Maybe Don't Use Zoom Actually
A car parked where you're really just not supposed to park a car. Also, Zoom wants to use video of you to train an AI, Ohio voters decisively shut down a bad faith issue, a recap of the Battle of Montgomery, and a few years in the woods.
You're Not Supposed to Park There
A car crashed into the second floor of a house in Pennsylvania on Sunday.
Details are super sparse right now, but we know the family was home, but downstairs and were uninjured. The driver, a 20 year old guy, was injured, and cops say they believe it was "an intentional act."
But like how? Right? The best understanding we have right now is that he fuckin' ramped off a culvert, cleared their driveway and then, presumably, WHAM.
Zooming Away with Your Data
Zoom updated their terms of service and IT AIN'T GREAT.
They made a change to the wording of how they can use your data (for example, your video feed), clarifying that they can do basically whatever the hell they want with it, including "derivative works" which in 2023 means "train an AI."
Zoom may redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content
They pinky swear they will prompt for your consent beforehand, though so.
Anyway, a decent-enough Zoom alternative for lightweight, secure and no-account-needed group video meetings is Jitsi. Have at, its peer to peer and Actually Free.
Ohio Says No, but in a Good Way
Ohio voters came out in record numbers to decisively say "miss me with that shit" against a desperate attempt to continue to subvert the will of the people.
Voters came out for a one-issue special election to determine, among other random changes, if it should take a 60% vote rather than a majority vote for voters to approve a constitutional amendment. This was timed before an election where Ohioans plan to vote on the issue of enshrining abortion rights in their state constitution as many other states have done.
Had the issue passed, it would have also made it harder to even propose an amendment as a citizen, as well as essentially killing the notion of correcting signatures deemed invalid on mail-in ballots.
They really came out there and were like "hey, we're planning a random election in August for a single issue that you should just not worry about its okay". And by "they" I do very much specifically mean the Republican party.
Anyway, billionaires should not exist and should not be able to fund political endeavors.
Protect Our Constitution received most of its funding from Illinois billionaire and conservative donor Richard Uihlein
The Battle of Montgomery
If you've not seen the footage already, allow me to summarize what went down and then implore you to go watch the footage because it is a cinematic masterpiece.
A dinner cruise boat was trying to dock in Montgomery, Alabama. Their dock was blocked by a pontoon boat. The owners of the pontoon boat refused to move their boat when a dock worker told them they weren't allowed to dock there, so the dock worker started just untying their boat because they were being belligerent. The pontooners then attacked the dock worker, at one point making it an 8-on-1 fight.
Seeing the dock worker fighting the pontooners sparked a bunch of reinforcements to join the fight on the side of the dock worker. They ran in from the street above, and one even jumped off the dinner boat and LITERALLY SWAM TO THE DOCK TO BEAT SOME ASS. Not long after, half the dock would be consumed by a brawl for the ages, ending with a man swinging a folding chair of justice.
The detail I've left out is that the pontooners were entirely white and the dinner cruise, dock worker and reinforcements were Black.
Race history in Montgomery is uh… not great. It was a massive slave trade port. It is impossible to ignore the inherent issues there, with a group of obnoxious white people refusing to move their unlawfully docked boat to allow for an entire dinner cruise boat to dock, so much so that one of them started the entire fight with a running punch at the worker.
There's been the expected pearl clutching in reaction to how it ended: the chair-wielding man hit a white woman on the head while she was on the ground. Notably, the woman had joined in the brawl, and per my understanding of The Rules, once you've entered in a dock brawl, you best assume you're leaving with a concussion.
Nobody died. Cops miraculously did not shoot anyone. Scrapes and bruises all around (including egos). At the end of the day, its a relief that nobody is seriously injured, though unavoidably cathartic to see such a quick turnaround of Finding Out.
On This day…
On this day in 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden, a memoir of sorts that covers a span of 2 years, 2 months and 2 days of Thoreau staying in a remote cabin of his own construction by Walden Pond.
Here's the Weather
More Stuff
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- The US FDA has approved an oral pill to help treat postpartum depression