It wasn’t just one big thing (although there were plenty of those), it was death by 1000 cuts. In the end it was something relatively small. I asked her to remove me from her regular right-wing email blasts and she refused to do so. What kind of asshole refuses to do something so small for a complete stranger, much less a family member? A malignant narcissist asshole.

If you haven’t read up on narcissistic family systems there’s a lot of good content out there. Here’s a short article.

Conservatives are all about freedom until there’s profit involved.

There should be no compromising our right to privacy and these cameras need to go. Fuck Flock and their cash grab.

Of course. Roberts has to do what his real employers (the ones paying the big bribes) want.

I use AI for the CLI stuff I down have memorized. Linux is still frustrating

I had the same experience when I switched and it’s funny how things change. Now I think people are forced to use Windows 11 in the ninth level of hell.

Thanks for that great write-up and link!

They were quite successful pushing me - directly to ebay. I’d rather spend more than to ever deal with AliExpress and their BS again.

100 to 1 odds that despite what Target is claiming, it will in no way be used to “invest in price” and reduce prices to their customers. Trump’s Tariffs ended up being an enormous transfer of wealth from the American public to corporations. It’s GOP heaven.

And some, like the majority of SCOTUS judges will literally make stuff up so they can legislate from the bench as they’ve been paid bribed to do.

Not an exception. Minors cannot get married if they’re under 18 in any state unless they get their parent’s (or a court’s) written approval. A minor cannot enter into a marriage contract by themselves.

Yet another reason to avoid AliExpress, as if we need more.

Their website makes it damn near impossible to make a purchase (buy 3 more for this deal!!!), changes prices when you put something in the cart, charges multiple times for shipping and then provides inaccurate tracking info once something finally ships. Last time I had a month’s delay because everything sat for more than a week in the U.S. after clearing customs.

Never again.

I dealt with the same thing many times and it really helped me to understand what a malignant narcissist is: https://mindpsychiatrist.com/how-to-deal-with-a-malignant-narcissist-at-work/

Malignant narcissists see other human beings as nothing more than puppets. If a puppet isn’t doing what they want (usually after some emotional abuse) they’ll toss it aside and just get another puppet that will. These people are usually incapable of feeling empathy for others.

Sounds like your VP is a prime example.

I’m no expert, but my Business Law professors were absolutely adamant about the fact that a minor can never execute a legal agreement and there are no exceptions.

Even if the parent leaves a contract out with a stamped envelope and tells their kid to sign it and mail it off, the contract is null and void. If my professors were correct and things haven’t changed, I can’t imagine a child can waive their (or their parents) rights by clicking a checkbox either.

A great cautionary tale is Bristol Palin (Sarah Palin’s daughter), who became pregnant while unmarried and later became the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Ambassador for an organization promoting abstinence-only education.

That was a great decision financially - she was paid more than $1/4 million per year, but even that kind of paycheck, her born-again nutcase mother, and the evangelical church couldn’t make abstinence work. She became pregnant with a 2nd child while still unmarried and while still getting paid for promoting abstinence-only. Imagine the outrage if that had been Obama’s daughter!

Actually since she walked away with $1 million plus, maybe it isn’t such a great cautionary tale.

Corporations steal $1 billion and pay a $100k fine and there’s a lesson there. The profit margins of outright corporate theft far exceed everything else. Who said “Crime Doesn’t Pay”?

I’ve been seeing more and more reports and videos of grocery stores (and Walmart in particular) systematically stealing from their customers by falsifying the weights of their meats, sometimes delivering half the product they’re charging us for.

This article is a few months old, but the corporate thievery goes on and the corporation can be easily stealing a billion plus dollars from their customers each year. The reports of this practice go back years.

The numbers are staggering. Walmart has 260 million customers per week visit their stores. If they overcharge 1/10th of their weekly customers just $1 that works out to $1.35 billion dollars per year of outright corporate theft. The only reason this is becoming known isn’t the MSM or consumer protection agencies, people are making videos of the products Walmart has mislabeled.

Since there is no enforcement of existing laws other corporations are doing the same thing. Other videos show packaged products like sugar actually weighing much less than their labeled amount.

Not only selling old items, stores like Walmart are openly violating consumer laws by selling substantially less product than the product label claims. Lots of videos on Youtube and other places. Here’s a random one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuWatOoYmDE

Just about every freeze I’ve had on Linux in more than a decade has been a GPU driver problem, even when it seems to be processor related.

You can also run it on your Linux box and check external IP via web page. Sites like https://myip.wtf/text provide it in plain text that can easily be used without accessing your router’s UI.

Instead of connecting via your external IP, consider setting up DDNS (Dynamic DNS). Most routers support it out of the box, it’s free (using a DDNS service like DuckDNS) and easy to set up. Once working you’ll connect via a static URL rather than an IP and when your external IP address changes, that URL will update automatically within a few minutes and direct you to the new IP.