Can you still buy a star? Obviously dubious that you actually own it. But certainly bigger than anything on earth and a bit tricky to deliver.

He was TOO good at the satire. On the left dum-dums thought he was actually right, while on the right dum-dums thought he was on their side.

Also, I think people are hitting their limit of joking about the collapse of democracy and civil society. I know I am. I know there are now movies, TV, and books that I might have found interesting in less interesting times; now it all just hits too close to home. John Oliver can hit those “too close to home” topics and move on to other things. But it always felt like when Colbert was doing his conservative pundit schtick, he was trapped in it. It was harder to laugh along with him about other things that weren’t specifically about that kind of satire. He might have had some more material of a particular idiom if he’d stuck with it, but that idiom can wear thin.

Aggressive is modifying “virtue signaling”. I guess I could have been more clear by adding an “ly” to make it clear that aggressive was an adverb.

But, honestly in my experience there is ALWAYS someone finding some new way to understand your comment so that they have something to argue with. I was both making a joke AND making a point. Complicated, I know.

And it is something to criticize: OP asked about “X”, commenter replied about NOT “X”.

I downvoted your comment because it’s doesn’t really add anything to the conversation, it’s just aggressive virtue signalling.

Oh yeah, I’m aware. I don’t really disagree in general, but that dependency on devices is problematic. Also, I think that dependency is almost entirely a fiction. The only vendors I’ve ever met that don’t take cash, weren’t selling anything I’d generally need in an emergency or miss if I couldn’t get it immediately, e.g. craft/art fair vendors and fly by night food trucks. And I mostly managed to navigate everywhere without a map, even though I kept one in the glove box. The U.S. (I assume we’re talking about the U.S. because carbrained) is fairly easy to navigate without either as long as you can find a highway and you can read road signs. Maps helped sometimes sure, but the lack of one never made me feel unsafe. Sure, things can go badly, but that’s due to a lack of ingenuity and knowledge (street smarts as we used to call it), not the lack of a phone. In fact, I’ve gotten just as lost while looking at a map and trying to follow a friend’s directions. Maps, physical or digital, are almost always wrong or outdated to some degree.

You’re only as dependent on your phone as you make yourself. That crutch is the real danger.

It’s amusing to me that the very idea of leaving the house without your cellphone is seen as very dangerous. But I guess payphones and landlines at every tiny shred of civilization aren’t really a thing anymore. Nobody could track me and I could get genuinely stranded occasionally for the first few decades on my life, but I never felt that lifestyle was dangerous. Just raw dogging life before it was cool I guess.

Reminds me of a sci-fi story I read. A detective (wait was this in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, maybe? I don’t remember, anyway) is looking for a person and asking around. I stead of carrying around a picture of the person they are looking for, they compare the person’s features to a list of celebrities and just go around asking if anyone has seen someone that looks like that celebrity. Point being lots of people have surprisingly similar features and there really are “doppelgangers” out there.

But just try explaining that to some stranger that just caught you staring off into space directly at their face because they look like a person you had a crush on in college, only you’re an old fart now and they don’t look like that old crush would look now, but like the memory you have of them. “You look like someone I know” always sounds like a pickup line.

deleted by creator

Value was making value as you put it, long before rapid trading. Speculation and arbitrage are like the first two things that develop in any economy. Any entrepreneurial grade school child trading candy, baseball cards, pogs, hotwheels, or whatever the hot new thing is has probably seen both first hand.

I don’t know much about either the Order of Canada or Georges St-Pierre. So I looked it up before crafting a pithy response or downvoting and moving on without comment. The wikipedia page for the order states that criteria are basically “Canadians who make a major difference to Canada through lifelong contributions in every field of endeavour” and those that exemplify the motto “they desire a better country”. Nowhere do I see any mentions of excluding someone because their career path wasn’t serious or valid enough. He’s obviously made more of an impact on Canada than most. You can call the whole award a popularity contest and you’d probably be right, but shitting on someone’s accomplishments just because you don’t think their career is valid enough just feels gross.

Tell us you don’t have a clue how the electoral college works without telling us.

Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.

The best part is the random bill.

• Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
• Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

Or another variant.

• Go to the emergency room.
• Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.

If I’m going to skin or peel the vegetable, I go with the cheap stuff. If I’m eating the skin then I go organic. I never buy the prewashed lettuce and salads when they are on sale because those have already started to go bad usually. And when it comes to things like berries, strawberries, tomatoes, and peppers I go with whatever looks like it will taste the best. Cheap blueberries for instance, absolutely do not hold up against the good stuff; life is too short for tart blueberries.

Think about how crazy attached that lady seemed for screaming for her bird from dawn to dusk. Now imagine that she is a parrot attached to you and multiply the crazy by 10. Now you want to travel and leave this emotional wreck with strangers in a strange place for a bit.

From what you’ve said in the rest of this thread, most parrots would not be a good fit for your lifestyle or level of experience. I guarantee that it will be traumatic for you and the bird. If you’re still serious about pursuing this, then it is absolutely critical that your first step be to volunteer at a rescue or care facility of some kind for birds specifically. Get dirty, get bitten, get some training, get some experience, and get some contacts for help when things inevitably go sideways. You’ll hear first hand all the stories about: someone’s loved pet that turned into depressed wreck on their owner’s death; or the parrot that was caged alone and never received any attention and went mad; or the malnourished parrot that was fed only seed; or the parrot that was bought as a gift and abandoned; or the family pet that permanently maimed and disfigured a child because of improper training and supervision.

I’ve known a few bird people and their unifying characteristic is a very high tolerance for noise, mess, chaos, bird shit, and emotional codependence. It takes a very special kind of person with a lot of extra time and space to care for parrots full time in a healthy way for either party.

Parrots do not make good pets. They can be kept in captivity, but they require specialized care by experienced and trained caregivers. They are a LIFETIME commitment that may very well outlive you, so don’t forget to include them in your will.

Not the parent commentor, but I do something very similar with Tasker. Whenever my phone disconnects from one of a list of Bluetooth connections (like my watch or my car) or even if it just gets a solid jolt to the accelerometers, it goes into lockdown mode. This means the screen gets locked and biometrics can no longer be used to unlock it, requiring the entering of a PIN code to unlock.

2fa: No issues, as I can easily migrate to a different device.

How exactly? This ability would seem to negate any benefit or security of multi-factor authentication.

The comment I left t here no longer relevant because parent and child revised their comments after the fact. This is not a healthy way to have a discourse people.

Is your abuse of the ellipsis and dashes supposed to be ironic? Isn’t that a LLM tell?

I’m not even sure what the (‘phrase’) construct is even meant to imply, but it’s wild. Your abuse of punctuation in general feels like a machine trying to convince us it’s human or a machine transcribing a human’s stream of consciousness.

Who is out there wiping their ass with %100 ethanol?