, but I would appreciate some advice....
What happened when a Tesla came to Ekalaka, MT ( montanafreepress.org )
A Los Angeles couple, an electric vehicle and an unattended utility outlet energized the gossip mill in the 400-person eastern Montana town last week.
First fountain pen came in yesterday. ( i.imgur.com )
Left hand Lamy Safari Vista alongside a travelers company notebook in basic brown leather.
[FOX News] Texas school board invokes eminent domain, could raze century-old family home to build parking lot ( www.foxnews.com )
Local coverage- A cool SNW connection to The Rock aka Newfoundland ( vocm.com )
The wonderful comedy of Vulcan manners, Charades, turns out to be a first time directing Trek for Newfoundlander Jordan Canning....
[The Texan] Texas Cities Prepare for ‘Ring of Fire’ Solar Eclipse Tourism in October ( archive.is )
Writeup and gallery I did a few years back on my Harbor Freight Dust Collector mods ( imgur.com )
Short version: Thien Baffle, wall mount, ducting, Truck filter.
A happy chonk ( i.imgur.com )
This pine tree in my yard partially collapsed. Probably have to take the rest down. Can I make anything out of it? ( media.kbin.social )
Good from far, but far from good. Plywood printer stand with SPF facing/edge banding ( media.kbin.social )
Pecan headphone stand. Joined via floating tenon with mortises cut on a Shopsmith. ( media.kbin.social )
What brand of tools is everyone here using? ( lemmy.world )
Houston was from a rescue but has only known love... and stealing his human sister's stuffies. (originally posted to lemmy.world when they were down and it didn't federate) ( media.kbin.social )
Simple "half-board-foot" mallet made from Pecan wood. Danish oil finish. ( media.kbin.social )
I Went on a Vigilante Raid to “Save” Kids Sold for Sex. What We Did Haunts Me Now. ( slate.com )
Walnut and white oak fountain pen chest ( media.kbin.social )
When we first got him, Stet slept in his crate 23 hours a day. Years of love can fix that. ( media.kbin.social )
For those who need a cute-induced smile today
Bandit is one of my ferrets, and she enjoys walks. I’m sure most people haven’t seen a ferret walking on a leash before. 🥰