Fondots

I'd say there's one narrow exception for people who espouse Nazi views in order to infiltrate and undermine the Nazis.

That's outside the scope of the question though.

I had to buy a handful of components so I guess it counts

Built my first PC recently. Mostly it's my wife's old components after a few years of upgrades stuffed into a new case, but it's new to me. Pretty much just had to buy the case, a hard drive, PSU, CPU cooler, and a couple fans.

It's not a powerhouse by modern standards (though it was pretty beefy for its time when my wife first built it) with a pre-ryzen amd CPU, and a 970, but it's still running most of what I've been throwing at it (it helps that most of my steam library is 10+ years old)

We're a little short on space in our house, nowhere to squeeze in another desk for a computer so I built it in a HTPC case and I've been gaming on our 70" TV with surround sound with our hue lights synced up to it, and it's been pretty sweet, and astonishingly it hasn't burst into flames from being crammed in my entertainment center with limited airflow.

It's nice to be back to PC gaming, and I'm having almost as much fun tinkering with it and getting everything set up how I want it. Still a couple more tweaks to make, gotta figure out how I want to set up KODI, need to get a decent wireless keyboard and mouse, maybe a couple more controllers, find a way to enable HDMI CEC control so I don't need to fiddle with the PC and receiver volume separately, etc. and then maybe some more upgrades when budget allows

Off the bat, every one of those 258 incidents paints an important picture about the gun violence issue in the US, however there's a whole lot of people who are going to take issue with their methodology because they're defining a school shooting as any time

a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims (including zero), time, day of the week, or reason.

And honestly that feels a little too broad for me.

If a gun is simply brandished, that's just not a shooting. It might be an attempted or potential shooting that was stopped before it started somehow, but by definition it's pretty hard to call that a shooting if no shots were actually fired. It's a closely-related and important statistic that should be mentioned along with actual shooting numbers, but lumping it together with incidents where a gun was actually discharged feels like a really disingenuous to inflate the numbers.

They go into a lot of detail on their website about their methodology and what sort of incidents could potentially be counted as a school shooting but I feel like they missed the mark here a bit.

When we hear the phrase "school shooting" I think we all picture a pretty similar scenario, something like columbine or sandy hook where someone brings a gun to a school during a time where they expect students and staff to be present and open fire intending to do harm to those students or staff, not two assholes having a shootout on the school yard at 3AM on a Saturday when there's no students or staff present, or some parent negligently discharging their firearm in the car while waiting to pick up their child, or any other number of other shooting or gun-related incidents that could occur at a school.

I think it would be more appropriate if the data were narrowed to something like

An incident where a gun is intentionally fired on or at a school property during or up to one hour before or after school hours or any school-sponsored activity where students or staff are present

Leaving one hour to allow for students who are dropped off early or are late being picked up, just kind of linger around the school to hang out, etc.

Which still leaves a bit of wiggle room for the shooters intent, who/what they were aiming at, etc. but that can sometimes be hard to determine objectively so I'd be ok including those, it would also include situations where the gun was fired but no one was actually hit and I'm also ok with including that.

It also would include some situations that aren't the sort of "classic" mass shooter scenario we tend to envision, like two students with a personal dispute or a gang related incident that happens to play out at school with guns, and I'm also ok including those, the core of the issue is shooting happening at school during school functions involving students and/or staff and that fits the bill.

When we leave the definition so broad it leaves too much room for assholes to deflect and nitpick and say that our arguments are invalid because we're making up numbers, even though they miss the point that even one school shooting a year is far too many, never mind the countless other similar incidents that occur as well. I think it's best to get out ahead of that by keeping the definition more narrow.

I work in 911 dispatch, this will vary somewhat from one jurisdiction to another, and this isn't necessarily relevant to how the stats are collected, but it definitely gives some insight into how I frame these incidents in my mind. If I get a call about someone with a gun at a school there are about 10 ways I might enter it (maybe even more, but these are what immediately come to my mind)

1. Suspicious Person- There is someone with a gun at the school. It's holstered, someone saw it in their bag, etc. they're not brandishing it or threatening to use it, and they may or may not be otherwise acting strangely but the gun is just present but otherwise not involved in the situation

2. Disturbance- They're arguing or fighting with someone but the gun is not involved, just present

3. Domestic - same as a disturbance but the involved parties have some kind of relationship- family, roommates, exes, boyfriend/girlfriend, etc.

4. Assault victim- basically a disturbance or domestic where someone is hurt and needs EMS but was not shot (or stabbed, we also have a stabbing code)

5. Armed Subject- Someone has a gun and is using it in a threatening manner but has not fired it

6. Shots fired - a gun has been fired, intentionally or unintentionally, but no one is believed to have been shot

7. Shooting - someone has been shot

8. Active Shooter- the shooter is still there actively shooting (whether or not someone has been hit)

9. Suicide attempt- someone has shot themselves

10. Behavioral/Psych Emergency - there's going to be overlap with this and some of the other incidents, but we might use this code if the person is having a psych issue, is threatening to kill themselves, etc. and needs to be taken for an evaluation or committed but otherwise no one is injured.

Each of those have their own special considerations, different types and amounts of resources are going to be sent with different priority levels, and ideally our police will handle each situation differently as appropriate (cops in my area are generally pretty good at that, but YMMV) and it feels weird to me that using this database's methodology a lot of these could potentially all be lumped in as the same sort of "school shooting" incident.

My dad remembers from his childhood occasionally seeing houses placed under quarantine for diseases like measles and then at some point thanks to vaccines measles pretty much just stopped being a thing in most of the US. He got his polio and smallpox vaccines back in the day, and has lived to see smallpox eradicated and polio nearly so.

My grandfather was born a couple years after the 1918 flu pandemic, he had a brother born a couple years before him who died in infancy, he never talked about it much but the timing lines up that his brother was likely a victim of that pandemic. It was certainly something he heard talked about in his childhood just as we'll probably keep talking about COVID for years to come, and I think it definitely left an impact on him, he always was wary about passing germs along to his grandchildren, he always warned our parents against kissing us and never did himself, the only time he did was on his literal deathbed (cancer, nothing communicable) when he kissed my sister (in a non-creepy familial way) as probably one of his last conscious acts.

He was never one to shy away from a fight, I would have loved to see the hell he would have raised against anti-maskers if he'd lived another decade or so. There are people his age or older still walking among us. These things aren't even out of living memory, we're barely a handful of generations removed from them.

The chickenpox vaccine was introduced when I was in elementary school. I remember a lot of children's shows when I was growing up having a chickenpox episode where one or more of the main characters would get chickenpox, they'd take oatmeal baths and slather on calamine lotion to ease the itching, their parents would discuss having their friends over to get them infected early and give them immunity, etc. It kind of seemed like it was inevitable that many if not most kids would get chickenpox eventually, and at the time it kind of was. The vaccine was still optional at the time, and I remember a lot of discussion about it not being very effective, but a lot of kids in my age range got it, and the number of kids in my school who got chickenpox was probably in the dozens instead of probably hundreds just a few years earlier.

There have been some missteps along the way, my dad had a small hepatitis scare when a blood test turned up antibodies (though no active infection) likely from exposure from reused vaccine needles when he was in the army. The US did a grave disserve to polio vaccination efforts by using them as a cover to track down bin Laden and increased distrust in the vaccine in the process. There have been cases where vaccines have used ingredients that have proven unsafe, where people have had adverse reactions, etc. but still overall, the fact that I have never met anyone who has had smallpox, polio, or measles and probably never will speaks volumes about how much more good than harm vaccines do when 100 years ago I would almost certainly have known people who had died or left disabled or disfigured by those diseases.

This is true, and I did think about mentioning that but decided to keep it brief because once I start talking about trusts I'd find myself out of my depth pretty quickly and probably open up a rabbit hole of other financial strategies I'm not prepared or qualified to go down (and also to keep my comment at a more readable length)

But since we opened that can of worms (and like I said, this is getting out of my depth, so there's a very real possibility that some or all of what I have to say after this is wrong, so take it for what it's worth)

We also don't know how much money we're talking about here. The line between qualifying for benefits and not can be razor thin sometimes, and while we might assume that we're talking about 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars or even more where a trust would absolutely make sense, we might actually only be talking about a couple thousand bucks, maybe not even enough to afford a couple months of rent depending on where you are, but potentially enough to fuck up someone's benefits depending on where some government bean counters drew the line. It might be difficult or impossible to find a financial institution willing to act as a trustee for such a small amount, and there may not be any individual they trust to fill that role, and once the lawyers and such are paid there may not even be much left over.

There's also the possibility that the parents are counting on the sibling(s) to sort of act as trustees without putting it in writing. We don't know what their relationships and personalities are like, or what conversations they've had with their parents that maybe OP isn't privy to. There could be an understanding there that they're getting everything so that they can continue to provide for their disabled sibling after the parents are gone, and OP hasn't been made aware of that (some people are really uncomfortable talking about this kind of stuff and avoid it even though they really should) or misunderstood what the intention is. That of course depends on the siblings being trustworthy and generally having their shit together well enough, which isn't a given of course and their situation could change drastically.

There's also the possibility that a trust is exactly what's happening and OP either misunderstood it or just plain doesn't like it. A lot of people out there are pretty clueless about financial matters. If the siblings were named as the trustee (it's often not a good idea to have the trustee be a close relative, but that's neither here nor there) I could see some people viewing the situation as "they left all the money to my siblings" because they're not getting a big one time payout and the money has to go through their siblings in some fashion.

Again, I'm talking all in hypotheticals, there are countless "ifs," "ands" and "buts" here, we don't know the specifics of OPs situation so we can only speculate.

I don't recall ever hearing that specifically

Somewhat similar though, I remember being told that anything you put out on the internet is out there forever. Which may not technically be true, there's a lot of lost pieces of internet history, but the core of that statement isn't really to be taken literally, it's more that once you put something online it's out of your control what everyone else who might have access to it does with that data, you can't really control what people download, screenshot, save, repost, or when it may resurface.

But back to what you're saying - even with China and Russia, and other attempts at censorship, the internet still carries on. You can take down, wall off, censor, etc parts of the internet for a lot of people, but taking the entire internet down would be a massive undertaking, probably more than what any country or even any realistically feasible alliance of countries could hope to achieve, as long as there are people with computers linked together somewhere, the internet endures in some fashion.

There's a lot of redundancy in the internet, there's no one big box to blow up or one cable to cut that carries the entirety of the internet, it's millions of devices all linked together in millions of different ways that make up the internet. You can take down parts of it, maybe even most of of it, but it would be nearly impossible to never every last thread of the internet without some truly apocalyptic event happening, even if all that's left at the end of the day is two nerds on opposite sides of the planet with ham radios hooked up to laptops sending emails back and forth, or some friends sending memes back and forth on thumb drives via carrier pigeon, you could still say that the internet is alive, if not exactly thriving.

I think it's also worth having frank discussions with your kids about their inheritance and encouraging them to work things out themselves ahead of time.

My family has maybe a bit unusual but I think very healthy relationship with death. It comes for us all eventually, no sense dancing around it.

There's no complicated inheritance situations in my family, if you have kids everything gets divided up evenly among them. If they don't have kids it gets divided up evenly among their nieces/nephews.

So for example my parents estate gets split between my sister and myself, my uncle who doesn't have kids gets split between us and my cousin, my cousin gets his parents' all to himself.

We've already got things divvied up amongst ourselves pretty well. As long as my sister signs over her claim to our parent's house, I'll sign over my third of our uncle's house to her, and she's happy to buy our cousin out of his third or trade him for her current house (which would also have the benefit of getting all 3 of us in the same town, cousin has some disabilities and it would be nice to have us all nearby in case of emergencies, or the payout from my sister or money from sale of her house plus his own inheritance from his parents would set him up pretty well)

We also occasionally call dibs on some other desirable belongings, like my uncles skillsaw

There's no one size fits all answer here, it's going to depend on how much money, how severe the childs disabilities are and what their care needs are, and what other sort of inheritance might be on the table ( for example one child gets the money and another child gets the house)

If the child is able to live on their own, then yeah, it's a dick move and the parents are just playing favorites and being ableist.

If they have significant care needs- nursing home, psychiatric treatment, home health aides, visiting nurses, etc. then there might be some logical arguments to be made. If they're already qualifying for some sort of government assistance then a large windfall of cash could potentially disrupt those benefits since they now have too much money to qualify.

That can be a real headache to navigate, they may need to arrange all new care for themselves, maybe switch doctors, find new housing, etc. which may be a lot for them to manage depending on the extent of their disabilities, and unless that inheritance is incredibly large it will probably run out at some point and leave them in a position where they need to navigate the system to get back on those government benefits, which is often no small feat.

So there could potentially be situations where it's better for them to not leave them money and cause significant disruptions to their care and living arrangements.

This is all totally hypothetical without knowing the specifics of the situation. There's a million different things to consider here and everyone's situation is unique, and at best we're getting one side of this story and don't really know what the parents thoughts and reasoning are since we haven't heard in directly from them (and it could very well be that their reason is just as shitty as it appears on the surface, I won't discount that possibility)

"I don't know what you're up to, but I am so fucking ready for it."

She's a Malinois, and as far as her breed goes, she's probably just about the laziest one in the world, which still puts her high in the running in the list of most energetic dog I've ever met.

I've never seen her walk when running or jumping was an option, she gives 110% to everything she does, even if it's just running up the stairs to go to bed. I'm fairly certain she has never touched half of our stairs because she pretty much just jumps from landing to landing.

My aunt and uncle hosted an exchange student from China.

He was a bit of an awkward weirdo, I kind of got the impression he was somewhat wealthy, seemed nice enough, just weird, and didn't seem to have much interest in experiencing anything American except for buying clothes and such that I guess we're more expensive in China.

After a few months, they noticed their cat walking funny and got him checked out, and found what looked like burns on his paws, and they weren't sure how it happened.

They checked their security cameras, and saw the exchange student holding the cat to the hot stove.

Sent him packing really quick.

People need a place to live, they don't need stocks to live. By owning more properties than you need you are contributing to a scarcity and inflated pricing for a basic necessity.

The picture quality leaves a bit to be desired, but the two jackets do look pretty different to me. It looks like one may be a quarter zip without any chest pockets and the other is a full zip with chest pockets. And because of the differing picture qualities it's kind of hard to say just how similar or different the colors are, they almost look like different colors from one picture of the same jacket to the other.

Also there may have been some deliberate choice in that sort of dark earth tone kind of color (or at least that's what the colors look like to me,) different witnesses could give different answers for what color that jacket even is, I could imagine people calling it black, grey brown, tan, or green, depending on the lighting, how close they were, how much attention they paid, etc. on top of eyewitnesses just being kind of generally unreliable, so until they were able to get the security footage, which probably was at least a few minutes, cops could potentially have been working on conflicting descriptions of the jacket color.

Side note: I work in 911 dispatch, so I spend a lot of my nights trying to get descriptions of people and vehicles, I get a lot of people really struggling to tell me what color something is that's right in front of them, and when we have multiple callers about something we're often going to get as many different descriptions as there are callers. I remember one major incident I worked where depending on which caller you got, the description of the subject was either an older white guy wearing camo, a young black guy in a hoodie, or 3 white teenagers in trench coats.

It also looks like there was just another picture released where he was wearing what looks to me like a black or navy puffy jacket.

Also worth noting, I don't think the NYPD has been totally clear about where these pictures were all taken on the timeline, one was taken at the hostel he was staying at and I'm not even totally clear if it's actually from the same day as the shooting or not.