Yes!

I was just talking to my wife about, if not this idea, then the ramifications of splitting. We were discussing how someone like Putin can stay in power, or how I think it would be touchy to have joint protests against Trump in the U.S., even as his support falters across the board – because I couldn’t imagine republicans with morals, disaffected MAGA, democrats, and leftists on the same side of a picket line.

Well, it’s likely the DOGE cuts haven’t shown their impact just yet.

Of roughly 30 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration workers dismissed in February as part of Musk’s campaign to shrink the federal workforce, many were in the “office of vehicle automation safety,” — Car safety experts at NHTSA, which regulates Tesla, axed by DOGE

Personally, I’m sort of hoping for the same karma as when Elaine Chao was secretary of transportation and let Tesla roll out an untested and confusing shifting system, which later helped kill her sister.

Having just read a comment about someone who actually went through the process of having a kid by employing stuff like cycle and fertility tracking, scheduling both sex and abstinence, as well as other not-fun stuff, your comment made me think of taking the kink to an extreme, where instead of lots of rambunctious boning, it was a couple nerds doing intense and fruitless science to find the optimal way to impregnate someone that was impossible to impregnate. (Unless they start looking at the mating habits of bedbugs, but that’s a third, separate, entirely unhinged thing.)

I mean, I’m pretty sure I know which interpretation you meant. But brains are weird and I’m sleep deprived.

As someone who isn’t going to have kids and doesn’t want them, I still get the growing old alone concern.

It’s not that I would have wanted children to take care of me, but that I don’t trust the social safety system in the U.S.
Even if things are going well, it’s still a terrifying proposition. My first job ever was as a dietary aid at a mid-level retirement home, and while some of the people there were thriving (namely the folks who somehow managed to go into the home with their partners), the majority were a study of what happens when the ability to live exceeds the will. It was a formative experience.

That’s why I’m in therapy and desperately scared that between neurodivergence and trauma, that I’m not going to be one of those really social old people with friends everywhere that care for them and keep them company. Although I think it’s not a given that kids will automatically be there for you as you age, I can see the appeal of doing what you can to hedge your bets. It’s a terrifying world out there, and we only have each other.

Work took a meta turn today.

Someone reached out to ask if I was really in all the meetings I’m booked for, only to give up and schedule their meeting for sometime in February because I didn’t respond in a very timely fashion … because I was in a meeting.

Science vs religion, baby.

It’s too socialistic by the standards of capitalists and has been run out of most cooking schools. It’s occasionally taught as an ‘alternative’ recipe, but for some reason, despite rendering a better pizza, it’s never widely adopted.

I think the joke is that might be AP style pizza.

In the U.S. milk comes in half gallon and gallon measures, which look like your 2L and 3L containers, respectively.

Sometimes you will find milk in waxed paper cartons, but that is not the norm. (It’s very common, however, for dairy products that are often bought by pint and quart — typically half and half, heavy cream, or coffee creamers.) Our fancier non-dairy creamers tend to be in tetrapaks or cartons, with less expensive (or at least distributed in higher volumes) creamers in plastic bottles.

I completely missed the water and the curtain because I was distracted that she kind of looks pregnant and focused on trying to figure out the meaning with that.

It’s okay! You can buy an upgrade to use a stainless steel milk tube! 😒

It also has you pour coffee syrups into a little plastic dispenser so you have to clean that, too.

It appears there’s some sort of cleaning mode where you let the machine heat water into to a specially shaped tub that fits across the drip tray, where you also stick the siphon end of the milk tube. But it looks like the dirty milk water is ejected into the drip tray tub, so your wash starts off with clean boiling water before beginning to reuse cooled, dirty water.

Also, what’s the wisdom on encouraging customers to keep dairy at room temperature? You know people are just going to forget the dairy container on their counter. It’s like they tried to stand out but all their features add more complexity and failure points than solved problems.

I’ve been manipulated by people who do it on purpose, and it really screws with one’s threat response. (Especially if the manipulation occurred during formative years.)

I have to make an intentional effort to coach myself through these situations to have an appropriate level of empathy. It’s really fucking hard not to sound like an asshole sometimes - and really easy for others to misunderstand me because they don’t have the same frame of reference.

My local fancy grocer has bins of loose spices, including salts of various colors and descriptions. A few years ago I was curious and did a bit of a deep dive on their supplier, to be disappointed when I learned that all their special salts were artificially colored. Their salts, reflecting geographic names, were named so because the company named the colors after the location – not because the salts came from those locations.

It can be pretty annoying. We wind up creating extranet sites or using other services. (We have some ftp-like file services that work for us.)

Yeeeaahh… At my org our default security policy for all of our site collections prevents sharing outside of our domain, and requires managed devices to access our SharePoint.
To share things outside of our org via SharePoint, a site collection with a different security policy has to be created, and only admins can control the sharing. We can only share with people who have some sort of identity service that can federate with ours.
No user is granted above contribute access, and sharing is turned off. (People can share links, but they cannot change the permissions of an item to share it.).
Theoretically it’s possible that a SharePoint can be created that allows public access, but to my knowledge we do not do that.

OneDrive files cannot even be downloaded by external parties (although they can be viewed in the browser!), and Teams workspaces are also not accessible externally unless by special circumstance.

I would imagine the federal government is… well, hopefully at least as locked down as my work.

You don’t accidentally publish the list.

At very large organizations, sharing files easily is a pain in the ass. The available tools are usually tied to your Active Directory, which means you have to know who you’re sharing with, or at least have some idea of what permission groups allow what access.

To share documents appropriately, you still have to do the hard work of finding out who and what permission groups you should be sharing with, even if that means coordinating with other IT teams to make sure you understand their permissions structures properly.

Or you half-ass it, and put the document somewhere public and hope the link doesn’t get shared beyond your control (or found).

I guess I’m saying it’s not intimidation, accident, or resistance — just laziness and stupidity. Both of which are not unfamiliar ground for this administration.

You could possibly DoorDash some river water to your home. (I don’t know how DoorDash works.)

But then it won’t be free. Hm. Foiled by capitalism!

Just like eroding every possible freedom to ‘protect’ people from terrorists and children from pedophiles. Irony is dead.

I’m way more interested that they were apparently also making thumb tacks.