The last major antitrust action on this scale in the U.S. 8 years to process.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

This type of lawsuit is why the billionaire bro’s are backing the senile rapist and felon. Making them play somewhat fair ruins their business plan.

Firing middle managers is a fun way to kill the company. Not that cleaning house is a bad idea. Unfortunately the people making decisions of who to keep and who to let go are usually idiots.

Middle Managers are promoted for two reasons: technical expertise and ass-kissing expertise. Now the technical experts tend to not mix well with incompetent parasitic c-suite types idiots. The ass-kissers are beloved by the c-suite as that is their only role in life.

So when firings come around guess who they get rid of? Then 1-3 years later everyone is shocked when everything starts to fall apart.

LMAO. I did have some fun making this one up. Like any good but fiction it’s a mixture of facts and fabrications to make it believable.

Well…spit… growing up on the ranch we had between 13 to 18 horses around all the time. Everything from Arabians to some workhorses.

100% true. I even sent a nice loogie to get into character.

Now we only shoed them in late summer for the fall when we were working cattle.

Partially true - we shoed them in late summer as it was our pack train for guided hunts etc. we only used the 3 quarter horses to work cattle with. Those we kept shoed year round.

Now swimming is an interesting topic. During the hot days in the summer we would hop on a few hoses bareback and race across in the ponds.

Fabrication. The ponds were all spring fed and came out of the ground at 40F. The ponds held a 50F temperature all summer. Nobody swam in them other than a few dares. We did stock them with trout.

You would think the massive workhorses with their oversized hooves would win. Poweful, strong animals with big flippers on the bottom. Unfortunately they were the slowest in the water. They were stiff and inflexible, dumb and slow. They tended to swim a few feet, decide it was too much work, turn around and find some nice grass to eat.

This is one of my better fabrications. I used the personality of the Belgium’s we had. They were slow and powerful and always eating. However I never once saw them swim. We used them for trail clearing and pack horses in the woods.

Now the Arabians with the smaller stature and dainty little hooves were by far the fastest in the water. The fastest was horse named ugly. He was a swayed back ill tempered little guy with a massive chip on his shoulder. He just had to be first everywhere. He was almost as vicious as the Spawn of Satan aka “Shetland pony”. Now Spawn of Satan didn’t like the water because brimstone and water don’t go together so we never got him to swim.

Mix of fabrication and truth. Ugly was an smaller appaloosa whose name started out as chief. So we called him Chief Ugly then just Ugly. The Spawn of Satan was really called “Cookie” but if you know anything ponies the Spawn of Satan is more apt.

What’s curious is after they were shod and their hoofs trimmed down, they all seemed a wee bit faster. I guess the smaller hoof works better for their swimming mechanism.

Total bullshit. I have no idea what makes a horse swim faster or not.

Well…spit… growing up on the ranch we had between 13 to 18 horses around all the time. Everything from Arabians to some workhorses.

Now we only shoed them in late summer for the fall when we were working cattle.

Now swimming is an interesting topic. During the hot days in the summer we would hop on a few hoses bareback and race across in the ponds.

You would think the massive workhorses with their oversized hooves would win. Poweful, strong animals with big flippers on the bottom. Unfortunately they were the slowest in the water. They were stiff and inflexible, dumb and slow. They tended to swim a few feet, decide it was too much work, turn around and find some nice grass to eat.

Now the Arabians with the smaller stature and dainty little hooves were by far the fastest in the water. The fastest was horse named ugly. He was a swayed back ill tempered little guy with a massive chip on his shoulder. He just had to be first everywhere. He was almost as vicious as the Spawn of Satan aka “Shetland pony”. Now Spawn of Satan didn’t like the water because brimstone and water don’t go together so we never got him to swim.

What’s curious is after they were shod and their hoofs trimmed down, they all seemed a wee bit faster. I guess the smaller hoof works better for their swimming mechanism.

They also need to remove the limited liability from companies for intentional illegal activities.

illegal business practices should be charged to the people involved instead of the company. The executives who made the decision to break the law lose personal assets.

Otherwise the shitheads just pass the company losses onto the employees: no raises, hiring freezes, layoffs, reduction in benefits, etc…

PRSV doesn’t immediately kill the plant. It kills it slowly over quite some time. It replicates in the growing point of the plant. This conveniently is the same location where aphids feed.

The aphids then transfer the virus to a new plant. Plant viruses have a wide range of host species and they move around with their vectors.

For more information, Here is an excellent write up on the virus.

https://www.apsnet.org/edcenter/disandpath/viral/pdlessons/Pages/PapayaRingspotvirus.aspx

No it is not harmful to humans. This virus like most others others like it only infect plants. It is transmitted by aphids. So it survives inside of them but doesn’t replicate.

In watermelons it damages the new growth, especially the leaves. This reduces the plants ability to phosynthesize sugars and stops fruit production.

The Wikipedia picture is misidentified, kindof.

So there were two mosaic virus discovered in watermelons. The first one discovered was called watermelon mosaic virus. The second one was called watermelon mosaic virus 2 (WMV-2).

Now as molecular technics advanced it was discovered that the the first WMV virus was the same as Papaya Ring Spot Virus (PRSV)

Since the PRSV name for the virus was older, it was kept. WMV-2 then was renamed to WMV.

So that is most likely PRSV aka the old WMV. WMV (aka WMV-2) rarely causes ringspots.

http://ncsupdicblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/sample-of-week-papaya-ringspot-virus-on.html?m=1

I am of the opinion that most “supply” issues are due to investors. Except in certain geographic areas we do not have a shortage of actual physical housing. What we have is a shortage of available housing at a mixed pricepoints for purchase.

All housing that investors purchase for rentals removes it from the supply.

Traditionally investors have sought out entry level housing for rent. They invest in building rental complexes. They make all cash purchases and then rent it out to people who otherwise would have been first-time homebuyers. Investors used to be the low end offer. Blatant price fixing has increased rent outrageously. Now investors are the high end offer and removing supply constantly.

With AirB&B, the middle and even upper range market that traditionally has had less investor competition is now a major target. This has led to price wars for investment purposes on previously safe segments.

The first solution to the housing supply is simple: taxing income from rent so that selling the property is financially more lucrative. It will have to include a prohibition against rental increases to cover the taxes as well.

The second is to mandate zoning and new construction to match the market needs not the needs of the investors.

Last would be to create a program where builders who focus on entry level housing receive incentives from governments (also include hefty penalty for substandard construction).

I did a little assassin creed run this summer. Started with Unity and went to Odyssey.

Unity by far has the best story-line. The game mechanics are also more focused on being an assassin, not a brawler. Sneak and stab, drop smoke and disappear when you get in trouble.

Syndicate - they changed the focus to more brawling. However the mechanics were pretty bad and the storyline was predictable and stupid to say the least. You can still play the assasin for most of it if you want.

Origins - They went all out into brawling with this one. Complicated all of the controls. Easiest way to make it through the game is as an archer. The story lines are dull and some are just plain weird. The offer you tons of different options in gear but only a few are worth keeping. Not much chance to actually assainate anyone. Lots of weird half baked stuff like the naval warfare in the story line but nowhere else.

Odyssey - it’s basically the same as origins. They spent more time fleshing out the mechanics. Added in a ton of options but you only use a few. Added in a ton more brawling combat and very little assassination. In many instances trying to play as an assassin is just not possible. The combat is often broken. Beating the bosses is all the same. Spam arrows while dodging until they weaken, get a hit in and run away- repeat. Save often because the game crashes regularly.

Yes I played all the way through and beat the main quests and side quest on all of them.

I have been attempting to use Linux for 20 years now. It has found its niche used for me over the years. For example when my kids were toddlers they had a old machine that defaulted to PBSkids. Before that I used it to run a gaming server.

Currently I have a old laptop that I dual boot with win 10 and whatever Linux distro I feel like trying at the moment.

The win 10 on the laptop barely meets the minimum hardware requirements and takes 10 minutes to load.

I have tried a few different distros and always had a few issues with the setup. All sorts of different ones - screen orientation, WiFi connection, printer hell, keyboard layout etc. Takes me days to fix the bugs or give up.

Mint takes 2 minutes to load and so far is working seamlessly. It’s apt manager is the easiest I have used in a Linux distro. It found my network printer automatically. It runs smoother than windows 7 did on my laptop.

With Microsoft ending win 10 for the shitty win 11, I imagine many people are looking for alternatives. If Mint continues to work to make setup and usage easy, it will gain market share rapidly. It’s not all the way there yet, but it’s a hell of a lot better than before.

“Due to the success of the program, vulnerabilities are harder to find. The amount we are paying is now insufficient to justify the time and effort for most researchers.”

One year later…

“The largest security breach ever has occured for Google…”

Not from Turkey and agree with the bear. It’s delicious. I had it when I flew into Samsun and drove around the region. It’s a really beautiful area as well.

Bananas are clonally propagated. The pathogen is inside the vascular tissue. No way to get rid of it from plants once infected.

Fusariums have developed resistance to many fungicides. They keep becoming resistant to more.

Fusarium spores are viable in the soil for more than 30 years. They also tend to infect multiple species, once they are in a region they are there for good. The spores are transmitted around the world in on seeds or soil. The spores are found at a very low rate (like 1:1,000,000,000) on the surface of many species of seeds. It’s well below the detection level of any test.

They are cheap because they are a commodity and exploit low paid workers.

Consumers adapt to observable diversification if the product is superior and significantly different. They are almost totally ignorant if the differences are small and the product is similar. That’s not the reason.

The issue is that most of the banana production is handled by very few companies. Changing varieties complicates their internal processes, will cost them money, and they will not do it until forced to do so.

A long time ago I was the guinea pig/first user for a company developed system.

I often had my 1 year old at the time son with me when I worked on the weekend. He had a great time smashing buttons on the keyboard and randomly clicking the mouse on the test version. He found most of the bugs.

They were a bit more tricky than that I believe. They capped the user page at 3 years of search. So when you delete everything using those scripts it deletes the newer stuff but misses all the older ones. Then after the script runs it shows - no comments.

From what I have seen, unhappy marriages are very common in highly religious/conservative groups.

Most of these groups have stupid “No Sex before marriage” rules. So two horny young adults (teenagers in some cases) get married quickly. Pregnancy follows immediately and they start being parents before they are fully mature.

Fast forward 5-6 years later and they don’t even like each other anymore. The smart ones do the adult decision and divorce.

Way too many of them live misery constantly bickering while claiming to be “happily married” because “divorce is a sin”. They then spend most of their time complaining about their spouses. The kids of course have all sorts of baggage from growing up in the toxic environment.

The heyday of the forums. For about 2 years the combination of Tapatalk and forums was awesome. Centralized interface with no ads, all the discussion.

Then they both gutted their functionality and spammed in the ads.