No clue!

The power almost never goes out at my house, which is nice, but there are 4 appliances with clocks in my kitchen. The microwave runs fast and is usually about 12 minutes ahead every time the clocks change, the stove is always rock solid, the coffee pot is never set (despite being the only appliance with a timer mode that would actually be useful), and the air fryer is only accurate during summer because I can’t remember how to set it (and I don’t care enough to fix it).

I tried not to, but it formed a mesh network with the neighbors toaster, and that connected to someone’s dishwasher the next street over, which connected to a washing machine down the block, and so on, until they found a self-aware microwave that just happens to be benevolent but sort of mischievous, and now whenever my toast is done, the Grindr chime sounds off and the toaster asks me to put it back in.

The cities also indexed their streets off of the same river, but at different places along the curving bank. As a result, traveling south in KCMO increments the street numbers, but in KCK, the numbers increment when you travel west.

For more hilarity, the cities to the south of KCK adopted the KCMO street number designations, so KCK is the odd city out.

It’s just doing a compatibility check.

The goal is not really to kill civilians or even to harm Hezbollah. The goal is to destroy vital services to further destabilize the country.

That’s very fair, indeed.

Perhaps awareness of one will spark awareness of the other. I suppose my concern is that plasticisers are sort of a ‘hidden’ risk, for the most part. They’re used in nearly every food packaging (and prep, such as hoses) that isn’t contained in glass, or served up in its own peel.

Microplastics are terrifying and all that, but I’m sort of more worried about plasticisers like BPA, BPF, BPS and the rest of the alphabet of BP-whatever’s that was created and brought into use after the dangers of BPA were realized.

Just a heads up - if something plastic says it’s BPA-free, it probably uses a different bisphenol compound that is less studied than BPA. And is likely as toxic (or even more toxic)!

But nobody ever talks about those, because science words.

The problem is that now the first page of results is all AI garbage and wrong, so you’re not 100% sure at what point you’ve reached the sane internet.

It’s so shameful what greed and broken electoral finance laws in the U.S. have done to the country. Right now, an investment of a few million by a PAC can turn into billions of dollars from the government, via direct aid, passing laws, or simply looking the other way if a company isn’t being too obviously evil.

The primaries this year were highly telling in that regard - politicians were being nakedly bought in plain sight, but, again, because “you don’t fuck with the money” it’s not a question in political circles of whether overhauling campaign finance should be undertaken.

I’m cynically viewing this as not a positive. I assume this is so they can make pages 2, 3 and so on as spammy as page 1.

Not at first, obviously. You don’t boil that frog on high heat.
You throw out a second page with a cute little text ad off to the side, then 1 or 2 at the top, then a mid-page ad. Maybe some suggested content.

Instead of having to scroll through a page’s worth of ads to get to semi-relevant results with a gem hidden in them, it’ll be a pages worth of ads for your semi-relevant results per page, and maybe what you were looking for 4 or 5 pages in.

Google used to be good. They ‘know’ what people are looking for. So they’ll probably hire someone familiar with gambling to figure out a minimum dispersion of relevant results on the pages, to keep people using the service and scrolling past ads. … I used to remember this. Variable-ratio reward schedule?

I just realized that I contradicted myself. I said that I use this with folks I don’t like, and then that when I use it, if someone responds well, that I know they’re my kinda people.

I don’t exclusively use it with folks I don’t like! I also throw it out playfully. It’s validating when folks respond in-kind.

It me!

Which is also probably why I give this answer. Because it irks me to some degree that we just throwaway important questions like another human’s well-being.
If someone responds without being tripped up, I sorta know they’re my kind of person.

I often respond with: “Well, I’m still kicking and screaming.” I don’t know why. I think it got used a lot when I was growing up - someone getting dragged kicking and screaming.
Folks get tripped up by that.

For me, it means that despite the fight being hopeless, I’m still trying.

I always respond thoughtfully to people I don’t like. Then I ask how they are and watch them squirm.

In the U.S. (if you’re in the U.S.), one option is to get allergy shots. And likely other places, but I can’t speak to that.

They do an allergy panel to determine what you’re allergic to and approximately how badly you’re allergic to each thing , then give you injections (usually weekly) of very low, but increasing amounts of the allergens until they feel your reactivity has ceased or decreased to an acceptable level.

I’ve had them. They’re sort of miserable, but they are effective.
They’re miserable because you have to go to the allergist every week, and sit there after the shot until they feel comfortable that you’re not going to have an anaphylactic reaction. But you do have a reaction, and it varies. My average reaction was to spend the next day and a half feeling a bit like I had a cold - sniffles, headache, body aches, and lethargy.
It did, however, ease my allergies significantly.

I want to downvote you because like, I love dogs (and cats, too). But like, not being able to love on or get loved on by dogs and cats is way, way worse than any downvote. That’s just a tragic allergy.

Got addicted to rosewater in the French foreign legion, and now that she’s been kicked out as their animal handler, she’s aa to resort to bottom shelf stuff.

She liked that he had two tails. He liked that she had 3 1/2 foot long femurs.

But it was not to be, because it was an AI ripoff of an actual webcomic.

This is probably the same strain that wiped out almost all of the seal and sea lion pups last year.
Bird flu is decimating seal colonies. Scientists don’t know how to stop it — AP News

I did not realize there’s been a bird flu epidemic since 2020. I wish I were quicker to characterize my thoughts - it’s interesting that the animal kingdom has faced their own pandemic while humans had one, too. My thoughts range from solemn concerns to silly ‘Mother Earth decided to press the reset button’ jokes. I hope it mutates to be gentler, in the way that COVID has.