Shoutout to my dad who accidentally moved into an up and coming black lgbt neighborhood and was very disappointed to learn that all of his “new friends” weren’t actually interested in how to use iNaturalist or where he saw coyotes on his walks 😔🙏🏻
You misunderstand. My father has accidentally been on multiple dates now with multiple guys he was hoping wanted to be friends 😅
It’s so funny how people forget what certain dog breeds were bred for. A dachshund named Valerie has been marooned on a remote part of Kangaroo Island since she ran away from a campsite in 2023 and everyone in the comments was like “that is the last dog breed I would expect to survive on its own for 500 days”. Hmm. I don’t know if it’s just me and I’ve met absolute freak dachshunds my entire life but they’re tenacious little motherfuckers with an incredible prey drive. I’m more worried about the critically endangered endemic Kangaroo Island dunnart population than I am Valerie. No large predators, several species of small mammal, temperatures consistently between 55° and 75°? She’s the queen of the island now. All small marsupials quake at the sound of her footsteps.
If I was forced to place a bet on survival odds between Valerie and the 50 or so remaining Kangaroo Island dunnarts…
My money would be on Valerie. Homegirl could drive the entire species to extinction in a single day under the right circumstances. I think people forget we domesticated and selectively bred common pets like cats and some small dog breeds TO kill small mammals. And they can be scarily effective at it, from an ecological standpoint.
Totally. Absolutely. At all times. BUT, I want to make it clear this does not seem to be a case of owner negligence. The reports say she ‘escaped a pen’ so it seems like they thought they had her secured and she did a doggy Houdini. Her owners DID extend their trip to look for her for another 5 days but eventually they had to go home. It seems that she has been continuing to do a doggy Houdini and evade all human intervention, the new spade of reports on her are because she was spotted on trail cam footage at a wildlife rescue.
So yes, please leash your dogs and don’t let your cats out, pets can have extremely detrimental effects on the ecosystem. But also Valerie seems to be a real stinker, a little problem child, a true boss bitch.
Well, dogs can be cunning little characters!
Hate to judge a book by its cover but she LOOKS the sort, in both pre-disappearance photos and her cryptid style security cam footage.
elon musk is like if you distilled the essence of 2010 “you, sir, win the most epic of upvotes” reddit and put it into the body of a wealthy peanut factory owner from 1835 london who exclusively employed 5 year old orphans
hey americans there is a recall on testosterone gel because they found benzene in it! please check the lot numbers on your batches, benzene is really not something you want to be rubbing into your skin, also you might be eligible for compensation because this is just insane what the fuck
Even if you aren’t on T gel and think this recall doesn’t apply to you, it includes way more than just testosterone, including a bunch of very common medications, so please please please still check this list. Every medication I am currently prescribed was on this list except one.
Many common medications are being recalled. If you take any medications, check the list.
It’s damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn’t have to fear competitors.
It’s a lot easier to prove what a corporation did than it is to prove why they did it. What am I, a mind-reader? But imagine for a second that the corporation in the dock is a global multinational. Now, imagine that the majority of the voting shares in that company are held by one man, who has served as the company’s CEO since the day he founded it, personally calling every important shot in the company’s history.
Now imagine that this founder/CEO, this accused monopolist, was an incorrigible blabbermouth, who communicated with his underlings almost exclusively in writing, and thus did he commit to immortal digital storage a stream – a torrent – of memos in which he explicitly confessed his guilt.
Ladies and gentlepersons, I give you Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta (nee Facebook), an accused monopolist who cannot keep his big dumb fucking mouth shut.
At long, long last, the FTC’s antitrust trial against Meta is underway, and this week, Zuck himself took the stand, in agonizing sessions during which FTC lawyers brandished printouts of Zuck’s own words before him, asking him to explain away his naked confessions of guilt. It did not go well for Zuck.
In a breakdown of the case for The American Prospect, editor-in-chief David Dayen opines that “The Government Has Already Won the Meta Case,” having hanged Zuck on his own words:
The government is attempting to prove that Zuck bought Instagram and Whatsapp in order to extinguish competitors (and not, for example, because he thought they were good businesses that complimented Facebook’s core product offerings).
This case starts by proving how Zuck felt about Insta and WA before the acquisitions. On Insta, Zuck circulated memos warning about Insta’s growth trajectory:
they appear to be reaching critical mass as a place you go to share photos
and how that could turn them into a future competitor:
[Instagram could] copy what we’re doing now … I view this as a big strategic risk for us if we don’t completely own the photos space.
These are not the words of a CEO who thinks another company is making a business that compliments his own – they’re confessions that he is worried that they will compete with Facebook. Facebook tried to clone Insta (Remember Facebook Camera? Don’t feel bad – neither does anyone else). When that failed, Zuck emailed Facebook execs, writing:
[Instagram’s growth is] really scary and why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.
At this point, Zuck’s CFO – one of the adults in the room, attempting to keep the boy king from tripping over his own dick – wrote to Zuck warning him that it was illegal to buy Insta in order to “neutralize a potential competitor.”
Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It’s like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting “record,” and barking, “Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder, and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck.”
Did Zuck buy Insta to neutralize a competitor? Sure seems like it! For one thing, Zuck cancelled all work on Facebook Camera “since we’re acquiring Instagram.”
But what about after the purchase. Did Zuck reduce quality and/or raise costs? Well, according to the company, it enacted an “explicit policy of not prioritizing Instagram’s growth” (a tactic called “buy or bury”). At this juncture, Zuckerberg once again put fingers to keyboard in order to create an immortal record of his intentions:
By not killing their products we prevent everyone from hating us and we make sure we don’t immediately create a hole in the market for someone else to fill.
And if someone did enter the market with a cool new gimmick (like, say, Snapchat with its disappearing messages)?
Even if some new competitors spring up, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, these new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.
Remember, the Insta acquisition is only illegal if Zuck bought them to prevent competition in the marketplace (rather than, say, to make a better product). It’s hard to prove why a company does anything, unless its CEO, founder, and holder of the majority of its voting stock explicitly states that his strategy is to create a system to ensure that innovating new products “won’t get much traction” because he’ll be able to quickly copy them.
Tumblr is odd because you’ll see a mutual post something really profound like “the birds still sing for those who listen” and you see them 5 minutes later saying something like “need to be pegged.grilled cheese style”
it’s funny because my job involves a lot of using a box cutter, so you’d think that’s the thing I’d accidentally hurt myself with the most
but nooo no no no. the box cutter is my colleague, my ally, my friend. you know what is truly bloodthirsty in a print & signage shop? literally Anything Else that’s able to cut but not supposed to. cardboard, sheets of plastic, the humble paper of course, corrugated polypropylene, aluminum composite sheets - i nicked myself on a sheet of magnetic material today?? it bled. kinda profusely.
basically:
box cutter: a trusty companion, might hurt you if you handle it wrong, but that’s understandable
stuff you use the box cutter on: they know you as their enemy. they know the rules of this life: kill, or be killed. they know what they have to do.
thank you. the people need to know about the real menace
ALT
