chiliedogg

I've just changed how I eat out.

Fast-casual restaurants cost the same as fast food these days. And if I need food super fast due to time and travel constraints, the quality of gas station food in many chains like QuikTrip and Speedy Stop is better and faster than McDonalds.

So they are no longer the fastest or the cheapest, while their food remains garbage.

Of course they're failing.

I didn't catch that joke for decades.

Evidence of citizenship and identification are 2 different things. You can have a driver's license or state ID without being a citizen. Proof of citizenship is more difficult - especially for married women whose names won't match their birth certificate.

The most common reason to prove citizenship right now is when starting a new job, where they'll ask for either a passport or a social security card and state-issued photo ID.

It matters in digital signals more than I expected.

A bad-quqlity HDMI cable over a long run will start getting a bunch of noise on some of my displays that shows up as random green specs popping off due to signal loss, whereas better cables will give a clean signal.

And back when more broadcasts were analog and I ran tech for a road show, I'd occasionally pick up random stations on poorly-shielded cables that would get amplified by powered speakers. The cables essentially became antennas. Though I haven't run into that in over 20 years.

Poorly-shielded cables and speakers also used to have a lot of issues with cell phones. Anyone else remember the series of 3-beeps you could sometimes hear on speakers a few seconds before a phone in the room started ringing?

Europe is working on it. Notice how they're starting to adopt open source software and are working on their own credit card processor?

Right now, their governments and economies are too reliant on US-based tech companies that can be ordered to cut them off. So they're working on eliminating that reliance ahead of sanctions.

That's the idea.

They openly allowed armed civilian militias like the "Minutemen" and "United Constitutional Patriots" to detain and hold migrants at gunpoint until CBP arrived.

Hell - in the 80s a militia group calling itself the "Civiliian Military Assistant" was actually making border raids into Mexico to shoot on migrants before they crossed the border.

Grand juries are different than trial juries in Texas. They're nominated "respectable" members of society that serve terms for multiple months. It's remnants of Jim Crow that are alive and well, where rich white guys decide who gets prosecuted for what.

And Texas made it even worse a few years back. In 2008, a white guy called 911 because police his neighbor's house was being robbed. He indicated that the neighbor's were not home, and also that he was gonna shoot the burglars. The dispatch told him over a dozen times not to interfere, and he repeatedly said he would shoot them. As plainclothes police were arriving on scene, dispatch told him they were arriving, but he went ahead and shot the 2 unarmed burglars in the back while.they were fleeing, killing both. They happened to be unarmed.

The grand jury refused to indict him for a crime, but the familes sued the murderer in civil court and won.

So Texas made a law that if someone is not convicted of a felony for a gun crime they can't be sued in civil court over it.

Deficit spending has historically worked out well because the US has been able to borrow at a rate lower than inflation, making it actually cheaper to borrow money and pay it off later. The national debt isn't much of a concern unless we tank our credit and reputation.

So it's a huge fucking concern.

She's also young.

Trump is a walking corpse. He'll never have to face justice. But Bondi will probably be around long enough to be a target when the reckoning comes.

They have the Marshalls. But they can also deputize people to enforce Court orders.

The biggest hurdle federal judges face right now is the pardon power. They effectively can't hold the administration in criminal contempt because Trump can make it go away.

Which leaves them with civil contempt, which is really difficult to enforce.

Things were bad in the 80s in general.

Look at movies from the time. Revenge of the Nerds has one of the nerds dressing up in the same costume as a jock to have sex with his rival's girlfriend. And when she finds out after the deed, she loved the rape so much she decides to dump her boyfriend.

Blade Runner - the beloved classic sci-fi has Harrison Ford pinning a woman who says no to a wall and sexing her up as the romantic climax of the film.

It's a joke.

But also, there are other, better forms of metal printing. One is to use metal powder and laser-weld it layer by layer. Another is basically using a wire welder essentially the same way you would use an FDM printer.