“In this here melting pot, we burn away all our differences until we’re left with only the pure white flame of Christian nationalism.”

I had to put the statement in quotes because while being hyperbole, it’s not too far from how some people think, and I don’t want to be confused with those folks.

Which is more or less what happened the last time Biden tried to forgive student loans. Eventually Missouri was found to have standing, and all his efforts were thrown out.

Aside from a nagging feeling that it was known this was going to happen, and this was all for political talking points, I wanted to info dump.

A few tidbits from that prior lawsuit:

• MOHELA supported loan forgiveness, although I can’t recall why. (I think it was about simplifying administration in the face of a bunch of loans that had already paid for themselves in terms of the interest collected. At this point the cost to maintain the loan on their books and or chase accounts they can’t write off is more expensive than attempting to recover the loan.)
• MOHELA refused to be a plaintiff, and it was the state of Missouri claiming standing.
• The state of Missouri only had standing due to a voluntary agreement where MOHELA would pay a certain percentage of revenue back to the state of Missouri - something it had not done for nearly a decade. Missouri’s standing was merely technical, and more or less un-realized.
• Yet it still was used to fuck over millions of people, because Misery loves company.

Patron status is ok

Glad your friend is doing well! Send my regards.

That sounds completely awful. He has my sympathy.

My mom used to talk in code a lot for no fucking reason. She’d throw out the weirdest segues and irrelevant stories. When I (barely) graduated from a gifted kids high school, she jumped from telling me she was proud of me, to telling me that when my sister was little, all her teachers told her that she should be “tested” - heavily implying it was for learning disabilities - and added that “none of [her] babies are retarded.”
2 things - that sister had dyscalculia and never got beyond an associates degree because she kept failing math. And it took until my mom died to figure out she was also talking about me - and every one of my siblings.

When going through my mom’s things, I found out that she ignored the advice of several teachers and school counselors to get me tested for ADHD. Because she didn’t want a ‘damaged’ kid.

Good thing T-Mobile just upped my bill, so they can afford to buy up their competitors!
Can’t wait until it’s only 3 companies that just charge the most they can possibly charge.

They have teeth. But half of the people who decide whether or not they pursue charges against someone are republican appointees.

So, you know… teeth, but corrupted leadership.

Or if CoPilot starts exfiltrating data to Microsoft so their server farms can ‘analyze’ it.

I’m not heavily involved in the space, but I’m given to understand that MS isn’t very clear about what happens to your data or how it gets used or shared.

Perhaps Microsoft will be smart enough not to allow the general public to query trade secrets or government data that’s been pulled via unwanted copilot integration.
But maybe the ongoing Russian hack of Microsoft will make it irrelevant, because the servers can be accessed directly.
Or perhaps at some distant time, Microsoft will roll out features or technologies developed using an internal version of CoPilot that has access to all data - including proprietary information from competitors.

And that’s not even counting what ISP’s will do if they find a way to analyze copilot traffic, or what state actors will do if they can set up MitM attacks for Copilot.

Honestly, I sort of fear the repercussions, but I look forward to the lawsuits.

At some point before the healing brush and patch tools were available, I saw an entire porn gallery (heh, remember when porn came in galleries?) of pixel perfect stitches where someone had joined waists to waists, to create a bunch of concatenated top/top, bottom/bottom images in front, back, and front/back configurations of a naked woman.

Because this was the early days of the internet, all I’d seen was gross, taboo, or unsettling stuff. I was sort of immune to it, but this was definitely my first “confused boner” situation. I still remember my absolute bewilderment. I was way more unsettled by that than goatse or whatever.

I knew something once. It was awful.

Having a “smarter” car has made me a bit of an angrier driver.

My car has adaptive cruise control, so it automatically paces the vehicle in front of me at a predefined distance. I use it extensively on the highway, and I often have it set for a bit higher than most other drivers go. This means that I know how fast the vehicle in front of me is going and has been for the entire time they’re in front of me.

This has lead me to realize that most other drivers seem to unintentionally (or intentionally) drive in infuriating ways.
Most folks in the left lane don’t maintain a constant speed, even when the lane in front of them is clear. They often go just slightly faster than the speed of “prevailing traffic” - which means they slow down when passing vehicles (often as slow as 10mph under the speed limit), and speed up quite dramatically when vehicles do get tired of them and move to pass - very often blocking would-be passers.

At best, I view these drivers to be inattentive. At worst, I envision them to be wannabe cops, enforcing their vision of highway traffic on others.
I wonder if they feel the same sense of satisfaction expressed in the above meme?

I feel like I fully lack the words to describe what I mean here, although I’m confident in my understanding of the idea. (Which is to say, please give me charity when untangling my rambling.)

I share your sentiment and I’ve been thinking about this the past few days.
I’ve read in a few places that Musk is trying to turn twitter into a ‘one-app’ in the same way that WeChat is. The common pushback against that is that we already have that - it’s the web browser. The web browser isn’t going anywhere.
But turning the browser into a closed ecosystem that Google gets to set the standard for, harvest the data for, advertise through, and ensure that users are locked in to their version of the experience/data that they collect essentially makes Chrome the one-app.

In much the same way that google killed XMPP, Microsoft used its weight to hamstring open document formats - this seems like an effort to thread a rope around the neck of the open internet and use google’s considerable market share to close off the open internet.

Somewhat ironically, we may find ourselves in search of a ‘new, open internet’ if corporations continue to define our current internet.
Maybe we’ll call it “Web 1.0.”