Came here to say this. I’ve worked on systems for a restaurant on the beach and it was corroded as hell. We had the wireless access points in cheap “weatherproof” boxes and they got corroded. We replaced them once a year or so because it was so bad.

It won’t. The kind of people who would offer themselves up to be killed for the good of humanity aren’t the kind of people who make a billion dollars unless they hit the lottery a few times in a row.

Simpson, eh?

I’d bet good money against a bent paperclip that they had childhood trauma already. That doesn’t excuse what they’ve done, in fact that makes it worse. It’s likely the thought was “this is what happened to me to make me the person I am today” or similar.

That being said, once you do this to a child you’re no longer a person in my eyes either. They aren’t human. They aren’t animals. They are nothing. The whole reason I’m not in charge of anything is because I think we should throw them in an oubliette and let them survive by drinking from puddles and eating rats. That’s not justice, that’s revenge. I just don’t have anything else in my heart for these people.

Best utility belt, best Batman, best Catwoman, second best Catwoman, second best Joker…1966 Batman was awesome.

I did contract IT work for one where one of the staff got in very serious trouble for having CSAM on their work computer. Like a lot of it.

You’re both right! It started as 7 for the default and changed to 5 because 7 was also the default for the parallel port.

I watched it happen while drinking a refreshing Coca Cola. I’ve never felt so sad and refreshed at the same time.

He calls it his lair.

No worries! It’s less than half an hour to downtown Houston from here at this time of night and probably right at half an hour from Katy proper.

I grew up in a true rural community of less than 1000. It was half an hour to the outskirts of the nearest city, and that place had 75,000 people. It was hours away from the outskirts of the closest REAL city, Dallas, with 1.3 million people. In contrast, Katy has 25,000 people and sits half an hour from the center of a city with 2.3 million people, nevermind the size of the metro area.

So if she lived on the west side of Katy, she was describing the place as she saw it and that’s not on you. A small place as compared to Houston, and more on the rural side of the suburbs. I take my motorcycle out that way because if you leave headed west it’s pretty empty for a while.

Katy ain’t tiny. Well, in and of itself it is but it’s part of the Houston metro. I live off the Energy Corridor. I can be in Katy in a few minutes. I can also be at a dozen grocery stores, an insane number of taco trucks, any type of bar you’d care to visit, escape rooms, several gyms (I’ve recently started rock climbing in one again!), and shit loads of white collar industry for a good paying job within a few minutes. My first IT job making more than $125k was 10 minutes out of Katy. It’s suburban, not rural.

Some places, yeah. But some of the screening tools have grown more sophisticated now that the information about copying and pasting the listing has made its way to the public.

They won’t have me, friend. I can stand on a stage and sound like a Pentecostal preacher. I’m not inbred but I dress like I am. With exactly the right amount of alcohol I’m pretty likable (too little and I’m weird, too much and I’m over the top, and the difference is razor thin). And there’s pictures of me at a whole bunch of Pride events and taco trucks. I support the gays and the immigrants.

It’s an uphill battle that I’m not prepared for, don’t really have time for, and have no desire to get into. But we’ve got 2 years to find someone who hasn’t said “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47”. There are a lot of single issue firearm voters in Texas, as stupid as that is. I like Beto but pragmatically there’s no way back from that statement here at this time.

There may be enough cop hate here to run on a platform of grinding 1/5th of them into a fine powder. Even the staunchly red area I come from hates the cops, who are at best thought of as meddling piles of shit.

I see you’ve been to my hometown.

The other person that replied did mention a lot of cool things you can do in a rural community. But being half an hour from a grocery store that has something I actually want at a price that’s reasonable (as reasonable as groceries get, I guess) sucks.

It’s less about what was done than the hypocrisy. Especially the hypocrisy of doing it while kids were around. Hell, I expect the hypocrisy out of her but that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore it.

It’s the same reason we talk shit about all the Republicans that get caught doing gay shit. I don’t care if someone enjoys doing gay shit. Good for them. But if you’ve voted for laws that harm the LGBTQ+ community and get caught sucking dick in an airport bathroom then I’m going to make fun of you.

I guess they talked to us because we were the “light” version of their church. I don’t really know how they’d treat a real outsider I guess. They always tried getting us to come to church stuff with them.

It was normal to me. My parents weren’t bad people and they didn’t make me raise my younger siblings. I didn’t get abused like a lot of the kids around me. I put up with some bullshit, but we all do to some extent.

I appreciate it, though.

Did we just become friends?

They’ve got 55 police per 10,000 residents. That’s more than twice as many as LA per capita with a 3% decrease in violent crime per capita. That tells me we could, but definitely shouldn’t, grind up one fifth of them into a fine powder freeing up a whole bunch of money in the budget. NYC does seem to have a significantly smaller property crime rate than the national average but that number is suspect. How much of that is them just not dealing with property crime and not filing the paperwork?

And that $5b? That’s not their whole budget, that’s their personnel budget. Total budget for FY2025 is closer to $11.9b/yr. Their salary is closer to 80k/yr/officer on average.

I sure am feeling like a rambling old man today.

By the time the oldest kids become parents they’re already tired of being parents because mom and dad can’t possibly keep up with a dozen kids and sure aren’t paying nannies and babysitters.

By the time a couple generations go by, there’s no more help. They still get government assistance if they don’t get out but grandma and great-grandma still have school aged kids and aren’t helping (let’s face it, pappy ain’t doing it).

So who the fuck is taking care of these hundred and change kids? It’s only good for a surge unless you have multiple wives (again, you know the guys aren’t doing it), which is not happening at a rate that makes a difference, although that happens a little bit. So by that third generation you’ve got a fuck-ton of kids who definitely think it’s bullshit.

I grew up in a semi-related cult and saw that happen in real time. The one I grew up in wasn’t the “super family” welfare abuse type but did preach to have as many as you could handle while still being able to afford them. I personally know the people you’re talking about and they’re super literalists, young earth creationists, and dispensationalists who hand wave millennialism with “a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day”. Some of them believe that the war in heaven started the day the Jewish people went back to Israel and that the horsemen of the apocalypse are already here. Some referred to covid as either Plague or Death until they decided it was fake. They’re sure that every event is the harbinger of the rapture.

Hearing these people talk is fucking wild. I know they’re a minority, but if you go into some of the more insular rural communities you’ll meet them and they are fucking serious. They don’t understand why you and all of their kids can’t just see what’s happening.

So you’re telling me that if we just started grinding cops into a fine powder we’d not only save on their salaries and benefits, we’d also save on the amount of equipment they need and could fund things like libraries and social safety nets? And that we could sell that fine powder for uses such as food for heads, surgery, delousing, cosmetics, bomb disposal, firepower, and head transplants and fund even more things?

I’m not saying we should be grinding cops into a fine powder. I’m saying let’s take a look at where we could save more money while helping more people.

Torgo’s Police Powder is certainly not a thing we should turn those fucking pigs into. No sir. And if someone tries laying this at my feet I’ll deny it.