Paging Charlie Brooker…

They could save a lot on consulting fees with a cheap Netflix plan and binge watching Black Mirror.

Right, that’s…what they all say. But if you’re blocking the ramps and I have to heave-ho my cart over the curb and/or walk around a parade of other parked cars, it gets annoying.

It’s better than that lol. The last time I heard that announcement at the airport (been several years), it was “The loading zone is for immediate loading and unloading only”. These people park in the fire lane for 15-20 minutes while their passenger “just goes in for a few things”.

True enough; selfishness, entitledness, and laziness are not strictly a generational things, but I’ve seen this for over 25 years (worked retail from high school and through college), and it always seems like it’s the Boomers who get it going, and other people go “me too” and line up behind them.

Ugh. This old argument again.

If you’ll remember, that’s how social media used to work. If you are old enough to remember OG Facebook, back when it required a .edu email address to sign up (and for a brief while after it was opened to the public), you only saw posts, and other people only saw your posts, if you both accepted friend requests. No randos were spewing nonsense in your feed; if Becky or Brandon started spewing conspiracy theories, you just un-friend them and they’re gone from your digital life.

It was just a place for people you already know to connect online and maybe meet some friends-of-friends in the process. The feed (“wall” I think it was called?) was reverse chronological and nothing was boosted or demoted; likes only indicated you liked it.

That model seemed to work pretty damn well by not allowing toxic people, bad actors, conspiracy nuts (unless your friends were all conspiracy nuts), and dis-/misinformation to permeate every freaking interaction.

That sounds like the job a contestant on one of those HGTV home makeover shows would have:

“My husband is a stay at home dog dad, and I spend 30 minutes a month creating 2 or sometimes 3 social media posts. Our budget is $400,000.”

Curious if this going to affect google results in Searx. Not sure how it works (scraping page, API, etc)

Rectenna

It’s the basis for the receiving end of “beaming” power (long distance; not the induction kind used in wireless chargers).

Not that, specifically, though it might be indirectly?

I’m basing it off of one of Gyles Brandreth’s yarns where he described how he dealt with abusive constituents when he was a MP.

Dear sir or madam:

Some crackpot has written me an abusive letter, and they’ve signed your name at the bottom. […]

Whether he came up with that or adapted it from something prior, I don’t know.

Standard reply:

Dear sir or madam:

Some crackpot has written me an abusive message, and it seems they used your account to send it. I’m replying to you as a courtesy in case you wish to take action against this lunatic.

Yeah, but he’s mean in Continuum lol. In Dark Matter he was probably the nicest of the 6 main characters.

+1 for referencing Continuum. “Canadian Sci-Fi starring Roger Cross” is probably one of my favorite sub-genres of it, and Continuum is at the top of that list (Dark Matter is a close second).

So you’re stereotyping a country of 341 million people based off of your personal interactions with a few of them on the internet?

We’re not a monoculture, bud. How would you feel if I asked “Why does it seem like Europeans have become so judgmental and preachy in the past years?”

Now, now, now. Let’s not be too quick to call it “disinformation” or “propaganda”. It could just be Respectful Dissent. Every Opinion Matters. /s

RCS is a whole can of worms. It’s presented like a carrier services (and carriers are in the mix, though often just for authentication), but it’s really a Google service. With Android, RCS connects directly to google’s mothership.

I believe on iOS those go to Apple’s servers which “peers” with google. Maybe search the RCS endpoint for Apple and see what comes up?

Listening to whoever reads his eulogy will probably also keep people on edge.

how much mass we’ve lost to space with all of the shit we’ve flown to and let in space.

Shooting from the hip here, but probably a tiny, minuscule fraction of a fraction of a percent. I’d venture a guess we’ve lost more mass in atmospheric gases being ionized and stripped away from solar radiation than we have launched from the surface.