memfree @ memfree @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I worry that whatever you choose, your son will be dissatisfied. Maybe your kid is different, but most the kids I've known wanted a pet they could bond with. They've wanted a pet that was interested in what the kid does, that silently listened to the kid expressing their issues, and that offered things to do, like: "feed me", "pet me", or "play!"

Rabbits might work, but they might be too interested in one another. Even if they weren't forbidden, you'd run into the same issue with social birds like cockatiels. The only pets I can think of that give kids the attention a kid craves are the animals that have lived with humans for hundred if not thousands of years. Basically: dogs and cats. After that you get into cows, pigs, chickens, goats, and the like. Goats are wicked smart, but the males stink to high heaven unless neutered young. If you raise geese from goslings, they will love you forever and ask for cuddles whenever they see you -- but they have to stay outside and do make a mess. Someone else might correct me, but I doubt you want a pig -- partially just because they end up getting so big (I'm told there's no such thing as a teacup pig).

If the only issue with dogs is allergies, you could consider a low-allergenic breed. Dogs are simply the ideal pet for people with the time and space for them. They've lived with humans nearly forever and do all the stuff a young boy wants from a pet. Cats require less attention and can be caring and affectionate if they want to, but that depends on the particular cat. I've had turtles, ferrets, parrots, fish, and lots of other animals as pets and only the parrots and ferrets held a candle to dogs and cats. Fish-wise, I found the most exciting to be South American Cichlids -- but mostly because I had a Green Terror who fell in love with a Blue Acara overnight such that the two of them tried to kill everything in the tank in the span of 10 hours. I got them their own tank where they raised many babies.

Could you fix a mistake I made? Near the bottom I inadvertently typed ‘Munich’ instead of the correct ‘Berlin’ games for when the Nazi salute was allowed. Source is Wikipedia and you can see there it clearly say 'Berlin'. I was just reading too many Olympic details and didn't even notice I typed the wrong city/game.

Thank you both. You are both very considerate. I stumbled on one detail and then went down a rabbit hole of different aspects about that Olympic moment and wanted to share. I'm glad to see people are as interested as I was.

Thank you for cross posting :-)

I looked for the WaPo URL and somehow didn't see this post. I even made my own because I thought this story was important -- but I deleted it once I saw it was here.

The New Republic also covered it. In summary:

The Egyptian government may have given $10 million to Donald Trump in 2017, violating U.S. law—but the investigation into the payment was squashed by Attorney General William Barr.

Here's the bits from WaPo that stood out to me:

Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.

Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier...

Barr directed Jessie Liu, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in D.C., to personally examine the classified intelligence to evaluate if further investigation was warranted. Barr later instructed FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to impose “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr described as “hell-bent” on pursuing Trump’s records, according to people familiar with the exchange. It is unclear what if any actions Wray, who was also appointed by Trump, took in response.

The Post investigation reveals that investigators identified a cash withdrawal in Cairo of $9,998,000 — nearly identical to the amount described in the intelligence, as well as to the amount Trump had given his campaign weeks earlier. A key theory investigators pursued, based on intelligence and on international money transfers, was that Trump was willing to provide the funds to his campaign in October 2016 because he expected to be repaid by Sisi, according to people familiar with the probe.

Trump’s attorney general did not order the case closed, according to multiple people with knowledge of the events, but his instructions to Liu and, later, his selections to replace her, helped steer it to that end.

As the Mueller team got going, investigators focused on how at the time candidate Trump met with Sisi in 2016, Trump’s campaign had been running low on funds. They learned through interviews with the candidate’s closest advisers that they had pleaded with Trump to write a check to his campaign for a final blitz of television ads. Trump repeatedly declined — until Oct. 28, roughly five weeks after the meeting with Sisi, when he announced the $10 million infusion.

Sometime after her June meetings with the FBI, Liu met with Barr to discuss the Egypt case. He urged her to personally review the underlying information from the CIA that had prompted the opening of the criminal investigation two years earlier, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The case was sensitive, Barr told her, and she needed to reach her own conclusions about the merits of further investigative steps, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Afterward, and after conferring with Barr again, Liu expressed hesitancy to FBI agents and her deputies about the proposal to subpoena Trump’s bank records, according to people familiar with the case. It felt to some that she had made a 180-degree turn, these people said.

By late 2019, Liu’s office was poised to make sentencing recommendations for high-profile senior Trump advisers it had prosecuted, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone — cases that could tarnish Trump and his campaign. That December, the White House nominated Liu to be an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department.

Barr seized the moment to make a change. Breaking with the tradition of allowing White House nominees to remain in their current posts until confirmed for new ones, he ordered Liu in early January 2020 to step down by the end of the month, people with knowledge of the matter said. The White House later withdrew Liu’s nomination.

Barr replaced Liu with Shea, and then four months later replaced Shea with former Navy intelligence officer Sherwin.

On June 7, he sent an email to the head of the FBI’s Washington field office. The subject line of the email, which was reviewed by The Post, read: “Egypt Investigation.”

“Based upon review of this investigation,” Sherwin began, his office would be “closing the above matter” because neither an indictment nor a conviction was likely.

See also this 2020 piece: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/politics/trump-campaign-donation-investigation/index.html

That's not the point, though, is it? It doesn't matter if Nazis mask faster. What matters is that there are Nazis and other non-state-actors who will happily try to identify and dox people who get in their way. Such doxxers aren't even necessarily at the protests. They might be in, say, Russia and looking to shut up pro-Western activists in neighboring countries.

It may be that no one in Sweden is immuno-comprosmied and that no one in Sweden could get hacked or doxxed when their identity is uncovered, but for the rest of the world, there are plenty of reasons a person might want to wear a mask that don't involve wanting to be riot-ready.

Or the thing about his former cabinet secretary's sexual harassment issue.

From the Daily Beast:

A fellow Democrat [...] tweeted last week that she wanted a vice presidential pick who “doesn’t sweep sexual harassment under the rug.”

In his reply:

The governor's office highlighted his “long track record of protecting survivors and prosecuting predators” when he was attorney general, including exposing "child sexual abuse and cover-ups within the Catholic Church.”

Have you seen people protesting against Nazis in Sweden? That's the sort of situation where you do not need to fear the state, but the violent and retributive people you are protesting.

Well he liked Blade, so I'm guessing his issue isn't with comics in general.

Do you spend those 2 hours watching something with more 'substance' or do you do something else entirely -- like play with your kids or read up on investment trends? For the time you do choose to use for passively consuming entertainment, is it in the medium of: books, tv, podcasts, music streams, or what? Regardless of medium, what sort of content is it (documentary, romance, action, op/ed, true crime, sci/fi, real-tech, instructional)?

studios being run by business vultures wanting short term massive returns only, even if it means no longer making anything else but trend chasing mega films

Two things on that:

• I've heard studios now count on international deals so movies must shy away from anything that would get them banned in the major markets
• the current age of cinema reminds me a bit of the precursor to the great 1970s film revolution where studios weren't making enough money, so they started letting anyone and everyone take a shot at making movies and lo! the public suddenly had a wide variety of all kinds of things to watch

I'm not sure we ever lost that variety, but no longer have the constraint of theater-only viewing that gets people to all see the same set of movies at the same time such that 'different' movies (like One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest or Star Wars as well as Smokey and the Bandit) were all getting attention and conversation at the same time.

Now we have streaming from services and we can wait to watch movies until they become available online, so many films miss the box-office and never get the hype they deserve because only the biggest have publicity junkets promoting them online and on chat-TV. So maybe the critic's actual issue is that -- as a paid critic -- he's forced to watch the publicized flicks designed not-to-offend and doesn't have the time to find all the other movies going under the radar.

I'm also not an expert, but that was my thought, too.

More than that, even if a tail is undamaged, including it is not giving useful imformation because tail size can vary out of proportion to the main body and is pretty standard for other animals as well. For example, no one is measuring a horse to include the tail length, nor a dog, cat, and generally not a bird, either.

That said, I expect an news story about alligators on the golf course or catching invasive snakes to measure the whole body for the NEWS story and let the experts worry about the booper2pooper length in their own space.

Nah, he's read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and/or subscribes to Suber's ideas in The Power of Film and is doing a mental checklist of what Marvel lacks.

Marvel hits the main points of a Hero story most of the time -- where we have a Hero who comes from one place, goes 'adventuring' elsewhere and ends up doing a 'thing' that benefits the ordinary folks -- but the frequency of needing a HERO over and over, and the escalation of what's at stake (the whole world, the galaxy, universe, multi-verse, existence itself) means that after you've seen a few Marvel movies, the characters aren't doing things that are new or different from what they did in other movies. Saving 'normies' is their day-job. Yeah, the path is different each time, but we keep seeing the same Heroes and most of them aren't getting transformed by the journey and there are too many cases where the 'sacrifice' they make doesn't have any real choice involved (if you can opt walk away from the drama then staying or doing 'X' is a sacrifice, but it's no sacrifice if leaving means you die anyway).

Suber suggests that a hero often has to GO AWAY at the end of the story. The normies are happy for help, but then they want to get back to raising their kids and the Hero is not good for that. I like that idea. More than that, I think that is the critic's actual complaint. He sees this as another story in the same universe (multiverse) with the same characters and he wants something new rather than something comfortably familiar -- and that's HIS problem because lots of us would like more stories about the Heroes we've come to know and love.

If it matters, my favorite Marvel story is the Loki TV series. It hits many of the expected markers and both the lead-up to- and the actual-ending both really resonated for me.

What really struck me was that he compared Deadpool & Wolverine to Blade?! So... Blade is the movie with "discernable purpose" and/or "artistic ambitions"? I mean, I liked Blade, but if the complaint is that Marvel movies aren't Citizen Kane, then Blade seems a weak comparison. So where does he draw the line?

I knew about the police getting access, but I missed that home insurance companies were checking properties with drones. I guess I don't mind them spending their own money to send their own drones to verify properties they insure, but I agree that using MY camera that I bought to get info or sell MY data is at least unethical and ought to be illegal. It should be required that they get my explicit consent to that sort of thing for each instance of data collection or sale.

Who? The Senators? I think they're genuinely interested in stopping the practice (obviously it also gets them good press, possibly even votes, but they coulda probably got cash if they did nothing).

I think the car companies are just trying to make money anywhere they can.

Doubtful since NAT is a service with multiple RFCs defining various methodologies for mapping. That is: software expects NATing. Software expects IPs, ports, etc. to get redirected. I guess if you wrote your own NAT service that did not conform to RFC standards, it might be considered a modification of the original intent, but I suspect the issue would have to be with changes to packet data rarther than the header.... now try explaining that to a copyright judge -- because I bet some will choose to not understand.

My apologies. I will take this down.

Well yeah, but we know Trump doesn't give a whit about facts. I'm trying to figure out if his tongue went up to the front of his palate to form an 'n' sound.

So in the 2002 suit against bnetd, "Blizzard sued them for analyzing software they'd paid for, while it was running on their own computers." ...

because IP law is (correctly) understood as "the law that lets a company tell you how you can use your own real, physical property." Hard cases make bad law, hard IP cases make batshit law.

Now:

Sony argues that the Datel device – which rewrites the contents of a player's device's RAM, at the direction of that player – infringes copyright. Sony claims that the values that its programs write to your device's RAM chips are copyrighted works that it has created, and that altering that copyrighted work makes an unauthorized derivative work, which infringes its copyright.

and:

How bad can it be? Well, get this: the German publishing giant Axel Springer (owned by a monomaniacal Trumpist and Israel hardliner who has ordered journalists in his US news outlets to go easy on both) is suing Eyeo, makers of Adblock Plus, on the grounds that changing HTML to block an ad creates a "derivative work" of Axel Springer's web-pages

And Cory says all this to convince the public to reject Intellectual Property rights as a form of "rent" which he equates to dangerous feudalism.

I can't argue him. In the cases cited in the piece, his complaints seem valid. On the other hand, I feel like there has to be a case for saying that if you, say, try to fix your iPhone yourself and botch it badly, Apple doesn't have to honor a warranty. The tricky part is whether they would have any grounds to terminate your service or stop running some software because .... oh, maybe some security feature can no longer be verified or something. The only case for that which pops to mind is if you hacked it to copy/relay the identity of other phones such that you were stealing from other people -- which is already a crime, but you'd want a way to stop it immediately rather than rely on the hope someone catches the perpetrator.