And I’m cracking up at the scammers phoning up my 85 year old father telling him his Windows has been compromised on his Linux desktop.

Sadly, the sociopath/idiotic formula does seem to resonate with the algorithms and/or the public. There is a local creator that I know to be a thoughtful, well-rounded person, yet they had to reduce themselves to a cartoon caricature in order to get traction. But that approach seems to have worked out for them, at least initially through Tik Tok and YouTube. Now I see them taking on increasingly sketchy sponsorships as their 15 minutes fades. And of course audience capture indisputably steers media makers into conspiratorial niches they can’t escape without sacrificing views/payout. Authenticity be damned.

No doubt. Some folks seem to believe everything has to happen in a vacuum.

Have heard folks unironically make this argument. “The insurance industry! Massive unemployment! My 401k is invested in them! I’ll be ruined!”.

Just assumed he was incognito at a “wizards only fools” sort of place.

Once, I used a bunch of plastic storage bins as a bedframe. Properly elevated bed, plus a lot of storage.

This is my speculation too. Been super-sick a number of times. Always swabbed negative. Anecdotally, I know folks that tested a lot more often and only came back with a positive on the 4th try or so when feeling ill. The fine-print of my at-home tests say they’re only something like 76% accurate. Maybe I need to play the odds.

Somebody explain this to the trees that drop millions of nuts in the surrounding forest every few years skyrocketing not only rodent populations but also their parasites; ticks, chiggers, fleas. Predators are here, but they can’t seem to catch up to the mouse output.

This reminds me of a recent meme pushing back against the “greed is human nature” narrative. Was something like:

“If you see a bear riding a bicycle at the circus, do you assume it is the nature of bears to ride bicycles?”