Here’s a link to the original song. The part the meme comes from starts around 0:45. It was a hit in 2004.

Eventually, Hecker’s inclusion on the 2018 roster produced the most serious ramification for him. A member of the US military went to law enforcement and reported that he was a teenager in 1975 when Hecker, then a staff member at his high school, strangled him unconscious in a church bell tower – pretending to teach him a wrestling move – then sodomized him.

The archdiocese of New Orleans waited to turn over Hecker’s complete personnel file until June 2023, when it received a subpoena from the local district attorney. Three months later, a grand jury empaneled by the DA charged Hecker with aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated crime against nature and theft.

He’s now claiming he’s not competent to face the charges because he has short-term memory loss. If you read the second article, that doesn’t sound believable (scroll down to number 5).

At the deposition itself, Trahant bluntly asked Hecker: “Do you have a problem remembering things from 15 minutes ago?”

“No,” Hecker answered.

Yeah. Business Insider had a good long read on that. I think it was posted before, but it’s worth reading.

In addition to their financial struggles, all of the hospitals shared three things in common. They all served low-income communities that suffered from a lack of access to healthcare. They were all owned at various points by for-profit investors, including leading private-equity firms like Cerberus, Leonard Green, and Apollo. And in a move that stripped the hospitals of one of their prime assets, the owners had sold the land beneath the facilities to a little-known real-estate investor called Medical Properties Trust. MPT, which has purchased some $16 billion of hospital real estate over the past two decades, now bills itself as one of the world’s largest owners of hospital beds.

For many of the hospitals, the deals proved disastrous. Once their real estate was sold to MPT, they were forced to pay rent on what had always been their own property. That added to the massive debt burdens already placed on the hospitals by their for-profit owners, deepening their financial woes. It also deprived Americans of desperately needed healthcare and put lives at risk — all while enriching some of the world’s wealthiest investors.

Oh hey, I love your owl posts. I always read the comments too because I know there will be more pictures and info. I’ve been meaning to comment there, but work got super busy and I forgot to stop by.

And then there’s the different ways to connect verbs in English.

• I want to go to the movies. (“I want going” is wrong.)
• I like going to the movies. / I like to go to the movies. (Both ways work.)
• I despise going to the movies. (“I despise to go” is wrong.)

There aren’t rules for that, as far as I know. Just very fuzzy guidelines at best. And word stress is pretty random too. Both of those things can be tricky for non-native speakers.

Gender often comes along with cases, which basically show you what role a noun is playing in a sentence. For example, is someone doing something, or is something being done to them. That lets you change the word order and keep the same meaning. You can emphasize different parts of the sentence, or just be more flexible with how you say things.

Here’s an example from German:

• Der Hund (subject) hat den Mann (object) gebissen. / The dog bit the man.
• Den Mann (object) hat der Hund (subject) gebissen. / The dog bit the man. (Implied: That guy, and not someone else.)

In English, the meaning changes when you change the word order.

• The dog bit the man.
• The man bit the dog.

Languages do fine with genders and without. They’re just different systems that happened to evolve over time. And languages can even change. English used to have 3 genders, but they disappeared hundreds of years ago. Instead of having like 12 different ways to say “the,” we just have one, thanks to the Vikings and the Norman invaders.

It’s subjunctive, so “were” is technically correct. But it’s super duper common for people to use “was” instead.

It’s actually kind of complicated. I did some digging and it looks like the problem is that he wanted a new judge in his case challenging the election results in Georgia. But he made a legal move that prevented that from happening.

This is the case he’s talking about (warning: legal language). Trump originally asked for emergency relief, which means the case could be decided in days or weeks instead of months or years. Then he withdrew that request for some reason. So the original judge said no emergency relief for you. You don’t get it unless you ask for it and the judge decides it’s appropriate.

Well, Trump didn’t like that, so he did two things. He filed an appeal (of an order that you’re not allowed to appeal). That basically puts a stop to your case until the appeal is over. That’s just how it works and even brand new lawyers know this.

At the same time, he asked for his case to be assigned to a new judge. The court couldn’t say yes or no to that request because of the appeal. Thus the complaint that they wouldn’t assign a judge.

He dismissed the appeal a few weeks later and got a new judge.

I checked just now and it’s normal for me. I don’t know if the instance matters, but I’m on mastodon.social.

Your cats are really cute. Always nice to see them here.

She threw their homework and other things in the trash. Said they had until the end of the day to pay cash or do chores to get it back so they could learn the real value of their things.

She took her son’s bed away for seven months, apparently because he played a prank on his brother.

Oh, and the kids had to make their own school lunch in the morning. The school calls one day because her 6 year old daughter didn’t have any food. She let the girl go hungry. Quote:

My hope is that she’ll be hungry and come home and go, ‘oh man, that was really painful, being hungry all day. I will make sure to always have lunch with me.

Wow. I’d never heard of stomatitis before, but it sounds pretty painful. Hope he gets through it OK. Thanks for the extra pic! That’s a face that’s hard to say no to.

Scooter is adorable. I hope he got whatever he wanted.

Yeah. In case anyone was wondering, the down payment on a surgery to remove a cancerous tumor near your heart is $100,000. Cash, or no surgery for you. The tumor is growing fast, so you only have a few days to come up with the money.

That’s all because the insurance company said the surgery wasn’t necessary. Or maybe it was too experimental. I forget. Some family members with high paying jobs managed to come up with the money, and my uncle got to live a few more years. I’m sure not everyone is that lucky. And why on God’s green earth should it have to come down to luck?

Insurance changed their mind after a long appeal. I think it took 1-2 years.

Now, more than a decade after Sylvia’s death, their efforts have landed the Wildensteins before France’s highest court. The evidence she and Dumont Beghi brought forth has persuaded prosecutors that the Wildensteins are a criminal enterprise, responsible for operating, as a prosecutor for the state once put it, “the longest and the most sophisticated tax fraud” in modern French history.

A trial this September will determine if the family and their associates owe a gargantuan tax bill. The last time prosecutors went after the Wildensteins, several years ago, they sought €866 million — €616 million in back taxes and a €250 million fine, as well as jail time for Guy. The consequences could do more than topple the family’s art empire. The case has provided an unusual view of how the ultrawealthy use the art market to evade taxes, and sometimes worse. Agents raiding Wildenstein vaults have turned up artworks long reported as missing, which fueled speculation that the family may have owned Nazi-looted or otherwise stolen art, and spurred a number of other lawsuits against the family in recent years. Financial distortions have saved the family hundreds of millions of dollars, prosecutors allege, but their treatment of Sylvia could cost them far more — and perhaps lead to the unraveling of their dynasty.

What a story. It’s a long read, but fascinating.

It can be to limit how much vacation time the company has to pay out on separation, or to limit how much “liability” for vacation pay they have on the books at any given time. If your employees get 5 days of vacation a year, use it or lose it, you don’t have to deal with someone who (the horror!) has built up 2 weeks and wants to use it all at once.

There are no state or federal laws that give employees a right to paid vacation time. Only 10 states require the company to pay out unused vacation time when you leave (CA, CO, IL, IN, LA, MA, ME, ND, NE, RI). In most of those states, use it or lose it policies are illegal. Everywhere else, the company policy basically decides if it gets paid out or not.

Sure does! [email protected]

I think part of it is because of pricing software like RealPage.

On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.

“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?

“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”

I lived in a building that used this software. In 6-7 years, rent went from around $1200 to about $2,000. More and more apartments stayed empty. They kept raising prices during the pandemic. Surprise surprise, a tent city popped up down the street. A couple people died there.

Are they soft? Do they make cute noises? Would love to pet one if I could. Looks like this guy really liked the attention.

I browse by all and new a lot. It’s a good way to find interesting posts that get buried by the memes, but you also find a lot of NSFW stuff.