Also Trump is panicking so you know they ALL are 🤣 bsky.app/profile/midd...

Middlerage@middlerage.bsky.social · 7h ago

🚨🚨🚨 Trump is telling his followers to “get ready for another rigged election” because he knows The GOP is going to lose!

Oh, things haven’t even begun to get scary for them yet. Just wait until the midterms

Three of the most unpleasant looking mutants you've ever seen in your life: You wouldn't want a doctor in charge, would you?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 7h ago

JD Vance: "We don't want the next administration, whoever -- god forbid you're gonna have President El-Sayed in three years ... "

"America is broadly Islamophobic, and so any enemy of Islam is a friend of ours"

For those not wanting to click through, it's on sale for $240k, which represents a price drop (it's been on the market a while). $240k is on the higher end in Bradford proper. Prices are higher out of town, where the houses come with acreage.

I pass by this house every time I go to the church. It's lovely on the outside; the inside looks like it hasn't been updated in 50 years. The person who gets it should expect some to put in some renovations. Also, Bradford is nice, and also VERY MUCH a rural Ohio village, with all that implies.

Sean Eric Fagan@kithrup.bsky.social · 6h ago

Oooh maybe we could be @scalzi.com's neighbour.... www.realtor.com/realestatean...

When I was in Wales the Bone Fairies literally STOLE MY TOOTH RIGHT FROM MY MOUTH* so cheers from the dentist, hope the $500 I paid will get me out of here cause that’s all that was left on my credit card *my crown popped out of my mouth and disappeared after I was climbing the ruins of a castle

Oh yes they do make huge sums from scam ads. So does Meta (more so than Google) do the same shit knowingly. There's money in letting these scams proliferate, and if anything, these companies love their money.

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 10h ago

I don't know why Google doesn't do this. Maybe they make huge sums from these scam ads and they don't want to forego the revenue. Or maybe they just don't care. Whichever it is, there's real consequences for this negligence by the internet's absentee landlord. 35/

To paraphrase an old adage, when the cat doesn't care the mice will run amok. The cat (Google) lets all the mice (fraudsters) do whatever they want so long as the cat gets its cut Google is a scammer's paradise @doctorow.pluralistic.net pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/a...

Oh heck yeah. I've recently had an issue with an Agoda booking. The only customer support available was a chatbot who repeatedly insisted in providing a solution that had _nothing_ to do with our issue. Took a while to escalate to an actual human.

The Playlist is never a concern. Battle has happened over which ridiculously long podcast or audiobook on occassion, but that's only a car issue, not plane, train, or boat.

I am the worst of the heretics: I am a Car Guy who is pro-public transit. My utopia is a world where cars occupy much the same cultural space as horses: something you want, not need.

My coworkers give me the strangest looks when I describe my car as "a tool, not a lifestyle". I couldn't care less about cars in general, and would prefer to take a train/bus/walk everywhere if infrastructure allowed. I try to eject from those conversations before my opinion is necessary.

Oh, man. Yeah. It sucks. Men suck. Especially "car guys."

I would like to be comfortable while in transit and I would like it to take as little time as practical. ALARA but applied to travel, I guess. The rest is aesthetics.

Oops. I forgot one of those conversational third rails. In addition to politics and religion, Americans are bit weird about cars and my opinions are not in keeping with tradition. I'm generally not excited about the means or path so much as being at the destination. Teleportation would be best.

My father is alive because of this. I’ve done it too, obviously I’m high risk group (get the pills if you don’t want to use the slime prep). It’s a day of bathroom visits and then potentially many years of being not dead.

Jessica Luther@jessicawluther.com · 21h ago

Well, I am of colonoscopy age now and I got my first-ever one yesterday. The prep wasn't fun but not as awful as I'd imagined. My appt was at 6am on Monday, I was home just after 7am. There's no recovery except catching up on the sleep you missed. So, if you need a nudge to get yours, this is it!

This is important enough to their business model that they will spend literal millions of dollars to do it, claiming there is some possible legit reason anyone other than Marriott should even want to register MarriottHotelBookings(dot)com.

Zero argument there. But Google knows that’s not why people are buying those ads. The closest they come to what you describe is selling “Marriott” to Hilton, which is close to the exact facts of one of the first lawsuits they defended on the topic.

To be clear, I think it's fine for a company to buy an advertisement targeted at people searching for Marriott that goes "Don't book at Marriott, our hotel is better!" But that is clearly not intended to deceive people into thinking they ARE booking Marriott.

Don’t forget that Google has repeatedly gone to court to fight for the right to do this, by vigorously contesting any suggestion that it has an obligation not to sell a trademarked AdWord to anyone other than the mark owner.

We pay for their failure to take minimal, obvious steps to protect us from the scammers who thrive on their platforms. Why should they? They're the main characters. They're Bizarro-world spidermen, whose great power confers no responsibility. eof/

Google, Visa and the other monopolists who serve as *de facto* regulators for our society have arrogated to themselves the power to observe every transaction and block the obvious scams. 58/

They *could* treat these merchants as the fraudsters they are, but because the crooks wreathe themselves in gauzy excuses and lengthy terms of service, Visa enables these massive, nationwide cons. 57/

Visa - another bloated monopolist with terminal Main Character Syndrome - can see that it has merchants who generate zillions of appeals and charge-backs because they run scam businesses like these. 56/

I discovered this for myself when I was tricked into buying theater tickets from a ripoff site that had registered the URL of the show I wanted to go to. 54/

Card companies allow merchants to set terms of service that refuse refunds under almost any circumstances, and, more often than not, the card issuers side with the merchants over their own customers when they call to cancel a charge from one of these scammers. 53/

City Attorney Chiu says that the perps here registered domains for all kinds of hotels, even tiny ones in small towns, all over America. That means that it's not just visitors to San Francisco who got screwed by these creeps - it's also San Franciscans who booked hotel rooms around the country. 51/

This is a pure ripoff. If Google had served the correct result at the top of the page - if it had used its own database of confirmed merchants and their associate websites to validate its ads - then people booking hotels would have saved 35% to 85% on their rooms. 50/

Here's how the scam worked: these companies put up websites with deceptive URLs, like *SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com*, and then bought the associated Google ad-word ("San Francisco Marriott"). 48/