Thank you for this!
punkwalrus
joined 2 years ago
TIL ancient Romans used communal toilets—stone benches with keyhole-shaped holes—where people sat side by side without privacy, chatting while waste drained beneath them using flowing water.
It's pretty scary: I am seeing it in the IT sector as well. It's not just knowledge; anyone can look up things, even Einstein did it. "I never memorize anything that I can look up," he said once, about the why he never memorized cosine tables and such. But it's basic logical flow of thought and problem solving. Like the skills behind the knowledge, that I see less and less of.
TIL ancient Romans used communal toilets—stone benches with keyhole-shaped holes—where people sat side by side without privacy, chatting while waste drained beneath them using flowing water.
TIL ancient Romans used communal toilets—stone benches with keyhole-shaped holes—where people sat side by side without privacy, chatting while waste drained beneath them using flowing water.
Instead of Orange Man doing Tariffs would it not have been better for him to talk about shopping locally and so forth. And giving more tax breaks to companies that stay and sell in the US?
I have seen some rhetoric about this, like "a few bad apples," but here's the problem with this and a lot of enforcement jobs.
- Polite and decent people, on average, dislike confrontation. Thus, are not particularly attracted to these types of jobs.
- This leads to an uneven amount who are fine with confrontation or even like it. Some of these people are sociopaths and psychopaths.
- People who are psychopaths are actually very attracted to position where they have power over people.
- US Customs are not regulated under the same laws as police or military. They can do what they want, when they want, with little to no discretion.
Are all US customs agents bad? No, of course not. But unchecked power is dangerous for anything. I can't tell you what percentage is or is not, because you can't measure a negative. But I see this in military, police, hired guards, and politics.
Many years ago, they cavity searched an underage girl at my local airport (Dulles) as she returned with her family from a vacation in Jamaica. They separated her from her family, did not tell her family, and searched all her holes "for drugs." They defended their actions by saying, "if we told people we didn't cavity search babies, they'd hide drugs inside babies." Essentially admitting, with no shame, they'd cavity search an infant. All in the name of "stopping drugs." Oh and the girl? US citizen, but dark skinned. The mistake they made was her dad was a powerful attorney and went public.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106hhrg66023/html/CHRG-106hhrg66023.htm
https://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/circle/raceprofiling/stories.racial.profiling.html
These are two types of cartoon sounds when a character snores.
The "Inside you there are two wolves" is the name of a proverb which began being parodied towards the end of 2018 and through the beginning of 2019. In the original proverb, a grandfather says there are two wolves fighting inside him, an evil one and a good one. His grandson asks, "who will win?" The grandfather replies, "The one you feed." In parodies, the story is often simplified to "There are two wolves inside you. One is X. The other is X. You are X." The proverb's actual origins are murky. It has been attributed to Christian pastor Billy Graham in 1978, as well as the Cherokee Native American tribe.
Basic setup for me is scripted on a new system. In regards to ssh, I make sure:
- Root account is disabled, sudo only
- ssh only by keys
- sshd blocks all users but a few, via AllowUsers
- All 'default usernames' are removed, like ec2-user or ubuntu for AWS ec2 systems
- The default ssh port moved if ssh has to be exposed to the Internet. No, this doesn't make it "more secure" but damn, it reduces the script denials in my system logs, fight me.
- Services are only allowed connections by an allow list of IPs or subnets. Internal, when possible.
My systems are not "unhackable" but not low-hanging fruit, either. I assume everything I have out there can be hacked by someone SUPER determined, and have a vector of protection to mitigate backwash in case they gain full access.
- The grandson of an amateur naturalist rejects the church, and hooks up with a Southern Chicago native, resulting in a breach of intricate personal human data the scope of which could be disastrous.
- A boy nicks a ticket punch from a bus operator, and now I have to attend mandatory training on social engineering.
- Someone figured out how to store electricity in rocks, and now democracy is being threatened by liars
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When I was in theater camp as a pre-teen, one of our actors was a very enthusiastic foot guy. I had heard of foot fetishes, but never understood them. But this guy was like an overexcited fan boy of feet. My curiosity triggered this guy into a huge brain dump, and one of the things he went on about about how feet were the "true expression of a person's feelings." Feet turned towards you? They like you. One foot pointed away? They don't. He then showed me how girls' feet would match their mood, so no matter what parts they were rehearsing, he could tell their underlying mood: anxiety, sadness, anger, happiness, etc... I have no idea if he was right, but that was my first exposure to another person's fetish. I could only understand it abstractly, but I found it fascinating.