That sounds great. I have 10 days of vacation a year (not required by law) and 3 sick days (required by law in my state). 60-80 hours a week, and this is a “good” job. It’s been 12 years and I can’t keep this up much longer. But I look at other people’s jobs for a living, and I know it could be worse.

Well, there’s that, and also

• Having to work really long hours to try to make ends meet
• Being underpaid
• No or minimal time off work (vacation and sick time both, and sometimes even medical leave doesn’t protect you all that much)
• Poor worker’s rights in general
• Crushing cost of housing
• Crushing cost of education
• Food and everything else you need to live is getting more expensive all the time, and the quality often goes down
• Poor quality of medical care (on top of the exorbitant cost)
• Not being able to spend much time with friends and family because they’re all drowning in work or otherwise struggling
• Thinking about the number of friends and family who have killed themselves, come close, or are likely to try

That made me think of the screaming choir from Finland. He says

Do people need to shout? Yes, that is necessary. Human being comes to this world, it’s the first thing they do.

It feels good to go to a concert and just scream your head off.

Were you pretty sure the price would go down, or did you just roll the dice? I’ve watched prices at the places I’ve lived, and they only ever seem to go up. As in, I’m paying $1600, about to get raised to $1800, and the unit next door is listed for $1900. But one place used RealPage, and I would bet the other one used something like that too.

Yeah. The voice stays young if you take care of it and are healthy. You can be 60 and sound like 30.

Well I’ll be. 20 times their body length.

Officers or prosecutors withheld the existence of multiple witnesses and police reports, including one of an attempted armed robbery at a gas station across the street from the furniture store within hours of the murders. The original judge also behaved inappropriately, the lawyers say, getting a doctor to prescribe Valium to a holdout juror, who only then voted to convict.

Withholding evidence is not that uncommon, unfortunately, but it looks like it was especially bad in this case. And giving Valium to a juror is an egregious overreach. The full details of what happened are even worse than it sounds at first glance.

She was under a lot of pressure because she wanted to talk about the evidence and the other jurors didn’t. They yelled at her and heckled her, basically, until she fainted. The judge finds out and says it’s no problem. Defense lawyer asks for a mistrial, gets turned down. Juror says she doesn’t need a doctor. Then the judge makes a phone call, in secret, and gets her doctor to give her Valium. Enough that the other jurors thought she was “floating.”

The worst part is, the Florida supreme court saw no problem with that. They said it wasn’t judicial misconduct, it was just the judge being concerned and looking out for her.

This is the aria. It’s from an opera called Cosi Fan Tutte.

I’d say even one landlord is too many, but easier to deal with. The scale this seems to be happening at is mind boggling and should be criminal, in my opinion. Or whatever it takes to stop this.

I understand that, but at some point they will hit a number where people in the area can’t afford the 1st month (or more) down or even monthly payments.

I lived in a place where that happened. There were very obvious changes as the rent kept going up. (I stayed because everywhere else was going up just as much.)

• Long-term tenants moved out.
• A lot more one bedrooms had roommates.
• People had less furniture. Sometimes just a mattress on the floor and a plastic chair.
• A lot more three-day notices and eviction notices on people’s doors.
• Some apartments turned into Airbnbs.
• One apartment turned, very not surreptitiously, into a “massage” place.
• More and more units stayed empty for months.

None of that stopped the rent from going up. If anything, it went up faster.

The article does mention him by name. His part of the story starts in section 5 (the detective and the sheriff). I couldn’t believe the part where the mole brought a bug to the Kinch’s house, his dog stole it, and then he just handed it back without asking questions.

Same guy who bragged about being on a “black squad” and woke up with blood on his hands, wondering if he had killed someone.

Link for anyone who missed the article. It’s a long read, but worth it.

Yeah. And how is it that corporations, or big businesses in general, have elevated themselves to an almost holy status? Why is it murder when Blackrock kills 17 civilians in Iraq (Nisour Square), but not when an insurance company denies an operation that a doctor who’s at the top of their field says could save your life? And the hospital helpfully tells you it will cost over a million dollars. For all the non-Americans, that’s not an exaggeration.

And even with Blackwater, it was only the individual employees who got convicted. The company just kept going under a different name. And the employees got pardoned later.

Here you go. Courtesy of Courthouse News.

Yeah. Those keys on the piano are E and F. You can see those notes in the sheet music for the title track. Those long rows of notes are a bunch of E’s and F’s.

If you hit the play button in the bottom left corner, you can hear a computer-generated version of the song. Real version here.

And the newer threads (from the last 1-2 years) often just aren’t that helpful. Lots of people who don’t know what they’re talking about, or comment just to say they have the same problem.

I can usually get a helpful answer by trying a couple search engines or just fighting with Google, but it takes longer than it should sometimes.

And wealthy or well-connected. If you’re poor, you don’t necessarily have much of a chance.

The link is a long read, but interesting. The story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 for supposedly setting a fire that killed his three kids.

In December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, of the Chicago Tribune, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of Hurst’s report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation. The experts concurred with Hurst’s report. Nearly two years later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson had been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”

You get told it’s just pneumonia, but it keeps coming back for years.

Eventually someone figures it out and says you have mesothelioma. You travel the country for a few years, looking for treatment wherever you can. It costs everything you have.

Somewhere along the way, you have to put down $120,000 in cash for a surgery that gives you a few more years. But your last years are still mostly pain and exhaustion.

I wish my uncle hadn’t died the way he did.

Some kids have died at camps like this. The link is the story of a 16 year old who died in Arizona in 1994.

He had to hike for miles a day and sleep with no blanket or sleeping bag in temperatures below freezing. He had no food for 11 days out of 20, partly as a punishment for being sick.

He complained about being sick for weeks - stomach pain, falling down, hallucinations. On the day he died, it took him an hour to crawl 20 feet to the fire. He died from an infection from a perforated ulcer. The staff were standing around making fun of him when he collapsed for the last time.

The owners of the camp pleaded guilty to negligent homicide. One of the counselors was convicted of felony neglect.

Earlier this year, a 12 year old suffocated to death at a wilderness camp in North Carolina. His death was found to be a homicide.

Fascinating! So oxygen from the air (or wherever) + hydrogen from food = water.

Plants can make their own food, and birds can make their own water :)

That’s what I thought too, but bones are about 1/3 protein with a lot of fat and minerals. Kind of like tonkotsu broth.

They also store well. If the vultures find more than they need, they’ll keep the extra bones in a storage place really high up. The fat content drops a lot when the bones dry out, but the protein is still there.

The downside is bones don’t have a lot of water, so bearded vultures need a source of fresh water in their territory.