What made me unhappy today ?

[Luxuria]

Aside from the tens of millions of dead young men in WWI, the power vacuum of disposed monarchies, the complete collapse of the global economy, and the lack of centuries of liberalism and representative government that proceeded it... there's really no comparison at all. In times like these, I find my history degree more comforting than a million hugs. Imagine if they had doom-scrolling in 1933? That would have been some shit.

I get it. No history matches 1:1, but I am seeing some similarities. History can be similar, but not the exact same. And yeah, I know...history can be very comforting as it tells you that nothing lasts forever and nothing remains the same. OMG, yeah, that would have been a disaster. I can only imagine the doomscrolling headlines for 1933.

"Hindenburg to blame for Germany's Situation."

Then people get confused about WHICH Hindenburg and then there's a widely circulated conspiracy about the Hindenberg.

(I'll leave it at that and thanks for the laugh.)

 

[Luxuria]

It's good you have a tender heart about it. It's so common for people to decline into the attitude of "It happened a long time ago and I don't care."

Aw, thank you. I try to tell myself it's good that it makes me sad. I appreciate knowing having a tender heart is a good thing.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

Outside of forums, I'm on a couple of social media platforms just so my family knows I'm not dead in a ditch somewhere. (I'm an introvert, I hate phone calls. Text or email...preferably email.) Anywho because I usually don't post anything other than sarcasm and things about my boys (Basse and Marlowe) I get a lot of dog related social media,

There was an account with a sizable following that made a post featuring their GSD known for its outrageous behaviour wearing a 'service' dog vest. As a service dog handler myself, (Marlowe, medical alert 2+ years of training), people passing off ESAs as 'service' dogs is something we encounter on a regular basis. It's aggregating, but you have to learn to deal with the ignorance and stupidity of the general public in a reasonable manner.

Where I really got just irritated was the fact that this account was being 'satirical', but marched out every entitled ESA Karen reply in the book. The post was bad enough, what was worse was the comment section. People honestly thought the behavior was funny. It wasn't. It was ignorance that has the potential to adversely affect service dog teams because people being people will take that post at face value and assume that by spending the $49.99 they are now entitled to call their untrained pet a 'service' dog and take it everywhere. Real service animals usually have a minimum of two years of intensive training and are conditioned to work in a variety of situations, we're talking hundreds of hours of work with these dogs. For many, their dogs are more reliable than any tech out there and are usually significantly ahead of the curve when monitoring their owners. (Marlowe does cardiac function and has autodiatically picked up on when I get low blood sugar). They alert to seizures, cardiac episodes, blood sugar shifts, help their handlers determine when something is real or a hallucination, ground someone during a panic attack, etc...The list goes on. Service dogs are a different calibre of animal than a pet. They literally save lives and prevent injury. Yet they were treated as a joke and knowing the average understanding of the general public (US) at least 15% of the people who saw that post will take it at face value.

I did something I don't generally do. I said something on a social media platform. I was polite, but good grief, why do something so tactless. It is like allowing your kid to try and pet an on duty service animal or play with someone else's mobility aid. It wasn't funny. It was just plain stupidity and no one said anything. When something can negatively impact another demographic because people don't 'get' the joke, it stops being funny. That is bullying. It is ignorance at its finest.

Put a face to it: Say someone sees the post and buys the vest for their reactive GSD, which they then take to Voldemart on a busy Saturday afternoon. A mom is out running errands with her little boy (5). The little boy has Type 1 Diabetes. He has a task trained service dog to alert when his sugars go high or drop too low. The dog is always at least fifteen to twenty minutes faster than the boy's monitoring tech and more accurate. The dog is this little boy's lifeline. They walk down the Lego aisle to look at the Star Wars sets. The person with the GSD also wants to look at the Lego sets. The GSD sees the service spaniel and lunges. GSD's owner is taken unaware and doesn't control their dog. The shepherd attacks the spaniel and there is damage. The spaniel needs a vet ASAP.

While mom is trying to get their dog help and calm her hysterical child, the incapacitated dog misses an alert and the little boy into acute ketoacidosis. Due to the 'joke' of someone with a sizable platform a child and his service dog are now in a battle to survive because someone said a vest automatically qualifies your dog to be a 'service' dog. What is really sad, is that while my example is hypothetical it has happened before and will likely happen again because of crap like this. People need to do better.

A vest doesn't make anyone's dog a service dog, any more than a red hat makes me a firefighter. What a ridiculous thing to say.

I hope the people on that social media platform (whichever it is) understood how horrifying the spread of false information is, and didn't double down.

I'm sure at least one or two of them probably did double down, but I hope not everyone did.

Oh, just my history class made me sad, because we hit WWII and we had a few sad readings for the class. I am glad that this teacher is assigning the readings, but it's also just really sad.

I think the next two weeks are going to be hard, too. Because we continue with WWII and then have a whole unit on the Holocaust. Which is also depressing. I think that for me, reading HOW Germany and Italy declined in to Nationalistic Fascism was hard, because of modern times. The good thing about all of this is that we ARE learning about it and learning about the horrors of the Holocaust.

IIRC, my mother's parents (and their family) grew up in Romania just after WW1 ended. When WW2 started and the Nazis invaded, my grandparents' family was caught between the Nazis and the Soviets.

Hitler or Stalin. What a choice for a Jewish family to make!

My maternal grandfather fought in the battle of Stalingrad. Unfortunately, some members of his family were taken by the Nazis, and others succumbed to Stalin's paranoia after the war. He and my maternal grandmother were the only grandparents I knew.

When my father was 7 or 8, his mother's neighbours 'told' on her that she listened to someone tell a joke about Stalin. The KGB took her to a work camp. He never saw her again until she was released in the mid-1960s. Six months later, she was dead.

Is it any wonder that my parents didn't want their children growing up in a country like Russia, or that I never wanted to visit it?

 

[Amontillado]

I'm disgusted (again) with Ally Financial, the car loan people.

One of those rare windfalls plus a work bonus let me pay rather aggressively on our car loan.

Ally doesn't send statements that reconcile. In this case, today's statement showed my total payments were $2,000, I was charged less than $12 interest, and my balance dropped $5,194.75.

The balance drop was real (yay, me). The interest and the total payments figures were complete fiction. They sent no record of several payments so I could confirm that what I sent landed in their books.

It drives me batty. I reconcile every statement I get. With Ally, previous month's balance plus interest, minus payments, never equals the new balance.

I also see that Ally has paid nearly a billion in penalties in recent years. I think they were initially penalized $12 billion in just two cases, but the amount was negotiated way down.

Could be a case of a tangled web woven when deception was first practiced.

I don't trust that company.

 

[Stuart Dren]

I'm disgusted (again) with Ally Financial, the car loan people.

One of those rare windfalls plus a work bonus let me pay rather aggressively on our car loan.

Ally doesn't send statements that reconcile. In this case, today's statement showed my total payments were $2,000, I was charged less than $12 interest, and my balance dropped $5,194.75.

The balance drop was real (yay, me). The interest and the total payments figures were complete fiction. They sent no record of several payments so I could confirm that what I sent landed in their books.

It drives me batty. I reconcile every statement I get. With Ally, previous month's balance plus interest, minus payments, never equals the new balance.

I also see that Ally has paid nearly a billion in penalties in recent years. I think they were initially penalized $12 billion in just two cases, but the amount was negotiated way down.

Could be a case of a tangled web woven when deception was first practiced.

I don't trust that company.

Good for you. I wouldn't trust car loan people either.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

I'm disgusted (again) with Ally Financial, the car loan people.

One of those rare windfalls plus a work bonus let me pay rather aggressively on our car loan.

Ally doesn't send statements that reconcile. In this case, today's statement showed my total payments were $2,000, I was charged less than $12 interest, and my balance dropped $5,194.75.

The balance drop was real (yay, me). The interest and the total payments figures were complete fiction. They sent no record of several payments so I could confirm that what I sent landed in their books.

It drives me batty. I reconcile every statement I get. With Ally, previous month's balance plus interest, minus payments, never equals the new balance.

I also see that Ally has paid nearly a billion in penalties in recent years. I think they were initially penalized $12 billion in just two cases, but the amount was negotiated way down.

Could be a case of a tangled web woven when deception was first practiced.

I don't trust that company.

I agree with Stuart. Car loan people are about as trustworthy as used car salesmen.

Don't trust car salesmen. Except Gil. You can always trust Gil to try really hard and always fail. Even Crazy Vaclav does better than Gil.

So much about this short clip is hilarious and based on fun facts. For instance:
- When Vaclav says "Put it in 'H'!" ... 'H' in the Cyrillic alphabet is 'N', so Vaclav is saying "Put it in neutral".
- Vaclav says that the country this car was made in "no longer exists", so it might have been Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia.
- The car itself has three wheels (!) and a fly on the bonnet. It's obviously making fun of the Yugo or Trabant; although the Trabant itself had four wheels, it was originally designed to be a three-wheeled motorcycle.
- Vaclav says the car will "run on kerosene". Many Soviet military planes did use kerosene, which is similar to petroleum and diesel oil. Oil diesel engines could burn kerosene, but only turbine-powered planes could run on it. Piston engines run on leaded 100-octane gasoline.

One last thing: "Václav" is a Czech name, so perhaps the car was made in Czechoslovakia. However, this episode was made in 1992 and Czechoslovakia only broke apart in 1993 (and besides, they use the Latin alphabet, not the Cyrillic one). So this car might have been a Russian one, since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a year before this episode aired.
===================
Anyway, before I started digressing, I had something that made me unhappy. I got new insoles yesterday, and my feet are killing me. :-\ Earlier today, I had to get a new toilet mat. That shouldn't have been a problem, almost every Dollar Store (or Two-dollar Shop here in Australia) has them. Or so I thought.

I spent two hours (!) wandering around various Dollar Stores, Homeware stores, Opportunity shops and even supermarkets. No-one had them. I finally gave up, went into the last two-dollar shop, and asked them ... and they had a toilet mat (yay), but only as a set with a bathroom mat (which I didn't need). But I got it anyway, since I was exhausted and my feet were killing me. Again.

In retrospect, part of this shopping trip was funny, because at another two-dollar store, they told me they had it - hooray - but it turned out to be a door mat, not a toilet mat. So every time I go to the loo, it'll be "WELCOME!!!" Yeah, no thanks.

On the plus side, I really cranked up my step count today - well over 10,000 steps. So that's something.

 

[Link the Writer]

I'm feeling very conflicted. I'm learning about Python through Codecademy, but now part of me is thinking, 'Wait, am I gonna have to use AI/work with AI if I get into the tech business?' While I'm mostly neutral about AI, I have relatives who are 100% against it and I'm trying to honor them by not using AI. But what if I have to?

 

[Amontillado]

I'm feeling very conflicted. I'm learning about Python through Codecademy, but now part of me is thinking, 'Wait, am I gonna have to use AI/work with AI if I get into the tech business?' While I'm mostly neutral about AI, I have relatives who are 100% against it and I'm trying to honor them by not using AI. But what if I have to?

I can't speak for anyone else. I am convinced that AI will destroy the economy, unfortunately after dependency on AI has become entrenched.

Long term (did I remember to say this is all my opinion?) it will devalue education. The have/have-not gap will widen, but this time the joke's on the haves. The gap will eat them, too.

I like the Davy Crockett gambit, in which he invited his critics to go to hell while he went to Texas. The world can use AI for whatever it wants. I'll earn a paycheck doing what I must. In my personal endeavors I will not use generative or agentic AI.

Python is good for you. I've always figured for learning object programming, you could start with Java and take a year to muddle through concepts and become adept. Or, you could learn Python in a week and transition to Java in a month. Interactive Python is truly cool for learning and exploring.

 

[CatrionaGrace]

Car loan people are about as trustworthy as used car salesmen.

We had the world's best, most dependable car salesman. Over about ten years, we bought two cars and a truck from him. By the time we got to the truck, we just called him up, said, "This is what we want, this is what we can pay," and off he went to find it. Came in well under our upper limit, so he wasn't just looking to increase his cut. Didn't have to. We weren't the only folks who called and asked him to find a particular vehicle. He retired, alas, but maybe we won't be needing any more vehicles.

The world can use AI for whatever it wants. I'll earn a paycheck doing what I must. In my personal endeavors I will not use generative or agentic AI.

Here, here.

 

[Link the Writer]

Been reading Bruce Alexander’s ‘Blind Justice’ about a man named John Fielding, who is a blind magistrate in 1768 London. Out of curiosity, I looked him up to see if he were real.

John Fielding - Wikipedia

He absolutely was. And he absolutely was a magistrate. And to think my inner critic was going, ‘Oh, there’s no way a tavern owner could accept a random blind teen under his roof to work for him in that era! That‘s unrealistic!’ about my historical fiction with Amos.

Meanwhile, this guy’s over here like, ‘Boy, do you even lift?’



I have since amended my thinking.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

Been reading Bruce Alexander’s ‘Blind Justice’ about a man named John Fielding, who is a blind magistrate in 1768 London. Out of curiosity, I looked him up to see if he were real.

John Fielding - Wikipedia

He absolutely was. And he absolutely was a magistrate. And to think my inner critic was going, ‘Oh, there’s no way a tavern owner could accept a random blind teen under his roof to work for him in that era! That‘s unrealistic!’ about my historical fiction with Amos.

Meanwhile, this guy’s over here like, ‘Boy, do you even lift?’



I have since amended my thinking.

John was also the brother of Henry Fielding, the founder of the traditional English novel. Fielding's most famous novel is "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling".

Henry Fielding also used his authority as a magistrate to found the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force. They were a forerunner of the later London Metropolitan Police, founded by Sir Robert Peel, and nicknamed 'Bobbies' or 'Peelers' in his honour. Both nicknames still exist today: 'Bobbies' in London and 'Peelers' in Northern Ireland.

 

[Kiraann]

John was also the brother of Henry Fielding, the founder of the traditional English novel. Fielding's most famous novel is "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling".

Henry Fielding also used his authority as a magistrate to found the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force. They were a forerunner of the later London Metropolitan Police, founded by Sir Robert Peel, and nicknamed 'Bobbies' or 'Peelers' in his honour. Both nicknames still exist today: 'Bobbies' in London and 'Peelers' in Northern Ireland.

I learned about the Fieldings and the Bow Street Runners way back in the early to mid 70's. There was a series of novels by Derek Lambert under the pen name of Richard Falkirk. The MC was one of the newest Runners named Blackstone; given name may have been Edmund. Anyway, his assignment in the first novel is protection of Princess Alexandrina, who took the name Victoria when she ascended the throne. Interesting book.

 

[Pending]

Technically this was two days ago but I have been busy and unable to comment it. This is much longer than intended but I desired to write about it.

I went to a campus library and on every wall of the first page were posters promoting AI. For the most part it was promoting Generative AI. I didn't get a chance to read them (I was in a group we had a mission), but for the most part they blabbered for paragraphs about how great it was. There was a QR code to talk about it and send in generated images. Only one poster seemed to mention the detriments, and ethically, it said GenAI may have partaken in Copyright Infringement.

As if legality was the only thing that mattered.

When we moved upwards, the librarian excitedly pointed out the pictures on the stairwell. They were submitted by students who had studied abroad. The walls in the upper floors were a soft cream color and fairly sparce, but homely. The librarian said that they planned to decorate it with students' artwork next year. Somewhere, I was told, was a petition asking for transparency against professors using AI in classes and grading.

At last, we reached our objective at the top floor: the rare book collection. In the 1600s printing was expensive, so if you printed something it had to be very important. That's why there was a controversy when Shakespeare first folio (the complete collection of his work) was created. But the actors and some of the other writers of the time felt it was important that it was recorded. They didn't want it to be lost to time despite the cost. They gathered what scripts they had saved...and if they didn't have a script they scribed it from memory. Even past Shakespeare's passing, there was passion in creating his work.

We had time to kill so we were able to look at other books. The oldest book they had was from the 1420s. When it was open, it was two feet long with a height of a foot and a half. I don't know how thick it was. It was written (by hand) by monks. It was a hymnal. The lettering was impeccable and the lines were perfectly straight. It reminded me that monks are the main reason literature survived throughout the dark ages. They copied whatever they could find, letter by letter, for hundreds of years. This was in addition to dealing with starvation, plagues and the other horrors of the older world. But they persisted because they thought it was important. I don't think all of them even knew what they were copying.

Having been exposed to all of that, I looked at the first floor GenAI posters in a new light. It felt pathetic.

 

[Madman Starryteller]

Technically this was two days ago but I have been busy and unable to comment it. This is much longer than intended but I desired to write about it.

I went to a campus library and on every wall of the first page were posters promoting AI. For the most part it was promoting Generative AI. I didn't get a chance to read them (I was in a group we had a mission), but for the most part they blabbered for paragraphs about how great it was. There was a QR code to talk about it and send in generated images. Only one poster seemed to mention the detriments, and ethically, it said GenAI may have partaken in Copyright Infringement.

As if legality was the only thing that mattered.

When we moved upwards, the librarian excitedly pointed out the pictures on the stairwell. They were submitted by students who had studied abroad. The walls in the upper floors were a soft cream color and fairly sparce, but homely. The librarian said that they planned to decorate it with students' artwork next year. Somewhere, I was told, was a petition asking for transparency against professors using AI in classes and grading.

At last, we reached our objective at the top floor: the rare book collection. In the 1600s printing was expensive, so if you printed something it had to be very important. That's why there was a controversy when Shakespeare first folio (the complete collection of his work) was created. But the actors and some of the other writers of the time felt it was important that it was recorded. They didn't want it to be lost to time despite the cost. They gathered what scripts they had saved...and if they didn't have a script they scribed it from memory. Even past Shakespeare's passing, there was passion in creating his work.

We had time to kill so we were able to look at other books. The oldest book they had was from the 1420s. When it was open, it was two feet long with a height of a foot and a half. I don't know how thick it was. It was written (by hand) by monks. It was a hymnal. The lettering was impeccable and the lines were perfectly straight. It reminded me that monks are the main reason literature survived throughout the dark ages. They copied whatever they could find, letter by letter, for hundreds of years. This was in addition to dealing with starvation, plagues and the other horrors of the older world. But they persisted because they thought it was important. I don't think all of them even knew what they were copying.

Having been exposed to all of that, I looked at the first floor GenAI posters in a new light. It felt pathetic.

Somewhere out there an AI is copying my works into its database for future generations?

 

[Louanne Learning]

It reminded me that monks are the main reason literature survived throughout the dark ages.

Shout out to the Irish monks, who played a huge role in this. You can read more about it in -

How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

 

[CatrionaGrace]

Shout out to the Irish monks, who played a huge role in this. You can read more about it in -

How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

A very fine book that I read when it first came out. It's probably somewhere among my history book collection; perhaps it's time to bring it out for summer rereading.

 

[Louanne Learning]

A very fine book

A fantastic book that first introduced me to Queen Medb

 

[Rath Darkblade]

Something that made me unhappy over the weekend, and is still making me unhappy:

On Saturday morning, I woke up with excruciating pain in my big toe. I took a painkiller and the pain dulled, but over the past 3 days, it hasn't gone away. It alternated between either throbbing, or my toe being on fire, or both.

I've had this sort of pain before, but it never lasted this long. I tried various painkillers of different strengths, but nothing worked. (I also put an ice-pack on my toe, but it's hasn't done much). The only time I wasn't in pain was when I was asleep.

This afternoon I went to see a doctor who told me I had gout. She gave me stronger painkillers than over-the-counter ones and told me they should help, but they haven't.

My GP told me that if the stronger medicine doesn't help, here's a script for something else. (Only take one a day, and only for 3 to 5 days). I don't know what it is, and I don't care, as long as this pain stops.

I'm sick and tired of being in pain all the time. *headdesk*

 

[Stuart Dren]

Something that made me unhappy over the weekend, and is still making me unhappy:

On Saturday morning, I woke up with excruciating pain in my big toe. I took a painkiller and the pain dulled, but over the past 3 days, it hasn't gone away. It alternated between either throbbing, or my toe being on fire, or both.

I've had this sort of pain before, but it never lasted this long. I tried various painkillers of different strengths, but nothing worked. (I also put an ice-pack on my toe, but it's hasn't done much). The only time I wasn't in pain was when I was asleep.

This afternoon I went to see a doctor who told me I had gout. She gave me stronger painkillers than over-the-counter ones and told me they should help, but they haven't.

My GP told me that if the stronger medicine doesn't help, here's a script for something else. (Only take one a day, and only for 3 to 5 days). I don't know what it is, and I don't care, as long as this pain stops.

I'm sick and tired of being in pain all the time. *headdesk*

Colchicine, probably.

I sympathise. I've never felt it, but I've been told it's some of the worse pain out there.

 

[Catrin Lewis]

Something that made me unhappy over the weekend, and is still making me unhappy:

On Saturday morning, I woke up with excruciating pain in my big toe. I took a painkiller and the pain dulled, but over the past 3 days, it hasn't gone away. It alternated between either throbbing, or my toe being on fire, or both.

I've had this sort of pain before, but it never lasted this long. I tried various painkillers of different strengths, but nothing worked. (I also put an ice-pack on my toe, but it's hasn't done much). The only time I wasn't in pain was when I was asleep.

This afternoon I went to see a doctor who told me I had gout. She gave me stronger painkillers than over-the-counter ones and told me they should help, but they haven't.

My GP told me that if the stronger medicine doesn't help, here's a script for something else. (Only take one a day, and only for 3 to 5 days). I don't know what it is, and I don't care, as long as this pain stops.

I'm sick and tired of being in pain all the time. *headdesk*

Oh, ouch! And you don't even get the fun of being an English country squire.

(Did they say anything about diet?)