Bravesirrobinson said:

I graduated college with 3 degrees in 4 years with a 4.0. I ran multiple clubs' best years on campus, led a political campaign for my city, and trained for 2 marathons.

Now, I'm a C's get degrees kinda guy. I figure my C level effort is better than most people's A game. I don't volunteer for extra work, don't stick my head out beyond my coworkers and went from anxious & depressed guy to happy & laid back. Be the change you want to see in the world, only you can prevent yourself from overworking.

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I can totally relate to this. For me it is more about age and stage of life. When you are in school you are only worth as much as the results from the latest exam and you chase every opprtunity to prove yourself.

The older you get and more established you become the less you need to chase to feel good about youselve and at some point kids come into the picture. At that point you need to either prioritize work and be a shit dad or do the bare minimum at work to survive life.

To me many overachievers are basically stuck as eternal unsecure teenagers that use work as a way to relieve anxiety.

Aurich said:

And yet, look how some people pearl clutched over Adam Schiff running ads decrying his right wing opponent in an election as slimy and underhanded and unfair.

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It's weird how strongly you are clutching to this disingenuous framing of why people have an issue with what Schiff did during the election. He wasn't "decrying" his right-wing opponent. He was running ads that were deliberately meant to increase the Republican's appeal among his base. And it's not about fairness. It's about being a self-serving asshole, which is a negative in my book.

And once again, for those in the back, he had no need to do that to keep a Republican from winning. It in fact made sure that a Republican ended up in the general election. It was about not having to run against another Democrat. No one would have given a shit if it was about keeping a Trump-acolyte out of office.

rcduke said:

I find at BWW it's either a complete miss or a slam dunk with service. No middle ground, no "okay" service. Crappy or great.

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Which is why (among other reasons) I haven’t bothered to go to a Buffalo Wild Wings in nearly a decade.

MichaelC said:

This is an interesting channel. Sometimes the discussions are head bang on desk dumb and unproductive. But then there are discussions like this one that are really interesting.

Login to view embedded media View: https://youtu.be/auPYOsBejK4?si=zxb80pvT1IIZVOvX

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What really annoys me about these kinds of videos is that those satanists... are atheists. They're not satanists. Satanists are (usually pretty devout) christians that differ in opinion on a few pretty minor aspects of the religion, namely they consider satan the protagonist in the Bible (which can very much be argued from the way it's interpreted in recent times). They generally don't believe in hell (as it's not canon) and they believe satan is good because it's the only entity in the bible that provides free will, desire and creativity to humans.

I'm pretty sure, the way those 'satanists' in the video present themselves, they know perfectly well that they're atheists or nihilists and just play up the satanist angle to make for a good video thumbnail and title. To be clear, I use 'nihilist' (and 'atheist') in the technical sense: not believing there is intrinsic good and evil in the world, and the only source of meaning being yourself. In a lot of ways, nihilism is opposed to satanism on that technicality, as satanists believe meaning was imparted onto the world by god and satan (in traditionally reversed roles) and at least in part, virtues and vices can be derived from the teachings of the Bible.

Edward Francis said:

Harry Stonecipher’s exact 2004 quote about The New Boeing is in first paragraph: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” This is an amazing quote as we look back to what he destroyed. Surely, there was another way to add financial discipline to Boeing’s engineering strengths?! 20 years later, his ill-conceived restructuring of Boeing threatens the future of one of the world's greatest companies.

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A typical action of a class of individuals who do not understand the products they make and only understand the bottom line. They understand the cost of everything, and do not understand the value of anything. Great for a quarterly share boost, also great for drawing and quartering up the long term value of a company.

Lukasz said:

Any possibility of galaxies far away being made from antimatter instead of matter?

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If some galaxies were antimatter, we'd expect there to be a dividing line somewhere between matter and anti-matter. Even though intergalactic space is "pretty empty", it's not entirely empty and there'd by a boundary where matter and anti-matter were regularly annihilating -- creating gamma ray background emissions. While those annihilations would be low-density, it would be happening along a huge boundary, so would be noticeable.

crombie said:

Watched Suitable Flesh, not a bad Lovecraftian body horror. And how does Heather Graham look so young when she is 3 years older than me!

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Heather Graham, you say?

(She was so freaking cute in the second Austin Powers movie.)

You are right. That is how it should be.
...
But it isn't.

Personally I pick my battles. Max 3 things I try to change for the better per year. Everything else? I trust the process of the company, even if I know there are gaps in it.

That may sound bad, but we did a lot better than most of our customers, who tended to get caught up in very male political struggles for dominance.

MichaelC said:

some people apparently do not realize the Olympics came from Greek history and that there is a difference between the last supper and a feast of dionysus

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Ignorant indoctrinated people are going to do what they do and read everything through their narrow understanding of the world.

cblais19 said:

Halal chicken made a perfect salad for this 95f day.

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That looks excellent. What makes your chicken halal? We get Muslim halal duck at Costco which states on the packaging that it’s raised and slaughtered accordingly (wife described the latter process vaguely to me) and it’s affordable and quite delicious bird, though I’ve never seen the chicken counterterroristpiecespart.

Drizzt321 said:

They trickle?! Not float?!! Yikes. No wonder the batteries die so quickly.

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Technically I have no idea. I can only tell that their charge circuits are always pushing electrons when a cell is topped (is that floating at a set voltage or trickling?), and that be death to maintenance free batteries. Such is the life of all crappy UPSes. Why has not a better solution (yes, I know about the LiFEPo versions) ever been designed for the health of the gel type batteries?

What kind of training does he expect from 160 character messages? (Now it is more, but most old Twitter is 160 chars).

Aurich said:

Has it?

What are you actually basing that on?

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On my personal experience with the algorithm not long after Musk took over. I never posted that many Tweets but replied quite a bit, and had some evidence that the visibility of said replies (based on the sudden absence of replies or even likes post-Musk*) had gone away entirely. On top of that, as already mentioned, suddenly there was a lot of alt-Right BS intruding on my feed when I certainly hadn't started following any of its purveyors.

Good enough for me to say "f_ck that noise" and move on. YMMV.

*either I'd gotten 100% less clever/engaging nearly overnight or my Tweets weren't being seen by anyone.

AbidingArs said:

My understanding is that attacks are either at military targets (with precision weapons - I recall a big story on Lebanon developing/gaining access to precision munitions) or striking at military targets in the abandoned border communities with unguided weapons. It had seemed very much like a tightrope act of Lebanon and Israel striking targets in retaliation without escalating the situation - Lebanon strikes one or more of these and Israel strikes at Hezbollah operatives (and usually announces how senior whoever they killed was).

But your question on what it was like did get me interested. The Times of Israel live feed of posts includes rocket/drone warnings in Israel. I decided to go back through an pull out those posted. I tried to find the locations on Google Maps and pull a straight-line distance to Majdal Shams. Of course, that is all rough - it is not like a town is a single point on the map, and I'm just typing in destinations and right-clicking to mark to get distance, so there could easily be errors.

A note on the timestamps - these are pulled from the Times of Israel news items, they seem to be in local time (ie, Israeli time). I have included follow up reporting one the attacks at the same time the alert was announced.

Spoiler: timeline

8:04 AM
Tel-Hai (almost fifty miles away), Kiryat Shmona (about 12 miles away)

8:40 AM
Arab al-Aramshe (about 33 miles away)
This attack damaged a home in the Bedouin community of Arab al-Aramshe, but no injuries occurred

9:46 AM
IDF announces they shot down a Lebanese drone over water, no warning sounded as no community was threatened

1:00 PM
Metula (about 11 miles away)

1:58 PM
Yiftah (about 15 miles away)
This was a Drone alert - all clear was given a short while after (caused no injuries)

3:33 PM
Shtula (about 29 miles aways) - 2 rockets hit, causing no injuries, not sure what url I saw with that info

5:09 PM
Kiryat Shmona (about 12 miles away) and Kibbutz Manara (about 14 miles away)

5:26 PM
IDF announces that Hezbollah operatives at a weapons depot in southern Lebanon's Kafr Kila was attacked by Israeli fighter jets a short while ago.

5:27 PM
Rocket sirens in Kiryat Shmona and "other communities in the northern Galilee Panhandle" - this appears to be the warning for the strikes that hit Majdal Shams

6:22 PM
Hezbollah announces death of four operatives from the IDF air strike earlier

6:33 PM
Reports of multiple casualties in Majdal Shams

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Thanks for doing all this footwork. I found this piece on the BBC which gives a little more information - there was a bomb shelter right next to the football pitch, but the warning siren only sounded seconds before the impact.

C64 raids Bungling Bay said:

You guys are more creative, what should he do with his hall pass?

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Venezuela had an election today and Maduro is already declaring himself the victor, just like Lukashenko did in the last Belarus election. Nobody believes that either of them actually won.


Biden could arm around 100k of the 750k Venezuelans in the US and insert them into that country in a mass invasion, while simultaneously coordinating the bombing of key parts of the military into submission. Also blow up their top court with the justices inside (it is analogous to a court staffed entirely by clones of Aileen Cannon, except protecting Maduro rather than Trump). Most Venezuelans would probably be fine if whatever building Maduro happened to be in, along with the 2000 Admirals and Generals, was also flattened. They can build another Presidential Palace, but they don't seem to be able to shake off the current once and forever government. For good measure, coordinate invasion units from Columbia and other South American countries.

So why would Biden go military like that? Well, it is probably the only way to remove that government, and that government is the only reason Venezuela is such a basket case that hundreds of thousands of its citizens are coming here. Last I looked, just short of 8 million Venezuelans have left that country, somewhere around 20% of the population. Make Venezuela a (real) democratic country again and it takes a considerable amount of immigration pressure off. Venezuelans aren't just coming to the USA.


they are also a problem for all the neighboring countries, probably even more so than for us. Then there is that whole "carving off a chunk of Guyana" business. We went into Kuwait for a similar trespass.

So there are plenty of reasons to do this.

It does have the potential to end up like the Bay of Pigs, which is why air and naval support should not be omitted this time.

Not that I think Biden could actually make something this big happen in the time remaining. Who knows, maybe they have been planning this for years? Jake Sullivan. Nope, not in the works, he would have resigned before being associated with a risk like this.

CrowdStrike has made its own promises in the wake of the outage, including more thorough testing of updates

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Aka "any" testing at all, apparently.

GFKBill said:

Or as fast as it wants to.

Even a 25 octillion pound planet must choose one of the other

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Isn't it weightless, since it's in freefall around its star? The weirdo US unit is weight, not mass I think.

dragongoddess said:

As an individual who has for the last 3 plus decades working with Local,State and National Elected office holders, held office and served on many local Boards and Commissions at the request of Mayors and Council members and I can tell you that is there is no such thing as a casual political discussion. Such a thing does not exist. It's like religion. It's a serious, hot topic and always will be a hot topic. This is why we do not talk politics or religion at the gun range. They are explosive topics so we avoid them.

Now as to the Mod's making the decision as to what is political or not and what is serous and what is casual I would ask for a list of what topics are political and if they were casual or not. Without such a list what one Mod may consider a serious political discussion another may say it's a casual one.

Now just because a Mod decides a discussion is not serious has no bearing on the seriousness of the discussion. If multiple people are engaging and debating a political point it's going to be serious to them regardless of what a Mod may think. You must understand that if a subject is serous enough for a person to take their time and post their ideas for discussion it qualifies as a serious discussion.

Quite frankly I think these changes to the Soap Box are a waste of energy and not needed. I'm also reminded of how our own government implements changes in an effort to control speech, thought and participation in our government. This is what I see happening here in the Soap Box.

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TL;DR

Telwar said:

Went to the Buffalo Wild Wings near me. Order off of website...that's fine, but it wouldn't let me connect, so the server reluctantly took my order.

And took a half hour for the damn tenders to come out.

And I had to ask for napkins.

That was not the best tip I've ever left, no.

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I find at BWW it's either a complete miss or a slam dunk with service. No middle ground, no "okay" service. Crappy or great.

elkhantar said:

Oh, I definitely do. I'm checking some figures for an audit I have tomorrow, and it's Sunday midnight over here (well, technically it's already Monday). Also, I'm quitting my job in a month for a much healthier job, because half the problem is the feeling of personal responsibility for my work, but also that the higher ups know us perfectly, and simply offload much more work to some personnel that tend to go that extra mile to do whatever the company needs.

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One of the mistakes I made was solving all the problems. Keep your managers busy, make sure they are not too comfortable. Let things go wrong when they keep demanding the extreme. (make sure you have at least one email where you pointed that out.) They may throw a tantrum, but you will get better attention.... sort of.

Carhole said:

Not terribly, no, though the 24V series arrangements where the two gel cell heads are taped to one another is indeed a horrific design. Check voltage, at that age I doubt that they’re topping up. Grab a couple of replacement cells and just reassemble them in series as originally built, then wrap the assembly in packing tape before sliding back into the UPS. I’ve done two here that have continued on here just fine after a battery swap. Problem with most of these units is that they trickle charge their SLAs a bit too aggressively (always warm) so they go bad very quickly.

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They trickle?! Not float?!! Yikes. No wonder the batteries die so quickly.

noahmayer said:

It also reveals some of the weak points in the bike: worn out pedals, broken spokes, fiddly shifter, worn/broken headlight, rear tire worn out after 1400 miles.

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This sounds fine to me, if you ride every day, those are all consumables. 1400mi for a bicycle tire is good actually.

EnerJi said:

Do you have recommendations for better alternatives in this price range? I haven't ridden a bike in decades but the last bike I did have was a cheap MTB (or at least styled as a MTB) and it might be fun to pick up again as my kids learn how to ride.

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A "cheap MTB" from 2024 will be significantly better than any "cheap MTB" you remember from the old days. No need to spend $2k unless you're going to ride it every day.

My last purchase was a Marin Eldridge Grade 1 for like $300 on super-sale

migrena said:

fun fact: this is a known condition in cats (i'm not joking). although they tend to have cat fingers.
image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydactyl_cat
View attachment 86157

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Called shipper cat in Norwegian. Our neighbors cat was like that

Technarch said:

"Coastal elite" means "intellectual", one of the worst things a person can be in 2024 Ur Murrica.

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Yeah it's not that he shows off his fancy book learning or is snobby and looks down at people who don't have education beyond high school -- if even that.

It's that these people feel insecure so of course anyone who comes across as "too smart" puts them off. They have to be coddled to, like Republicans telling them they don't have to go to college, which is where their kids would get woke anyways. Or Trump telling them he lows the poorly-educated.

The best thing they should be doing for their kids is to get them into college and out of those rural shit holes but they want their stupid life decisions reinforced. In a lot of cases, they need kids to stay and work at the farm, free labor and eventually taking it over to take care of them in their old age. Meanwhile, many of the kids don't want to do difficult farm labor all their lives, they want to get out of Smallsville.

There will always be this tension between city and country, thus resentment of coastal elites, because many of the kids from these rural areas have escaped to big cities.