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Cake day: December 15th, 2024

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  • Short answer with no context: Bill Clinton touched me appropriately.

    Back story for those interested:

    In 2012 I worked for the Obama re-election campaign as a Field Organizer, and typically the job was just leading and organizing volunteers in activities like phone banking and voter registration and such. I was in a swing county in a swing state, so the campaign made a stop in our area. Obama and Biden were supposed to swing through along with Bill Clinton and others. Biden was even supposed to come to our office so we all had to get vetted by the Secret Service. But the candidates canceled thanks to Hurricane Sandy forcing them back to Washington. The rally continued on, though, with mostly just Bill Clinton and some local politicians.

    On the day of, I gather up my group of volunteers and we head to the rally venue. I was originally assigned to pass out water bottles to people waiting in line, but then we learned we didn’t have enough barriers around the tents where the candidates and Bill were (supposed to be) hanging out and I volunteered to be a human barrier to fill the gap. The job turned out to be kinda fun, a skateboarder tried to get past me and into the tent area because he was trying to cut through to get to another building and when I stuck my arm out to stop him I accidentally clotheslined him. He looked at me super pissed, then noticed the Secret Service right behind me and left with a quickness.

    Anyways, Bill gets on stage, says his thing, then comes to the fence like to shake hands. Well, I was also a part of the fence and the people swarming me started to overwhelm me. Until two Secret Service agents swoop in and push the throng back, that is. As Bill passed by he pats me on the back and heads to his tent.

    And that was the time I was touched by Bill Clinton in an appropriate manner.



  • Dude it’s not about Jew vs Not Jew, it’s about genocide justification. To be clear here, the people on this genocide campaign are the Israeli government, the settlers that support the genocide, and the world leaders that continue to support the Israeli government. Trying to paint this as “Jews Bad” is no different than saying that Americans love Nazis just because we have Nazis in our government – in actual fact some Nazis are American but not all Americans are Nazis.

    So watch out with your broad brush buddy, you seen to be cruising along the slippery slope of eventually accusing Jews of operating space lasers.


  • As others have mentioned, video downloaders works. Personally, I would either use a VPN or proxy. I don’t have this problem in my state but when I traveled through Oklahoma I just used a VPN and it worked just fine.

    The problem with downloading porn, I learned many moons ago before “tube” websites made it so accessible, is that unless you constantly hunt for new stuff it’s a waste of space as porn doesn’t have a ton of rewatch value (for me at least). So you amass a collection and then the collection gets boring after some watches/views.

    If you happen to use a DNS-based ad blocking/security service such as NextDNS, ControlD, or whatever you can also often just have your DNS queries route out of another region. Doing that can get you around some regional stuff because you’ll get service URL’s and IP’s back from DNS for that other region, so you can skip the VPN and still get what you’re looking for. But that’s most useful for things like getting UK shows in your Netflix TV app. For your use case I would just VPN.

    That said, if you’re set on downloading your porn, yt-dlp is the gold standard for ripping video off of the Internet. I haven’t tried it myself, but a cursory search seems to confirm that it’ll work with sites like PornHub (it’s apparently hit or miss depending on the site). You might still need a VPN for the content to not be blocked though.



  • It’s unfortunate that remote work is going away for many places, but it isn’t gone. There are remote work jobs out there, though the competition for them is fierce. Everyone has a different path, but let me share mine and hopefully it helps you. I

    , too, work in IT, and when I got my start in IT beyond bench tech work there was almost nothing as far as jobs that could put me on a good career path. I had a GED, no certifications, but I’m a quick study and taught myself enough to combine it with a silver tongue and talk myself into a remote job. In the meantime I decide that I need to build up a network, so I start hanging in the r/msp Discord server and mostly lurk except to chime in to help when someone has a technical issue or needs help. Over time I get more active and establish a bit of a reputation with the regulars as a smart and helpful guy. So when I eventually put out there on the Discord server that I was looking for my next opportunity I got DM’d with 4 different job offers that same day. All but 1 required that I move to a higher cost of living area, and I made sure that the pay made sense for the area.

    I took a job in a very expensive area with a lot of tech work available so that I have actual prospects around me, work it for almost 4 years, and then meet a guy who would be my boss for the next 3 jobs that followed. Now I’m very established in my career, and I can safely say that cultivating relationships with people did as much, if not more, for my career than the technical knowledge I’ve racked up has. Sure, my knowledge and experience were the reason I was hired, but I would probably still be a bench tech or help desk guy now if I had never made relationships with people who could help get me past the mountain of ATS-screened resumes and put me in front of an interviewer.

    So the takeaway here is that, based on my singular experience, studying up and submitting applications aren’t enough in today’s job market. You need to get to know people, and you need to get to know people in different job markets in particular. My recommendation is to find a place where IT folk gather and just try to be friendly and helpful.




  • I don’t think it’s a normal expectation for services with variable labor and materials to have a flat price associated. Certainly not for businesses buying said services. But there isn’t a single “charge per seat” software company that has a valid excuse for obfuscating pricing. Every software company I’ve worked with (and I’ve worked with hundreds over my career buying software for corps) has a “list price” for their product even if they hide it.


  • Jimmy Kimmel made a comment about how the MAGA gang was spinning the shooting of Charlie Kirk as a politically-motivated assassination by “Democrats”, when the shooter themselves was part of said MAGA gang and was not, in actual fact, a Democrat.

    In response, the FCC threatened ABC and encouraged TV broadcast stations to exclude their programming, and so ABC indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show in response.

    That just about sums it up briefly.







  • My knee-jerk reaction is that I’m generally against it. I’m all for AI in a variety of applications, but I don’t participate in discussion in online places to give free training days to corporate LLM’s. If somehow it could be guaranteed that it was only used in open models I suppose I would feel a little better, but the second issue in my mind is that even careful people leave a trail of identifying breadcrumbs sprinkled across their posting history. A human having to sift through thousands of posts and comments will have a much harder time putting pieces together than an AI will. So I see it as a privacy concern mostly.


  • You got a lot of distro recommendations from across the spectrum and it’s honestly hard to go wrong with any of them. It’s mostly a matter of preference. As such I’ll give you two pieces of advice:

    1. Set up a multi-boot flash drive (assuming you’re currently using Windows, YUMI is a great utility) so that your can try a bunch of them and see what jives with you most. A great feature of Linux installers is that you can actually run the entire OS, full-featured, from the ISO. So grab a whole slew of them, throw them on the flash drive, and spend some time taking them for a spin.
    2. Do your research on compatibility. Laptop makers often don’t make Linux drivers, so the latest hardware has compatibility problems until the community covers the gap. There are also some laptop manufacturers that have Linux in mind when they make their products, like System 76 and Framework.

    Good luck! IMO getting into Linux for the first time is a fun journey. Enjoy it!



  • Well as far as I understand, this discussion is about voting and not prosecution. A prosecutor’s job is to seek the greatest penalty they think they can feasibly get, so of course they’re going to focus on charges that carry the greatest penalty. A voter’s job, in the context of presidential elections, is to choose between a series of power-hungry hyenas to lead the Executive branch of the government. Not voting is counter-productive and under the current system voting third-party is also counter-productive, so a voter has an incentive to consider all of the “crimes”, and even the good sprinkled amongst them, and not tunnel-vision on the worst.

    So debating the “lesser charges” could not be more relevant, because who you vote for matters and the government does a heck of a lot more than support Israel. If I follow your line of false equivalence, I can only envision 2 conclusions:

    1. Who you vote for does not matter at all, just flip a coin.
    2. There’s no point in voting at all, leave the decision to everyone else.

    Yes, the current system is corrupt and is awful, and it needs to change, but in the meantime elections are still held and decisions are still made about things like education funding, women’s bodily autonomy, trans rights, student debt, and so on and so on. Saying nothing else matters because the political parties that have a duopoly on power support Israel’s genocide campaign is short-sighted at best. As far as I can tell what you’re advocating for is voter apathy, and I fail to see how that’s productive.


  • And nobody in this thread at least is arguing against that. You seem to have taken the position that because both parties support Israel in their genocide of Palestinians there can be no other measures worth judging them by. That they are equal. And the “both sides” argument is objectively a false equivalence. It’s not as though a woman’s bodily autonomy no longer matters because Israel is leading a genocidal campaign in Gaza, for instance.

    It is precisely because there are other issues in the world and in the country that there is a lesser evil. Even if we disagree on degrees of “lesser” or even who is “lesser”, everything is not so one dimensional as to be able to label both political parties as equally evil when there are other evils that need to be piled on and added to the scale. Ignoring those evils is ignoring the victims of those evils.


  • Not to be reductionist of the genocide in Gaza, it is undoubtedly evil and both parties deserve to be labeled as such for supporting it, but to speak as though that’s the only issue in this world and the only yardstick we can use to measure both parties is itself reductionist. And the reason they maintain their power is that the system is so structured as to ensure it. And that’s not to say there is nothing we can do about that (for one, elimination of FPTP voting), but as of the 2024 election the reality was that only one of those two parties would win. And to claim that recognizing that in itself is the sole cause of it is silly.