See May 1-16, June 1-15, (View All)
Houston’s own Dwight Silverman does a rundown of adblockers. Ironically it appears on forbes.com, which has a shitload of
Here’s a fascinating comment to another article about adblockers:
I agree. What good is an ad blocker that only gets you locked out of perhaps 70% of all Internet sites you want to visit? I believe HTML5 is directly responsible. Only after it came into general use were sites magically able to detect you are using an ad blocker. Web pages used to be simpler. I remember loading them on 56kbps modem in the 1990s. Now, to read a 2 kilobytes of TEXT, I have to load 5 megabytes or more of cumbersome web pages graphics and ads when all I care about is the 2 kilobytes of text that actually compromises a typical news article, for example. THAT is progress?
Meanwhile, I’ve found “Techblocker” to be better than any of the above ad blockers as it actually bypasses the ad blocker detecters on over a dozen major sites (including Yahoo Mail), but I think it’s only available for Chrome at the present time (itself an inside source of info for Google itself). Ironically, it still didn’t block the detection on Tom’s Guide here, but then I find it ironic this site has an article on the best ad blockers while using an ad blocker detecter itself.
The truth is if web sites loaded static photo ads (like quaint newspaper ads) in pre-loaded image sized forms (that didn’t cause web pages to “jump” like crazy as it loads yet MORE ads for the same 2K of news text), most people wouldn’t even feel the need to “block” ads. But greed is an infinite black hole that can never be filled and so it’s abused to the point where we need an ad blocker just to keep our 2-year old phones from crashing from running out of memory when we only want to read that 2k of text! It’s miserable. But when one of the world’s greatest web browser creating companies is also the world’s greatest seller of ads (Google Chrome and Google/Alphabet), some might say there’s a conflict of interests happening at the very least. What else can the average person do but find a way around the roadblocks? They want to guilt us for using ad blockers, but they don’t care if they send us 5000x the actual information content in the form of ads and make us pay to receive it as well (bandwidth).
In my last dump, I mentioned the long time of waiting for Texas Workforce to consider appeals. I’m still waiting on that appeal (it’s been 14 weeks of waiting for me). In the meantime, Gov. Abbott has helpfully refused the federal extension of unemployment benefits and Texas Workforce Commission is sending out weekly announcements about how they can clawback overpayments. I’ve tried to avoid complaining about personal things on my blog, It’s never been clearer to me how much unemployment benefits and federal extensions of it provide a boost to the economy — irrespective of whether it provides a disincentive or not. Money is money. The same holds true for the refusal of states like Texas to expand Medicaid. The net effect is less spending overall on health care in Texas — that affects jobs and salaries, to say nothing of medical outcomes.
The underlying problem seems to be that Texas fails to set minimum standards about employment and welfare. Texas still has the minimum wage of 7.25, and while the argument commonly is that nobody pays the minimum wage anymore, it means that in a place like Katy — where a living wage for a single person without kids is 14.25, a lot of wages were in the 8-12$ range 5 years ago– and post-COVID, it’s only slightly better (probably 11-15 per hour). At the same time, a lot of jobs are part time (without benefits). People basically end up having to do the 60-90 commute to Houston. Driving time and transportation is a huge factor for me in working unfortunately. On the other hand, I can work from home very efficiently and cheaply for IT/freelance writing job — if only there was enough of those things.
On why we should be putting more insect repellent around our feet and less around our face:
Riehle noted that most mosquitoes are not attracted to our heads. Rather, these bloodsuckers may be more inclined to seek out our feet, which sport bacteria that give off mosquito-enticing aromas. However, most people probably don’t notice a mosquito buzzing around their ankles, he said.
Yesterday while cooking dinner, I watched several comedy specials with middle aged women: Whitney Cummings and a sex robot (truly ground-breaking) and Jen Kirkman. Both have Sarah Silverman vibes. The funny thing about both of them is that both are charismatic — sexy and fun, yet middle aged or approaching middle age. A lot of female comics do sexy humor — in their 20s a female comedienne often tells much dirtier jokes than men because she can get away with it. Nikki Glaser is much dirtier than most stand up comics. Truthfully, I get bored of comedians who go dirty. Actually, that’s not so much an issue than comedians who tell jokes in the exact same format
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