LanyrdSkynrd

joined 2 years ago
[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 5 points 13 hours ago

I googled this because I was curious, and it doesn't look like they have a blanket ban on people with autism. It seems they only exclude people who need expensive care.

(Not defending this policy, ofc. Just trying to get the facts right)

https://www.immigration.govt.nz/opsmanual/#46506.htm

Severe developmental disorders or severe cognitive impairments where significant support is required, including but not exclusive to:
... autistic spectrum disorders

I would of course check with an immigration lawyer before committing to a plan to move, though.

[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago

CW:Meat spoilerMy family had a fridge in the basement where we stored extra food. It failed when we were on vacation. It had a bunch of trout my dad had caught, stored in plastic grocery bags. It smelled as bad as you could imagine, and my dad made us clean it because he wanted to try to have it repaired.

The freezer was warm, the defrost cycle still happened even though it wasn't cooling., They were partly liquefied, falling apart. Really nasty.

[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 22 points 3 days ago

That sub has useful information, but it has so many gearheads buying $500 routers and building $5k server racks that sound like jet engines for backing up their photos and watching a few hours of TV every day.

[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 32 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Proposing new legislation happens all the time from both parties, thousands of bills per Congress. Most a doomed to die from the start. This link has a bunch of bills proposed the week of 1/9/23:

https://legiscan.com/US/legislation/2023?page=385

I don't think we can say Republicans are getting shit done until they pass some of these. The media is just covering this stuff now because the Trump admin doing scary stuff is good at selling papers.

I'm not saying they won't succeed, it's just too early to say.

[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 38 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It is basically an arm of the Democrat party, though.

If you're running a supposedly socialist party, probably not a great idea to freely give donor information to your enemies.

Plus they charge almost 33% more than a regular payment processor. The only advantage I see is that actBlue helps you send out donation emails.

[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 19 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Here's a crazy story, man couldn't get anyone to believe his identity was stolen. Ends up being imprisoned, locked in mental ward and ordered to use a name that's not his.

From DOJ press release:

spoiler

An Iowa hospital administrator who lived under a false identity for more than 30 years and caused the false imprisonment, involuntary hospitalization, and forced medication of his victim was sentenced today to 12 years in federal prison.

Matthew David Keirans, age 59, from Hartland, Wisconsin, received the prison term after an April 1, 2024, guilty plea to one count of false statement to a national credit union administration insured institution and one count of aggravated identity theft.

Evidence presented at hearings in the case established that Keirans and his identity theft victim worked together at a hotdog cart in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the late 1980s. Keirans assumed the victim’s identity and, for the next three decades, used that identity in every aspect of his life. Keirans obtained several false documents in the victim’s name, including a Kentucky birth certificate.

In 2013, Keirans obtained employment as a high-level administrator in an Iowa City hospital. Keirans provided the hospital with false identification documents during the hiring process, including a fictitious I-9 form, social security number, date of birth, and other identification documents in his victim’s name. After getting hired, Keirans worked for the hospital remotely from his residence in Wisconsin. Keirans’ access to, and roles in, the system architecture of the hospital’s computer infrastructure were “the highest it could be,” and Keirans “was the key administrator of critical systems.”

Between March 2014 and May 2022, Keirans repeatedly obtained vehicle and personal loans from two credit unions in the Northern District of Iowa using the victim’s name, social security number, and date of birth. Keirans obtained nine loans with a total value of over $250,000 from the credit unions. Keirans also obtained various lines of credit from other lenders in the victim’s name and with his personal identifiers.

Keirans also maintained deposits at a national bank in the victim’s name. In August 2019, the victim, who was homeless at the time, entered the branch of the national bank in Los Angeles, California, and told a branch manager that he had recently discovered that someone was using his credit and had accumulated large amounts of debt. The victim stated that he did not want to pay the debt and wished to close his accounts at the bank. The victim presented the bank with his true social security card, as well as an authentic State of California identification card. Due to the large amount of currency in the accounts, the branch manager asked the victim a series of security questions, which the victim was unable to answer. The national bank then called the Los Angeles Police Department (“LAPD”).

LAPD officers spoke with Keirans on the telephone, who stated he lived in Wisconsin and did not give anyone in California permission to access his bank accounts. After faxing the LAPD a series of phony identification documents, the LAPD arrested Keirans’ victim on two felony charges. After Keirans requested his victim’s prosecution, the victim was charged in Keirans’ name and held without bail at the Los Angeles County Jail.

In the ensuing months, Keirans contacted the LAPD and Los Angeles District Attorney (LADA) numerous times requesting updates on the victim’s prosecution. Meanwhile, Keirans’ victim continued to assert throughout the California criminal proceedings that he was not Keirans. A California state court judge ultimately found Keirans’ victim was not mentally competent to stand trial and ordered Keirans’ victim to a California mental hospital. The California state court also ordered Keirans’ victim to receive psychotropic medication.

In March 2021, Keirans’ victim pled “no contest” to the two felony charges in exchange for a “time-served” sentence, a $400 fine, and immediate release from custody. In total, Keirans’ victim spent 428 days in county jail and 147 days in the mental hospital as a result of Keirans’ false reports to the LAPD and LADA. The state court also ordered Keirans’ victim to “use only their true name, Matthew Keirans” in the future.

After his release from jail and hospital, Keirans’ victim made numerous attempts to regain his identity. For his part, Keirans continued to make false reports and statements to law enforcement officials in Wisconsin and California. The State of California billed the victim over $118,000 for the costs of his “care” in the mental hospital between October 20, 2021, and March 15, 2021.

In January 2023, after learning where Keirans was employed, the victim contacted the Iowa City hospital’s security department about Keirans. The hospital referred Keirans’ complaint to a local law enforcement agency, which assigned an experienced detective, Ian Mallory, to investigate the victim’s complaint. The detective conducted an investigation and, over the course of the ensuing months, unraveled Keirans’ identity theft scheme. Among other things, the detective obtained DNA evidence that conclusively proved that Keirans was not the son of an elderly man in Kentucky, as Keirans had claimed, but that Keirans’ victim was the man’s son.

During an interview with the detective in July 2023, Keirans initially insisted that the victim was “crazy” and “needed help and should be locked up.” After the detective presented Keirans with the results of the DNA testing, however, Keirans confessed to the three-decade identity theft scheme. Keirans also admitted to providing fraudulent documents to authorities in Los Angeles from his residence in Wisconsin to aid in the arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of the victim. A California court ultimately exonerated the victim after Keirans pled guilty in federal court.

Keirans was sentenced in Cedar Rapids by United States District Court Chief Judge C.J. Williams. Keirans was sentenced to 144 months’ imprisonment and fined $10,000. He was ordered to make $6,191 in restitution the victim and ordered to repay $10,000 in court-appointed attorney fees. Keirans must also serve a five-year term of supervised release after the prison term. There is no parole in the federal system.

Williams said Keirans’ crime was “egregious,” “callous,” and “Kafkaesque.” Chief Judge Williams stated Keirans “weaponized the criminal justice system to achieve his goals.” Chief Judge Williams praised the “remarkable and exceptional work” of the Iowa detective.


[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Minestrone soup.

Stock, can of crushed tomatoes, can of diced tomatoes, quartered or halved small potatoes, zucchini, green beans, can or two of kidney beans, the cabbage(probably half unless you're making a huge pot, or it's a small cabbage), and whatever other veggies you like. Garlic, cumin, salt and black pepper, plus a good amount of whatever hot sauce you like.

Cook until the potatoes are soft.

[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

"We were once a family" is a good book about that case. It's not true crime slop, it digs into the systemic issues and racism of the foster care system and how it allows stuff like that to happen.

[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 10 points 1 week ago

Along with the other things mentioned, Tesla hasn't been good with insurance repairs. They have such a backlog with parts and service that insurance companies have been totalling a lot of vehicles that are repairable because they would take too long to repair.

Especially so with the cybertruck because there's no way use bondo and paint, there's only a few specialist Delorean shops that can rework stainless panels. That means only complete panel replacement, which is a complicated procedure on the CT because it mostly uses adhesive rather than fasteners to attach body panels. It's like a supercar, they don't design them to be repaired, because they don't want them to be repaired.

 

Lol

[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

$6.75 per dozen here today

[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 4 points 2 weeks ago

I run a lot and was stupidly adamant against stretching because I injured myself doing it before a run like 10 years ago.

Last year I started getting pain from tight muscles at the end of my range of motion. I started stretching at the end of my runs, while my muscles are still warmed up, and it's been amazing. No more pain, no injuries, less soreness, and I feel faster.

[–] LanyrdSkynrd@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago

Probably no difference. Military aid funding was already appropriated and apparently still flowing. Plus they have some of the money and weaponry we've previously provided, which should get them through the 90 days. Some reconstruction aid will probably be stopped, but it's not clear.

The order stopping foreign aid was another of Trump's poorly written and poorly considered EO's. The Pentagon has plenty of time to get in Trump's ear about it before it would affect the war.

 

Body camera footage obtained by Kentucky Public Radio shows that as Lt. Caleb Stewart walked closer, the woman yelled, “I might be going into labor, is that okay?”

Her water had broken, she said. “I’m leaking out,” she told him. She grabbed a blanket and a few personal effects as a bright orange city dump truck pulled up to remove the makeshift bed.

The woman had no phone. She said her husband went to call an ambulance, so Stewart called one for her. But as she walked toward the street to wait for help, Stewart yelled at her to stop.

“Am I being detained?” she asked.

“Yes, you’re being detained,” he shouted. “You’re being detained because you’re unlawfully camping.”

Stewart was enforcing a new state law that bans street camping — essentially, a person may not sleep, intend to sleep, or set up camp on undesignated public property like sidewalks or underneath overpasses. He has issued the majority of the citations for unlawful camping in Louisville.

“So I don’t for a second believe that this woman is going into labor,” he said.

He returned to find the woman sitting on the ground, with legs askew and labored breathing, waiting for the ambulance. Stewart hands her a citation, and she balls it up and tosses it aside as the ambulance arrives to take her to the hospital.

“You’re all horrible people,” she said, as she got to her feet. “I’m glad y’all got this job to f*** with the homeless and not help society.”

Later that day she gave birth to her child, according to her attorney, Public Defender Ryan Dischinger. He said both the woman and her son are healthy three months later, and the family is now in shelter without assistance from LMPD or the court system.

“The reality for her, and for anyone who’s homeless in Kentucky, is that they’re constantly and unavoidably breaking this law,” Dischinger said. “What she needed was help and compassion and instead she was met with violence.”

Now, she’s waiting for a late January trial date on her citation, which could carry a fine and requires the people charged with street camping, who are mostly homeless individuals, to appear before a judge.

 

I was running on an unused logging road and came up behind a wild cat. It didn't see me coming, so I got pretty close, maybe 20 feet away. It turned and stared at me for a second and then took off up a steep hill.

It was about 2.5 feet to the top of it's head, a little smaller than a Labrador. It wasn't a bobcat or lynx, because it had a long tail, but I don't think it was long enough to be a mountain lions tail(I don't remember seeing it curled). It had a brown coat and the tail had a stripey bit at the tip. 100% a cat from the body shape and movement.

But after looking it up, it seems like mountain lions basically don't exist in new england, or at least are extremely rare. Its limbs were not as thick as the mountain lion images I'm finding online.

I thought maybe it was one of those megasized housecats, but this trail is separated from town by a deep and wide river, any housecat would have had to walk 3 miles and across 2 bridges(one of which is a metal mesh footbridge) or 7 miles along the logging road to get to the nearest house. It's also below freezing out and there's 5+ inches of snow on the ground.

It's making me feel like I hallucinated this or something, because it doesn't seem possible. Hopefully I'll see it again now that I've looked at a ton of wild cat pictures. I was trying to remember as much detail as possible when I saw it, but I didn't know what to look for.

 
 

Pictured: Google trends showing a lot of people just today discovering Joe Biden isn't on the ballot

 

Another great Ed Zitron essay about the tech industry. Some quotes:

The "growth mindset" is Microsoft's cult — a vaguely-defined, scientifically-questionable, abusively-wielded workplace culture monstrosity, peddled by a Chief Executive obsessed with framing himself as a messianic figure with divine knowledge of how businesses should work. Nadella even launched his own Bible — Hit Refresh — in 2017, which he claims has "recommendations presented as algorithms from a principled, deliberative leader searching for improvement."

There are many, many reasons this is problematic, but the biggest is that the growth mindset is directly used to judge your performance at Microsoft. Twice a year, Microsoft employees have a "Connect" with managers where they must answer a number of different questions about their current and future work at Microsoft, with sections titled things like "share how you applied a growth mindset," with prompts to "consider when you could have done something different," and how you might have applied what you learned to make a greater impact. Once filled-out, your manager responds with comments, and then the document is finalized and published internally, though it's unclear who is able to see them.

One employee related to me that managers occasionally add that they "did not display a growth mindset" after meetings, with little explanation as to what that meant or why it was said. Another said that "[the growth mindset] can be an excuse for anything, like people would complain about obvious engineering issues, that the code is shit and needs reworking, or that our tooling was terrible to work with, and the response would be to ‘apply Growth Mindset’ and continue churning out features."

In essence, the growth mindset means whatever it has to mean at any given time, as evidenced by internal training materials that that suggest that individual contributions are subordinate to "your contributions to the success of others," the kind of abusive management technique that exists to suppress worker wages and, for the most part, deprive them of credit or compensation.

One post from Blind, an anonymous social network where you're required to have a company email to post, noted in 2016 that "[the Growth Mindset] is a way for leadership to frame up shitty things that everybody hates in a way that encourages us to be happy and just shut the fuck up," with another adding it was "KoolAid of the month."

There are many, many reasons this is problematic, but the biggest is that the growth mindset is directly used to judge your performance at Microsoft. Twice a year, Microsoft employees have a "Connect" with managers where they must answer a number of different questions about their current and future work at Microsoft, with sections titled things like "share how you applied a growth mindset," with prompts to "consider when you could have done something different," and how you might have applied what you learned to make a greater impact. Once filled-out, your manager responds with comments, and then the document is finalized and published internally, though it's unclear who is able to see them.

The problem, it seems, is that Microsoft doesn't really care about the Growth Mindset at all, and is more concerned with stripping employees of their dignity and personality in favor of boosting their managers' goals. Some of Microsoft's "Connect" questions veer dangerously close to "attack therapy," where you are prompted to "share how you demonstrated a growth mindset by taking personal accountability for setbacks, asking for feedback, and applying learnings to have a greater impact."

This all feels so distinctly cult-y. Think about it. You have a High Prophet (Satya Nadella) with a holy book (Hit Refresh). You have an original sin (a fixed mindset) and a path to redemption (embracing the growth mindset). You have confessions. You have a statement of faith (or close enough) for new members to the church. You have a priestly class (managers) with the power to expel the insufficiently-devout (those with a sinful fixed mindset). Members of the cult are urged to apply its teachings to all facets of their working life, and to proselytize to outsiders.

As with any scripture, its textural meanings are open to interpretation, and can be read in ways that advantage or disadvantage a person.

And, like any cult, it encourages the person to internalize their failures and externalize their successes. If your team didn’t hit a deadline, it isn’t because you’re over-worked and under-resourced. You did something wrong. Maybe you didn’t collaborate enough. Perhaps your communication wasn’t up to scratch. Even if those things are true, or if it was some other external factor that you have no control over, you can’t make that argument because that would demonstrate a fixed mindset. And that would make you a sinner.

Yet there's another dirty little secret behind Microsoft's Connects.

Microsoft is actively training its employees to generate their responses to Connects using Copilot, its generative AI. When I say "actively training," I mean that there is an entire document — "Copilot for Microsoft 365 Performance and Development Guidance" — that explains, in detail, how an employee (or manager) can use Copilot to generate the responses for their Connects. While there are guidelines about how managers can't use Copilot to "infer impact" or "make an impact determination" for direct reports, they are allowed to "reference the role library and understand the expectations for a direct report based on their role profile."

To be extremely blunt: Microsoft is asking its employees to draft their performance reviews based on the outputs of generative AI models — the same ones underpinning ChatGPT — that are prone to hallucination.

Microsoft's culture isn't simply repugnant, it's actively dystopian and deeply abusive. Workers are evaluated based on their adherence to pseudo-science, their "achievements" — which may be written by generative AI — potentially evaluated by managers using generative AI. While they ostensibly do a "job" that they're "evaluated for" at Microsoft, their world is ultimately beholden to a series of essays about how well they are able to express their working lives through the lens of pseudoscience, and said expressions can be both generated by and read by machines.

I find this whole situation utterly disgusting. The Growth Mindset is a poorly-defined and unscientific concept that Microsoft has adopted as gospel, sold through Satya Nadella's book and reams of internal training material, and it's a disgraceful thing to build an entire company upon, let alone one as important as Microsoft.

 

...when landlords are absolutely perishable. mao-shining

 

It's a long article, so I put the most relevant excerpts below, but the whole article is interesting and infuriating. There is a lot more details about the case and lack of evidence.

Richardson and Claiborne's plight is as unique as it is complex. Since they were accused in April 1998 of shooting and killing Officer Allen Gibson, they've faced charges in both the state and federal court systems, and seen their cases go up and down on appeal while seeming to skirt some of the judicial system's most basic rules regarding double jeopardy and the disclosure of exculpatory evidence.

Despite state prosecutors initially charging them with capital murder, the charges were drastically reduced thanks to what court records say was a lack of physical evidence. The two men ultimately pled guilty in 1999 to manslaughter and accessory after the fact, and served little to no time in prison.

Federal prosecutors, however, went on to try them again for the same killing under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in 2001. In the federal trial, jurors found Richardson and Claiborne not guilty of the murder, but did convict them on drug possession and distribution charges.

Even though they were cleared of the murder, the federal judge overseeing the case sentenced both men to life in prison under U.S. Supreme Court precedent that allows judges to consider conduct for which a defendant has been acquitted to impose a longer sentence. And in making the call to put both men behind bars for life, the judge pointed to their guilty pleas in state court.

"The court is just leaning on the guilty plea instead of trying to find out what happened that day," Adams said. "And the reason, I believe, is they are not looking to find out what happened, because they already know. And what they know is that it ain't Terence and Ferrone."

The Guilty Plea

Nearly a year after the killing, prosecutors reduced the charges against the two defendants from capital murder to involuntary manslaughter in exchange for their guilty pleas. According to the report that attorney general Herring prepared years later in response to Richardson's innocence petition, a state prosecutor had admitted to the press that the case was weak and that "the risks in going to trial with a jury were just astronomical."

"My family ran out of money," Claiborne said. "They were talking about giving us the death penalty. When our attorney came to us and said that this was the best deal, what else was I supposed to do in order to stay alive?"

Richardson said his lawyer told him that, "even though they know that it may not have been y'all that did it, they're going to make somebody wear this case. And it's going to be y'all. You're going to get the death penalty."

"I said, 'Man that's crazy. You're trying to tell me I got to go to prison for something I didn't do?" Richardson said.

The Federal Case

Richardson and Claiborne took the plea deal in December 1999, with Richardson admitting to involuntary manslaughter and Claiborne agreeing he had served as an accessory after the fact.

Richardson was sentenced to 10 years with five suspended based on good behavior, while Claiborne was sentenced to time served.

Adams said there was public outrage at the outcome.

"If you're in D.C. and you're reading that, out of Waverly, Virginia, a cop was killed by two Black guys and they plead guilty, but [one is] given time served, you're going to be like, 'What the hell man?'" Adams said. "You've never seen such concessions made for Black men accused of killing a white guy. It just doesn't happen."

So in December 2000, amid pressure from Gibson's family and others, federal prosecutors indicted Richardson and Claiborne under the RICO Act for one count of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, one count of use of a firearm to commit murder during drug trafficking, and one count of murder of a law enforcement officer during drug trafficking.

"These drug charges came out of nowhere. It was a loophole," Adams said. "They couldn't just say, 'We're trying to get to the murder of this officer.' There would have been some sovereignty issues with that. But this way they could do it and say, 'I'm charging you with a RICO case where your drug dealing resulted in the death of an officer.'"

As with the state case, the federal case included no physical evidence in support of the charges.

 

I found someone had uploaded them all to YT, so I ripped them and uploaded a zip file with mp3s. If you have trouble with the link, let me know and I can upload them somewhere else.

Obviously, support them if you can afford it.

 
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