During the 2000 election, the Diebold electronic voting machines used in many states stored results in an Access database. Kids today wouldn’t understand how disastrously insecure that was (Access DBs had an audit table that was manually editable). I have zero doubt that newer machines have similar “flaws” baked in (even if they didn’t use Starlink as was reported briefly), making the results absurdly easy to rig.

Rogan literally said Musk “saved us” - before the election no less.

Oh, I thought it was a plywood reference which didn’t really make sense in context. 10-ply plywood is pretty badass.

He’s too weak to make a proper job of it.

He got booed at Chappelle’s standup show

Even as much of a hot mess as Chapelle has become, I assume that Musk had to pay him to come onstage with him. I wonder how much it was.

Lol a quarter? I doubt even the real ones comprise a quarter.

Eh, I don’t think he’s been upgraded to the liquid metal version yet so you’d probably be OK.

For me the weirdest moment was when Joe Rogan - before the election - said that Musk “saved us”. Not “is going to save us”, already saved us.

The most efficient use of my time as both an engineer and a people leader

My last company had the most efficient standup meetings possible. We always did them by phone since 4/5 of the team was in India, so I was able to shower at home during them and then catch the bus in to work.

I would actually like to work at a place like that. I’ve worked with a very wide variety of languages and platforms and I don’t much care which one I use now. I’m much more interested in what the project is than in what tools are being used to produce it.

Just kidding - nobody has interesting projects any more.

I like the ones where the tech stack is literally every language/framework in use by anybody anywhere. Maybe you guys should try picking the stuff that’s best suited for whatever it is you’re doing.

female candidates with male VP’s named Tim

Man, I had to look up who Hillary’s veep candidate was. Feels like that election was about 60 years ago.

I think we need to go with the Zelensky model (comedian-turned-politician) rather than Zelensky proper. My money’s on Jon Stewart and/or Bill Burr.

My bus is 35’ long so it fits in (most) parks AFAIK. It’s fine for BLM of course, but I don’t really want to live that isolated.

I used to dream of living on a sailboat. Then a friend of mine who owned one took me out for a ride and I was so seasick I had to jump into the water and be towed back to the dock. So much for that shit.

It’s probably a bit easier to live in a boat, since it’s common (and I guess legal) for marinas to allow people to live in their boats while docked there. I own a skoolie (used school bus converted into a motorhome) and it is nearly fucking impossible to find anywhere that I could legally live in it - especially anywhere near big cities. Ironically, I’ve even tried contacting marinas to see if I could live there in my skoolie and they’re all like “hell no you fucking hippie”. I wonder if I could buy a barge, park the bus on it, and then live in a marina.

I have the same experience driving around the Philly suburbs (mostly west and southwest of the city proper). Like, what the fuck do all these people do that they can afford these places?

My mom grew up in the '40s and '50s and she told me many times about the surplus PT boat her dad had bought at the end of WWII which the family would take out for boating trips. I was like holy shit a PT (Patrol Torpedo) boat! These things had three Packard engines and could make 45 knots. Later on as an adult I discovered that it was actually just a pontoon boat, one of the things the army would use to make temporary bridges over rivers and that could only go about 3 mph. My mom had just thought “PT” stood for “Pon Toon” so that’s what she called it. It turns out she had always wondered what the hell John F. Kennedy had been doing in the Pacific fighting the Japanese in a pontoon boat.

Later on, I then learned that my mom’s uncle had actually bought a surplus Air/Sea Rescue boat after the war. This boat was basically a PT boat, just with two of the Packard engines instead of three; since it was 15 feet longer than a PT boat it could also do 45 knots. So it turns out my mom did have this childhood experience of rocketing around the ocean at unbelievable speeds. Her uncle ended up selling the boat after the engine room caught fire for the third time (something these engines were notorious for) and we have no idea what happened to it after that. These boats cost about $190K new and he had somehow acquired it for $10K - I expect there was some shady dealing going on there.

This reminds me of how much “fun” it was to write Blackberry apps back in the day. Whenever you compiled your app, not only did the entire app need to be signed by the RIM servers, each individual module of library code you incorporated into your app had to be signed, so the more shit you added the longer the process took (and signing a single app sometimes took 30-40 minutes or never happened at all because the signing servers were down). I remember once I needed to use the sin() trigonometry function, which forced me to incorporate one of the cryptography library modules, which in turn doubled the amount of time it would take to compile and sign my app - so I ended up writing my own custom sin() function for no good reason at all.

There was a whole website back then called isthesigningserverdown.com (long gone now) devoted to telling you whether the RIM servers were working or not. The only good part about this was that if I ever felt like blowing off work, I would just tell my bosses that the signing server was down and go home.

Just forget about the “trust fund” because as I mentioned, it’s not central to the way the SS system works. Social Security is simply a system whereby a large base of workers pays taxes to fund the (modest) retirement of a much smaller number of retirees. These are rough numbers, but: the average man starts work at age 21 and retires at age 65 (meaning he pays into the system for 44 years); the average male retiree then dies at age 76 (meaning he collects SS benefits for 11 years). So on average, four workers pay SS taxes to support one retiree. The average SS benefit is $1,583 per month, which means the average worker needs to pay just $396 per month in SS taxes for the system to remain solvent indefinitely. The median annual salary in the US is $59,384 (or $4949 per month) which means the SS tax rate only needs to be 8% (it’s currently 6.2% because the trust fund is being dipped into). Any shortfall could be easily made good by 1) raising the tax rate, and/or 2) raising the cap on taxable income.

This is why the “Ponzi scheme SS” meme is bullshit. A Ponzi scheme provides fake returns to investors by returning part of the money invested by new suckers; as soon as you run out of new suckers, the scheme collapses. Social Security does not in any way rely on perpetually finding new suckers, it only relies on the demographic reality of human beings having a much longer working life than retired life.