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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Sent a relatively new and somewhat nervous co-worker a “grandpasimpsonleave.gif” responding to the 8 billionth mutual emergency of the day followed immediately by “I kid, I kid, we’ll fix it! 😉 [Relevant follow up question]?”

    Guess which of those two messages was the last one unaffected by the outage? Yep. I got to watch her devolve into a panic as her messages reached me and my responses didn’t get sent to her, and THEN delivered in the worst order/selection possible. Felt like the more critical the message, the less likely to send.

    And! She’s on the other side of the continent and all her location’s phones are through teams also! And it was time sensitive.

    Rough Friday.



  • It may not be CSI quality, but it is FBI quality! Those EXACT tests and types of matches were how they identified the golden state killer and identify hundreds of John/Jane Does every year these days.

    Turi King, who worked on the Richard III identification, has done very great and approachable lectures on those tests and how they’re used in forensic genetics. Highly recommended watch BTW, and several are available on YouTube - she has one on just those tests and how they can be used as well as discussing their strengths and weaknesses with examples.

    The “I’m 3.2% Native American” stuff is (mostly) BS, but if it’s identifying specific matches, it’s pretty strong evidence. It’s not definitively HIM until they test him specifically, but it is the exact sort of thing that should put you on a suspect list and warrant him spitting in a cup, yeah.

    The only way I could see it NOT being him is if he was using a close relative as the source, but I’m not sure why he wouldn’t say that once challenged. Technically, that would have fulfilled the requirements of “anonymous” and “unknown to the mother” he promised.


  • There’s a lot of “these allegations will be proven false in court” going on in this article.

    My dude, there’s DNA evidence. What allegations are there to disprove??

    And why does it matter that it was before he worked at your clinic?? Like if someone had been found to be groping patients or stealing at their last identical job, there’s no reason to be concerned they might have continued to do so while they worked for you?? No ‘we’ll look into this and be sure nothing untoward happened’??

    “This was before he worked with us, and now we have safeguards in place, by which we mean we’re aware he’s a pervert and we watch him like a hawk, or whatever legal equivalent will absolve us of any wrongdoing for providing him with a target rich environment in exchange for the prestige.”


  • Also they were HORRIFICALLY unreliable, to the point where my mechanic’s actual quote was “Folks, I’m not in the habit of talking myself out of a $10,000 paycheck, but this car is not worth it.” 30 minutes before we walked in his door it was working fine, by the time he went to drive it to the bay it wouldn’t start, and never did again.

    It wasn’t even paid off yet.

    To say nothing of the fact that one had to drop the engine to get to the alternator, the electrical blew itself out twice in the 4 years we owned it, very few of the features worked with any competence, and we just got our 3rd or 4th safety recall for it (or whatever is left of the parts at the scrapyard).

    Consumer Reports rated its reliability as a six - not out of ten, but out of ONE HUNDRED.

    Absolute lemons.


  • needing to ask people what 3rd party chat service they prefer

    Yeah Signal’s great and all, but my spouse’s family refuses to use anything but WhatsApp, half my family uses FB Messenger while the other half use Discord (and they are feuding about it), the older folks in my hobby group refuse to learn anything but the default text on their phone (that group chat is an unmanageable NIGHTMARE), and anything from work uses teams…except the US folks who use slack, and now my friends want to get me on Signal, too? Relevant XKCD.

    The solution to my problem is not yet another messaging app. I just want ONE inbox!

    I’ve been pretty happy with Beeper so far. There are some features that aren’t quite as good as using each app natively, yet, but I think they’re off to a great start considering the sheer scale and variety of interfaces they’re working with. It even gives me tools to deal with the hobby chat anarchy, and now I can send default SMS messages from my computer!




  • To be fair, Baby Boomers are actually statistically the reason divorce rates are so high, and also why they’ve been going down recently.

    Not trying to be insulting, just wanting to speak about the statistics I’ve read, so I’ll try to use the full generation title to distinguish.

    Speaking about the generation as a general group, Baby Boomers had many marriages and many divorces per capita. Your stereotypical “on my fifth wife” dudes were Baby Boomers and were a disproportionate percentage of marriages that ended in divorce - basically “Divorce Georg”.

    From a statistics perspective, a large part of the reason divorce rates are going down these days are because as people get older, they tend to settle down and have less energy for those kind of antics basically, and the rate of Baby Boomers marriages and divorces was slowing down in response - with other generations being pretty much stable.

    So on that level I’m not particularly surprised that those attitudes towards divorce are still affecting them in old age. It does pose interesting questions for our elder care infrastructure (or lack thereof) though.



  • I’m literally saying this as a visa holder / residence permit holder in my country of residence right now. When it was issued me, it was made very clear that my status in the country was a privilege that could be revoked at any time for a myriad of reasons. Now, “repeated wars of aggression by your home country with the specific excuse of controlling territory occupied by you” wasn’t EXPLICITLY listed, but I’d be shocked to retain my status in those circumstances.

    I’m not their citizen - as of yet I haven’t started attempting to be one. Describing myself even as “from” here would be misleading. "Once a _____ always a ______” doesn’t even apply - I’ve never tried to be anything BUT a ______??

    If article was “Lithuania strips citizenship and rights from Russian born naturalized residents” I’d be concerned. Instead, article is “Lithuania deports small fraction of its Russian and Belarusian expats identified as active threat during wartime”. Which is actually surprisingly restrained.