Hello. I was taught how to write cursive by hand.
But stuff still happens.
So what's up?
Hey, consider the following.
You're out on vacation, minding your own business, having a grand old time.
Maybe you saw a cool bird.
Maybe you ate a meal.
And then you went home and your house was demolished.
Oh, is that not normal?
Susan Hodgson of Georgia came back home from a vacation
to find that an old family house on her property had been destroyed.
I want to be clear that it doesn't appear to be her permanent residence.
It was like an old house that was in her family,
but they kept it up and they were paying taxes on it and it was her property.
But while she was gone, a demolition crew showed up onto her property
and destroyed the house.
And when a neighbor was like, what the hell is going on?
They were like, mind your own damn business.
Eventually, a family member of Susan's went over and was like, hey, what the hell?
And they checked their permit and it turns out they had the wrong place.
But that wasn't until after the house became a pile of rubble.
Understandably, Susan's not super thrilled about this
and is trying to figure out where to go next from here.
I would be pretty upset myself.
I do have to say, I don't think I'd be super thrilled coming back to a pile of rubble.
It seems to me the only reasonable path forward
is to have the demolition crew put everything back together exactly as it was,
like putting together one of those 3D jigsaw puzzles.
Canada is considering UBI.
Kind of, sorta.
They're looking into it.
The Canadian Senate is investigating what universal basic income would look like
after a bill that was proposed is making some forward momentum.
It's not a sure deal, but they're looking into it, which is more than nothing.
The bill as written would provide a quote,
livable basic income for all Canadians over the age of 18.
That includes permanent residents and refugees with legal status.
What a livable wage looks like, I do not know.
That is not my economy and who knows what they're going to consider a livable wage.
But still.
This wouldn't be the first time that Canada tried out UBI,
although they didn't do it federally, some of the provinces have actually tried it before.
For example, in 1974, apparently Manitoba tried a universal income project,
and they found that when they did that,
mental health hospitalizations went down, as did school dropouts.
Weird! Who would have thought?
It's almost like when a society of human beings come together and help each other,
they all flourish.
I wonder if anyone's ever studied the evolution of humans and what kind of creatures we are.
Nah, nevermind.
I think instead of doing that, we should just assume that we're supposed to be solitary,
self-serving creatures who never should ever interact with anyone else.
As we all know, throughout all of human history,
the greatest civilizations were in shacks by themselves, never talking to anyone.
There have been a lot of wild stories in the news recently,
so let's talk about something a bit more tame.
Like a judge pointing a loaded firearm at a defendant in his own courtroom.
And then being super racist about it and getting fired.
Sorry, I lied to you.
New York Judge Robert J. Purtorti pointed a loaded gun at a man in his courtroom
after claiming the man approached the bench too quickly.
This was back in 2015.
Judge Purtorti would go on to talk about this incident constantly,
to a bunch of his colleagues playing up the size of the man and talking about how black he was.
Yep, large black man, 6'9", built like a football player,
came rushing towards me and I had to defend myself.
Except the man was actually 6' and 165 pounds, and you're not supposed to point a loaded gun at someone,
regardless of how quickly they may or may not be approaching your bench as a judge,
in a courtroom that has bailiffs and security that scans for weapons before they can even enter the building.
Anyway, eight years on, after bragging about this constantly, he was finally fired.
Because the wheels of justice turn real swift.
Remember earlier this year when Reddit did a bunch of dumb bullshit and pissed off most of their community
because they wanted to be more like how Elon was doing Twitter?
Well, they're doing that again.
Reddit is reportedly considering removing themselves from search results,
blocking Google and Bing,
citing that they're trying to prevent AIs from training on their user data without paying for it.
I want to draw some attention to that though, because it's not paying you for your data,
paying Reddit for your data.
So it was originally reported that Reddit was going to start requiring people to log in
to read anything on the site.
Reddit has since insisted that that's not what they're planning to do,
but they are kind of planning to pull out of Google.
They're saying that they don't need search to survive,
and they're basically saying pay us for our users data.
This comes at a time where Google search results are already struggling,
and we previously saw how much it gets worse when Reddit basically disappears from Google search results,
so they kind of have a point there.
Or rather, they have a point in saying, hey, your search results are garbage,
and we're one of the only places online where genuine publicly indexable conversation happens,
even if that conversation is primarily just misogyny and transphobia.
We are entering a phase of these massive corporations having unbridled control
over the vast majority of our internet infrastructure,
where they're all just trying to take jabs at each other and be the last one remaining.
And guess who loses?
Us.
Do I think there should be ample discussion on the internet with a whole bunch of different topics
and a place where everybody can find their community and learn a lot and exchange ideas?
Yeah.
Does it gotta be Reddit?
Please no.
The internet was built to have many a website, not five of them.
But what do I know?
I just worked in consumer technology for 15 years and left because I couldn't handle the corruption anymore.
On this day in 2001, Apple released the first iPod.
Despite other products already existing in the personal audio device space,
the iPod took over the industry at some points having 70% of the market share.
90% if you only include stuff that had hard drives in it.
The iPod line would go on to eventually be discontinued in May of 2002
after selling 450 million products.
That is a lot of U2 albums.
Lightning round.
Google has been found guilty in a gender discrimination suit
and now must pay former executive a million dollars
because they are promoting people around her who were men and less qualified.
Geico is laying off 6% of their workforce and is also instantiating a return to office policy.
Because of course.
Cops in New York City have arrested over 100 protesters
who were out protesting the Israel assault on Gaza and calling for a ceasefire.
It's a good look.
Arresting people calling for a ceasefire.
The data breach of 23andMe continues to grow in scale and controversy
as the company is not entirely sure just how much data was taken.
Hackers are continuing to release the private information of people
using their genetic code to target specific ethnicities and nationality.
Another defendant in the ongoing court case in Georgia over the election interference that Trump did
has pled guilty and will be flipping and testifying against the other defendants including Trump.
This is the second one to do that in just a matter of days.
A third party investigation into misinformation on Twitter about the Israel Hamas conflict
has found that blue checkmark accounts are responsible for at least 74% of that false information.
Mitch McConnell has stated that he is going to support Joe Biden's $105 billion aid package
for Israel and Ukraine.
Speaking of Israel, Israel has carried out a further aerial assault against Gaza,
bombing locations that citizens were told to seek shelter
while also attacking the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria.
Also, Israel has free healthcare and free college.
So...
As we enter another week of the US not having a speaker of the House,
House Republicans are still scrambling to figure out what the fuck to do
as nine people are now running for the gavel.
And finally for today, Tinder is launching a new feature that will let you invite friends and family
to come suggest accounts to you to match with.
Send me your invite. I'll tell you who to do it.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to StuffKeepsHappening.online for sources, bonus content,
and in-depth instructions on how to do the Macarena.
My name is Endeavorance. I'll be back on Wednesday.
Take care and be well.