straight up it should be illegal for a physical storefront not to accept physical currency, or for restaurants not to provide physical menus

I'm assuming the above is a normie opinion (as it should be) so i do wanna go a tiny step further and explicitly state any laundromat that requires digital payment should be burned to the fucking ground

if a business cooerces its customers to download an app, i should legally be allowed to set both the business and its board of directors on fire

The assumption that every single business, or service, is owed your personal data, and should be able to track you and mercilessly spam you and monetise the ability to sell off your contact details and so on it’s absolutely deranged.

I have flashlights that are borderline unusable because, while the hardware is fine, the company that made them (hello OLight!) demands that you install and login to the storefront before you can access the configuration software.

But they don’t actively maintain the software or provide any of the new utilities that they promise. They are mostly using it as a way to turn off functional hardware to try and force you to upgrade.

We are living in a society where you can pay for something and the manufacturer can turn it off because they’ve decided that you’ve owned it too long .

I’ve just had to warn my family not to buy electronic door locks because the chances are, if they are Internet connected they will be disabled once the company that owns them has decided that they’re not making enough money charging you a monthly fee to open your own front door.

This is part of an ongoing trend to turn money into something that is no longer usable by everybody .

The eventual aim is to be able to pay people company scrip: If you lose your job, or badmouth the company, or disagree with the dictator, they severely curtail what you are allowed to buy, and from who.

And at that point, you have to pick sides – do you want to be able to have drinking water from Coca-Cola, or Pepsi, and whose package allows you to buy Doritos, and use your smart oven to cook food? Because it won’t turn on unless you use the app to scan the appropriate barcode from the company who now owns your ability to eat drink, heat your home, and wear clothes from brands that they approve.

And if you think that Bezos wouldn’t do that or run his own ghetto where employees have to use Amazon brands and be paid in Amazon money… You haven’t been paying attention to what he’s been building lately.

Read "Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow, from his book Radicalized

Found a link to the story: Unauthorized Bread

Holy shit.

I truly hate to tell you all this, but the reason needle sizes are numbered that way (smaller numbers = bigger needles) is BECAUSE SOME ASSHOLE HAD A 1-INCH DIAMETER CYLINDER AND LABELED HIS NEEDLES' SIZES BY HOW MANY NEEDLES HE COULD SHOVE IN THERE.

Like, 24 24-gauge needles can fit in a 1-inch cylinder. 18 18-gauge needles can fit in a 1-inch cylinder. Wrong and horrible. The worst possible way to measure a needle. Good night.

this is how shotgun shells are made apparently and then needles got made that way too

Wires as well

That is so unnecessarily imprecise.

It’s not actually that imprecise from a low-tech perspective though? How else are you going to measure the difference between a 6 vs a 9 gauge needle without some highly precise measuring equipment? This is cheap and replicable, and isn’t it easier to make a big cylinder to match a specific diameter?

I'd measure the diameter of the mold used to make the needle and label the molded needles accordingly but however people want to do it is fine I guess

Stacking circles inside circles doesn't measure things all that precisely. To give a super exaggerated example, a 1-guage needle via this method could be 1 inch diameter, .51 inch diamater, or anything in between. You can nearly double the size of a needle at that scale and still have the same gauge.

Obviously most needles are smaller than that and the margin of error is thus smaller, but it's still so unnecessarily imprecise when you can just measure the diameter of the molds and use that as your standard. If you want to measure them at home by chucking them in a ring you still can. But the measurement standard should be diameter-based.

It seems weirdly imprecise because it's not true. I don't know where this rumor comes from, but that's not how needle sizes came about. As I understand it, they come from wire gauge sizes, where you make a wire thinner and thinner by repeatedly pulling it through smaller and smaller holes in a draw plate:

They're numbered in order from largest to smallest because you do them sequentially, making the wire slightly thinner each time, and the gauge # is just the number of holes you pull it through.

Notably, in every gauge system I'm aware of, the size-0 wire or needle is still much, much less than an inch across, because it's a wire or a needle, not a piece of rebar.

My best guess about the "number of wires/needles that fit in a 1in cylinder" things is that someone who was confused about gauge numbers had a 1" hole, noticed that they could shove a little more than 20 24-gauge wires in it, jumped to the conclusion that this must be how it was defined, and started confidently telling everyone that this was true.

Do you want me to use historical knitting knowledge to make this a little bit worse

I must know how historical knitting information can be anything but a benefit.

And now I'm thinking about the Terrible Knitters of Mold or whatever it was, the women who hand-knit REALLY fast using knitting sheaths.

Right! so this post is about sewing needles, where gauge/diameter are slightly less important than in other types of needle, such as medical needles or knitting needles. There's of reasonable amount of wiggle room in crafting a sewing needle, a very ancient technology that can really be made any old way (it doesn't even need to have an eye - it can just be a poky thorn or animal quill that pokes thread through holes.) And the technological innovation of the metal sewing needle being made from drawn wire and the points ground on a grindstone is supported because we know that's how they did it and because that's the easiest way to to make long thin pieces of metal, so needle size mapping to wire size (and a higher number being number of draws through a plate) makes sense.

Kermit the Frog would be an ideal assassin because if caught he would need to be tried by a jury of his peers (Muppets) and you would not be able to find a Muppet who does not have a pre-existing opinion on Kermit the fucking Frog. case thrown out. kermie can kill again. it's easy being green

I don't know, I think his chances are still good on getting out but if the court put in the work they could fill the box.

not letting these tags get away

“you can’t hate ICE agents for wanting a fat paycheck” ah yes. people who are willing to disregard all morals for cash. congratulations you played right into their hands you uneducated piece of shit

you couldn’t pay me an amount even feasible to do this evil shit. you are lower than dirt

This. You can and should judge people for working for ICE, they're people who willingly signed up for an American secret police force that's violating the rights of people constantly in order to act as enforcers of a fascist government.

Basically everyone is not an ICE agent. Like, virtually all of us, the entire population, are not ICE agents. No matter how steep our bills are, very nearly every single American is not an ICE agent.

We can, and should, judge them forever. It should be the sort of thing their grandkids are ashamed to discover. The sort of thing that hamstrings a career forever. "What were you doing in 2025-26? Oh, you were with ICE? Thank you for your time, get out right now."

They should all be judged and shunned for the rest of their lives.

The funniest thing I've learned in the last day is that the "$50K bonus" only pays out after 5 years of service.

Like, lmao, you thought Trump was gonna give you a big chunk of cash? Silly.

2026

Original Post: Keith Porter was tragically taken from us by an off-duty ice agent, and his family is seeking justice during this difficult time. Every donation can help support their fight for truth and accountability. Please consider clicking the link below to contribute or share it with others who might want to help. Thank you for your support! https://gofund.me/530afb61e

https://gofund.me/530afb61e

who else has fantasized about the Nutrient Brick

Sometimes you will be a lesbian to your parents and a straight man to your partners parents and a gay man to your partner and a woman to your grandparents and out to your friends and stealth to your classmates and a nice young lady to the cashier at the coffee shop and then people on your computer will ask you to choose which of these identities you ACTUALLY are and which you are Appropriating The Oppression Of because don’t you know they contract each other. You can only be one thing solidly forever

I feel like all the "they broke weird al" "weird al got serious we're so cooked" comments about the killing in the name cover are missing the point. that is not a broken man. comedy is politics. comedy has always been politics. weird al has been satirizing politics for a long time because he knows the court jester can say to the king what other people can't. by doing a serious cover of an explicitly anti-establishment song that his gen x and millennial audience knows by heart when he's built his career on parody, he's saying this can't be satirized anymore and he's saying it in a very deliberate way that his audience will understand. those aren't the actions of a broken man, they're the actions of a man who is trying to tell you something. are we going to listen?

I feel like all the "they broke weird al" "weird al got serious we're so cooked" comments about the killing in the name cover are missing the point. that is not a broken man. comedy is politics. comedy has always been politics. weird al has been satirizing politics for a long time because he knows the court jester can say to the king what other people can't. by doing a serious cover of an explicitly anti-establishment song that his gen x and millennial audience knows by heart when he's built his career on parody, he's saying this can't be satirized anymore and he's saying it in a very deliberate way that his audience will understand. those aren't the actions of a broken man, they're the actions of a man who is trying to tell you something. are we going to listen?

So just so we're all clear ICE straight up murdered that woman in broad daylight and the government is calling HER the terrorist

So just so we're all clear ICE straight up murdered Renee Nicole Good in broad daylight and the government is calling HER the terrorist

So just so we're all clear ICE agent Jonathan Ross straight up murdered Renee Nicole Good in broad daylight and the government is calling HER the terrorist

From the Wikipedia page on loons

Now with free ready-to-print .png and .tif file

Been thinking about this image a lot today.

To update this, the astronaut didn’t actually do it, she and her wife were getting a divorce and the wife plead guilty to lying to the feds about it

And framing your ex for a crime mid-divorce while they are actively in space is some Agatha Christie level shit

the more educated you get on fat issues the more you realize that almost everything that supposedly justifies fatphobia is actually complete bullshit. most of the health conditions that are treated as almost divine punishment for being fat (like heart issues and diabetes) are being revealed to actually *cause weight gain* instead of being caused *by* it. this goes for social 'consequences' of being fat, too. is that "neckbeard" redditor actually fat because he spends all his time online, or is it that he spends all of his time online because he's not treated like a person if you can see that he's fat, so the internet is his best option? everything is less accessible to fat people. seats on busses, at restaurants, and even at things like amusement parks, are frequently too small to comfortably sit in for a fat person. people treat you worse if you're fat, or even try to avoid you entirely. you get judged for doing leisure activities, or even for exercising at a public gym, (which proves the claims of trying to motivate you to get fit are bullshit btw) getting filmed and laughed at, posted online for your body to be a punchline. if you want to be progressive or body positive you *need* to be examining your beliefs. oppressed people are routinely forced into positions that, from the outside, may justify the narrative about these people. black folk are pushed into poverty, so that crime is often their only means of survival, enforcing the idea that black folk are criminals. queer folk are made unsafe in public so that we use codes to identify each other, enforcing the idea that queer folk are trying to secretly seduce people to be gay. and yes, fat folk are forced indoors and online so that they can enforce the narrative that we are lazy shut-ins.

#if you are skinny you need to take an interest in this#get involved with fat liberation#start fighting people on fatphobia#get mad at them when they are casually fatphobic around you because youre thin#make them afraid#defend your fat friends