The action of automating the Selective Service Registration honestly seems on its surface like a logical choice to reduce paperwork. It’s been a hot minute since I filled out mine but I remember the information being extremely minimal and already basically all prefilled since I received the card in the mail.

Now, a politician like Trump instituting this change makes me extremely skeptical, but hopefully the US military still remembers why it’s 100% volunteer and the soldiers revolts they had deal with the last time they held a draft for a shitty war that the United States had no business starting/inserting itself into.

I think the point they’re trying to make is that racism is a state of mind, and opening oneself up to being racist against a non-human or imaginary thing can open the floodgates to more “real” forms of racism against fellow humans.

Basically the difference between anthropomorphizing bots while one expresses their dislike for interacting with them vs. expressing one’s dislike of being forced to interact with a machine that is made to feel like interacting with a person but isn’t.

I’m not sure how I feel about this sentiment I’ve described, but it’s one I’m open to arguments on since as a white dude I come into it with a mountain of privilege that likely blinds my view of things

I only got as far through the books as I did because I was commuting 2 hours a day and needed something to occupy my brain during the 100 miles of driving I was doing each day. Didn’t finish the third book because that job I was commuting to ended up making up a reason to fire me when I was about a week away from finishing it, and I just didn’t feel like slogging through the remaining 8 hours on my own time

Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Wight are honestly both really memorable parts of the book. Tom Bombadil happened to just be an ancient spirit that had aligned values with the hobbits and clearly used a form of magick heavily infused with music. He showed up just as the peril was becoming more than the hobbits could handle at that stage and happened to be the one force strong enough to protect them as they had to quickly learn the scale and scope of the peril they faced.

I’m disappointed he was cut from the films, but I get why they did cut him from the already 3+ hour long film

Driving under the influence is not cool in any situation though

I’m just gonna leave this here and move on…

I thought I remembered first seeing the Spanish version then later they started running a dubbed version

You know what they call alternative medicine that works? It’s called medicine.

Is the healthcare system designed to extract as much value as possible from people? Absolutely, but unlike a chiropractor they aren’t likely to leave your paralyzed from a routine visit. “Alternative medicine” only really exists due to a historical choice by the FDA to not regulate supplements back when supplements were an absolutely tiny market and now the supplement industry is as big as the regulated medicine industry. One of these things is regulated so it won’t kill you/destroy your life, the other isn’t. I’d rather take the safer route.

I painted my NAS red and you won’t believe the improvements

Okay this just unlocked a random memory. Back when I worked at a call center, on a slow day a lady called about a product that we no longer directly supported, and she went on a huge tangent about how everything she buys is bright red to remind her of the fires of hell. Bright red purse, bright red clothing, bright red phone, bright red computer, etc. she also told me quite a bit about a religious children’s book series she wrote about a Christian dog

If gym membership shenanigans are what’s keeping you from becoming a more fit version of yourself, might I suggest a home workout regime?

Not long into the COVID lockdowns a coworker at the call center I was working at pointed me towards Hybrid Calisthenics. It’s all workouts primarily using your body weight, minimal equipment (and there’s variations or alternate workouts if you want to skip one requiring equipment) and there’s variations of every workout for any level of physical strength from “I struggle to make it through the grocery store” to “I can lift a literal car” and the guy who does it does a brilliant job of explaining how to work out and how to do each excercise

I got a gym membership from a small independent gym hoping to avoid this bullshit. Nah I still had to replace my credit card to get them to stop charging it despite multiple calls, texts and emails demanding fill ceasure, only I had the pleasure of getting to argue with the owner of the business rather than some peonn at the business

That was a Unix Epoch joke

The salient fact is that this change was made in order to “comply in advance” with totalitarian fuckery. It SIGNALS POLITICAL SUPPORT for it, and that’s not okay!

On an individual level, absolutely do not comply in advance with fucked up laws.

But as a technical professional working in regulated industries, you have to try to predict future legislation to remain compliant and permit your place of work to continue operating. Anything computer or network related takes time to update, and if you do it wrong you can bring your entire organization down. It’s far better to be proactive and ensure that your organization is compliant with future legislation than it is to sit on your hands because you don’t like this new change and then have to scramble to implement it at the 11th hour before your organization becomes noncompliant and may be forced to pause operating business. That’s literally your job if you are, say, a SystemD developer working for RedHat/IBM

This ire needs to be directed towards your local politicians (whether or not such age verification laws are in the process of being passed!), not towards career developers who happen to work on projects you care about

It’s a good reminder that a lot of Linux Enthusiasts are very quick to bandwagon.

SystemD already has (optional!) fields to store user data, proactively adding a birthdate field as multiple jurisdictions are working to pass age verification/restriction laws and the clear best (or more accurately, least worst) technical path to cleanly doing so is to store the user’s age in the OS to pass to the application, it’s a very sane move.

Developers and maintainers don’t exist in a vacuum. Corporate Linux maintainers need to ensure that their product is legally compliant. SystemD, is developed and maintained by RedHat, a subsidiary of IBM. They would be silly not to be proactive in the face of a clear legislative trend to ensure their product remains legally compliant.

It’s the same thing any professional has to do when they work in a regulated industry (which IBM operates in many regulated industries, from finance to banking to military contracting, they have a ton of industry regulations to try to meet), keep an ear to the ground for any likely upcoming new legal requirements and proactively meet those potential new requirements so instead of scrambling at the 11th hour you can focus on other things.

Folks blowing up on this should be focusing their efforts on their legislators, not on hardworking devs who are just trying to make a living

So many of those fax lines are just email servers in a trench coat in the US though

Of all of the musicians I’d assume are super pleasant to interact with in public Fred Durst is not one of them, but honestly I’m happy to hear that

Every body is different, but generally for most people every 2-3 days tends to be the sweet spot for a full shower with shampoo, conditioner, etc.

Personally, I have greasy hair problems, and I ultimately found that showering less frequently made the biggest improvement of all of the changes I made. I’ll generally shower every 2-3 days, and if I do something that makes me sweaty I’ll hop in the shower and rinse off without using any product between those every other day showers

On the other hand, for OOP, they’re making some big changes and probably need the consistency of every day to help maintain the habit they’re building

…because young kids are insane and constantly make poor choices when left to their own devices.

I don’t think kids should walk to school independently until they’re at least about 9 or 10. Before that point their decision making skills are simply not developed enough and their understanding of risk is basically non-existent. Is it probably fine at a younger age? Yeah, but it’s not a risk worth taking, especially given how society at large generally considers all kids to require 24/7 parental monitoring even at ages where they should gain some independence

I live in a town about that size, and I’d estimate that over half of students get to/from school via their parents driving them. Which is insane because the way the buses are setup, your kids will just be picked up/dropped off from whatever the nearest school to your home is, so the parents spending multiple hours each day going to multiple schools to drop off then multiple schools to pick up could entirely avoid it

It’s seriously the only real rush hour in my town is when school starts/ends

About the only edgecase I’ve seen with busing in my town is if you have multiple kids in school and one is special needs, because the special needs bus exclusively goes door to door and they don’t let siblings ride with them unless the sibling is also special needs, so parents have to be in 2 places at once for both kids to take the bus

I guarantee every single one of those transactions got flagged and a report was written as per federal banking regulations. If they didn’t the bank could face heavy fines for failing to monitor for illegal financial transactions. Do most of those reports amount to nothing? Absolutely but the reports get filed and the paper trail exists

I happened sat near one of the guys who did that when I worked at a bank. Basically any transaction that was slightly outside of normal he’d look at, look at who the customer is and go “oh yeah it’s spring and the construction company is spending more on supplies just like every year, oh but what is Darla doing right now that looks odd? Jimmy’s deposit for his new motorcycle got flagged but that’s pretty obviously what it is…” You get the gist.

Also a high chance that every mobile check deposit photo gets reviewed by a human being too. I saw so many communications about scummy companies sending fake checks as marketing and people misunderstanding and trying to deposit them, or just blatant fraud that might pass an automated verification but is obvious upon human review

Banking is one of the few industries that still relies heavily on human review for basically everything because it’s so heavily regulated. But also it’s one of the few industries that hasn’t super consolidated down to a handful of companies so you can quite easily go to a small community bank that’s locally owned and operated. And that’s also partially thanks to regulations as well. I remember the bank I was working at really wanted to open a couple of new branches but they were severely limited due to it being in a different state and some other laws that weren’t fully explained to me