pdxfed

The Melo pick, while not surprising, is disappointing. I can't think of many players who did less with his talents and the situations he had. I had hoped that the NBA would stop honoring chuckers after the 90s; the last 10 years has seen the true elevation of "team" ball, San Antonio in 14/15 and GS for their stretch (and I'd argue Boston's failed few years showed you simply cannot win with hero ball and no defense and when Tatum finally stopped trying to be Kobe they finally won but I'm not here to argue about Boston).

Melo was never able to put aside his ego, arrogance or ignorance and learn to be part of a system on offense, let alone defense which he showed consistent contempt for. The closest he got to competing was in Denver--and that was mostly thanks to Chauncey and over-performances by most of the rest of the team. He immediately took that great team and opportunity and decided to get a bag instead, moved to NY and took himself out of competitive basketball in hims prime so he could be a NY superstar and work on his brand and celebrity which Denver couldn't offer. He took less money to go to NY, and because he demanded a trade before his contract was up, it forced NY to give up most of the young talent they had--so he arrived to a historically struggling basketball city that had been building a nice young core that it had to gut to get him. I don't recall if they ever even made the playoffs with Melo. He should have been booed at every touch for his duration there.

Melo never wanted it in the NBA, shrunk in the big moments, never committed to any sacrifice nor leading by example...until he finally had a mini-renaissance with a reduce role on the Blazers--something had he done it years prior would have made him a wicked weapon as a 6th man, but with that ego it wasn't happening.

If Melo gets in, Bradley Beal should get it. Can score with their eyes closed but want no part of what it takes to win. Hopefully the last relics of a dinosaur era where stats didn't matter.

Howard did more and did enough. Intensely unlikable guy, and while his ring wasn't really "his", he played some nice support minutes to AD and added value and managed to keep his idiocy in check thanks to the bigger dogs having him on a leash. Howard deserves HOF in my book.

Ziply was a dumb pipe with decent rates for symmetrical fiber with moderate usage. No good can come of this for customers, hope Kahn blocks it.

Screw your workers for 30+ years, move your production, make them embarrassed with your company name by eliminating engineering excellence and outsourcing quality to lowest bidder, withhold raises for a decade, remove a real retirement plan and see what happens.

Good for them.

I received several texts today on my personal phone number addressed to a minor child in my household for whom I provide health insurance from Kaiser.

1. I opted out of Kaiser text message communications. They don't respect it because Marketing?
2. The messages are addressing a minor child, yet sent to me, the adult. Kaiser would know their age. If they're young, directly texting them is a violation of parental consent. If they're a dependent there could be all kinds of privacy concerns for say a teen who maybe doesn't want their parents to be involved in such conversations.
3. I went to Kaiser's website to make a complaint. They don't provide an e-mail contact so you have to use a web submission form. Attachments (e.g. screenshots) aren't allowed. I copied in the text of the text messages after noting my concerns above and tried to submit. The web form said "unsupported characters", which I then spent 30 minutes trying to guess which of the characters from the texts they sent me might be unsupported by their website.
4. I decided to call their web support to find out which characters were unsupported, I'm sure I wasn't the first person to have the issue. They asked for personal identifying information that isn't necessary to provide website support, spent 5 minutes locating my account, and then told me they'd have to transfer me to a different region as they don't support my region.
5. They transferred me and I received an audio notice that the region was experiencing technical difficulties and the call disconnected.
6. I went back to the web form to open a complaint about their web form and submitted it suggesting they identify which characters are not permitted. The form also is about 3 lines of text high but accepts 1,000 characters which makes it very difficult to read as the web user (I'm sure a dark pattern to reduce form submission)
7. I called support again to try to reengage them to find out if they could identify the characters so I could submit the ticket myself. I got a different agent and had to tell them my original complaint and then what had just happened. They said they didn't know which characters were permissible, that my regions support shouldn't be down as they had no alerts, and wouldn't be able to find out which characters the form could use, despite being web support. They said they could take my complaint over the phone.
8. I asked what else they needed to make the complaint. The woman said just a minute and pulled up a form after talking to a colleague and asked me to start from the beginning to make my compliant. I hung up.
9. I went back on the website, typed out the entirety of the text messages I had received, my concern and the form allowed me to submit. The text messages must have had a hidden character or space that wasn't visible to me when copying/pasting.

Now I wait to hear back on my two complaints. All so that, after furiously and competently struggling against the machine, I get back to a place where maybe if I'm lucky they will respect my communication preferences, not contact my child without my permission, potentially fix their shit website, which would leave me maybe about as good off as I was before I was aware of these issues.

I feel like Calvin at the bottom of the big snowball hill he and Hobbes used, only in the modern US it's a shit snowball and it's full of companies who are technologically incompetent and aren't incentivized to follow even the laws they likely helped shaped through lobbying. The above issue is hardly even bad compared to other situations I or others have been through, it's the routiniety of it that is so dystopian.

Edit: 10. IT support responded to my ticket tonight. They didn't read the complaint and provided boilerplate AI template responses on how to submit a ticket when logged in as a customer.They also provided instructions on how to take a screenshot and asked me to respond to their e-mail and attach it so they could review. I responded telling them I didn't need instructions on how to take a screenshot or how to submit a message, that was included in my ticket which they didn't read--I needed a functional communication system, and reviewing the above points and then attached screenshots. I received an automated response almost instantly from their system that I had responded to a ticket that had already been closed and that Kaiser hoped they had resolved the issue to my satisfaction. No ability to re-open the ticket, no contact e-mail or phone number to continue to try to resolve the issue.

If anyone else uses this emulator and (unfortunately) Windows, are you seeing turbo run throughs when loading ROMS? This updates were installed yesterday and they're the only thing I can think of unless the rom speed can be controlled elsewhere in the system I'm not seeing:

2024-10 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Version 23H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5044285)

2024-10 Cumulative Update for .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.8.1 for Windows 11, version 23H2 for x64 (KB5044033)

Cheers.

edit - fixed with tip below (- key slows down emulation)

I posted about this 3 months ago and it was $750--glad to see the measure is going for it. The $1,600 is per person, not household. Minors count.

Large corps ($25m in revenue minimum) pay.

Replacing a dishwasher. Most of the mid-range options now come with fucking Wi-Fi. Found a model I liked, no info in manual and support from Samsung was of course, useless since it wasn't already in the manual and wanted to keep talking about their exciting "smart things" app. gag.

I saw a youtube video of a guy disconnecting wifi cable on a fridge. I'm fine doing that if I have to open up the board but it'll probably be smaller than the fridge and who knows if it'll be helpfully labled like the one in the video was. Internet searching showed me there may be oven keypress combinations to turn wi-fi radio on/off. Anyone have anything similar/advice for Samsung appliances, specifically dishwashers?

Full bill text: https://sos.oregon.gov/admin/Documents/irr/2024/017text.pdf

TLDR; Oregon corporate tax has a minimum rate of 1%. This ballot measure would raise it to 3% and give $750 to each Oregon resident (including children).

Get ready for an Uber/Lyft level of corporate ads and media spamming to try to sink this common sense bill.

Other than "dont' use Godaddy", what do I need to know? I've never owned a domain or had a website of my own before.

1. Domain registration/host recommendations?
2. Web hosting recommendations? Should I mix #1 and #2?
3. Website template creation suggestions? Have fairly simple needs like service offerings and contact forms but want something without rotating construction cones.
4. What else should I consider? Security? e-mail?
5. Am open to all-in-one for the above, just would like to understand tradeoffs, what to look for/avoid.

TIA

It's strange and unintuitive that my own submitted posts are hidden with this basic feature. Given the slow pace on some communities as Lemmy grows, it gets really repetitive without the ability to filter out read posts. On the other side though, the ability to review my posts and check back on them seems pretty basic as a feature.

Is there a deliberate reason Lemmy functions like this?

X-Post from Uplifting News:

There is no law of economics that says natural changes in demand or technology have to be met with brutal, unanticipated layoffs, that MEANINGFUL retraining can't be offered, or that unemployment payments should be poverty wages.This article shows one country's industry doing the first two at least!

As an American it's always been hard to believe the absolute sloth and lack of investment shown in helping workers retrain. I'm from Oregon, and we still have communities that never recovered from forestry preservation initiatives in the 80s. In laid the groundwork for bitter, powerless, formerly proud souls to be courted by lying politicians. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising given companies want to minimize investment in worker training here while being surprised they can't hire qualified employees 🤔. If only there were solutions...