They want them because they’re being lazy/cheap. No, seriously. They’re called widowmaker cords for a reason, but inevitably some muppet with two plugs and some wire will come up with the brilliant idea that one of these will work for.

One really sneaky and dangerous place these get made are generator backfeed cheater cables for houses. You see them in RVs, Xmas lights etc too, but generator backfeeds are super dangerous because they’re also juggling two poyential power sources. A backfeed is where a house/building is disconnected from the grid just by flipping off the main panel breaker, then it’s “backfed” by a generator going into another breaker in the panel. Usually, without any type of safety interlock to keep the mains voltage off when the generator is on, or vice versa.

Afaik, this is illegal per housing code almost everywhere that I’ve seen, but still every now and then some yahoo thinks “wait, if I make a two-ended cable and put a receptacle on the house, I can remove the generator easily without any of the expensive safety crap!” And then grabs a live male plug when they fuck up and didn’t shut off the generator or mains voltage…

Electrified double-sided dildo sex, no less!

Fun trivia: that’s a domino’s advertisement printed on their pizza box, in which the box claims to “dream of being another box,” and its actually horrible for the recycling stream. Essentially every legitimate recycler explicitly states that grease- and cheese-contaminated cardboard is not allowed to be recycled because it degrades the quality of the recycled product and causes messes at recycling facilities.

So basically, this dream is a manufactured corporate lie and belongs exactly where we see it.

(Well alright fine, if you need good news, the good news is that in some areas while they still don’t belong in recycling bins, pizza boxes can go in your green bin compost. Although this is heavily dependent on where you live and what type of compost stream is used there. Don’t assume it’s ok to recycle or compost without checking, and never trust the packaging labels!)

For those unaware: -196°C (-320°F) is the approximate boiling point of liquid nitrogen. Call it creative marketing I guess!

And yes I used to do lots of charpy impact testing hence that knowledge is engraved in my brain forever. DBTT gaaang

Hmmm, for some reason the first thing I thought of was “www.customgiantdildos would sound better than www.giantcustomdildos because of how the words flow.”

Yet another victory for manged ⁠☆queeromacy☆

Ah shit, that reminds me I need to go get killed by the airstrikes of internet randos in helldivers again. 10/10 game

“Too broke to play PC” is a vanishing argument IMO. People have been saying that forever, to be fair, but given how bad Xbox and Playstation have gotten I don’t anyone who’s actually into gaming purchasing a new one today. Maybe used, that might make sense if it was really cheap.

A budget gaming PC can check out at slightly over 600 now. PcPartPicker has two recommended builds priced right at 600, though honestly there might be even cheaper ways to arrive at that level of perfromance. Compared to 300-400 for the less garbage Xbox, and there’s not much argument to lock someone into the xbox’s ecosystem vs something you can upgrade for much less.

Now I think it’s a different matter if it’s a hand-me-down or given for free. There’s no reason not to do that.

I gave my last console away and got a friend of mine into gaming, then helped them build a decent PC when they actually wanted something new.

The US Navy hates this one simple trick!

Tipfenestrating.

NYT crossword for me (just because it’s there next to wordle, not specifically because I love nyt or anything)

Also has the cool added side effect of raising my blood pressure and make me feel progressively more stupid as the week goes on. I don’t even try the Friday ones anymore.

Democrats touting a road widening project… why celebrate a carbrained regressive idea. No it’s not murdering people in Gaza or Ukraine but seriously folks, not the right move. May be democrats in name but not progressive in practice. That’s increasingly why I’m frustrated with dems and the two-party shit system.

Silly investors, must learn from my secret method to obtain true inner haopiness:

1. Buy house during shortage when prices are insane
2. Everything breaks and you struggle through replacing it all one by one
3. Prices go down more than offsetting your efforts with loss
4. ???
5. Profit. Emotionally. Because you’re happy with the heap of wood sticks plywood and fancy paper over your head that keeps you dry and comfy and weren’t planning to sell it anyway.

I won’t give the mouthpeices much credit. But be careful in underestimating them. Self-delusion is deep and complex, and that’s frightening enoguh. Even more frightening though, is that if you go searching deep enough in conservative donors networks, conservativeism always winds it’s way back to members of the 1% seeking unchecked power.

Conservative and religious institutional donors do think ahead, and they are a special breed of cruel, ruthless, and smart. Yes, most of the conservative bloc is dickwaving while they push the “give money now” button of reaction hate politics. It’s pretty obvious that on the surface there’s nothing particularly thoughtful going on there.

But the underlying strategy is as fascinating as frightening. There is a LOT of effort that goes in behind the scenes to figure out how to manipulate literally every aspect of people in society. These big donors typically have highly lucratice connections, often very direct ones, to big corps. Some of the most insidious manipulation that goes on in our society today is the result of capitalist businesses finding ways to perpetually squeeze us harder for a dollar. It’s no coincidence when we see the same tactics being used in politics.

So yeah. I don’t entirely disagree with you but progressives consistently get our asses handed to us when we underestimate anything.

Oh sure, he’s an absolutist: Free speech for him and people he likes? Absolutely. Free speech for people he doesn’t like? Absolutely not.

Yes, exactly. The short term solution requires that people recognize the greater evil in the room and defend what little progress we’ve made. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Our first part the post voting system is horrible, but until we can build up enough progressive movement to update it to a better system, priority 1 is exactly what you said.

Choosing not to vote for Democrats because they’re not perfect is choosing to step back and give republicans a free ticket to burn all of our progress to the ground. It’s naïve to think otherwise.

And honestly, that naïveté is holding us back from actually addressing issues like us aid to israel. Enoguh splintering among progressives will by default give control back to republican leaders who would happily sit back and watch palestinians die while lying about it and blaming it on anything anyone else other than themselves.

GOP: Gaslight, Obstruct, Project

There are two groups of people who support capitalism as it exists today:

1. The truly rich, the 1%, who exclusively got that way by exploiting the 99% as much as physically possible, and

2. The portion of the 99% who’ve been brainwashed through various methods into thinking that they can become rich -or- that the rich will “watch out for them” or some equivalent fairytale