Here’s a reminder that the Olympics was held in Nazi-controlled Berlin, and a team of 18 black athletes from the US thoroughly trounced Hitler’s “master race” talking points by sweeping the medals.

The black athletes then had to return to the US, where segregation was still the norm; many of them struggled to support themselves afterwards, because racism kept them from being hired into any decent jobs.

For reference, a thousand cubic feet is around the same size as a school bus.

This reminds me of an old Reddit writing prompt that I got a good chuckle from. Something along the lines of “humanity discovers FTL travel, and is invited to join the Galactic Federation. The federation goes out of its way to accommodate incoming species, and part of that intake process involves respecting existing legal structures and contracts… They just realized humans have been selling stars to each other for centuries.”

There are a few security issues with it, but all of the worst known issues require a valid login token. So an attacker would already need to have valid login credentials before they could actually do anything bad. Things like being able to stream video without authentication (but it requires already having a list of the stored media on the server, which means you have been logged in before). Or being able to change other users’ settings (but it requires already being logged in to a valid user).

Basically, make sure you use good passwords, and actually trust any other users to do the same.

Hah, you stumbled upon one of Lemmy’s weird UI quirks. If you start a line with a number and period, it assumes you’re making a numbered list. But that period is placed at a specific indent, so long numbers spill off the left side of the screen.

1. Here’s what it is supposed to look like.

(Adding a line break here)

12345678. And here is what happens when the number is too long.

It only works with 8 numbers or less though, because 99999999 is the highest value that the numbered list supports.

I know; that’s exactly why I used the phrase. My point was that Epstein was ultimately just a salesman filling a (highly immoral and illegal) market gap. He noticed there was an established demand, and worked to fill that demand with a supply. If there weren’t any customers for what he was doing, he wouldn’t have been successful. But it also means that he already had the infrastructure set up (and the lack of scruples) for trafficking, so the difference between trafficking a 13 year old and a 19 year old was largely bureaucratic as far as he was concerned.

Yeah, my bet is on Sabatini. She looks a lot like Melania did around that same time:
Sabatini

Melania

Exactly. Epstein didn’t really care about their age, as much as he cared about whether or not he was able to sell the women off to potential buyers. Underage girls being in high demand (ugh…) led him to trafficking children. But if he had a market for +18 girls, he absolutely would traffic them too. After all, trafficking was his specialty. And as the old saying goes, “the customer is always right.” As long as he could find a customer, he’d be willing to traffic outside of the underage demographic.

The kompromat angle only factors in until Epstein has it. Epstein may be worried about a first-time buyer blabbing about buying a 19 year old… After all, there’s very little risk to the buyer, but a ton of risk for the seller. But if Epstein already has footage of Trump raping 13 year olds, he doesn’t need to worry about Trump blabbing when he traffics a 19 year old.

Yeah, edema (fluid gathering, causing swelling) is a classic sign of diastolic heart failure. It’s caused by the muscle fibers of the heart stiffening, which reduces the heart’s ability to expand and draw fresh blood in between beats. Usually caused by a lack of exercise. The heart can’t draw blood back up from the legs, which increases blood pressure in the legs as blood gets pumped down but not back up. This extra pressure in the legs forces fluid out of the veins and into the surrounding tissues, causing swelling.

Yup, I use a million dollar system that runs on XP. We updated the computer last year. They sent us a PC that dual boots XP and Win10. Win10 so it can connect to the internet and pull updates. XP so it can run the control program, which is written in Flash.

It’s largely learned; people who are born deaf don’t vocalize their sneezes, because they never heard anyone else do it.

Complains about Lemmy being just like Reddit… While using lemmy.world

Okay

I mean, it depends on how many people you have available. Five or six strong dudes could easily overpower him in like 10 seconds. Have another dude ready with a pre-tied noose, so all he has to do is throw it over a bar and pull it tight. Once Epstein is being bearhugged by like three dudes, getting him into the noose would be trivial.

A minute would be tight, but if you keep cameras in mind and bum-rush him with a practiced team, it could be doable.

There is one instance where I have heard of a literal Suck Button. Gonna copy and paste it here…

Not my story, but I like to read it again from time to time and get a good chuckle:

My band’s drummer, John, is also a sound guy; for several years before we hooked up musically, he had been doing sound for other bands I was in, as well as for touring acts I booked shows for. He’s very good at what he does, and has a pretty massive rig. Anyway, he’s the nicest guy in the world at band practice, at Burger King, or at a gig we’re playing, but when he’s running sound for other bands, he can be pretty crabby.

Very little patience for bands who start late or end late. Even less patience for bands who take an encore when they’re the second band playing out of five. Very little patience for singers who ask for more vocals in the monitor while cupping the microphone ball in both hands (feedback, anyone?) In general, just an altogether grouchy sound man.

For example, he ran sound once for this seven- or eight piece ska band. One of the trombone players said he needed two mics: one for his horn and one for his backup vocals. Normally at this venue (a 120-seater), John didn’t bother to mic horns at all. Rolling his eyes, John put up a Shure Beta 58 and some AKG condenser mic. “This Shure is for your vocals, and this AKG is for your horn, OK?” he said. “Don’t blow your horn into the vocal mic, because your horn is about 30db louder than your voice and I’m going to have everything mixed properly.” Horn player nods his head. During the second song of the set, apparently this trombonist was set to get a solo. Right before his solo starts, he grabs both mics and pushes them close together, so that the capsules are actually touching. He then blows this fortissimo opening note into BOTH mics. I was sitting at a table in back, by the sound board, at the time. John’s limiters caught most of it, and I STILL had ringing in my ears for two days. At the end of the song, John mutes both of the guy’s mics (and leaves them mute), and basically threatens to ream out the guy’s plumbing with his own horn if he ever pulls that shit again. John does this through his talkback mic, which is clearly audible over the monitors. The crowd bursts into laughter, and the horn player goes bright red in the face.

At any rate, for years I had heard John threaten bands with the “suck button.” Bands who were taking too long to set up, or whose members repeatedly refused to follow reasonable directions (please keep that vocal mic away from the monitors!), would be threatened. “Pull that shit again, and I’m gonna hit the suck button on you guys!” I took it to mean that he would intentionally make them sound bad, but he never followed through on the threat, so I took it as a vague general warning.

So anyway, a little while back he’s running sound on a four band show. The second band, a Matchbox 20/Train kind of band, has him running 20 minutes behind before they even play a note because their lead guitarist was late. Their allotted set time is 40 minutes, but their last song runs over and by the time it’s done, they’ve played for almost 45 minutes. John says quietly over the talkback mic, “Hey guys, you’re done.” The lead singer says loudly over the vocal mic “Sound man says we gotta get off the stage. We got one more song for you!” as they kick into another soupy jangle-rock tune. John shakes his head at me. Then, the most amazing thing happened. After their “encore,” this band kicks straight into ANOTHER song without announcing it, apparently in the hope that John wouldn’t notice it was a different song.

John leans over to me to be heard over the PA and asks, “Hey, wanna see the suck button?” “Sure,” I replied. I figured he was going to muck with the levels or just turn them off or something. Instead, he reaches to one of his racks and starts scrolling through patches on his trusty DigiTech unit. Sure enough, he gets to a patch titled SUCK BUTTON. He engages it, and all hell breaks loose onstage. The lead singer and the lead guitarist (who was singing backup), immediately start to sing WAY off key. They try to get back in tune, fail, trail off in mid-line, try again, and start glaring at each other. The guitarist is so distracted by this that he starts muffing the chord progression. If not for the drummer, I think the whole song would have derailed. For the entire four minute duration of the song, I was treated to this asshole band sounding like crap and getting madder and madder at each other. John explained the patch to me; basically it pitch shifts all tracks from the vocal submix up one step, BUT ONLY IN THE MONITORS. So the audience, out in front of the mains, was treated to the sound of two guys trying to get in tune, only to be utterly confused. If they got it sounding right in the monitors, they could tell that something was grossly wrong in the mains. And each of the singers thought it was the other guy who was singing out of tune. I just about died laughing.

Yeah, Humble has been spiraling, and this is one of the largest symptoms. If they’re out of stock, they shouldn’t be allowed to list the game for sale. It’s particularly bad on their Humble Choice offers, where trying to claim after Day 1 often ends up with half of the keys listed as out of stock.

I actually wanted to ask about that… Is it considered best practice to run a bunch of different compose files, and update them all separately? Or do you just throw all of them into a single compose file, and refresh the entire stack when updating?

The latter definitely seems like it would be more streamlined in terms of updating, but could potentially run into issues as images change. It also feels like it would result in a bunch of excess pulls. Maybe only two images out of a dozen need to be updated, but you just pulled your entire stack. Maybe you want to stay on a specific version of one container, while updating all the others. Sure you could go edit the version number in the compose, but that means actually remembering to edit the compose before you update.

Yeah, I get severe weather warnings all the time. Usually for hail or damaging winds, but also occasional tornadoes. But I have only ever seen a few tornadoes actually touch down, and it has always been dozens of miles away. Even the hail warnings are usually overblown. Warning about baseball sized hail, then we only get some wind and a light sprinkle.

My favorite is when it’s a local/college-age band and parents are around. Or spouses of older band members. “No, I can’t get her vocal any louder because she’s whispering six inches from the microphone and Jimi Hendrix up there is blasting his amp at 11.”

There’s a reason the lead singer’s girlfriend is the butt of so many jokes. And I have 100% had to use the Baffle of Shame for guitarists who won’t turn down. It’s just a doghouse made out of pink foam board and tape, that you can throw over the top of problem amps. Add a corner notch for cables to run in/out, and dust it in some black paint.

If it’s a tube amp, I can at least understand it; Tubes distort at higher volumes, and the distortion is part of the tone. And if you try to argue with a guitarist about their tone, you’ll lose every time. The nice once will smile and nod, then not make any changes when you ask them to turn down. The rude ones will make direct eye contact as they turn it up more.

But if it’s a solid state amp, putting a 2x4 block under it (or putting it on a spare guitar stand) to tip it towards their head usually works. The guitarist is used to having all of the sound blow right past their knees, so actually aiming it at their head makes a world of difference.

She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to “fix” including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.

My buddy has a $6000 projector. He found it in the trash. The only thing wrong with it was a cracked solder on the power supply.

Similarly, I have a $5000 audio console that I got for ~$100 in parts; it had a bad power supply. Honestly, probably just a bad capacitor on the power supply, but I didn’t feel like desoldering every capacitor to check their capacitance. Diagnosing the power supply took about 5 minutes, and most of that was just finding all of the screws that were holding the case together. A quick read with a multimeter told me everything I needed to know. Swapped out the supply, and it has been working fine ever since.

That I can make the band suck less. Sure, there’s something to be said about polishing a shit… But ultimately, it’s shit in>shit out. Your guitar doesn’t sound like ass because of the EQ; it sounds like ass because the guitarist had nine beers before he even walked on stage, and he can’t stay on beat to save his goddamned life.

Psychoacoustics is a fascinating subject. Just like placebo, people will fool themselves into thinking that something sounds good or bad, simply because they want it to. I always keep a DFA fader on my console, for when random people walk up and have suggestions. I make an adjustment to the DFA fader, they smile and nod to themselves, and then walk away. DFA means “Does Fuck All”. It’s literally a fader that isn’t doing anything at all. It’s not in the mix, it’s not in the monitors. It’s just a spare fader. But by adjusting the DFA, audience members will feel like I took them seriously, and they’ll placebo themselves into thinking that I took their advice.

To be clear, not all audience advice is bad advice. But for every “it’s too loud” complaint, you’ll inevitably get an equal and opposite “it’s too quiet”. There’s a reason music festivals have their audio console fenced off with a very wide perimeter. It’s specifically so drunken audience members can’t just saunter up and start yelling suggestions. That shit is distracting and 99% of the time is entirely unproductive.