Right now I am working on an exposé on something which lurks beneath Meta’s shiny exterior — the shocking scams going on in Facebook Marketplace ads for apartment rentals in Montreal. It seems to be at least a semi-organized thing because I’m seeing a lot of patterns emerging from my investigation so far. so stay tuned!
The ultimate “fuck you” from the City of Montreal
Imagine this scene – it’s 11h30pm and you just got home, you were supposed to be about 500 miles away except for an incredibly frustrating car issue (more on that in a later post). So you park in the drop-off area in front of your apartment building because you need to take your daughter and your dog to your apartment before looking for a proper parking spot. So you wake up the little dear, leash the dog, grab as much luggage as you can, head upstairs, put the youngun to bed and make sure the K9 has food, take a leak, then get back there. You’re up there maybe 5 minutes before you head back down to find a place to park the whip.
Only when you get there there’s something on your windshield… a parking ticket. At 11:35pm on a Thursday.
And then it strikes you that there is a bunch of data entered on there and do a bit of math in your head, and realize that the parking warden must have seen you wrangling with the kid, the dog and the luggage, and then swept in, issued the ticket, and disappeared again like The Flash.
That pisses me off.
I’m not saying that people should be expected to help me out when I’m struggling with something, but when it’s clear that I’m just taking care of the fam and dropping people off it seems like bad faith for some asshole to just sweep in and deliberately kick me when I’m down. And if that’s the kind of people that the City of Montreal hires to monitor street parking, well, that just sucks.
I’m really curious to see exactly who it is that would be such a jerk, so I’m thinking that maybe I should establish exactly who it is by taking and posting photos — I have a front-facing apartment so that shouldn’t be so difficult — and maybe one day confront this person and tell them about my concerns about how they’re doing their job.
Anyway I’m still pissed off. Maybe I should let my dog poop on the City Hall lawns and not clean it up… I really feel like I need to get some retribution here, $102 worth of it. That’s potentially a lot of poop.
This is a normal title for a political article in 2024
Yes, this is a screencap of the Rolling Stone web site, not altered.
Elon Musk Keeps Spreading a Very Specific Kind of Racism
If nothing else positive comes out of his acquiring Twitter, it will at least have provided the public with an opportunity to see how obsessed Elon Musk is with race-related conspiracy theories. A surprising amount of it is just plain creepy.
Elon Musk Keeps Spreading a Very Specific Kind of Racism (Mother Jones)
To say it looks dodgy is an understatement
A second Boeing whistleblower has suddenly died “after a struggle with a sudden, fast-spreading infection.” Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?
Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died (Seattle Times)
“If it’s Boeing I ain’t going”?
Considering they’ve made probably more than half the commercial aircraft flying today, what’s coming out in the news about Boeing’s transformation since their acquisition of Mcdonnell-Douglas is frightening. Some people are even referring to the merger as a testament to the genius of MD management, because “they bought Boeing with Boeing’s money”. The Seattle giant went from being an engineering-first aircraft company to an accountant-first corporation that happened to make aircraft, and that’s when things started going wrong. Even the headquarter move to Chicago was, in hindsight, a big tell that at the corporate level engineering was no longer job #1. But it gets worse.
Suicide Mission (The American Prospect)
See also: The Strange Death of a Boeing Whistleblower (The American Prospect)
With the spotlight on him Elon Musk doesn’t look like much of a genius anymore
A highlight: “Musk is a right wing demagogue and a pathetic, narrow-minded racist, one that endorses causes that suppress the marginalized and champion white supremacy.”
The Descent of Elon Musk by Ed Zitron
Climate change leveled up last year and it’s bad
There’s really no other way to interpret these charts showing the daily average sea surface temperature. About a year ago there was a noticeable increase in average sea temperatures, a serious bump up, and as you will be able to see from this year’s sampling this appears to be an irreversible change.
The article’s author is much more knowledgeable about the details of it so I’ll recommend you read his article: The Climate Charts Are Not Okay.
New roommate has arrived!
His name is Taz! He is an English bulldog, almost 8 years old, roughly 70 pounds, and is recovering from knee surgery. He was entrusted to me this weekend by the Mission Mayday dog rescue. He seems to like it here so far! Here are a few early photos.
News from the 2024 Australian Grand Prix
Confusion is said to reign in the paddock at Melbourne as Aston Martin driver Lance Stroll beat his teammate Fernando Alonso, leading to a bunch of people wondering around saying “is it like opposite day or something?”
Also Yuki Tsunoda made it to Q3 while his teammate Daniel Ricciardo bowed out in Q1 and Lewis Hamilton fails to get to the final stage of qualis. So, except for guessing the winner of the race (too easy) it should be a very exciting race.