ndrosen

This month I will be celebrating a very particular birthday. With my new health insurance, I am now eligible for a program that enables me to go back to the YWCA.

I am absolutely overjoyed about this. I had to give up my Y membership when my job was cut in half with the pandemic, five years ago, and I've missed it dreadfully. I dug my Y membership card out of a drawer (I even had an old towel card that still had some punches left on it) and presented myself at the Y membership desk with my new Silver Sneakers number and was duly reinstated.

Now I regularly use the treadmill, rowing machine, weight machines, and especially—oh joy—the sauna. I am sore, because I have not been diligent as I should about using weights, but I am determined to do so now.

This is definitely one perk that has come with growing older.

Background: a sauna. Underneath the sauna light are the words "Eliminating racism, empowering women, YWCA. In front of the sauna bench is a rowing machine. Hand weights rest on the sauna bench. Lower center: A silver sneaker.

Silver Sneakers

15 Silver Sneakers

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: excited

brainwane

Over in this MetaFilter thread I've been going on and on about:

the books use the medium of prose well, including unreliable narration; how can the TV series adapt that? can it?

the bookending of the two big rescues at the start and end of All Systems Red, and how Wells describes people helping each other overcome their automatic patterns

etc.

I welcome your thoughts! I have spent like 3 hours this week talking about this stuff and would happily talk 3 more.

thewayne

It's moving back into the beta preview builds, which means they're hoping for a public release in coming months.

As if we need a reminder, here's some reasons as to why it's bad.

1. It will eat approximately 15% of your TOTAL disk space.
2. If you're running a solid-state disk, it will increase your disk wear. This means your disk will fail sooner than it should. This is not as problematic as your traditional spinning rust hard drive.
3. Increased CPU use, possibly laggier system. We don't know how much CPU resource it will use IRL.
4. While it is theoretically secured behind your login, we don't know how secure it is. The last time around for it, it was capturing banking information, medical info, SSNs, etc.
5. We don't know if it might be reporting things upstream to someone. Guaranteed that once it gets into the beta program, much less general release, there will be privacy and security boffins who will be watching their firewall logs for what activity it is generating.

I expect we can anticipate further privacy issues with this thing on-going. And if you're not running it, and you send sensitive or confidential information to someone who is running it, well, your information will be hoovered up by their system.

Broadly speaking, it's probably not a good idea for a lot of people. I certainly do not recommend it. The article has recommendations on how to disable it, I don't think we have solid information on how to uninstall it at this time since it is not an actual released feature yet.

https://gizmodo.com/windows-controversial-recall-is-back-heres-how-to-control-it-2000589002

jsburbidge

In journalism, the use of the passive voice, usually discouraged elsewhere stylistically, seems to be endemic in headlines.

The problem is that the impact of the headline becomes very different when the agent is omitted. The CBC has a headline: "Carney attacked for wanting 'free ride,' 'hiding' from public amid latest campaign break". It would leave a different impression if it said "Leaders of the CPC and Bloc attack Carney for wanting 'free ride,' 'hiding' from public amid latest campaign break", which is in fact what the article is about.

pegkerr

I went to the Hands Off protest on April 5. The one I attended was a smaller one across the river in St. Paul, but not the one at the capitol--that one drew about 25,000 people, I understand. I chose to go to a closer one, where I hoped it would be easier to park, and that indeed turned out to be true.

naomikritzer was there, too.

The weather was cold and breezy (I'll know next time not to big a big flimsy card for a placard, because the wind kept trying to take it away like a sail). But the sky was a brilliant blue (I used it at the background for this collage).

There were several hundred people there, and I saw no counter-protestors. Many cars honked in support as they drove by (although one yelled out the window, "Get a job!" and I thought to myself Dude. It's a Saturday.). We all interspersed our chants with friendly chatting. We all found comfort in our solidarity of purpose and trading of experience. What can we do?

I made the deliberate choice, which I never have before, to blur the faces in the collage other than my own. What a strange world we are entering, where that feels necessary.

The headline in today's newspaper read, "Students With Visas Live in Fear," and I thought about the quartet of Norman Rockwell paintings "The Four Freedoms," especially the one entitled "Freedom from Fear." How have we come to this point, where we are losing these basic freedoms?

Image description: against a brilliantly blue sky background, various people hold protest signs.

Hands Off

14 Hands Off

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: determined

thewayne

I am shocked, shocked I say, to find that the tariffs have been altered so soon.

China is at 125%, and they've responded in kind.

Democrats had several Republicans signed on to a bill to claw back the POTUS's ability to unilaterally enact tariffs, a power normally reserved to Congress. The only reason he's been able to is he invoked an 'emergency', granting him extraordinary powers. Pretty transparent power grab is what it is.

Now, how much money did the top 0.1% make, shorting the stock market? My investment fund is down 7% since this fiasco started, 9% since he was elected to office, though it's up a tic today.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-pauses-tariffs_n_67f3ecfbe4b0afc2a9d7c2a7

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Reading

2025 52 Card Project: Week 15: Silver Sneakers

Discussing the upcoming Murderbot TV show

Microsoft's AI Recall feature slowly moving towards release. Again.

Active and Passive

2025 52 Card Project: Week 14: Hands Off

POOF Tariffs gone down to 10%, except for China

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