Yup, glad someone else mentioned this. First world was allied with the USA. Second world was allied with the USSR. Third world wasn’t allied with either.

The reason “third world” became synonymous with “undeveloped” is because of why countries tended to be third world. Countries were largely third world because they weren’t developed enough to be notable allies to the USA or USSR. They didn’t have enough development to be able to contribute things like military tech or manpower outside of their own borders, or corruption was so rampant that the first and second worlds didn’t feel like they would be reliable.

As far as the USA and USSR were concerned, third world countries were only “useful” as land for staging proxy wars. But that meant “third world” quickly became associated with “undeveloped, corrupt, and war-torn.”

I have my tribal ID dismissed as fake all the time. My cousin started boycotting Walmart in the 90’s, because they refused to sell her beer. She doesn’t have a drivers license and (due to a quirk where her home state wouldn’t recognize her out-of-state birth certificate as valid) she couldn’t easily get a state ID. So she used her tribal ID. It worked in most places because she lived in an area with lots of natives. But Walmart’s company policy was to refuse tribal IDs… Meaning she couldn’t buy beer at Walmart, or use their pharmacy. So she started boycotting them all the way back in the 90’s due to that.

Hell, it happened to me just two days ago at the bank. I changed my name a while ago, and needed a photo ID with my old name on it. I had already changed my driver’s license and passport to my new name, so all I had on me at the time was my old tribal ID. The bank manager (a tiny blonde white lady) and I went back and forth about it for a little while… But it became clear that she had no intention of accepting it as a valid ID. So now I’ve been stuck dealing with some bureaucratic BS for the past two days.

My wife (who is just as white as the bank manager) was more surprised about the denial than I was, because it was the first time she had seen it get denied. Like she knew conceptually that it happened, but she hadn’t seen it happen in person until then. Luckily, my cases of denied ID have had much lower stakes than this article. But I wouldn’t doubt for a second that it happened to her, because I know from personal experience that tribal IDs get dismissed as fake all the time.

She does seem to genuinely believe in protecting kids… But she has an extremely warped idea of what that entails. The Epstein thing has been an obvious wedge between her and Trump, because it’s one thing she has dug her heels in and refused to drop. Because (again) she does at least seem to care about protecting kids. And she sees the Epstein stuff as an obvious “if you protect the files, you’re protecting pedos” signal flare. Broken clocks, I suppose. At least she has shown that she hasn’t been willing to budge on this one specific issue.

I’m brown and have started carrying my American passport card on me at all times. The issue is that there’s nothing stopping them from just taking it away when they stop me on the street, and deporting me anyways. They knowingly deport American citizens all the time.

It’s more so privilege and/or status/wealth.

And position. Cops are called class traitors for a reason. Being a cop is one of the few ways that a common peasant can effectively be unbound by the law. They’re the rich’s enforcers in class warfare, so they’re protected from being bound by the rich’s laws.

I also have ADHD, and have also done a 16 hour drive straight through. Audiobooks or podcasts help. Music gets boring after a few hours. Audiobooks or podcasts are constantly changing, so it’s enough mental stimulation to stay engaged, while also not being too distracting.

People like this are why safe drivers’ insurance premiums are still so high. The safe drivers are subsidizing the dangerous ones. We’re being forced to pay more because the risk of being hit by a braindead watches-movies-while-doing-100 driver has increased.

Yeah, it was called Can’t Help Myself.

Yup. Not only are the materials entirely unregulated… So are the labels. A company can stick a “Made with 100% pure medical-grade silicone” on the box, even if they know it’s not true.

That’s why there are independent toy reviewers. The companies send a few toys to the reviewer, who does destructive testing on them. IIRC, most testers require at least three of the same toy for a full test. They’ll do things like light the toy on fire, (the presence/color of smoke and if/how it melts tells the tester if it’s pure silicone, or if there are harmful additives), attempt to break/rip/crush it (to confirm tensile/compressive strength is adequate), etc… And yes, they’ll also use the toy to review how well it works.

It’s an art installation. The idea is that the machine slowly leaks hydraulic fluid. So it works to squeegee it back up towards its base, so it can remain operational.

At first, it was a cute little art installation. The machine worked well and barely leaked. It would take time in between scoops to dance for the crowd or rest. But over time, as the machine aged and the leaks got worse, it had to shift more and more towards scooping up the hydraulic fluid. It changed from a cute dancing robot to a haunting metaphor. It desperately worked to keep the fluid contained, all the way up to the point that it broke down.

When it finally broke down, it was revealed that it ran on electric stepper motors, and didn’t even need the hydraulic fluid.

It needs a tuned jingle bell directly underneath one ear… And then a different slightly off-key jingle bell slightly behind the other ear.

Yeah, I mapped my public transit commute out one time. For starters, it’s complicated because Google/Apple/Waze/etc have the public transit option greyed out. Like it’s not even an option. If I try, Google suggests getting a Lyft. Which is really just saying “lol get a car, scrub.” I wish I were making this shit up:

Here’s a quick visual of my daily drive, versus the public transit route I would have to take:

So my commute starts with me biking 20 minutes away from work, to get to the nearest bus stop. Then I take a 20 minutes bus ride to the nearest rail hub. Then I take a commuter rail south-south-west for an hour, to get to the connecting line. Then I make a connection. The rail times rarely line up, so I’d probably have to wait at the station for ~15 minutes for the connection. Then I take the second rail line 45 minutes northwest.

But here’s where I run into my next problem… My house is serviced by one public transit system, and my job is serviced my another entirely separate transit system. Due to local politicians in the different cities not getting along, the two systems don’t connect. So now I need to bike 20 minutes north, to get from the northernmost station in one transit system, to the southernmost station in the other. Then I take another train 20 minutes north. Finally, I have about a 10 minute bike ride to get from the train station to my job.

All together, that’s ~50 minutes biking, ~20 minutes on a bus, and a little over 120 minutes split across three different trains. Plus the waiting time in between each connection, because the trains I need only run every 15-20 minutes. Bare minimum, I’m looking at around 3.5 hours for public transit… Or I can just take the highway 10 minutes west.

“But wait, you have walking and biking options! You could do those instead! The biking option in your screenshot is only 54 minutes!”

While this may be true on paper, I’d like to refer you to the “I had to go 2 hours out of my way to avoid certain death” panel in the posted comic. That 54 minute bike route is on a 70 MPH two lane highway, with no shoulder or sidewalk. I’d be dead before I was even halfway there.

“So take an alternate route?”

That giant loop I listed earlier is the alternate route. That 10 minute highway route cuts through a nature preserve. There are no other roads or paths parallel to it. You either take the highway, or you go all the way around.

I can’t even legally reach my grocery store without a car. I have to cross that same highway to get to the store, and there is no sidewalk that crosses it. So I’d need to break the law to walk to the grocery store.

Yeah, my thoughts on this are “well they still overwhelmingly voted for him. And they’ll overwhelmingly vote for whoever the next republican is once Trump croaks.” Trump wasn’t keeping his ICE plans secret. He was saying it with his whole chest, and conservative talking heads were screaming it from the rooftops. If they didn’t get the hint, it’s their own fucking fault.

I mean, they also blatantly want to use the n-word so I wouldn’t put too much faith in their reasoning skills.

Edit: Odd, the username is showing as the same in my app, but different when I follow the link in my browser:

Maybe a weird federation thing, since the original comment was removed by a mod (and apparently they were banned from the community entirely).

They’ll get a golden parachute job as a highly paid lobbyist, and be right back in the rotunda, schmoozing with all their old buddies by the end of the month.

Yeah, the primary reason people end up exposing things to the internet is because of friends and family. I can call my tech-illiterate “anything more difficult than logging into Facebook has her throwing up her hands in defeat, saying it is too hard, and tech is just too complicated these days” mother-in-law and walk her through setting up Plex, but that only works because Plex is exposed to the internet. If I had to walk her through setting up Tailscale on her living room TV before she could connect, it would be a non-starter.

That’s just DDNS. There are different ways to do it, and some routers come with a DDNS service ready to go. DuckDNS is commonly recommended. There are even images like Cloudflare-DDNS, which allow you to run it in a container.

Yup, good notes are really the difference between beginner and expert self-hosters. Write the notes as if they’re documentation to be read by someone who has never seen them before. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll remember things; that is the devil talking. You will forget in 6 months when you’re looking at it again.

Yeah, I did a few of those tests for my ADHD diagnosis last year. I’m in the 99th percentile for spatial reasoning. I’m also a 5 on this scale. I can see a puzzle piece and know where it fits in the puzzle. I can see a bunch of weirdly shaped blocks, and figure out how to put them into the shape I want. I was really good at those “you have a bunch of geometric shapes, make them look like a dog” types of things as a kid. My shrink was visibly shocked at how quickly I flew through that section of the test, because the primary limiting factor was how quickly I could rearrange the pieces.

But I can’t fucking picture any of it in my mind. If I have a sketch pad, I can draw a scaled floor plan of my house. But I can’t picture what my furniture looks like. I can describe it. I know what it looks like. But I can’t picture it. Part of my current job involves making scaled drawings. I’m sure that’s not related at all \s

Memories are more like the feelings and senses associated with the memory, alongside a narration of what happened. Like if I had a fight and had to recount it to police, I’d think of how I moved, where I was hit, what kinds of sounds and smells there were, etc. alongside a sort of fight announcer narrating the fight like a boxing match.