Mostly true, but there comes a point in poor health where you cannot travel at all, or fulfill the requirement of physically starting or engaging in the death process (if required), even if you’re rich as Croesus. This especially applies to end-term cancer, motor neuron diseases, etc. If you can’t drink through a straw, you can’t use your hands, or you can’t speak or otherwise make your wishes known, that excludes you from a number of programs that exist now.

In addition, there’s a catch-22 of how, when you are dying of a progressive disease like ALS or Huntington’s, every minute is bringing you closer to exactly the kind of suffering you want to avoid, while you may not yet be sick enough to physically qualify under the terms of that specific program or its country’s laws.

For example, if you were to want go to Dignitas in Switzerland, you are looking at a roughly 6 month lead time to get all the approvals and interviews and paperwork done, during which your disease may well progress to the point that even if you had a private plane and an army of carers to get you there, you would not be able to get there, or if you did, not be able to fulfill the requirements of the program. (They may have since removed this requirement as I no longer see it mentioned in Wikipedia, but back in the day if you could not pick up the cup or drink through the straw yourself, that was a complete disqualifier for Dignitas, understandably so.)

And even then, there are countries like the UK, and the number of people who could not travel and were forced to go through endless litigation with the government trying to get the right to end their suffering legally – but in doing so made it impossible to do on the sly without subjecting their survivors to legal jeopardy and possible accusations of murder. (Which is rather ironic, given that King George V was euthanized by his doctor with the royal family’s permission.)

I think a lot of that is changing, but not quickly enough. It’s still the age-old ongoing strife between people who can’t face their own inner baggage about the deaths of others, and people who just don’t see the point of needless terminal suffering.

For example, there are still methods anyone can use for autothanasia, rich or poor, like VSED, and today Nembutal is still fairly easy to get south of the US border – but even then if you have a personal carer that insists you do not have the right to end your physical suffering, and they squirt water down you throat or throw out your just-in-case meds, you’re screwed anyway.

“ROE IS SETTLED LAW” – that lying piece of shit Brett Kavanaugh

That sign in the back isn’t bad either, lol

In addition to the other points being made here, I have to add that this data is not sorted and discarded, it is sorted and KEPT.

So let’s say a few years from now we’re well into a second Trump term and he’s making good on his promise to fuck his enemies, and someone in his regime doesn’t like you. They won’t need for you to actually do anything wrong; all they will have to do is reach into the vast trove of communications you’ve already made, not even overseas but just caught up in the same widely cast net, and find something that appears to be illegal.

As bad as all the present-day uses for this material can be, far worse are the post-facto creation of crimes out of them.

“But they can’t do that!” Yeah, they can and will, if we get a fully authoritarian government. That’s what the Stasi and the Gestapo and the KGB and the Savak and all the rest of those agencies were about: the US will be no different. There’s no such thing as an authoritarian government without an enforcement arm that spies on its own citizens. And when someone has your data, hidden from you and easily manipulated to make it say whatever they want, you will have already done whatever they claim you have done, and the evidence of it will easily be whatever they want it to be.

Norm Macdonald loved roasting OJ and did it every chance he got.

the judge’s daughter, who has consulted to Democratic campaigns

This from the asshole who just had his own daughter-in-law installed as the co-chair of the RNC, and whose daughter and slumlord son-in-law should never have even been given security clearances to work in the White House.

It’s always projection.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

This “nearly daughter” thing seems so familiar, almost like “step-daughter” in a way.

I can’t imagine where I might have gotten such an idea.

Hmm.

So the IPO was Thursday; on Monday:

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman sold 500,000 shares … at an average $32.30 price, receiving $16.15 million.
CFO Vollero Andrew sold 71,765 Reddit shares for $2.318 million.
Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Wong sold 514,000 shares for $16.602 million.
Chief Technology Officer Christopher Slowe sold 185,000 shares for $5.975 million.
Chief Accounting Officer Michelle Reynolds sold 3,033 RDDT shares for $97,966.
Board member David Habiger sold 3,000 shares for $102,000.

All told, that’s $41.245 million worth of Reddit shares sold.

I knew they were going to sell as soon as they could, but damn. As someone who knows the bare basics of how it all works but does NOT actually follow the stock market, the last time I saw that kind of executive dumping was Enron just before it went under, lol.

Can someone who actually follows the markets tell me whether all the social media/tech IPO C-suites do that these days, or is this genuinely unusual? Because honestly I find the sales a bit shocking in both rapidity and amount, even for as greedy and openly corrupt as the Reddit board has been over the last few years.

EDITED TO ADD: Apparently this is not so unusual. Many thanks to those who took the time to answer.

Perfectly and accurately stated.

From beginning to end, how the cops treated the situation was abhorrent; the photo was just the shit cherry on top of the large, steaming shit sundae. And of course it was a cop who took it and then spread it around social media. Wonder if he’d be happy to snap and share a gory pic of a fallen cop with the same glee.

As the article notes, the cops could have at least spoken courteously with her when she called, and there is no explanation as to why, in the three+ hours he was up there, no one contacted her (he was asking for her), nor why they didn’t deploy the inflatable on the ground below.

Nor, especially, why they saw fit to deploy SWAT dogs when he was clearly a danger only to himself. The dogs at the end, it’s almost like the cops wanted to escalate it so he’d just do it already. It’s certainly what he thought, going by what he was yelling, and then he did. Job well done, assholes.

If the prick who took the photo ever dies on the job, I hope someone of his own character is around to immortalize his own photographed gore on social media as a fitting tribute. I’m glad she’s suing and I hope she wins every dime and then some.

Not that I don’t have absolute, unshakeable, limitless faith in law enforcement and local school boards, but I genuinely hope Nex’s family gets a second autopsy outside Oklahoma. Not least because their initial symptoms seemed to have a lot in common with head injury.

No, it won’t bring Nex back. But if they did this, then establish that fact via disinterested parties. The local government and law enforcement are anything but neutral parties here.

If Nex’s family is willing, I genuinely hope they are considering getting a second opinion: in many ways, this outcome lets the bullies off the hook . . . and not just the ones in the bathroom.

I don’t need to know the details, but I would like to see this conclusion confirmed by another forensic medical examiner elsewhere, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

On top of a political crisis this is an empathy one too, IMHO.

Very much so. And maybe the crisis of empathy is the deeper, more critical problem.

I have noticed that, right alongside the attacks against LGBTQIA+ folks, there has been an overt effort to normalize both apathy AND the “disorders of conscience” (sociopathy, narcissism, etc) to try to repaint those lacking conscience and guilt as just “different” instead of the amoral predators among prey, who believe conscience is for the weak, that they are.

There was an article in the NY Times just a couple weeks ago doing that, and it wasn’t the first. “Oh, sociopaths aren’t that terrible, just different,” that kind of shit, addressing the actual damage they do and the lives they leave wrecked in language more suited to a statistics report.

The first paragraph:

Sociopaths are modern-day boogeymen, and the word “sociopath” is casually tossed around to describe the worst, most amoral among us. But they are not boogeymen; they are real people and, according to Patric Gagne, widely misunderstood. Gagne wrote “Sociopath,” her buzzy forthcoming memoir, to try to correct some of those misunderstandings and provide a fuller picture of sociopathy, which is now more frequently referred to as antisocial personality disorder. As a child, Gagne found herself compelled toward violent outbursts in an effort to try to compensate for the emotional apathy that was her default. As she got older, those compulsive behaviors turned into criminal ones like trespassing and theft.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/25/magazine/patric-gagne-interview.html

Maybe overall, maybe, but there are a quiet number of us who went from “ah, they’re okay” to “don’t you fuck with these beautiful people,” and I know this because I’m one of them, and not the only one.

When LGBTQIA+ visibility and rights were on the rise and growing, I thought it was great, but I also believed it had nothing to do with me because I’m cis/het.

But I’m also a student of history, so when certain right wingers got emboldened to be openly hateful – and bizarrely so, like JK Rowling and her nonsensical TERF shit: “you, but NOT you” wtf? – and then the right wing started going after anyone not explicitly cis/het with ANYTHING they could find, finally getting to the point of criminalization of trans people’s actual existence in places like Florida, I had zero doubt about where we were headed, and I WILL NOT PARTICIPATE.

I’ve known the destination all along, and so has anyone who tracked the process of pre-WWII Germany into authoritarianism, as well as anyone who ever had a burning need to know how a country could go from a truly laissez-faire democracy to concentration camps. Germany was where the first successful trans operations were done in the 20s, and the first place trans people were thrown into concentration camps a decade or so later. It’s not a secret.

But this is not who I am, it is not what I stand for, and I will NOT be a part of that. So now I am fiercely PRO LGBTQIA+, and the right wing has itself to thank for that. I want you to live, and to prosper, and to enjoy the same rights as anyone else, and to know that at least some of us recognize that your lives are worth as much as our own.

When Team Ovens shows up for a rematch with Team Humanity, if one of us is not safe, none of us are safe. And we’re there. It’s happening.

insubordination for actions like calling parents without her permission

To the principal that’s insubordination, to me it’s a big red flag. A teacher should not require formal permission to contact a student’s parents.

And in this particular case, maybe the teachers are calling parents directly because administration refuses to do anything at all regarding student discipline, and the teachers are simply trying to get the behaviors corralled by any means possible just so they can get back to teaching the kids who want to learn; if so, again, that’s a much bigger problem than the fact that a teacher called a parent, IMO.

Lets not act like the Republicans have nothing at all to do with the continuing reduction/elimination of abortion rights at all, and like they do not now have their eyes on reducing access to or eliminating birth control altogether.

Republicans need to put their actions where they say their morals and religion are. Kind of like how all the right wing Supreme Court justices we have today promised in their nomination hearings that Roe v. Wade was stare decisis (settled law) and they would not overturn it. Where’s your condemnation for them?

I do not, and will never, understand why people look past the actions of the bad guys and solely to the perceived faults of the only group actually trying to change things for the better, or at least protect the rights we still have.

Where’s your condemnation for the party that actually did this, SupraMario?

That poor kid.

As much as my sympathy usually lies with the wronged party (those against whom he has committed crimes) it is impossible for me to believe that having those two as parents is immaterial to their son’s criminal acting out now.

“An abnormal response to an abnormal situation is absolutely normal,” as the saying goes, and I can’t help but think that’s at least part of what’s happening here: that while Lauren and Jayson Boebert have spent their son’s growing up years off chasing money and power and elected office and doing whatever else they do, that kid has been alternately bringing himself up or staring crazy in the face, depending on who was in the house at the time.

I feel bad for him, to be honest.