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atomheartbevo

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by atomheartbevo

  1. That was not surprising - they were saying some pretty violent stuff. I was getting that sub in my feed, not subscribed, but I visited once, and there were people posting violent shit that they’d like to do. Now it’s possible that it was some Leon fanbois who posted it to get the sub shut down. But there are plenty of other subs that are dissecting the DOGE stuff and digging into the backgrounds of his team. A lot of other subs.
  2. CDC’s website has been getting scrubbed clean of a shitload of useful information, and neither agency is allowed to communicate with the public without it being filtered through the White House. Just the way things are now.
  3. https://www.chron.com/culture/article/spacex-overdue-bills-texas-19454904.php
  4. We stopped playing for a long while, but I just got a notice that Blizzard is adding housing later this year or early next, and we will have to come back. Only 21 years after everybody asked for it, and 27 years after it was in Ultima Online. Building in Azeroth: A First Look at Housing And they are doing it right. Easy and cheap to get - they want everybody to have a house. No maintenance costs - once you get it, it's yours, even if you take a break and your subscription lapses, it won't be demolished. You'll be in instanced neighborhoods (sounds like you can change neighborhoods) with up to 50 other houses, so you won't be scattered across Sosaria Azeroth - there is a zone for the Alliance and one for the Horde. This is good because it won't lag the shit out of you when you are running around various areas. Groups can cluster together and build their own neighborhoods. Meant to be a social aspect. Extensive decoration/building features with new content added all the time, and all of your characters can access it, even if they are from different factions. Some cash shop items, but most items are earned/bought in-game. Sounds like a mix of UO and FFXIV (which has a nice system except it's shit for costs and maintaining it and it's a pain to get and keep).
  5. I didn't know a lot of things either - I remember asking my dad why there were a bunch of sailors inside of Rod Stewart, and him looking at me and asking what I meant and me responding with something about some older kids saying he was full of seamen. My dad:
  6. The same way all of the jokes about the Challenger blowing up did, the ones about what shampoo did the astronauts use, what does NASA stand for, etc. I was in a rural area when it happened, and to this day I don't know how that stuff spreads unless it's a bunch of dads talking to friends/relatives in different parts of the country passing those jokes on, and their kids hearing it or they tell their kids. I remember hearing and telling the jokes on the playground, and how forbidden it was (the teachers were coming down hard on kids and one even got paddled for teling the jokes). 5 or 6 years ago, I brought it up in my high school graduating class's Facebook group, and along with myself, quite a few of us were in different parts of the country from where we went to high school, but a ton of people knew those jokes. I wondered if it was some kind of thing where later somebody like Andrew Dice Clay told the same jokes on some HBO show or something and some got wind of it that way, but everybody was like "nope, I remember hearing it on the playground and passing it around". And for most of us, the jokes popped up within weeks of the crash.
  7. Well, either way, he's lucky. Leon's money isn't going to keep buying him free reign (or rein) from Trump when he goes after Social Security and the DOD.
  8. Somebody’s bottom line appears to be affected. Going after an Austin plastic surgeon and maybe others on social media. @Ghost of LL and @TwiceHorn and @South Austin and others, thoughts? It’s the law firm that helped get almost $800 million out of Fox News, so I wonder if this is going beyond one plastic surgeon. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/unitedhealth-hires-defamation-firm-to-counter-social-media-posts UnitedHealth Group Inc. has hired a prominent defamation law firm to counter what it sees as inaccurate and irresponsible social media posts about the company’s practices. Clare Locke, an Alexandria, Virginia-based boutique law firm, is working for UnitedHealth, the company confirmed. A doctor “is using her social media following to perpetuate inaccuracies, which is irresponsible, unethical and dangerous,” UnitedHeath said in a statement. The hiring shows the biggest US health insurer is pushing back against public statements it views as false following the high-profile death of an executive. Clare Locke is best known for representing Dominion Voting Systems Inc. in a landmark $787.5 million defamation settlement with Fox Corp.'s Fox News. Social media platforms lit up with criticisms and even hatred of health insurers following the Dec. 4 murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive officer of the company’s UnitedHealthcare unit, outside an investor conference in New York. Luigi Mangione, who had allegedly decried health industry practices, faces murder charges in Manhattan. Elisabeth Potter, an Austin, Texas, plastic surgeon, claimed on Instagram Jan. 7 that UnitedHealth denied an in-patient stay after surgery related to cancer. “I had to scrub out mid-surgery to call United, only to find that the person on the line didn’t even have access to the patient’s full medical information, despite the procedure already being pre-approved,” Potter said in the post. One of Potter’s attorneys, Jessica Underwood, said Potter received a Jan. 13 letter from Clare Locke demanding that she correct her posts, apologize to UnitedHealth and condemn threats of violence that the law firm said resulted from the posts. But Underwood, of the law firm Nix Patterson, said Potter’s statements about the insurer were truthful. “Dr. Potter will not be silenced by UnitedHealthcare’s attempts to threaten and harass her,” Underwood said. UnitedHealth said in its statement that it had previously approved coverage of the care the patient received, including coverage of an overnight stay. “Dr. Potter’s claims that she was called out of surgery are false,” the company said. “There are no insurance related circumstances that would require a physician to step out of surgery and it would create potential safety risks if they were to do so.” Clare Locke’s letter to Potter was signed by Tom Clare, who founded the firm in 2014 with his wife and former fellow Kirkland & Ellis partner Elizabeth “Libby” Locke. Firm partner Jered Ede also signed the letter. Before joining the firm, Ede served as chief legal officer for Project Veritas, the conservative nonprofit that goes undercover to expose what it sees as wrongdoing.
  9. I doubt it. If that would disqualify him from a position that isn’t confirmed by Congress, why wouldn’t it disqualify him for being Governor of Ohio? And if the DOGE bullshit went through confirmation in Congress, he would have been confirmed easily. The more one reads into the Leon Youth’s background, the more clear it is that it’s not just grifting and protecting his companies from the feds, but wrecking everything.
  10. Tell me what could go wrong with replacing all of the radars on airplanes and at the airports with cameras?
  11. Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy who bowed out of working with DOGE to ostensibly run for Governor of Ohio, has an interesting name and an interesting skin tone for somebody who wants to run for Governor of Ohio from a certain party. What if I told you that Vivek, for all of his bluster, had enough self-awareness that when he saw the teenagers and 20-something’s on Leon’s DOGE team that Leon planned to deploy inside the Treasury, etc. to try and take control of the United States’s governments finances, that Vivek knew that he needed to get the fuck out of DOGE. He will never win the the race for Governor of Ohio and he knows it. He’s all about raising his brand as much as possible, but he doesn’t seem like a True Believer in Musk’s efforts to destroy the country.
  12. I’d be more interested in knowing what golf club his ex was using on him.
  13. Keep in mind that Musk’s group of 19-25 year olds have the keys to 1/5 of the US economy, and this was from a few days ago https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/02/02/this-needs-to-stop-now-elon-musk-confirms-radical-doge-us-treasury-plan/ Now, as fears emerge Trump’s administration is “dangerously” undermining the U.S. dollar, Musk has confirmed he wants to put the U.S. Treasury on a blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—including Musk’s pet project dogecoin. Replying to X influencer Mario Nawfal who asked: "Should the Treasury be put on the blockchain so this doesn’t happen," Musk replied: “Yes!” Earlier, the New York Times reported Trump’s Treasury secretary Scott Bessent handed Doge department officials access to the payment system which sends out money to the tune of $5 trillion per year on behalf of the entire federal government on Friday, citing anonymous sources. Last week, Musk held discussions about using the blockchain technology to save money, it was reported by Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources. Unnamed people close to Musk told the financial newswire that there's been talk of using a blockchain to track federal spending, secure data, make payments and manage buildings. It is unclear if Musk plans on using an existing blockchain, such as bitcoin's, ethereum's, dogecoin's or one of thousands of smaller blockchains which have their own cryptocurrencies, or if he would rather create a new, purpose built blockchain.
  14. Waymo and Uber taking signups for robo taxis, but Leon is too busy using the access that his $250 million bought him to be concerned. https://www.theverge.com/news/606047/uber-waymo-austin-interest-list-robotaxi
  15. Here, cleanse your palate.
  16. It's set outside of the main Marvel universe in the movies, so it has a very good chance of not sucking based on that and the fact that they are going hard into the Kirby stuff.
  17. Put Anastasia on fucking ignore and pay attention folks. https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/as-nasa-flies-into-turbulence-the-agency-could-use-a-steady-hand/ Then there are the actions of SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Last week he sowed doubt by claiming NASA had "stranded" astronauts on the space station. (The astronauts are perfectly safe and have a ride home.) Perhaps more importantly, he owns the space agency's most important contractor and, in recent weeks, has become deeply enmeshed in operating the US government through his Department of Government Efficiency. For some NASA employees, whether or not it is true, there is now an uncomfortable sense that they are working for Musk and to dole out contracts to SpaceX. This concern was heightened late Friday when Petro announced that a longtime SpaceX employee named Michael Altenhofen had joined the agency "as a senior advisor to the NASA Administrator." Altenhofen is an accomplished engineer who interned at NASA in 2005 but has spent the last 15 years at SpaceX, most recently as a leader of human spaceflight programs. He certainly brings expertise, but his hiring also raises concerns about SpaceX's influence over NASA operations. Petro did not respond to a request for comment on Monday about potential conflicts of interest and the scope of Altenhofen's involvement.
  18. WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST H1-B VISA HOLDERS YOU RACIST!
  19. Those of you along/near South Lamar, is this you? Digging the knife in the belt, the machete in the re-usable shopping bag, the velcro shoes, the BB gun, the fighting gloves. And here he is 5 years ago
  20. Musk's team is treating the government like one big fucking startup, and wants to share government data with AI. https://www.404media.co/things-are-going-to-get-intense-how-a-musk-ally-plans-to-push-ai-on-the-government/ 404 Media has obtained audio of a meeting held by Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate who is now heading a team of government coders. In the call one employee pushed back and said one of the planned moves is an “illegal task.” Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate and now head of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), told government tech workers in a meeting this week that the administration plans to widely deploy AI throughout the government. Shedd also said the administration would need help altering login.gov, a government login system, to further integrate with sensitive systems like social security “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud,” which employees identified on the meeting as “an illegal task.” Shedd, who is a former Tesla engineer, said the government should “try to get consent,” regarding login.gov changes but that “we should still push forward and see what we can do.” WIRED and the New York Times previously reported on aspects of the meeting. 404 Media has now obtained audio of the full meeting and quotes it extensively below. Shedd told TTS workers that the administration would need help making radical changes to various government systems: “Things are going to get intense,” he said. These potential changes, he said, would include things like creating “AI coding agents” that would write government software for many different agencies and would be trained in part on existing government contracts, larger scale automations of government, and, critically, changes to Login.gov. “Just like a fun one that we've been thinking through with Login, specifically in TTS is, as most of you know, Login can't access government information on individuals. And so there's no connection that Login has with social security or any other government system, even though we're part of the government,” Shedd said. “And so part of one of the things to work through is how do we make it so that those agencies that has that information of very secure APIs that can be leveraged by login to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud?” “I'm not saying that this is an easy task, but it is a task that's worth trying to pursue and one that only we can do as an internal team, right? We can't bring a third party in, hire them and have them work on a project like this. It has to be an internal technology team that works on this,” Shedd continued.
  21. Y'all are circle-jerking around Anastasia just as he wants, and meanwhile this shit is going on - one of Musk's 25 year-old employees with no government or economic/financial system experience has basically full privileges to systems that handle 1/5 of the US economy. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-payment-system/ A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED. Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a secure mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy. Despite reporting that suggests that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to. “You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow. "Technically I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker tells WIRED in a phone call late on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server. "If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows." A source says they are concerned that data could be passed from secure systems to DOGE operatives within the General Services Administration. WIRED reporting has shown that Elon Musk’s associates—including Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter’s officesas Musk acquired the company, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs a GSA agency, along with a host of extremely young and inexperienced engineers—have infiltrated the GSA and have attempted to use White House security credentials to gain access to GSA tech, something experts have said is highly unusual and poses a huge security risk. Elez, according to public databases and other records reviewed by WIRED, is a 25-year-old who graduated Rutgers University in 2021 and subsequently worked at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, where he focused on vehicle telemetry, starship software, and satellite software. Elez then joined X, Musk’s social media company, where he worked on search AI. Public Github repositories show years of software development, with a particular interest in distributed systems, recommendation engines, and machine learning. He does not appear to have prior government experience.
  22. Then he’s definitely dead.
  23. I can vouch for your wife being real.
  24. Hasbro two years ago: Do a lot of players play as half-orcs or even orcs, even though full orcs are classified as monsters? DnD players: Oh yeah. All the time, we have people who want to play as orcs since they are humanoids, and we create storylines and back stories and everything, and we even gin up campaigns where everybody in a party plays as an orc. We even create entire orc towns and villages with economic systems, with orcs working together and doing dungeon runs and stuff we love orcs. Fast-forward to 2025 Hasbro: Okay, cool, we said 10 years ago in some of the publications that orcs aren’t inherently evil and had free will, and a lot of you ran with that, so now we’ve decided to take orcs and Drow out of the monster manual and if you want them to still be monsters, you can, just use the expanded generic stat blocks in the monster manual. We instead put them on par with humans, dwarves, and elves, so DMs have 40+ humanoid stat blocks to use with them instead of the old three orc-specific statblocks DMs used to have to use. Heck, a few versions back, we started giving you orc character sheets anyways. You DMs can now have an easier time creating Orc warriors and thieves and assassins and dozens of other things and have them appear in civilized areas with the other races. Your human, dwarf, and elvish characters can even journey into orc settlements and do stuff there without having to battle everything. The monster manual was just a book of stats and suggestions anyways, so this should make it easier on you DMs. W e are just taking something we did years ago and pretending like it’s new, just they aren’t in the monster manual anymore. DnD players: But what are we gonna hunt now?
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