Mine has two box knives, a box knife with a carpet blade, 4 pairs of scissors, a lighter, a bunch of twist ties, various types of command strips, a travel lock, keys to someone’s house (we don’t know whose), and empty battery packages. Batteries have been moved into to an organizer that lives in the storage cabinet in the basement, but the empty packages stay for sentimental reasons (we have ADHD).

I think you’re right, but I don’t think holding blackmail is relevant to their goals anymore, so there’s no point in releasing it right now.

Even if Trump could be blackmailed into doing more to help Russia, does it matter? The republicans control the house and senate.
All the U.S. has to do to benefit Russia is allow republicans to enact their domestic and foreign policies.

About time!

The kind of funny thing is that if this happened for real, the next big plastic product would just be pesticide impregnated plastics. And then we’d have pesticide microplastics everywhere!

What I’m seeing through your comments here is that your kid trusts you enough to get you into the weeds with them on this problem, has a good enough sense of judgement not to want to just fudge their name to follow the path of least resistance (don’t want to do election fraud in a technical, though not real, sense), and you all have thought through it all and realized it’s a battle not worth having, given your local and statewide political makeup as well as the stress it would cause your kid. It seems like your kid is comfortable with you, self-aware, and capable of making the sorts of pragmatic decisions that many adults cannot make.
Damn. Do you mind asking your kid what it feels like to have good parents that are preparing them to tackle life’s challenges?

Presented kind of as a joke, but good job. Seriously.

”Soory for robbing your sporting goods store, bud, but there’s a hockey stick shortage in Thunder Bay.”

Wisconsin city

CANADIANS?

Heh. Asstronomers.

A base plate that’s got a spring under it, except for a little nub that pokes the power button.
Terrible if you live in earthquake-prone areas.

Wait. Are we describing a bump stock for your computer?

“I don’t really want to look at my body any more,” he said, noting it was too painful to see photos from the hospital. “Every time I see myself, I have flashbacks. And every time I see cops, I think, is he after me? And I know in my head it’s not true, but it just comes up.” He said he questions whether he could’ve done something differently. “I have to keep telling myself … I didn’t deserve this.”
He added: “I just want the Department of Justice to take care of them and fix what they say they’re going to fix … I’m not trying to get attention, I just want my story to be heard because I hurt.”

Oof.

The Associated Press reported that Trump briefly met with executives of Bezos’s space exploration company Blue Origin on Friday after his newspaper had spiked its endorsement of Harris.

Musk goes MAGA in the hopes that Trump’s corruption will save him via government contracts and policy decisions.
Bezos, fearing for Blue Origin, spikes a Harris endorsement, which very fucking transparently gets the company an audience with Trump. If it weren’t for the fact that, you know, I live here, it would be very funny to watch these idiots get swindled by a con man.

But I live here, and that con man will tank the economy, raid the stock market, strip everything of value from the government, and do all he can to transfer that value into his pockets or the pockets of those he thinks he controls, while letting his allies steer the domestic and social direction of the country. And I don’t much care for the people he’s allied with.

I’m sure once the paper gets ahold of the terrorists PR team for a quote, they’ll say they killed 5 infidels and had 2 martyrs.

But for now, it’s the government giving the quote, and they’re saying they killed 2 terrorists, and had 5 martyrs.

Editing to add: I don’t see martyr as a loaded term. It’s an honorific about someone’s death, when other words fail. It’s just a colloquial use of the word.

Not yet. But their intentions are clear.

Destroying the hospital destroys vital services in Lebanon’s capitol city. A nation - especially one that is already struggling after years of economic crisis and national disasters - that has its healthcare system under attack is a destabilized nation.

If people are fleeing and not united, they cannot support a government, and the government cannot fight against an unlawful invasion.

They’re just holding him upside down and shaking him like a 1930s comic strip about bullies.

Genuinely chuckling at this and imagining his hair dye dripping off while it happens.

Shirley you’ve heard of absurdist humor?

Ah, sorry. I edited that away, after rereading the context. I didn’t want to inject personal philosophy into what was clearly not about my beliefs.

But the second clause was given (or was intended to be given) in the context that I don’t believe hope is actionable. It’s just wasted emotional energy. If I can take an action that directly improves things, I do.

The scale is also poorly defined - sorry. The first: world at large. The second: the world that is around me - my family, my local environment (radiating out from my house, into my community, etc - but I know I can’t impact the national level).

Edit: Sorry, sleepy posting. That was not contextually relevant at all.

Yeah. I guess we’ll never figure out why oil washed up on beaches next to an offshore oil drilling zone. One of life’s mysteries, I guess!

Editing to add: The legal fate of the offshore oil wells is in question, and it’s not clear if work has begun on them or not. New South Wales has banned drilling within their territory, but the company said they’ll just go farther out to sea, where it’s governed by Australia’s federal laws, and I don’t know if they’ve actually started drilling yet.
Heck, those could also have come from a deteriorated WWII ship. Not that I seriously believe that theory, though.

That’s where I know I don’t know enough to respond.

Well, crap. I just looked it up. Looks like phones will send out your MAC address when looking for WiFi networks to connect to, and they more or less always search for WiFi, unless currently connected to WiFi.

So - yeah. Same issues with Bluetooth.

And some newer consumer routers do all sorts of funky things under the hood in the name of security, which includes sending information about traffic back to their corporate home base. That could easily also include MAC addresses of passing devices. (Or telling the manufacturer every site you visit. Very fun now that the latest trend in routers is to require cloud connections and accounts, so your identity with them is ‘known’.)

Info dump incoming!

Basically, your phone is a big ol’ slut.

I’m not as well versed with WiFi, but phones are set up to be very friendly with Bluetooth. Every Bluetooth device your phone sees, it says hello to. Most phones these days don’t really disable Bluetooth (they just limit its active use), or they disable it for a limited time period.

This is ostensibly fine, since Bluetooth supposedly identifies itself with a MAC address that isn’t necessarily tied to your identity. Unless you connect to something with Bluetooth that knows your identity, like a smart speaker, or have given Bluetooth permissions to any apps you’re logged into.

BLE positioning with sensors utilizes BLE-enabled sensors that are deployed in fixed positions throughout an indoor space. These sensors passively detect and locate transmissions from BLE smartphones, asset tracking tags, beacons, personnel badges, wearables and other Bluetooth devices based on the received signal strength of the transmitting device. This location data is then sent to the central indoor positioning system (IPS) or real-time location system (RTLS). The location engine analyzes the data and uses multilateration algorithms to determine the location of the transmitting device. Those coordinates can be used to visualize the location of a device or asset on an indoor map of your space or leveraged for other uses depending on the specific location-aware application.
– Some random website - inpixon.com

That’s not to say that every place you go is deploying BLE beacons to know you spent 20 minutes looking at candy when you were supposed to be making a quick run to get milk, but it’s possible that is occurring. And if it is occurring, it’s likely they’re working with some sort of data broker to deanonymize your data. Or at the very least, making their own inferences - using that loyalty card and a BLE beacon to know that the loyalty info put into a register corresponds to your MAC address.
What’s not likely, however, is that this data is public. Your data has value, so they don’t want to let it go for free, plus if the general public knew they could be tracked almost anywhere, there might be enough outcry for lawmakers to adopt better consumer privacy laws.

Editing to add: Even if you aren’t being precisely tracked within a retail location, a single ping on a Bluetooth device is enough to establish that your phone was within 30-50 feet of the device, which is apparently all the police need to send you to jail for 20 years.

I hope you’ve enjoyed your tour of this info dump. Tin foil hats are on sale at the gift shop!