Another thing is that I feel like the era of the private phone number has passed. I see the use case for phone numbers for businesses, but people just don’t use them very much anymore otherwise.

Like, we don’t memorize them. We don’t dial them. They’re just entries in our contacts.

At this point, we could create an alternative way of contacting private phones. Something based on whitelisting instead of blacklisting. Something that can be easily shared but not easily guessed. Something that would be easy to trace who called you.

All of these phone scams rely on the idea that a stranger can just up and contact you without any effort. It’s ridiculous. If we got rid of that, we’d save people from untold billions of dollars of scams almost instantly.

This is an old tactic, and it’s been used by the oil industry before.

Plastics are polluting our environment? “It’s not the industry’s fault. It’s because individuals litter and don’t recycle. No need to have the government regulate the industry.”

If they can convince people that it’s their fault, then there is no need for industry to change.

I would say that he’s probably mostly in touch with reality. He just doesn’t care that he’s hurting people and destroying the planet because he personally profits from it.

I didn’t get the joke until it was explained, but I can explain this much.

In the fall, for daylight savings, you set the clock one hour back. Basically, you get an extra hour that is inserted into the night.

In leap years, you get an extra day, so the joke is that this extra day is inserted into the night.

The analogy doesn’t account for the spring part of daylight savings.

It seems like a better joke for a child going to school, then. An adult would have already experienced many leap years.

The thing about a cat, it’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes.

Cats have very expressive colorful eyes. “Lifeless black doll’s eyes,” would be a better description of rabbit eyes.

Spoiler for the movie Gravity:

In Gravity, George Clooney’s character wasn’t her husband and it was he who drifted away. But other than that, it’s a pretty common interpretation that this is the same thing that happened to Sandra Bullock’s character. That she died and the ending on Earth was her already being dead. This comic is basically a summary of the movie.

A while ago, there was a story about a man who made pretty good money from filing lawsuits against companies that ignored his do-not-call requests. If the laws still allow it, it might be a good way to make them stop.

I believe that all he had to do was to keep notes about the businesses and numbers that called him and when he asked them to add him to their do-not-call lists.

My computer is good enough to run any games I want to play, even recently released FPS types of games at reasonably high settings. Still not good enough for Win11. My weak-ass tablet, though, was upgraded straight away.

Are new instances automatically federated? If not, then it seems like making an instance, then hosting content enough to be federated, would be an awful waste of time and money, as I’d expect an instance like that would be quickly defederated.

I guess he prefers weirdos who have themselves photographed half naked riding horses.

Without looking up the answer, tell me approximately how long Lincoln was president before the Civil War started.

There are few theoretically possible technologies as overwhelmingly powerful as time machines. Even an extraordinarily weak time machine, for example, one that could only move you a few minutes back and forth, would be enough to make me insanely wealthy, assuming that it wasn’t cost prohibitive to run.

Even people who build their own computers usually buy all the RAM they want at the time that they’re building it.

The biggest difference to them is likely the feeling that they’re losing their ability to upgrade, more than the actual upgrade itself. I still think that feeling is an important factor, though.

This one is easy. I would simply do what they tell me to do. After all, since they came back to see me, it’s certainly because the future me sent them back in time.

If it wasn’t me that sent them back in time, then it’s probably a set up, and I would be powerless to resist it.

If they insisted on my ordering them around, I’d have them bring back a copy of their Wikipedia from 50 years in the future, and then I’d try to use the rest of the time to figure out the physics behind time travel, and see if I can’t get plans for a time machine.

This does look like it was printed on the kumquat. I don’t know whether it’s the case here, but this sort of thing sometimes happens when there is something printed on a bag or the plastic that food is wrapped in, and the ink can get transferred to the food.

Putin is willing to sacrifice Russia’s future for his own current glory.

Just think how many young Russian poets have been sent off to Ukraine to die.

Did we read the same article?

Her achievements that they mentioned are all related to Down Syndrome. The reactions they mentioned are reactions to her having Down Syndrome.

The article also talks about her rise in politics due to help from another politician… wait for it… who also has Down Syndrome.

I’m sure that she has more to her persona than her disability, just like everyone with a disability. However, the article is actually about her having Down Syndrome.

Do you remember a few years ago, it came out that some company was working on a new idea that, when you were given an advertisement on a TV, it could require you to say the product name aloud or it wouldn’t continue?

I try not to concede anything related to advertising because everything they want seems so dystopian.