TACO is an acronym that’s been in use for quite some time. It stands for Trump Always Chickens Out.

Before I start making suggestions, what’s your overall paywall budget? Some sites aren’t month by month but charged annually. If you actually have a newsstand or the equivalent (I’ve not seen one in years), you can of course pick up single copies.

This story lacks the basic info on election results coverage. With 97% of precincts counted, the measure passed by 51.5% to 48.5%, a margin of less than 90,000 votes.

As usual, we’re not getting the whole story. There’s plenty of stuff the company doesn’t make public … “national security” and so forth.

At a casino enjoying a martini?

This is part of why I buy instead of streaming. There’s no “AI”-generated music on my computer or phone, and no entry point for it.

I’m going to look into what my options are, but for now, the dental chair is my main concern. Today, it was phone, tomorrow it’s dentures … maybe I’ll have some bandwidth Tuesday.

Yep. You can’t have the same account on two different devices, and the eSIM has been transferred. I do love me a deadline.

Incorrect Princess Bride quote (no “seem to”), but we’re friends, so I’ll let it slide. I guess my post stayed down. God forbid we have decent homeless people in town.

Proxy satisfaction is always nice, but we seriously brought down a property-management company in a week. That’s going to be a story I tell with pride in my nursing home.

Sorry for my delayed response. I was busy talking to my college roommate on my phone. In 20 hours after this catastrophe, having a new Pixel is a pretty good outcome. Dude drained my account, but he thankfully didn’t realize he could borrow hundreds more and cash that out. So I am only fucked to the tune of $900.

My friend showed up at 10:15 p.m., which I figured was an unreasonable hope. But he’s a good dude who knew how much this meant to me (seriously, you want burners in your corner when things go to shit [he’s not the only one, it’s just that I used his address]).

My cortisol level is not quite back to baseline, but my veins are no longer throbbing out of my middle-aged hands, so, you know, baby steps.

I won’t even be able to know the scope of how fucked I am until I have my new phone set up, which now looks to be tomorrow.

Well, I’ve certainly now learned this $1,250 lesson. The big question is next steps.

Unfortunately, this is precisely the wrong week to rely on the burner community, given Flipside being upcoming and the load-out already having taken place yesterday.

Because there aren’t a lot of people in Austin on here. And I’ve been vehemently arguing against broad-brush arguments that the homeless are a bunch of drug-addicted thieves just in the past week.

The universe, it seems, has a wonderful sense of irony.

I love Beehaw and the Beeple. A local issue is not served by Lemmy.

What’s additionally fucked up is the state of our police department. There’s zero point in filing a report. They simply do not care about the livelihoods of residents; essentially, unless there’s a current risk of bodily harm, they just don’t respond.

Just sitting in a parked car with another squad car (well, they’re usually SUVs at this point) is way easier than doing any policing.

This is simply the reality we’ve come to accept. We nominally have a police force, but they’re still salty after an attempt to divert funds to things like social services and mental health that got the Legislature called into a special session a few years back to make it illegal to lower police budgets. (I shit you not, y’all; anytime Austin attempts anything progressive, Hot Wheels calls a special session to make the new ordinance/plans illegal at the state level.)

They’ve now got a giant budget, but still do nothing, because that’s just easier. No matter how fucked you think Texas is, I guarantee it’s worse.

It’s very fucked up. I get the impression his whole plan on “visiting” me was stealing my phone. Unfortunately, I know he has a gun, which affected my sleep-deprived decisions.

Looks like there’s a chance I can still get a replacement off Amazon today. I’ve got my mom on the order and a friend willing to take the delivery.

It’s really disorienting to not have a phone.

I have a couple of people I could try to nudge (ironically because he introduced me to them), but at this point, I have a prosthodontist appointment tomorrow, and I need to be able to order a Lyft.

Needless to say, I’ll not be willing to let him into the van again.

I did use the Google site before posting, but I had location services turned off for privacy reasons, and that is coming back to bite me in the ass.

That’ll be a useful solution in several years, not tomorrow.