Grok fucking nailed it. And everything stated is verifiable with almost no effort.

What?! You need the MAC to identify a router and MACs don’t go over the internet.

it would have been possible to track your ip and what it was accessing online

I’ll let you go ahead and explain that one.

Having lived Hurricane Ivan, shit like this shakes me to the core. That’s death you’re watching.

It was the locals who refused spending on alarm systems, in a blue county. In general, your point still stands.

You’ve never personally seen that sort of death and destruction. I can tell.

Been a functioning alcoholic my whole adult life. Got my first bad test for liver enzymes. Looked the numbers up, holy shit that’s fucking off the scale! Quit kratom powder for 2 weeks, keep drinking as normal, perfect retest.

Doc: “I’m so proud of you!” Uh…?

Another anecdote: Good friend crashed her liver with Tylenol. This was before it was widely known to fucking kill you. Hardcore alcoholic. 90-proof generic vodka, hiding bottles kinda alki. She got a transplant after being in a coma for 2-months, poster child for success! Doctors wanted her to speak at medical events as to how she no longer needed anti-rejection drugs after only 18-months. Imagine that!

Surgeon to family: “Believe it or not, her alcoholism had nothing to do with her liver failure.”

All that to say, yeah, other factors we didn’t evolve for can kill your liver. We been drinking for 10,000 years, the weak livers are largely weeded out.

Let’s hear from Kurt Vonnegut!

“Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.” I feel personally attacked. :(

Anyway, Julie got run over by a random dude while crossing the corner with her husband, my best friend. So it goes.

Donald Trump: ‘What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening’

It’s hard to overstate what these guys see. If you’ve ever experienced this magnitude of disaster, you know damned well that all the pictures and video in the world doesn’t do justice to the actual destruction and suffering on the ground.

Ex-FIL was in the Mississippi Guard. Earned 2 Bronze Stars on two (three?) tours of Iraq. Humanitarian aid, not combat, a detail relevant to the story below. He was just fine.

Came home and fought his way through Katrina on the tip of the spear. Those men chainsawed houses in half and pushed them off the road to get in. After all that he suffered PTSD, hooked up with another Guard member, left his wife of 32-years and stopped talking to his only child. He was not fine.

New Orleans got the news coverage, but the Mississippi Gulf Coast was fucking wrecked. We went to see the man in Gulfport, then headed north. The last of the damage we saw was past Hattiesburg, 80 miles of destruction. And that was going straight away, the blast radius closer to the Gulf was wide.

Some of these people are digging for corpses, some are little corpses, with their hands. Many, most?, of these people are facing serious PTSD in the near future.

Anyway, after living Ivan, I cried my eyes out over Katrina. I still tear up when I think about it, still cry thinking about what I saw the next morning. Cried when the Florida Guard rolled in to save our asses, thought I was on my own.

Taking the kids swimming in the creek now. I’m out.

^ Channeling Slaughter House 5

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

Life sciences are where this sort of thing will shine.

The GOP hasn’t used those words in years, yet their voters still perceive them that way.

Watching Mamdani interview Trump voters really woke me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7FcVCYqQNs

People can’t see past the tip on their nose and vote on what’s in their wallet today. I’ve had people tell me they voted for President by comparing their tax returns.

The BBB is so much worse than we’re talking about. A lot of American’s will get a few hundred, maybe $2,000, more back and say, “That Trump fella’s the man for me!”

So, to my fellow Americans in NYC, how are those gun laws working out? That’s a smartass question, but more seriously, what will you do when the Gestapo comes rolling down Flatbush Avenue?

I’ll never find it again, but a few years ago jihadis went rampaging down the streets in Iran, randomly shooting into apartment blocks. All I could think was, “At least that can’t happen here.”

American, white, liberal, redneck gun nut here. If you’re talking about “defund the police”, that’s yet another idiot liberal slogan that misses the mark. The idea is to take police funds and pay for workers who can handle situations police should never have been sent to. Want to kill yourself? Call the cops!

The far right loves cops because cops are on their side, or are perceived to be. To put it bluntly, guns are for shooting marauding black people, not white people. See all the stories about white people being shocked when law enforcement doesn’t go their way? Yeah.

Also, I suspect people who are anti-gun have never had violence inflicted upon them, or cops who are far away, or haven’t had a bear wander in the dog door, or haven’t had an enraged redneck struggling to be polite because they’re visibly armed. In related news, my MAGA neighbor came stomping down here to kick my ass, turned right the fuck around when I went inside for my .45.

I could write all night on the subject, but let me leave it at this: Now is not the fucking time for Americans to disarm themselves. The only reason fascists haven’t run us completely over is that they know there will be a real chance we’ll fucking kill them. Look where the ICE raids are happening, in the places where guns are the most suppressed.

Yes, this all sucks, but it’s where we’re at in America.

https://old.lemmy.world/c/chadmctruthstruth

I see it this way: If there are enough dumbasses willing to pay, go for it. I choose not to participate. OTOH, idiots paying subscriptions can hurt us all through enshittification.

On Nextdoor.com I brought it up that Trump’s admin was trashing NOAA and the NWS, which we literally live and die by in Florida. One woman was quite proud to pay $15 for her Accuweather app. “And where do you think they get their data?”

I dunno, Malaysia has been kicking the shit out of the US on trade for decades now. End the madness!

OK, I was being a smartass, but it appears we trade more with Malaysia than I expected. In any case, this dumbass still doesn’t understand “trade deficit”.

Has anything changed? The IRS never went after political churches in the history of ever.

In the US our colleges and universities typically have what they call extension offices that can tell you all about the local environment. Anything like that where you’re at?

From Gemini, but it’s factual:

A local extension office, often called a Cooperative Extension office, is a branch of a land-grant university that provides research-based information and educational programs to the local community. These offices are staffed by experts who offer guidance on various topics, including agriculture, gardening, food safety, natural resources, and 4-H youth development. They act as a bridge between academic research and practical application, helping individuals and communities solve problems and improve their lives.

Lots of great advice here! I’ve learned the most just by getting out in the woods and swamps and looking. Still so much I’m ignorant of! A great project for you, that I’ve been slacking on, is putting events into a calendar or tracking app. “May 15th, dragonflies are back.” “June 1st, banana spiders back.” Stuff like that.

Looked into beekeeping on and off and varroa mites are a top consideration in any source I’ve read.