Remember when Israel kept yanking the football away from the Biden administration every time that Biden announced new Gaza ceasefire talks? At this point, you’d have to be a fucking fool to believe a word that slithers out of Nettanyahu’s head. Israel is working damn hard on burning as much political capital as it possibly can as fast as it can. Of course, they’re not doing it to do something cool like fighting climate change or build a moon base, it’s simply to murder as many people as they can as fast as they can.

"They’ve been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

I honestly to goodness can’t think of the last time I heard Trump drop an F bomb. I think he’s actually rather cross with them

ColdFusion

I was there, 3,000 years ago

I have ADHD and, given some shared traits with my diagnosed kids, likely autism as well. I like myself the way I am as well, but it’s definitely made my life harder. While it isn’t a disability for me, my wife, or my daughter, it is for my son, to the point where, even as he nears double digit age, we’re still unsure if he’s ever going to be able to participate in society and care for himself independently. I honestly worry, with how free with violence he is*, that he’s going to end up institutionalized or in and out of jail once he gets big enough to actually start hurting people. That’s not a life that I want for him.

*A specialist broke this down for us. Basically, he gets so frustrated and has no means of dealing with it or communicating the frustration that it manifests as a fight response.

Imo, then it’s between the parents and the clinicians involved. My son has autism severe enough that it hinders his learning and his social growth and stuff. I go back and forth about whether he’ll have the ability to live independently, or to have a partner and not beat the everloving shit out of them for what seems to be no reason. I love him, AND it’s a burden for everyone in the family, not just him, not just us parents. If given the choice, yes, I absolutely would have chosen to give him the chance at a life where he doesn’t spend every day frustrated by invisible barriers and possibly a life in prison or long term clinical detention (I forget the term) if we can’t get him to manage his physical outbursts by the time he’s an adult.

The lab did specify that there’s a looooong road between here and putting this in the clinic, but it’s a good to see.

It’s a really deep pool, and I’m going to juuuust touch the edge here and say that consent should absolutely count, if they’re in a condition to give informed consent. In general, I expect that people with disabilities would prefer to not have the disability, and I would love to give them that choice. What shouldn’t happen, though, is people being changed or treated without their consent.

Remember when Gemini said that you should eat at least one small rock per day?

This is fuckin huge if it turns out to be a winner. I mean, almost on the level of the discovery of penicillin big. I did 15 years in EMS, and the single biggest problem in Trauma care is the lack of blood substitutes. Once those blood cells leave the body, that’s it, they’re gone, and either you’ve got replacement blood or you don’t. Artificial blood has been one of the holy grail pursuits of medicine for decades, and we’ve had many, many dead ends with it. Hopefully they’ve cracked it.

Talking a whole lot of shit for someone riding around in a machine that will find literally any excuse to break down. Helicopters are sketchy as fuck, and even if you manage to autorotate perfectly to try and recover from a stall, you’re still liable to suffer severe or fatal injuries. It’s super easy to crash due to human error or some kind of mechanical failure.

Bruh wow

Remember when Trump said he was going to end this war even before taking office? Then proceeded to try and extort Ukraine, whined at Putin, and gave up when neither of those worked?

Yeah, I’m in California’s central valley, which is a lot like the Serengeti in that it’s a grassy desert-ish thing that’s seasonally wetted by snowpack melt. It’s actually pretty swampy in its natural state. Used to be that you couldn’t drive forty minutes here without your car being a hopeless mess, especially in the late winter/spring. Now, I almost never hit a bug at all. It’s been that way for years. I pointed it out to my nature-loving MAGA mom and it freaked her the fuck out.

FUCK. Wishing you guys all the best!

So, we all know what’s going on here, right? They’re gutting any part of our society that relies on intellectual work and trying to compete with motherfucking robots to bring factories back. They want to cram everyone into sweatshops. The plan was never to bring good jobs back, the plan was always live-in factories and suicide nets on the windows.

E: well, at least the Roman space telescope lives on, I guess. I’m unreasonably excited for it; it’s already built and just needs to be launched, basically.

Just wanted to say that I took your advice, and posted an update to this thread. It turns out that moving to LibreOffice would have virtually no benefit in any regard whatever according to the city IT manager. Thanks for the advice!

Follow up: I called the IT dept and spoke with them. Apparently they already get the “low cost” licenses with Microsoft for users who don’t need access to office (which is the overwhelming majority of them) and just basically get them an email address. The cost increase is really down to the city having added more staff, which means more licenses, since they’ve got a fixed rate contract locked in with MS. It sounds like moving non-power-users into LibreOffice would have negligible benefit and cause more disruption than not. Ah, well, swing and a miss. Thanks for the support, everyone!

Oh, yikes, that’s problematic. I was afraid of that. It really doesn’t feel good to look at that and say “and therefore, sorry firefighters, we need to pay Microsoft half a million a year to let us have Excel”, but I guess I get it.

Nah, the cops are losing some positions too. Our council is pretty good compared to some others, (and, honestly, our PD is pretty good too. They’ve worked really hard to keep a good working relationship with the community) but they’re definitely hitting a bunch of stuff that nobody wants to see cut either. It’s pain across the board. I guess if we have to make cuts, that’s how to make them, but I’d like it if Microsoft took one for the team too, here.

Again, I specifically want to leave the power users alone, but my experience in business/industry is that 90% of folks with Excel on their machine don’t even know how to write a function. There’s no sense paying lavish amounts of cash for those particular people to have Excel when LibreOffice will likely suit their needs.