Kid_Thunder @ Kid_Thunder @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Remember when Microsoft pushed hard on marketing "don't be Scroogled" for this stuff?

Yet they are a Red county.

Doesn't matter. There's feces everywhere. When you smell a bad bathroom, a fart, your own poop it is because it is in the air all around you. You're nose is actually detecting the particles of shit in your nostrils. It is on your clothes, on your skin, on your face, on your hands.

The test used to detect trace amount of feces would likely find feces on door knobs, stove dials, clothes or anything else often touched in your house right now.

That's because there's feces on every person all over them. Your nose works because it detects chemicals of something. If you smell feces it is because it is inside of your nose. Feces is in the air. Smell a fart? It's now on you. Bathroom smells like shit? It is in the air around you and on you.

Just about 20 years ago when all those soda fountain dispensers tested always had feces detected on them, it wasn't because some bandit was going around the world smearing shit on them every day, it is because it is always every where.

According to the BBC article that talks about the McDonalds touch screen, they say the same thing.

The UK still uses imperial for things. For example, the UK buys gasoline in liters but measures the efficiency of the cars by miles per gallon. They also use miles to measure distance for driving. They measure people's weights by stone but only one of the various stone measurements.

Personally, I don't think the UK has any room to make fun of anyone using imperial units.

Speaking as a veteran, the VA 100% earned that reputation - it used to be shit. They’ve improved a lot though

The problem I have with this is that although the PACT Act may make it right in my case (we'll see), I don't really have any way to be diagnosed by the "improved VA" that I'm aware of. As I understand it from the letter I received previously, that I'm not able to appeal some shitty (in my opinion but I'm biased of course) findings.

sketchy fucking elevators.

lol funny you mention that. I thought my main VA was bad but then they contracted out some VA stuff more local to me and their elevators are even more sketchy! I actually take the stairs there, no joke. I just thought it was this VA and it was sort of a funny coincidence with the contracting practice's office.

I honestly don't blame the VA docs. They all seem pretty upfront and honest, even when it sucks but it seems like their hands are tied by the black and white.

Dude literally turned down completely free healthcare so that he could go get care from the exact same doctor; but now with a copay and insurance bullshit fighting against covering the care he needed in favor of a cheaper and less effective treatment.

It actually took someone convincing me to use the VA because I do have pretty good medical insurance for me and my family and I didn't feel like I wanted to tie up the VA's time and energy that could be spent on someone less fortunate. I have been discouraged for some time though because it just feels like a fight I don't want when I can go just get it taken care of with my own insurance. So maybe I can see it from Sergeant Dipshit's perspective without the details though the details are probably make a ridiculous choice he made. I can promise I'm not him though because I've never yelled at VA staff. I really don't think they're the problem. I don't even think the VA itself is really the problem. I think legislators and perhaps specifically the VA oversight committee in the House.

Pre recent PACT Act that Mr. Stewart shamed a certain party into finally getting on board with and passing, certain VA claims were difficult to get compensation or treatment for because there was no linking evidence to make it 'service connected'. You couldn't, for example, prove that the respiratory issues you have now was from huffing burning oil and other chemicals because you had no idea what chemicals you were ingesting and you didn't complain about it 20 years ago when you were still in. The primary catalyst behind the PACT Act that just passed a few months back is because Veterans were dying due to obvious military connected issues but simply had zero way to prove it. You can't just write a letter to some organization and be like "What was I exposed to while operating at FOB X, Y and Z. Also did you guys figure out if this could have caused this lung cancer I'm dying from?"

Or maybe for my predecessors "In the Gulf War I was on P-Tabs (pyridostigmine bromide if you don't know) every day for months. Do you think this has lead to my issues?" because even though the VA's Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses did in-fact find that it does and presented it along with other studies reinforcing this to the NAC (Gulf War and Health: Volume 8: Update of Health Effects of Serving in the Gulf War, 2010), in Chapter 8 they said

Although the Update committee did not assess the biological plausibility of the link between PB and pesticides and Gulf War illness ... A comprehensive assessment of all the evidence on PB and pesticides exposures in the Gulf War was beyond the Update committee’s formal scope of work. ... the Update committee found that human epidemiologic evidence was not sufficient to establish a causative relationship between any specific drug, toxin, plume, or other agent, either alone or in combination, and Gulf War illness.

and therefore, the VA's official stance is that although the VA itself found evidence that PB causes chronic multisymptom illness and presented all of it that

the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) ... has determined that there is no basis to establish any new presumptions of service connection at this time for any of the diseases, illnesses, or health effects ...

(see this Federal Register notice)

in what could be a punchline to a joke about how the VA can determine that there is a problem in its initial study but that after presenting this to the NAC that did not itself conduct a study, the NAC and therefore the VA has found that there is not a problem and the veterans effected are screwed. But it's OK because everyone involved recommends that something in the ether ("the government" without attribution to an actual organization) should still monitor the situation.

I have my own shitty experiences that I don't really want to go into. I feel like I've been one of the lucky ones that haven't died painfully as an old man yelling at clouds...yet. And it's funny because I know veterans that are rated at 90% disabled as a desk jockey and combat vets that are rated 0% and neither have any idea why they are so high or so low.

Thankfully, my deployment finally got listed on the burn pit registry last year after 20 years and the PACT Act is going to give me a second chance....maybe...we'll see after my toxicology appointment one day I guess.

Ask a Vet still on Tricare after service what they have to do to get anything above Motrin to manage chronic pain. I am grateful that I do not have to rely on Tricare myself and also that I currently do not need to manage chronic pain above Motrin/Ibuprofen every so often.

In 5 years I wouldn't be surprised to read about these current set of lawyers suing him for payment and him saying something like "they wanted a lot of money for being a bunch of losers. Why should I pay?" assuming he's still alive and hasn't died due to old age and cheese burgers by then.

VA benefits and care is really bad though to be fair. Some veterans really go through the meat grinder and are never put back together again.

The US' policy is basically support the troops (in words only) and throw away the veterans (in actions). Thankfully Jon Stewart has really has put so much energy and real effort into VA care advocacy or it'd be worse. It's still bad though.

That's really the beauty of decentralized federated platforms though. People can be scattered to multiple platforms that do their thing but can interoperate with other platforms still. Granted, we're still in sort of the infancy and ugly part of development and growth but so long as momentum doesn't die out, it could be the new norm sometime in this decade.

However, I fear, much like the world-wide web, something who's potential for humanity is so great can be ruined by business strategists and marketeers after all the hard work is done by people that genuinely care and sacrificed so much effort for the benefit of everyone else.

How does that work if you save the docx in OOXML Strict instead of OOXML Transient? I'm not sure about the current 365 rollout but OOXML was developed by MS due to the EU nearly 20 years ago to support interoperability but their default saving format was always OOXML Transient which is OOXML + MS Proprietary format. OOXML Strict should be an option and save the docx in OOXML only format.

OpenOffice has been essentially a dead project for a long, long, long time. LibreOffice is its successor.

Finally. Intuit has been lobbying for years to keep this from happening.

Derrick Plummer, a spokesman for Intuit, said taxpayers can already file their taxes for free and there are online free-file programs available to some people. Individuals of all income levels can submit their returns for free via the mail.

A “direct-to-IRS e-file system is a solution in search of a problem, and that solution will unnecessarily cost taxpayers billions of dollars,” he said. “We will continue unapologetically advocating for American taxpayers and against a direct-to-IRS e-file system because it’s a bad idea.”

And who believes that crap anyway? Intuit markets their solution due to the complicated nature of anything outside of standard deductions and figuring out if you should itemize and how to do that.

Intuit has spent $25.6 million since 2006 on lobbying, H&R Block about $9.6 million and the conservative Americans for Tax Reform roughly $3 million.

Now if the states get on board for easy filing online, it'll be great.

It isn't as if these people were caught attempting to scam the system and they also happen to be a vulnerable part of the population, one that relies on the very system that is screwing them now.

We can bail out billion dollar companies and banks but we can't forgive these peoples' debts.

The answers shouldn't be "we're reviewing our policies" and "they may have misinterpreted a law. I'll look into it." There is no definite good solution or a plan of any substance in any of that.

To view the coking, you really need a very small and long endoscope with it. You really didn't get that with the $50 borescopes back then. Most of them at that price point wouldn't allow change outs either. Now you can get them with changeable endoscopes, decent video and recording of course fairly cheap.

Well, the borescope is running on an old archaic motherboard with ISA slots to do everything so I just didn't really care enough to try to do anything with it at that point mostly because the fiberscope was garbage as well. At that point I might as well have built a new one but there's no way they would have funded it so I wasn't going to.

We used to have a borescope that saved pictures and some jet engine engineers always requested them when we checked for fuel coking. The thing was heavy, massive and ran on Windows 3.1. It would save one picture at it's highest resolution on a single floppy but wouldn't have enough space for another. So for each picture, we had to load in a new floppy. Then find the floppy drive with a USB.

I put a new borescope in the budget and it got knocked off for other stuff of course. As far as I know, they're still using it because a company that profits billions per year and hundreds of millions on this project couldn't afford a new one.

I've never seen that before but that doesn't mean it isn't real. Perhaps it is a market area test thing but it could also be a custom route on the web version of Google Maps where you drag the line over. Just like that user tried to manufacture hate for G Maps a few days ago complaining about a ridiculous route to Burger King in another country but it was actually the Magic Earth Navigation & Maps application.

I've been looking into something like OsmAnd and OsmAnd+ (uses OpenStreets and Maps) because I want better feature sets, specifically features that are locked behind G Map's having to set a destination. OsmAnd also has some pretty cool plugins like Parking Position, Mapillary (for Google Streets-like views) to bring it to closer parity with G Maps but also Weather to show weather forecasts along your route on-screen and External Sensors so you could put your Bicycle Fitness stuff (Ant+, etc) on-screen and record it on the recorded route.

I previously looked at TomTom AmiGo as a sort of trial for TomTom Go but I didn't like the routing sometimes and with TomTom Go you need to pay a subscription for stuff that shouldn't require one.

For example, features such as showing traffic congestion around you, accidents up ahead and showing the speed limit of the current road you are on only shows up when you put in a destination. This feature has been asked about for years on Google's forums yet it still hasn't happened. I believe Waze does this but I don't like constant ads.

I'm definitely OK with paying for apps that are useful and prefer it.

When people say “I own the game” these days they are generally saying there is no DRM or other factor preventing their passing it around for whatever reason

That's why I said:

If it's actual ownership instead of availability

The context is that the person I was responding to said they use GOG because they 'own' the game, in response to someone else saying that there are games on Steam with zero DRM that you can also buy.

Frankly, with the 'availability' argument you also don't need Steam to play them and could copy them over to a PC that's never had Steam installed and play them as well.