Smitty, of course

The specific effort here has to deal with his 2 week long fact-free diversion driven by his utterly unhinged hatred for the NIH. Start back here where I pointed out that our broken health care system needs to be completely scuttled to arrive at something that could ever improve outcomes. Then out of nowhere he declares the NIH to be an "epic disaster" , in spite of the fact that they do not have any meaningful role in the patient-provider aspect of health care. Strangely enough he mentions it right after backtracking away from his anti-factual bit about Sweden (perhaps in some alternate reality) abandoning Nordic Socialism.

Shortly after in a different thread we saw his NIH hatred come up again . He came up with a few random musings on the matter, including

Not a single one of which he gave any factual support for. Along the way he kept insisting that I was somehow calling them "perfect", in spite of multiple comments where I very plainly said the opposite of that. He did get in his last posts on the matters, so clearly he won on that dimension.

Apparently, the readers and writers for outside magazine don't read enough of the writings from Smitty's friends to realize that they erroneously chose a hopeless warzone hell-hole wasteland as one of the "top 15 happiest places to live in the US.

Certainly, Outside Magazine - and the people who wrote for it - must have accidentally visited some other place that they didn't see the "real" Minneapolis where people need to run for their lives and the murder rate exceeds 5,000,000%.

People are claiming that Trump's bit where he says that a Joe Biden re-election would cause WWII is some sort of gaffe. Excluding the standard GOP rant that exempts the infinitely infallible Saint Donald from ever making gaffes, there is a better explanation for what he was saying.

Really, this lines up with the standard GOP conspiracy of the Democratic Time Machine. After all if President Lawnchair had access to a time machine that could have prevented Benghazi, then certainly Biden would know about it as well, wouldn't he?

Too bad for Trump he didn't use that time machine to prevent the January 6th uprising. He'd be in a whole lot less trouble if he had.

I ran into a situation recently when trying to get a prescription filled for one of my sons recently (he's under 18). We have two main drug store chains here where we live, we'll call them "A" and "B". There are other options but these are the main players.

For no particular reason I've always had my own prescriptions filled at "A". A while ago my wife and I were talking about trying "B" in the future but we never progressed beyond talking about it.

Then we ran into supply issues getting our son's prescription filled at "A". Our son's doctor suggested we try "B" so we did; I asked a pharmacist at "B" if they had his prescription available and they said yes, so it seemed like a good thing to do.

Except I then went there after the prescription had been called in - mind you we had to adjust the dosing to match what was available but that wasn't terribly difficult - only to find that our insurance wasn't accepted there. All other things being equal the prescription would be $15 at "A" or around $50 at "B" (in other words full retail price at "B").

So then I was directed to a different pharmacy, that exists in some other local retailers. I went there and was told they couldn't fill that prescription for new patients currently; hence two different pharmacies that I could use could not fill the prescription while one I could not use could.

I'm sure this make sense to someone. All I see is another way that we are lining the pockets of the wealthy shitheads that run the most morally bankrupt industry the world has ever known.

I'm certain of this now. Not because someone would have assassinated Hitler, or Stalin, or any other political figure. Not because someone would have prevent 9/11. Not because someone would have stopped the assassination of JFK, MLK, or Archduke Ferdinand.

No. We have a plague that certainly someone would have prevented if they had the ability. I would have done so if I could have.

I'm talking about Windows 10.

I don't get a choice on my work operating system, I have to use software that runs in Windows 10, and it needs drivers that only run in Windows 10. There's no other choice.

But what really blows my mind is how astonishingly unstable it is. Even Windows 3.0 was more stable. Old versions of MacOS were more stable as well.

That is only the start though. Stability is something you can accept. What really goes beyond that is how incredibly unpredictable it is. I'm not sure that it's possible to make a piece of software of any kind that is that unpredictable without setting out with that as a design goal. If you don't know what I'm talking about, try to bring up the command prompt in the fewest possible number of actions. It should be by pressing the Windows key, then typing "cmd" and enter. Yet how often does that work? Maybe 20% of the time. Another 15% of the time Windows will try to be "helpful" and suggest something else similarly named. The rest of the time you'll press the Windows key, and you'll get a black menu with no options, that only responds to the Escape key (if even that).

How did they manage to screw up such a simple function? They wanted us to launch applications through menus - instead of desktop shortcuts - but the menus don't work. Now I need more desktop shortcuts to get around the broken menus.

I carry smartphones from both of the main mobile ecosystems; an iPhone for work (we use a couple iPhone apps that were written in-house for some of what I do) and an android phone for personal (keep some things separate). One thing I've noticed is that no matter how I try, some parts of the internal dictionaries - particularly the suggestions that it will come up with while writing an email or text - cannot be changed no matter how many times I try.

My first gripe is the suggestion of "u" as a word. Not once in my life have I used that as a word. I don't pay per text on either phone, and I don't know anyone who still does. I use real words in my text messages, to help with clarity. Yet no matter how many times I tell either phone not to offer that, they still do. Of course this is made slightly worse by the fact that the QWERTY layout (now over 150 years old, according to wikipedia") places the letters "i" and "u" next to each other.

My second gripe comes up more often in my field, and probably hits other people less often. At work we have a support group with the acronym "fsg". Once in a while I might refer to them in texts or emails with coworkers. Recently I've noticed - particularly in text though I caught outlook doing it as well - that "fsg" gets autocorrupted to "fag". It particularly surprises me that the dictionary on an iPhone would do that.

As we keep seeing one indictment of the former POTUS after another, I'm left to wonder if anyone would dare to release an indictment against Trump - and potentially Giuliani - on September 11th? Giuliani had so taken ownership of that day as his greatest achievement that it is practically called "Rudy Giuliani Day"; it would seem like it would be quite the shot across the bow to hand him an indictment on that day.

Not that he has a political - or legal - career left to salvage after what he has sacrificed at the altar of Saint Donnie, but an indictment on his favorite day would put a little more emphasis on what he has thrown away.

So apparently in some alternate reality, the coke found in the White House is actually a deep state conspiracy to take down VP Kamala Harris , because ... reasons.

But fret not, as Smitty proudly tells us that his conspiracy is supported by at least one of his fellow cheerleaders .

We're hearing lots of chatter about the screw-up son of the current POTUS - a respectable politician focused on trying to undo the destruction from his immediate predecessor - and his history of drug issues. We've seen that play before.

What happened last time we saw this? The screw-up son bravely quit drinking and using drugs some time in his 50s, then got elected governor of a screw-up state. Then friends of his daddy helped him become POTUS himself.

Then of course he started two unjustified wars that cost us the lives of thousands of US service members and trillions of US dollars.

Let's hope at least the last part doesn't repeat. It would seem all it would need to happen is for Hunter Biden to renounce the democratic party and run for the GOP nomination. After the GOP delivered our country its first non-believer POTUS, it would seem he wouldn't even need a "come to Jesus" moment to pull that off.

Some things didn't quite go as planned with my 2021 taxes. Not sure yet about my 2022 taxes, either. Turbotax apparently didn't realize that the "refundable child tax credit" from 2021 - which was a series of checks issued to taxpayers in 2021 - was actually a zero-interest loan to taxpayers rather than an actual refund.

My point here is this. The "refundable child tax credit" from 2021 meant I owed some $2,700 back to the IRS that I hadn't properly calculated in turbotax. For people in a higher income bracket that might not be a big deal. For people like myself that's more than a full paycheck after taxes, more than half of what I take home in a month. Yet the IRS expects people to be able to cough this up on demand, and assesses interest for those who cannot.

At the same time, people who make enough money to owe 5 figures - or more - of back taxes in a year can negotiate with the IRS to pay far lower totals through settlements. All they offer to us peons is installment programs. Sure, you can bring tax attorneys in to the game if you want but any amount they save you, you will end up paying back to the attorneys for their fees.

In other words those of us who make less, pay more. Just the way it's always been. Biden can harp on how broken trickle-down is - and he's absolutely right that it's broken - but it's so ingrained throughout the system that we all get screwed by it.

Side note, I'm surprised the JE system here doesn't have a topic option of "taxes". We have "Government", we have "The Almighty Buck", and several others but nothing that is specifically "taxes". I would expect the conservative supermajority here would have implemented it by now.

No, I don't mean unicode on slashdot. We know this site will shutter before that ever happens.

I'm talking about printer discovery in Ubuntu. I suspect this is more than an Ubuntu thing, it likely is a CUPS thing in general when attempting to deal with Bonjour.

I recently installed a new Ubuntu release on my laptop after some updates had turned the previous install into a nonworking pile of smoldering rubble. I bought a new SSD and installed on there, so I wouldn't have any remnants of anything to worry about. Things seemed great, until I went to set up my printer.

At this point of course I should reference the great comic strip on printers from The Oatmeal , essentially everything he mentions in there applies to this printer. Really the only good thing I can say about my current printer is that my employer bought it for me; I wish I would have had some say in which model though.

To the point, discovering printers couldn't be easier. Localhost:631, Admin, etc ... Except it then sets up a printer that you can't actually use. Every recent version of Ubuntu sets up the "discovered" printers such that jobs will all error out with "unable to find the printer". Yes I've searched google for this. It seems to be something with nss-mdns, and how that tells your system to go about finding things.

Except when it isn't, of course. I installed the expected libraries, and edited nsswitch.conf. I restarted CUPS, then I restarted my PC. I of course rebooted the printer as well. None of that made a difference at all.

Finally I said to hell with it. I checked the IP address for the printer, and changed the configuration to

And now it works fine. I had to manually pick the driver but that was a small tradeoff. Yes, that is a static address in my network so it should "just work" from there. We'll see how long that printer decides that is OK before it throws a fit and discards its settings.

I saw a message about a recent Journal Entry from him . I've followed and conversed with him before here. I'm responding in my own JE because I'm not allowed to respond to his JE itself - not sure how I earned a spot on his foes list.

His JE - and I'm taking it at face value as a literal depiction of how he feels - describes someone who could really benefit from mental health care. I know the world is dreary in a lot of ways. A lot of us are drowning in stresses and strains in ways that we didn't before. It doesn't help that our country still places a stigma on seeking out help with mental health issues, and our insurance system tends to savagely fuck over many who do.

I don't know who squiggleslash is in real space. I only know what he writes here. I only call him he because he mentions a wife and child. I have made no attempt to seek him out anywhere outside slashdot.

More importantly I wish him well. I don't know how much of his anguish is directly from this site - I presume it's not none of it as he mentions closing down his account here - but I hope it wasn't somehow at my hands. I'm known for griping about what a hopeless cesspool / echochamber this site has become, and yet I am guilty of returning time and again. That doesn't mean my choice is right for others.

Trump is above the law.

I don't like to admit it, but the evidence is overwhelming. Trump cannot be defeated through standard applications of the law. He has been indicted yet again, and the response is another avalanche of campaign donations. Armed zealots from around the country are swearing their allegiance to him, and declaring their readiness to lay down everything to defend him.

Equally significant, the latest indictment came in Florida. The probability of finding 12 jurors there who would convict him - regardless of the mountain of evidence - is truly zero. I expect the lawyers will argue over jurors for more than a year, and then another year will pass just trying to find a venue. The 2024 election will be over before this trial begins. One other thing we can count on is he will never, ever entertain a plea bargain that involves any admission of guilt.

This beast cannot be defeated this way. Anything that brings attention to him only makes him stronger. You cannot kill a weed with sunshine; you must sever it or let it wither on the vine. We know we cannot separate Trump from the Cult of Trump. All we can do is ignore him and hope he passes in due time. Certainly he is well past his life expectancy given his diet, lack of exercise, obesity, and the like.

I don't know if we'll ever see more to this thread from Smitty's JE on what is in his RSS reader , but since slashdot unceremoniously closed out the discussion after my comment asking for smitty to offer some insight in to where his opinions come from as they are unfortunately largely based on false information.

If there's interest, here's a new thread to continue this discussion.

Many conservatives have a hard time passing up on the opportunity to get their war on, regardless of how it goes down. It occurred to me that the rock solid conservative opposition to all forms of gun legislation is likely becoming as much about accelerating the culture war as it is about anything else - even the tidy profits that their owners are funneling back to them in campaign contributions.

Now is this because they want conservatives to take up arms and actually kill off people from "the left"? Not directly, though of course they could hardly care less about the body count. We've seen one after another offer up nothing but "thoughts and prayers" after the mass shooting of the week.

Rather it seems that the destructive potential of more and more guns is another fear tactic that benefits the GOP much more than anyone else. Democrats know that the millions of guns currently in circulation are nearly impossible to cull, and reducing the gun count would take many years if legislation was ever passed to do that.

Hence the increasing gun count becomes another supporting element of the "love America or leave it" mentality that is the exclusive property of the GOP. It's easy for them to get more guns in the hands of the public. It's easy for them to keep telling us that somehow the solution to gun violence is more guns. It's easy for them to offer up absurd "responses" to mass shootings that burn money while inconveniencing - or outright blaming - victims. It's easy for them to offer up "thoughts and prayers". It's also easy for them to ramp up the rhetoric and actively try to drive away people they don't like with right-wing nationalist extremism.