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bolverk

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by bolverk

  1. Wordle 1,330 4/6 🟩⬛⬛🟨🟨 🟩⬛🟩🟩🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Connections Puzzle #608 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🙂 Daily Quordle 1111 7️⃣5️⃣ 6️⃣9️⃣ m-w.com/games/quordle/ ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨🟨⬜🟨 ⬜🟩🟩⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟨⬜🟨🟨🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
  2. Yeah, we talked about it earlier for about a page in the damned plague thread.
  3. I mean, there is an impulse (AND THERE IS ONE) to post every outrage porn-tweet, but if we are going to keep our heads on straight (and we need to), at the very least, pause for a moment and make sure we're not posting bullshit. Holy fuck. Believe me, because we're gonna have a lot of material to work with...
  4. Dude, you've really got to quit your Twitter addiction. This is from October. Texas county reverses classification of Indigenous history book as fiction A Montgomery County committee caused an outcry after labelling “Colonization and the Wampanoag story,” a children’s Native American history book, as fiction. A Texas county on Tuesday reversed a decision to reclassify a children’s book on Native American history as fiction after the move drew anger from authors, advocates and one of the world’s largest publishing companies. A citizen committee in Montgomery County, just north of Houston, moved the nonfiction book “Colonization and the Wampanoag Story” from the county library system’s juvenile nonfiction collection to its fiction collection last week, according to an email from a librarian shared with The Washington Post. The book details encounters between the Wampanoag tribe and the Pilgrims, as well as encounters between Christopher Columbus and other Indigenous tribes. Advocates and nonprofits, including the Texas Freedom to Read Project, Authors Against Book Bans and the American Indian Library Association, blasted the move in an open letter Wednesday asking the county to move the book back to the nonfiction collection. They were joined by Penguin Random House, which published the book by author and Indigenous historian Linda Coombs. “Colonization and the Wampanoag Story is a carefully researched, fact-based account of the Indigenous perspective of the tribes of the New England area on the impacts of European colonization,” the letter states. “Moving it to the fiction section communicates distrust of material that reflects the truths of our American history.” On Tuesday, the Montgomery County Commission reversed the decision and returned the book to a nonfiction classification, according to messages from the group shared with The Post. The commission, which appoints the citizen committee that reviews library books, did not respond to requests for comment before the reversal or afterward.
  5. I'm going to go back to the well on this one. Are you honestly saying we don't have enough DEI in the CR? Personally, I fucking welcome your presence so that, hopefully, you'll be able to defend the shit you say and, then, we can have a gotdam conversation over, you know, facts, reality, or the color of the sky. Maybe actually try to "convince anyone of anything."
  6. This is what you voted for. He fucking told us this was what he was going to do. If you didn't want this but voted for it anyway, you were clearly not paying attention during the campaign or you were flat-out conned. Your responsibility now is to make amends and go help out the people you hurt with that vote.
  7. Is this the part where they try to erase US history?
  8. Yet another poster moseys in over here, talks out of his ass, gets corrected, can't/won't answer a simple question, and then runs the fuck off.
  9. Such as an attempt at the abrogation of fundamental citizen rights afforded by the US Constitution?
  10. (That's my Aubrey in the middle.)
  11. What's a little racist trolling between friends, right? And STILL no response on the other one, you know, the data thief. Explain why a 19-year-old intern, who was fired from his previous job for sharing leaked corporate information, has access to all of our (collectively, the whole fucking country) most guarded data?
  12. Okay, you've been gone for more than 24 hours after laying this egg and have posted elsewhere in the meantime. You come in, drop a stupid-as-shit post, and then don't come back after receiving multiple replies. If you're going to call us of being hypocrites for living in an "echo chamber," then you've just contributed to it. Probably without realizing it, you did the exact same thing other conservative [sic] posters do. You make a dumb/ill-informed/factually wrong comment (sometimes they just lie), get quickly corrected, and then don't return. That is why the CR is mostly an echo chamber. You guys just wholly abandon the playing field in preference of that hole in the ground where you stick your head so you can pretend all is well, except for all those undesirable vermin poisoning the blood of our country. That's not just hypocrisy; that's cowardice.
  13. Maybe they went to the same place all those billions of missing Bering Sea snow crabs went.
  14. Try again, and you might end up straining your collaborator muscle. Media reports tied Marko Elez, 25, who previously worked for Musk's SpaceX company, to a now-deleted social media account that posted the incendiary comments. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93q625y04wo Among the posts at issue from the X account tied to Elez is one from last June that reads, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” according to the Journal, which reviewed archived posts. "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity," the account wrote in a September post. And in another post the same month, according to the Journal, the account wrote, “Normalize Indian hate,” in reference to another post on the large population of people from India in Silicon Valley. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/07/jd-vance-doge-marko-elez-resignation-racist/78333485007/ No opinion on the other one, the data thief?
  15. Someone posted his essay on the topic a few days ago. It could've been missed, or some people aren't readers.
  16. Here's one of the other little shits with his finger in the pie. Fired after caught leaking company secrets...that's definitely not the face of a psychopath. https://archive.is/bP4bU (Let me know if link doesn't work, and I'll post full plain text.) Original Bloomberg link
  17. Some perspective to get a baseline handle on things. How Many Federal Worker Resignations Would Be a Lot? Sixty-five thousand have submitted resignations as part of Elon Musk’s “fork in the road” offer. But 150,000 voluntarily leave every year anyway. When the federal Office of Personnel Management first proposed a “deferred resignation” package to induce federal workers to quit last week, Elon Musk circulated an estimate that the offer could lure 5 to 10 percent of the government’s work force to leave. That estimate so far looks like an overshoot. By midday Friday, with the original Thursday deadline to accept the offer now paused by a federal judge, more than 65,000 workers had planned to resign, said McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson for O.P.M. That number — which could still rise further amid legal uncertainty — represents less than 3 percent of all 2.3 million federal workers, excluding the military and Postal Service. For perspective, about 150,000 federal workers, or 7 percent, voluntarily leave the government every year. The scale of resignations submitted as of Friday — offered in exchange for seven months of pay and benefits — would be the equivalent of five months’ worth of departures, many of which might have happened this year anyway. In other words, the federal government is an enormous work force that already experiences sizable turnover every year. In addition to workers who leave the government to retire or simply to quit, about another 50,000 to 60,000 are terminated every year for disciplinary or performance reasons, or because their appointments or funds expired. A small number — around 3,400 — die each year while employed by the government. All these departures are typically replaced by about 240,000 hires each year. President Trump and Mr. Musk are also aiming to reduce the work force by squeezing this second group — new employees — through a hiring freeze for large portions of federal workers. In terms of reducing total head count, the hiring freeze could matter more than encouraging resignations. Now the resignations that have been submitted may not even go through. On Thursday afternoon, a federal judge in Massachusetts froze the plan in response to a lawsuit by several employee unions who challenged the government’s legal authority to make such an offer. A hearing is scheduled for Monday. With the resignation plan and its legal status now uncertain, the federal government was moving swiftly this week to prepare for additional cuts, sending staff reduction targets to health and science agencies and more. Recently hired federal employees also typically work on a probationary basis for the first year (or longer at some agencies) and are easier to fire during that time. The Trump administration appears to be preparing to reduce the work force by targeting these workers. Several agencies have already been asked to share lists of such vulnerable employees. But even with involuntary layoffs, achieving Mr. Musk’s goal of major budgetary savings through staff reductions cannot easily be achieved without reductions in workers who provide popular public services. Average pay for federal workers is about $106,000, meaning the annual savings from salary alone, just to use 65,000 workers as a benchmark, could amount to around $6.9 billion per year (Mr. Musk has said the broader goal of his Department of Government Efficiency is to cut government spending by $4 billion a day). The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the government spent roughly $271 billion compensating federal civilian employees in 2022, with more than half of that going to the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security. Among agencies where cuts may prove politically perilous, Veterans Affairs is the largest employer in the government. The V.A. runs a network of hospitals and health clinics around the country for military veterans. The department has already exempted hundreds of thousands of these health care workers from the government-wide hiring freeze announced by President Trump on his first day in office. Mr. Trump has also exempted several other categories of workers shown above, including in the Department of Homeland Security, which carries out immigration enforcement, and in the Department of Defense. The I.R.S. this week also told some employees trying to resign now that they could not take leave under the deferred resignation until after May 15, an apparent acknowledgment that mass departures now could disrupt tax filing season for millions of Americans.
  18. I might be misremembering, but I think her speaking engagement was spoken of as a "talk with friends of Lumen" something or other. So, it might not have been a public event. Edit: It may have been her "coming out" as a future leader of the company when, before that, she wasn't a known public figure.
  19. "I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out." And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them." And i was like, oh ok and he continues. "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down. And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people." And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all." https://bsky.app/profile/iamragesparkle.bsky.social/post/3lbidcyttps2b
  20. Talk about a blast from the past. I'd completely forgotten that PSA.
  21. It's no wonder that a guy like GRU, who apparently highly admires Herr Musk, would also get his news from a German disinformation outlet that's quite tolerant of neo-Nazis, Holocaust denial, and anti-semitism.
  22. That sounds very much like something I had in early December, which was the first time I'd gotten sick in a couple of years. So far as I know, I never ran a fever and never really felt very bad elsewhere (just not 100%), but I don't think the glands underneath my jawline had ever swollen that large, my throat had ever been that soar (this part was really brief), or my voice more hoarse. It wasn't that terrible the whole time, but I think it lasted about a week and a half, all told. I don't know what it was, but it eventually went away.
  23. As far as I've heard, the measles outbreak is in Gaines County (Seminole area), not Lubbock, which is the nearest "big city". One thing to know about this county is that during the 1990s and 2000s, a huge number of Mennonites relocated to the county from Chihuahua, MX, with many of them regularly traveling back and forth between their local community and the one in Mexico. Many of their kids don't go to public schools and, like the adults, go unvaccinated. For example, the Covid vaccination rate for the county's total population was 22%, one of the lowest rates for a county in the entire US. Lubbock County was 49%, which is still far lower than Travis at 71% (Bexar 72%, Harris 65%, Dallas 61%, Tarrant 57%). News on the outbreak in Gaines Co.: https://www.kcbd.com/2025/02/06/lubbock-public-health-confirms-measles-outbreak-gaines-county-increased-risk-unvaccinated-individuals/
  24. If you have anyone in your life that you think might be persuaded as to what's going on and they're just not quite there yet in recognizing what the threat is, this puts it all together. Share this with them.
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