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"It was a coincidence." https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1613267212269391872

Parler’s parent company has laid off a majority of its staff Parlement Technologies, the parent company of “censorship-free” social media platform Parler, has laid off a majority of its staff and most of its chief executives over the last few weeks. The sudden purge of staff has thrown the future of Parler, one of the first conservative alternatives to mainstream platforms, into question. Parlement Technologies began laying off workers in late November, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. These layoffs continued through at least the end of December, when around 75 percent of staffers were let go in total, leaving approximately 20 employees left working at both Parler and the parent-company’s cloud services venture. A majority of the company’s executives, including its chief technology, operations, and marketing officers, have also been laid off, according to a source familiar with the matter. George Farmer, husband to conservative influencer Candace Owens, is the current CEO of Parlement Technologies, Parler’s parent company. Farmer replaced Parler’s former CEO, John Matze, in May 2021, shortly after the app was unbanned from app stores. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in February 2021, Matze said he was ousted for his desire to reshape the platform’s moderation policies. When asked for comment, an external PR representative who previously worked on Parler’s account informed us that she no longer works with Parler. Parlement Technologies did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Verge.

It is indeed.

Oh yes, my hubby wanted to do this. He had me reupholster his mower seat instead. Never again. I did a decent job of it, but never again.

@Jolly said in When you've lost Frommer's...: @LuFins-Dad said in When you've lost Frommer's...: We took Lucas back in 2014 for a week. It was absolutely everything that I hoped for. We spent a LOT (to my way of thinking), and we left agreeing it was worth the cost and planned on upgrading the next visit. We took Lucas and Finley to Universal this last May, and spent a day at Magic Kingdom. Universal was great. Maybe not quite as good as Disney, but close. We also spent less than we had on the Disney trip in 2014, so a great trip. We are thinking of going back in March-April while we still have the annual passes. During the Universal trip, we took 1 Day to go to Magic Kingdom for Finley. Meh. Nowhere near as good as what it was just a few years ago. Way too crowded, a bizarre new fast pass system that requires you be on your phone half of the day rearranging ride times, and I had to take 90 minutes just to stake out a spot for the fireworks, then nearly got into a fistfight with an asshat in front of us during the show. Food was mediocre, and if you wanted to get a reservation for a decent restaurant you needed to reserve it between 8 and 8:30AM 6 months to the day before you want the reservation. There are these insane Disney Karen’s that are partially responsible for the problems, but most of it is on Disney. They are way past due to start building another resort/theme park somewhere else in the US. Maybe Texas? Six Flags started in Dallas. They were quite successful for sometime and then got overloaded with debt and went bankrupt. I think they now operate a lot of parks, but nothing to compare with Disney. If I was Disney...I'd build a park out in the Hill Country or somewhere close to College Station. The CS location in particular could draw from Austin and Houston with no problem and Dallas would only be 3-4 hours away. Well, Disney’s already behind… https://www.wlbt.com/2023/01/11/universal-build-new-theme-park-texas/

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it had received complaints The ASA ruled that the poster must not appear again in the form complained of unless it was suitably targeted. It told Universal Music Operations Ltd to ensure their adverts did not cause serious or widespread offence in future. I went looking for the standard that was violated Apparently the standard violated was that it caused offence I might be missing it, but it seems to me they could write a more objective standard

@George-K said in China: The crematoriums are "packed": expecting Chinese fatalities to rise about 10 days after that to about 25,000 a day, The numbers it has provided to the Johns Hopkins COVID tracker, for example, show — some three years into the pandemic — just 4.7 million cases and 17,736 fatalities. From this web site: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries total death count: 5,272 Chinese math

@George-K said in Speaking of Committee Assignments: @89th said in Speaking of Committee Assignments: Uhhh yeah. Santos is a complete fraud, is wanted for crimes in Brazil (IIRC), and lied about nearly his whole resume. Yeah, indeed. But, now, he'll be able to put: "Former US Congressman from New York" On his resume and be truthful. In fact, if you think about it, if he were expelled tomorrow, he could still do that, LOL. Acccentuate ..the positive Obfuscate ... the negative

@Horace Well, I know what I'm watching this weekend.

It’s particularly saddening to me to see what happened to Scientific American. Why dad subscribed when I was a kid and I used to love the Mathematical Games column by Martin Gardner. Gardner lived most of his adult life about a mile from where I live now, in a house on - wait for it - Euclid Avenue. Every time I pass it I think of those columns.

@Catseye3 said in Swallwell, Schiff, Omar booted: I don't see how a hatemonger like Omar landed on a committee having to do with US relation [image: 1673453764557-image.jpeg]

One of my initial gripes with Windows is it gives you too many ways to do everything.

Something I recently realized: QR code is multilingual, e.g., one can encode Chinese/Japanese/Korean text in QR code; probably because it supports Unicode-8 which in turn supports multiple languages. Some new thing I saw at CES: “Hybrid Code”, it looks like QR code but enhanced to also allow encoding of different types of data (e.g., graphics data, as opposed to just text for QR code). It will require new/different reader software, so not sure if/when it will become widely used.

Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December. Mastodon, an open-source network of largely independently hosted servers, has often been touted as an alternative to Twitter. And its growth appears connected to controversies at Twitter. But for many it doesn’t fulfil the role that Twitter did and experts say it may be too complicated to really replace it. “Twitter, in its most basic form is simple,” Meg Coffey, a social media strategist, said. “You can open up an app or open up a website, type some words, and you’re done. I mean, it was [a] basic SMS platform.” There were about 500,000 active Mastodon users before Elon Musk took control of Twitter at the end of October. By mid-November, that number climbed to almost 2 million active users. “Right around that 5 November, it was a real opportunity,” Coffey said. “There were a lot of people who were scared, a lot of people who … didn’t want to be in the place Twitter was becoming. “I’m big about mute and block … and so my Twitter is fantastic. It’s a really wonderful place. But I know for a lot of other people it’s not. And so I can understand that they wanted to find a place that is less toxic or less harmful.” The surge in new Mastodon users continued throughout November, peaking at over 130,000 new users a day. The upticks often coincided with controversial decisions made by Elon Musk.

Reminds me of living in LA. California would be great if it weren’t for all the Californians.

@Doctor-Phibes LOL I created a ChatGPT version for my IT team. I just have it hardcoded to respond with "Have you tried restarting it?" to any input.

The Chinese did a bang-up job...

@Axtremus Their Marxist-Leninist ideology dictates that the the vanguard of the revolution and workers state must remain paramount and unchallenged. So Communist Party retention of political power must take precedence.

@Axtremus said in Finally - the GOP attacks spending: Democrats increase the deficit through compassion and ambition, through "great society" type social spending. Republicans increase the deficit throngh incompetence and being penny wise, pound foolish. E.g., cutting regulation and enforcement to the point where preventable crises metastasized and then $trillions need to be spent to deal with the crises. I'll bet you spent no less than 3 minutes figuring that out.