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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • I’m glad they reported on this, but the author needs to look into federal regulations for people who work on or hold federal contracts. There’s a ton of qualified language in there that makes it clear they didn’t do a ton of research. It’s actually much more black and white than they make it seem.

    I’ve worked as a federal contractor, and before I could even start onboarding, they do an intensive background check and interview where they ask probing questions about substance use (among many other things) and then they check up on your answers with a number of third parties (acquaintances, colleagues etc). Nearly without exception, if you want a job in the civil service, any prior drug use is almost always automatically disqualifying. Telling the truth about it doesn’t win you any favors with investigators either, so the general recommendation is that if you’ve smoked weed in the past, you must consistently lie about it, or you won’t get a federal job (or contracting job).

    And that’s just weed. This guy does and talks about doing hard drugs in public.

    The fact that it doesn’t seem to be a problem for someone who has pocketed such absurd amounts of taxpayer money from federal contracts, to openly use schedule 1 drugs in public, is one of the best examples of the legal double standards the rich have come to expect. Anyone who isn’t a billionaire would be prosecuted and jailed for the behavior Musk brags about. And they’d obviously never be awarded a federal contract.

    Drugs should be legal. But until they are, these double standards have got to go.






  • This may be splitting hairs, but this is being pushed on EPA scientists by the political appointees. This is why the politicization of these agencies is so critically dangerous. EPA scientists are incredibly talented and their recommendations are largely driven by good science. They know their shit. This is not that, this is political appointees forcing “interpretations” that the scientists themselves would undoubtedly take issue with.

    I’m not making excuses, this is bad no matter how you slice it, but blame should be directed at the political appointees.






  • I understand your skepticism, but gas-powered leaf blowers have annoyed the hell out of me for years. I live in a relatively small city in Northern California, and I can always hear and smell a leaf blower before I can even see it. I can’t overstate how strongly gas-powered leaf blowers smell. The smell of gas permeates my apartment, even with the windows closed, and is the kind of smell that gets stuck my nostrils for hours. The noise is pretty disruptive, but the smell is way worse to be honest. I’m not sure why they smell so much worse than other gas-powered things, but it’s like they’re just spewing gas out into the air.

    I have no problem with electric or battery-powered leaf blowers, just please use them at a reasonable time of day - after 8am and before 10pm.


  • I find Kenyatta’s comments to be pretty disingenuous, to be honest. He talks about how important it is that everything have the same source of truth, but then says shit like this:

    “We’re not for the incumbents; we’re also not for the challengers,” he said. “We are for listening to our voters who make the decisions about who they want our nominees to be.”

    That’s just laughably untrue. The DNC has almost always favored incumbents and establishment candidates, that’s why it’s so incredibly unpopular and why most Democrats don’t believe it represents their actual values.

    “You look at every story that’s written about this, and it’s, ‘Oh, my gosh, the party is doing this to David.’”

    No, I haven’t seen that narrative anywhere. What I have seen is a lot of disillusioned leftists pissed off on Hoggs’s behalf because of the intra-party double standard he has helped expose. Kenyatta harps about how unhelpful all the infighting is while he contributes to the infighting.




  • Asking a coworker for help is usually a much better way to get a relevant and correct answer on the first try. On my work computer I can’t reconfigure anything, so I’m forced to see chatbot results for my basic web searches. When I need a quick answer, I search myself before bugging anyone. Since I have to scroll past the “AI” answer to get to the relevant results, I’ve often checked to see if it’s right.

    It has never been right.

    I gotta stress that. It has never given me an answer I can use. I work in a field that isn’t particularly niche, and use software that millions of people use. If I need to figure out how to do something in an application, the chatbot answer will literally invent entire menus that don’t exist, just to show me exactly how not to do the thing I need. It’s all made up. I wish it would just say something like “Sorry, we don’t know how that software works yet.” But nope, it just makes shit up.

    So if I still can’t figure out how to do the thing without wasting too much time researching, I send a quick slack message to a coworker, and in 30 seconds I get a screenshot with big red arrow pointing at what I need. Humans win every time, and it’s insulting to your coworkers when you don’t take advantage of their experience. Bonus you’ll never need to bug anyone about how to do that thing again, so everybody wins.


  • I understand. The mailboxes I’m talking about are only accessible to the mail carrier from the top. They slide the letters in from the top after unlocking and opening it to access all the units’ boxes at once, and then I open mine from the front. They would only be able to see the top edge of an envelope. A post-it note wouldn’t be visible. But they never look inside anyway, because these are incoming boxes only.



  • This only works for certain kinds of mailboxes, not the standard ones many apartments have that only open for the carrier from the top. The carrier has a key that opens the whole box from the top, they put the mail in that way. It’s only incoming mail, there’s no external slot to put outgoing mail. If there’s anything left in the box when they’re delivering, the carrier just assumes the resident hasn’t picked up the previous mail. They never take mail out of an incoming mailbox box.



  • I just replied to a similar comment, but here it is again since you replied while I was typing :)

    Yeah, I have the same issue. I just keep the misdirected mail for a week or two until it stacks up and then drop it all in the nearest blue USPS mailbox, which is in the center of town. It’s annoying, but not a huge deal. Also I’ve read you shouldn’t write directly on the envelope, the post office prefers sticky notes so the original envelope isn’t defaced.