It’s not uncommon for ships to have a captain that commands and stays with the ship and a pilot that is familiar with and helps navigate regional waters, who takes over navigation and issues orders in the areas that they are qualified to operate.

I’m not saying that’s what happened here - I don’t know and haven’t seen any information that would support that idea - but it could explain the discrepancy.

It’s like something happened in 1980 to dramatically alter the political, social, and economic landscape of the U.S. that massively regressed things for the population.

Surely yet another presidency that’s uniquely entwined with the heritage foundation won’t set the U.S. on yet another 40 year pattern of decline.

I was about to say same!

Accidentally, though.
The story is roughly like this: I had bad allergies and fucked up sinuses - I thought. Got sinus headaches every day during bad periods. Lots of sinus infections. Went on for like 10-15 years through periods of being intense and focused and stressed with sinus issues and periods of checking out, being aloof and dippy without sinus issues.
In 2019, sinus rinses, pseudoephedrine, nose sprays, and pain killers weren’t doing it. Resigned myself to having to get the sinus roto-rooter, where they scrape out your sinuses to make it easier for all that junk to drain off. So I went to my doctor to get that in motion. Doctor sent me to an immunologist, who sent me to an ENT, who sent me to a neurologist, who looked at my records for 30 seconds, declared that I had migraines, and sent me on my way with a preventative script.
I was so fucking mad. Didn’t think he could possibly be right. But he was. And then Covid hit and by the time things got normal again, I realized I wasn’t able to work like I was before. So I got got tested for ADHD, and… here I am, rambling.

Hey, thanks for sharing this.

You said something that hits really close to home about one of my most important relationships — a relationship that is starting to experience value drift as they get sucked deep into social media.
I’ve been feeling like a conversation needs to happen, but haven’t had the ability to characterize my thoughts as well as I’d like. Your comment helped me a lot to get closer to what I’d like to express about it to them.

Generally I shrug off that scenario. If I need something or want something, I’m available. But if I don’t, then it’s okay to give myself permission to be unavailable.

But also, my phone number isn’t from where I currently live. Numbers that call do show up in my call logs, even if they get sent to a nonexistent voice mail. A number from my current area code may get a call back after I look up their number. But I don’t bother to look up numbers that aren’t from where I’m currently at, or numbers that call me repeatedly. Spammers use computers that automatically retry their calls, so an unreasonable number of calls immediately after one another are a dead giveaway.

Your attention is a valuable commodity. No one is entitled to it. I take a lot of steps to ensure my attention is protected from misuse - including asking a business to give me their number so I can call them first, so they’ll be ‘known’ to my phone before they try to call me.

If I find myself in a situation like that, I have temporarily turned off automatically sending unknown numbers to voicemail. But about 99% of my existence is sending unknowns into the ether.

I send all unknown calls to voice mail. I’ve had my carrier disable voice mail for my phone line.
My providers all use email or are ‘known’ by my phone. … I hope.

I feel like the article was pretty tongue in cheek about the reason for the bullet vote statistical anomaly. They went right from the conspiracy theory that. machines were hacked in swing states to Musk’s fake giveaway that incentivized people to sign up to vote in swing states.

It’s like, gee, do you think they’re trying to suggest maybe there’s a reason that people who would only be interested in one race may have skewed things a little? Add a dash of targeting your marketing (to conservatives), and maybe coordination with a PAC that can phone bank, and well, folks who may not normally vote might vote for just the one big election.
And there’s your statistical anomaly. No computer hacking. Just game theory, targeted advertising, and an endless torrent of texts and calls.

Incidentally, my phone number is one that’s, well, kind of fake sounding. It’s 3 sets of 2 (in the same row!), and one adjacent singlet, like (but not actually) 99-77-88-5. And I get a lot of other people’s calls and messages. I let down a lot of teenage boys back when exchanging numbers was how people DM’d. Anyway, a few of the wayward texts this year were from Trump’s PAC talking about this contest. But I didn’t hear shit about it from any of the democratic PAC’s!

So that’s sort of what I think explains what they’re talking about. Shitty and probably illegal, sure? A conspiracy? Meh.

It's a rude awakening for Thakker, who may have bought into the Cybetruck's various security features

May?
They don’t know? They didn’t, like, ask him?

who shared the upsetting news on Facebook a few days ago

Oh. They wrote an article about a Facebook post without any follow-up questions.
Modern ‘journalism.’

I know that COVID isn’t regarded to be a serious disease if you’re vaccinated and reasonably healthy, but I had mental fogginess for about 2 months after my infection.

I mostly seemed outwardly okay during that time, but it was a tremendous effort to just do the bare minimum.

I hope he ducks out if there’s even a fraction of those types of symptoms.

His doctor was like “Hey man, you gotta take your turban off and put on a motorcycle helmet.”
And he was like “Nah, bro, what if I just wore a bigger turban?”
And his doctor was like “Dude, you’d need a turban that’s like 100lbs to offer you the same protection as a good helmet.”
Avtar: “Bet.”

There you have it.

When I’ve been in OP’s situation, I filed a complaint with the FCC, performed a whois lookup on their site to send emails to the abuse/spam emails of their DNS registrar and host and inspected the email headers to email their email provider’s abuse/spam account(s). I’ve not yet had cause to reach out to my attorney general’s office when I’ve had a company violate CAN-SPAM, but it’s an option.
I also make sure each company knows there’s a pending CAN-SPAM complaint. I keep it convivial, but serious. “Hey, just letting you know that one of your clients is violating your terms of service and the law! A complaint has already been lodged with the FCC. Toodeloo!”
That bit of knowledge tends to shift the interpretation of your complaint from “annoyed nerd” to “someone politely informing you that you’re going to get skull fucked by the long dick of the law if you don’t fix this ASAP”

It may sound sort of excessive, but I’m a bit of a consumer rights absolutist.