David Baer @david@arktos.social
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- he/him/his
- XMPP
- david@amyanddavid.net (please interact w/me in fedi first)
Admin
Joined Feb 2018
uspol
Well, well. “[Trump’s] reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html
David Baer
boosted
David Baer
boosted
This is an absolutely wild account of security contractors working for eBay allegedly stalking and harassing the company’s critics. The executive who allegedly wrote, "Take her down," referring to the wife of the targeted couple, received an exit payout of $57 million. The front-line security people, on the other hand, got to face federal criminal charges.
David Baer
boosted
Getting autumny! The air quality here has been improving steadily, although this weekend is "high fire danger" (37 °C and winds around 20 knots). But, I plan to fully enjoy the autumn vibes as they come. #california
“The winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th,” Mr. McConnell wrote on Twitter. “There will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792.”
This is flagrant Tilden/Hayes erasure.
Young adults are more likely than senior citizens to believe COVID-related falsehoods.
uspol
Got my ballot in the mail today. I’ve already filled it out. It’s going into one of the county board of elections secure drop boxes—I’m not handing my vote over to Louis DeJoy.
David Baer
boosted
For sheer "subtly disturbing wrongness that you can't quite put a finger on but radiates a cold and silent OXYGEN-BREATHING MAMMALS STAY AWAY", I think the brand-new Majestic Church complex probably wins.
It amazes me that nobody looked at these building designs and went "uh.... are we intentionally going for 'dead lies dreaming' here or..."
uspol
Depressing, and probably correct. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/
David Baer
boosted
[admin hat on]
Pro Tip: if you are going to block the Admins and/or Moderators of the instance you post from, maybe you should find a different instance.
After a long meeting, a change of pace: I modified a countdown Lua script for OBS to count down to a specific future time (e.g. 10:00) instead of running as an egg timer. I’ll use it tomorrow morning.
David Baer
boosted
So amazing that generations of little hands and feet have slowly shaped the wooden ladder. Like laugh lines on the playground.
After discussing the widespread use of the “third degree” (beating confessions out of criminal suspects), the Wickersham report concludes, “The real remedy lies in the will of the community. If the community insists on higher standards in police, prosecutors and judges, the third degree will cease to be a systematic practice. But before the community can express its will it must know when, how, and to what extent these abuses are perpetrated.”
I enjoyed HBO’s Perry Mason reboot, and I appreciate Adam Serwer’s piece, which uses the series to spotlight historical abuses in the criminal justice system, and failed attempts to rein them in. In particular, he talks about the Wickersham Commission (1929), whose conclusions seem just as true today.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/perry-mason/616365/
So it's not my imagination... The smoke from out west has reached the east coast.
David Baer
boosted
mh, COVID
It makes me kinda upset. I know that in this exploitative hellhole of a country, people have been told that their lives are not worth protecting and that they should 'get back to work.'
I don't like how people have internalized that messaging. It's a pandemic, it hasn't gotten better, and we should all protect each other instead of treating out lives with the same recklessness and disdain as the ruling class.
After a (very minor) glitch with online worship this morning, I decided to do a brain dump to create a preflight checklist. It includes creating all the PulseAudio sources and sinks to make OBS and Zoom play well together, and all the magical setting and resetting you do afterward to make sure they actually work.
Now that I see all the gotchas I’ve been carrying in my head, it’s no wonder I feel so exhausted.
