No, this came out after the election was settled. There was a woman that maintained a website covering all these details called BlackBoxVoting or something like that (long gone now).

It can’t be … but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. I remember making fun of Access on StackOverflow circa 2008 and running afoul of some dude there who was like the last living Access consultant on Earth. I’ve never encountered defensive rage like that before or since.

Fun Access fact, the Diebold-manufactured voting machines that featured prominently in the 2000 presidential election cycle used an Access database as their underlying data storage mechanism. Access DBs did incorporate an audit table - which was manually-editable.

Ah yes, the secret to dieting: eat food that tastes like shit.

because that’s what you guys do in the US

Huh? Nobody below the age of 80 likes cottage cheese here. That shit is for people born before WWII to put on their canned peaches.

Your cheese is better than ours, too.

Depends on the gym. Planet Fitness (a huge chain with gyms literally fucking everywhere) requires checking account info (account number and bank routing number) and they automatically deduct the monthly amount and the annual fee. The advantage of this (compared to credit card info) is that a customer can’t do a chargeback through the credit card company and the checking account info never expires. PF’s basic business model is getting people to sign up for a small monthly fee (either $15 or $25) and then either forget about it or not care enough to bother canceling. They certainly don’t want people showing up every day - apparently the average PF franchise has about 6000 members, which would be utterly unworkable if they all actually used the gym. I’ve been going to PF for more than 15 years on a daily basis and sometimes I lose my mind and start thinking I’m actually a valued customer, when in reality I’m surprised I haven’t been banned.

Why would ancient humans have bothered growing bong gourds when they could have just punched holes in empty beer cans instead?

Some fun facts: Grover Krantz, the originator of the concept of human persistence hunting (which Wikipedia labels “conjecture”), was better-known as a staunch advocate for the existence of Bigfoot (there is of course no such thing as Bigfoot - it’s obviously a Yeti in a gorilla suit). Interestingly, he didn’t propose it as an explanation for bipedality, one of the unique characteristics of the human lineage, but rather as an explanation for our big brains, speculating that bigger brains would allow persistence hunters to survive a large fraction of their brain neurons dying from the heat stress that would result from long-distance running during the day.

For apparently no reason, Krantz’ skeleton and that of his favorite dog are on display at the Smithsonian.

I read War and Peace last year just to see what the fuss was all about. There’s a lot of random shit in the book, including a chapter about a dude hunting with his favorite borzoi. He casually mentions that he traded a family of serfs to acquire the dog, which says all you need to know about the status of serfs in early-19th century Russia.

Did you know: Deee-Lite used a sample from the Green Acres theme song in their eponymous 1990 club hit “Groove Is In the Heart”?

Fun fact: After Lenin died in 1924, he was mummified because of the worldwide popularity of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt - not because of any tradition in Russia of preserving the bodies of Tsars or other leaders. The “preservation” job was utterly and completely amateurish, because nobody involved had any idea how to do anything like that.

taxation

You mean like tariffs? Which are a tax on US citizens who import foreign goods? And which are ultimately paid by people who consume foreign goods? Which is fucking everybody.

needless bureaucracy and regulations

Like what’s needed to implement tariffs?

The only thing more annoying than your right-wing rhetoric’s inaccuracy is how fucking tired it is.

“These look great but you forgot to bring the ramrods.”

I grew up in a town in Ohio where John Brown built a tannery (well before the Civil War). That building was fucking well-built and was still standing after more than a century of total neglect, but in the mid-70s some Republicans on the city council had it condemned and torn down over the space of three days, too fast for anyone to take legal action to stop it. Ironically, they initially couldn’t tear it down and had to bring in heavy-duty demolition equipment to bring it down; at one point they were considering explosives. Today it is - you guessed it - a parking lot, ironically enough for a walking trail along the river.

They probably had it torn down just out of general hatred of history, not because John Brown was an abolitionist. Back then, even though Republicans were still assholes, they generally had the same distaste for slavery as everybody else. It took the Reagan Revolution (which kicked off the 1980 election cycle in Philadelphia, Mississippi for some reason) to make racism cool again.

My bus dreams are usually about getting into some tight spot where I have to back up and then smashing shit up when I do. We’re told quite emphatically to never back up and our enormous repair bills justify that. I’ve taken out a few fences myself in the real world.

If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

I think eyebrows count as “top half of my head”, unfortunately. I can sit and watch those fuckers grow in the mirror.

It’s always kind of amused me how grunge rock was marketed as a fresh air alternative to hair bands, and yet … everybody still featured long hair.

Counterpoint: look at any rock band from the 1970s to see what just plain washing with shampoo (very occasionally, apparently) produces. If they ever invent time travel, I’m going to let everybody else handle killing baby hitler (and baby cheetoh I suppose) and go back to the '70s with some conditioner. I will rule the rock world!

Edit: I might also try at least mentioning to people how fucked up it was that these guys were raping 14-year-old girls all the time (and sometimes the same 14-year-old girl).

That’s absolutely it. I was a chronic waker-and-baker for almost thirty years and never had dreams. I quit four years ago and now I have multiple intense dreams every night. I genuinely don’t like it at this point - I spend too much of my first few minutes awake each morning worrying about shit that never actually happened.