TerkErJerbs

What’s this? The architect of the 1994 crime bill who helped the Dems get elected on a platform further right than the GOP on policing and prisons is pro-police? Huh. TIL.

Ghostrunner 2 is 80% off for $17CAD and runs great on the deck. It looks like some of the best speed swordplay vibes from Cyberpunk and I’m stoked to play it.

Also picked up Rage for 5 bucks.

I’m not speaking in absolutes here obviously. But it’s pretty well established that a very small fraction of people who take drugs (prescription or otherwise) become what we term addicts. There are lots of affluent addicts and alcoholics (I know plenty personally) but just because they have access to medical and mental health care doesn’t mean every one of them will go there.

You don’t see a lot of upper middle class people end up on the streets with heavy addictions because they can usually get into rehab, get help processing whatever it is keeping them down, and move on with their lives. Lots of poorer people can do so as well (the poverty and “success” porn content out there is easy to find) but for every one of those success stories there are thousands who never make it. I don’t think it’s hard to parse that poorer people have less culturally acceptable means of getting help (if they don’t outright end up in prison for simple possession to begin with, which I’m guessing those peers you’re referring to seldom have to worry about).

The thing a lot of people get backwards (fuck the war on drugs actually) is that hardcore addiction is virtually always predated by some type of undiagnosed and untreated mental health issue. To say that another way, mental health issues are not caused by taking drugs. When someone is very unwell and often poor (i.e. low or no access to medical and mental health professionals) they often find a way to self-treat the affliction(s) with street drugs. Those same underlying causes for a more affluent person will be dealt with alongside medical supervision (and often with the same class of drugs) without falling into the trap of addiction (because supervised, and supported).

Nothing cool about being a drug user by choice, nor an addict trying to cope. It’s just reality.

I don’t have any personal experiences with any of these crew finder sites but I know lots of people who’ve used them. The catamaran designer I *apprenticed under met his wife through one. She had no prior sailing experience but was willing to learn, and he needed crew to do a Caribbean crossing, and that’s how the story began for them like 25+ years ago. They still sail together all over the world.

The other advice is good too. Just walk the docks and ask around. People love talking about their boats.

Between this community and the actual Onion I get pretty much the gist of current events, yeah. If some topic or other piques my interest from here, I’ll chase it down. The Onion and its opposite tend to give me enough of the context I need to figure out what’s important enough to pursue vs the vast majority of quasi-satire hitting “normal” news cycles over a given week.

It’s like a hyper-curated way to get my news, as if handpicked for me by a space clown. And I like it that way.

I understand that. However logging is taking out fir forests and replanting with pine and spruce. I hazard a guess that if the biomass were left alone less issues would occur given those primary forests have thrived for a very long time on their own.

In my early twenties I was looking for a field of work that was semi environmentally friendly. I had grown up in southern Alberta where it’s all factory farming, mono culture crops, and O&G. For a minute (as a prairie kid) I thought tree planting might be a good way. Basic research even back then showed me that young women who expect to get pregnant within the next fifteen years should not be handling seedlings because the fungicides and pesticides dusted on the root balls are so toxic. Then there’s the GMO monoculture of the species of trees they’re replanting with.

End of the day I didn’t feel like contributing to the next wave of suburb and luxury condo developments. Rednecks always like to say “they grow back” when we talk about protecting old growth forests and it’s obvious that trees (individually) can be grown on a given plot of land (like wheat in a season on the plains)… But the conversation ends when we talk about how it takes millennia to grow the type of environmental diversity primal forests have established.

Oh no! Pine Beatles and drought and other things are affecting our crop of trees! Who could’ve predicted such a thing!?? Bailout please.

In Arizona and New Mexico if someone loses consciousness and hits the pavement awhile they get life threatening burns. It’s crazy.

I met an old drunk outside of Phoenix many years ago who passed out on top of a fire ant colony for a few hours and woke up covered head to toe in attacking angry ants. It’s an inhospitable place!

Nope.

I quit a well known ecomm tech company a few months ago ahead of (another) one of their layoff rounds because upper mgmt was turning into ultra-wall street corpo bullshit. With 30% of staff gone, and yet our userbase almost doubling over the same period, they wanted everyone to continue increasing output and quality. We were barely keeping up with our existing workload at that point, burnout was (and still is) rampant.

Over the two weeks after I gave my notice I discovered that in the third-party app ecosystem many thousands of apps that had (approved) access to the Billing API weren’t even operating anymore. Some had quit operating years ago, but they were still billing end-users on a monthly basis. Many end-users install dozens of apps (just like people do with mobile phones) and then forget they ever did so. The monthly rates for these apps are anywhere from 3 to 20 dollars per month, many people never checked their bank statements or invoices (when they eventually did, they’d contact support to complain about paying for an app that doesn’t even load and may not have for months or years at this point).

I gathered evidence on at least three dozen of these zombie apps. Many of them had hundreds of active installs, and were billing users for in some cases the past three years. I extrapolated that there were probably in the high-hundreds or low-thousands of these zombie apps billing users on the platform, amounting to high-thousands to low-tens-of thousands of installs… amounting to likely millions per year in faulty and sketchy invoicing happening over our Billing API.

Mgmt actually did put together a triage team to address my findings, but I can absolutely assure you the only reason they acted so quickly is because I was on the way out of the company. I’d spotted things like this in the wild previously and nothing had ever been done about it. The pat answer has always been well people are responsible for their own accounts and invoicing. I believe they acted on this one because I was being very vocal about how it would be ‘a shame’ if this situation ever became public, and all those end-users came after the company for those false invoices at one time. It would be a PR and Support nightmare.

You have definitely interacted with this ecommerce platform if you shop online.