It’s okay, you don’t need to beat the poor lame joke to death just because YOU didn’t get it. It’s okay to just let it go.

That’s the joke.

As much as I’d like that to be true, probably not. Automatic signature machines have been a thing, especially for presidential signatures, for a while now. This is more a hit to Trump’s ego than anything.

The article is saying that these sharks aren’t really sharking though. The sharks behavior has been changed by environmental factors (regular human feeding and humans raising the local sea temperature by dumping warm water from the desalination plant).

1. Sharks are attracted by usually warm water from desalination plant.
2. Tourist guide boats start chumming the waters to keep the sharks around for tourists.
3. The attraction of so many mostly harmless sharks changes their feeding dynamic. Ever tried eating an ice cream cone near a small child? Ever tried pushing an ice cream cart through a crowd of small kids? Way different dynamic as supply and demand changes as the crowd grows.
4. Formerly mostly harmless and “shy around humans” sharks start directly approaching humans as a source of food.
5. Sharks investigate human, beg for food. How do sharks investigate? By biting, nibbles really, or bumping into people swimming.
6. The first bite generates a predictably violent reaction from the humans, which triggers a feeding frenzy response. Humans aren’t equipped to defend or escape this.

The point is that at every step of the way, these sharks are acting in a very strange way (for them) as a direct result of human action. We’ve seen this kind of thing before when people feed wild animals, strange and dangerous human seeking behaviors develop: alligators, bears, moose, etc. Dangerous animals? Yes, but the behaviors that result in human deaths are in no way natural.

People in here looking for less evil alternatives to Spotify and you suggest Clear Channel, the company that killed local radio broadcasting and enshittified the airwaves long ago?

I guess they couldn’t get it suspended long enough to get a measurement from the crane itself?

Properly designed speed tables should be able to be safety traversed at speed. Speed bumps force you to slow down to under the speed limit, sometimes far under, in order to traverse safely. That said, I’ve seen many many many more examples of things like: speed bumps with signs for speed tables, poorly designed humps that are neither speed bumps nor speed table, poorly designed speed bumps that are dangerous at practically any speed, or speed bumps without proper warning signs or paint to warn drivers, speed bumps in parking lots that just encourage people to drive wrecklessly around them. The absolute worst are those bolt-on DIY atrocities. Really, I’ve only ever seen properly designed speed tables in the richest of neighborhoods. All the other HOAs and towns seem to think they can get away with just hiring an asphalt guy or sending out a road maintenance crew to throw a speed bump and some paint down without any kind of survey, design, or traffic study.

Just a reminder that everyone is a criminal, but only the out group get the punishments. It’s practically impossible these days to do anything without running afoul of some law somewhere, especially when the new fascist regime is turning your old civil rights into new felonies every day. Fed the homeless? Criminal. Shelter an abused person? Trafficking. Give water to a protestor? To an immigrant? Aiding terrorists. Exercising your right to protest? Actual terrorist. Be a librarian? Obscenity. Report facts and statistics? Treason. Give medical care to the wrong person? Felony. Fail to pay debt? (often debt you had no choice about taking on, like debts to courts, medical, and school debts) Criminal. Insist on a separation between church and state? Hate speech. Resist a kidnapping by anonymous men in an anonymous van? Resisting arrest and deported, yes even the legal citizens. These are just the spicy examples. There are plenty of other more mundane crimes that everyone commits every day. The system is too corrupt and complicated to completely avoid breaking the law.

Yeah, I’d say they should only have shared it with the news if the news also named and identified them clearly every time the photos are shared. Corruption dies in sunlight. The dangerous ones already know, might as well hang a lantern on any attempts at retaliation.

You don’t get to make that determination during the stop, that’s for the court to decide after the fact.

He was TOO good at the satire. On the left dum-dums thought he was actually right, while on the right dum-dums thought he was on their side.

Also, I think people are hitting their limit of joking about the collapse of democracy and civil society. I know I am. I know there are now movies, TV, and books that I might have found interesting in less interesting times; now it all just hits too close to home. John Oliver can hit those “too close to home” topics and move on to other things. But it always felt like when Colbert was doing his conservative pundit schtick, he was trapped in it. It was harder to laugh along with him about other things that weren’t specifically about that kind of satire. He might have had some more material of a particular idiom if he’d stuck with it, but that idiom can wear thin.

Oh yeah, I’m aware. I don’t really disagree in general, but that dependency on devices is problematic. Also, I think that dependency is almost entirely a fiction. The only vendors I’ve ever met that don’t take cash, weren’t selling anything I’d generally need in an emergency or miss if I couldn’t get it immediately, e.g. craft/art fair vendors and fly by night food trucks. And I mostly managed to navigate everywhere without a map, even though I kept one in the glove box. The U.S. (I assume we’re talking about the U.S. because carbrained) is fairly easy to navigate without either as long as you can find a highway and you can read road signs. Maps helped sometimes sure, but the lack of one never made me feel unsafe. Sure, things can go badly, but that’s due to a lack of ingenuity and knowledge (street smarts as we used to call it), not the lack of a phone. In fact, I’ve gotten just as lost while looking at a map and trying to follow a friend’s directions. Maps, physical or digital, are almost always wrong or outdated to some degree.

You’re only as dependent on your phone as you make yourself. That crutch is the real danger.

It’s amusing to me that the very idea of leaving the house without your cellphone is seen as very dangerous. But I guess payphones and landlines at every tiny shred of civilization aren’t really a thing anymore. Nobody could track me and I could get genuinely stranded occasionally for the first few decades on my life, but I never felt that lifestyle was dangerous. Just raw dogging life before it was cool I guess.

Tell us you don’t have a clue how the electoral college works without telling us.

Who is out there wiping their ass with %100 ethanol?

In certain contexts the opinions of some federal officials is quite a bit more than “simply giving an opinion”. The most obvious examples being the chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Commerce Secretary.