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TwiceHorn

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Posts posted by TwiceHorn

  1. 3 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    It should have to go “beep boop beep boop boop” or produce lines of text that say “computing” before producing anything so it’s clear its a robot.

    And if you ask it forbidden or dangerous questions it should say

    DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER DANGER

  2. ·

    Edited by TwiceHorn

    On 12/30/2025 at 7:18 AM, Dbeasy said:

    Caution, long answer in case it helps others looking for a fridge:

    Thanks for all of the input. I am now much more knowledgeable on fridges than I was a week ago. Did a ton of research, and a few things I learned along the way:

    Consumer Rports shows heavy customer disatisfaction and weak reliability for every brand, with Bosch being the least offensive. They didn’t test the luxury brands like sub zero. I ruled those out because I don’t want to spend $10k and the selection was too limited. Bosch required ordering and they didn’t have the style we need. Otherwise we would have bought Bosch 800 series.

    We bought a Whirlpool that we thought would be good enough, but the ice dispenser wouldn’t work due to a poor design and manufacturability. But more concerning was that the temperature struggled to work well. We took it back and bought a GE fridge that had what we wanted and was the competitor to the Whirlpool.

    The GE fridges have the highest consumer reports ratings, but also the lowest customer satisfaction ratings. Given our experience with other GE appliances, we are expecting problems. But if it goes south, I’ll have a plan C ready for ordering a better fridge.

    The top, bottom fridges are more reliable because of their simplicity. We use a top freezer model for our garage fridge. Next most reliable are the side by sides because they don’t have multiple compressors and evaporators. We’ve had, and still wanted, a side by side because of space limits on open doors (damn kitchen island), and not liking freezer and ice on the bottom. French door types are the least reliable but most bought. And the most choices, by far.

    As said earlier ice dispensers are a source of problems. However we use that function every day, multiple times per day, so we bought one with it anyway.

    The Korean brands are controversial. Samsung and LG had serious quality issues as recently as a year ago, compressors and ice makers. However, theoretically they are improved. Repairmen still hate them. There are debates about why.

    The fridge ratings are all gamed by social media marketing companies putting in fake ratings. So you need to adjust the ratings. A 4.0 rating implies a lot of problems. A 4.5+ rating might indicate a reasonably good fridge.

    We looked at Costco but they didn’t have a type and model that would work for us. Ended up going with Lowe’s because we were able to buy it and have it delivered a day later. And every fridge was on sale. Saved quite a bit on the one we bought.

    Summary of brands IMO

    Bosch - pretty good quality, limited design options, longer deliver intervals. Not a bad choice if looking for a French door type. More expensive.

    Whirlpool - heavy volume sales, basic fridges, some ok some not. We liked the one we bought if not for the quality issues.

    GE - tested well but that bad customer sat has to come from somewhere. Probably will break prematurely.

    Samsung - ice maker problems behind them supposedly. Felt a little more solid than GE, Whirlpool or Frigidaire. Some interesting features. More features for the price. If quality issues are improved and repairmen are biased, maybe not too bad. I know a few owners who are unhappy with theirs.

    LG - same as Samsung except it was compressor issues. Almost bought an LG, if not for annoying ice door buttons.

    Fridgidaire - didn’t look too closely primarily because their consumer reports ratings were generally lower across the board.

    KitchenAid- overpriced for cosmetic features. It’s not the higher quality brand it used to be

    GE Profile - a little nicer than GE, better ratings. Potentially decent choice but harder to find and order. If Lowe’s would have had the model we wanted we would have gone with it

    Cafe - a GE upscale brand. Looked interesting but wasn’t able to touch one .

    Other brands - there were others but they were too hard to find or there were too few choices, indicating low market share. We wanted a brand where parts and repair were straightforward.

    One other the biggest surprises is that there aren’t really any great appliance stores in Austin anymore. We were interested in that to see a wider variety of lesser known models. But, since we couldn’t find a store we liked, we prioritized getting a fridge fast that we could touch over ordering one from one of the appliance stores where we weren’t able to touch the fridge.

    The whole process sucked.

    I think I would avoid the big box stores and try the types that supply builders, like Capital Distributing. They can do a little work on pricing for you. And I think the big box stores have "special models" like Walmart gets special, slightly extra shitty, versions of TVs and such.

    ETA: FBS seems to be the Centex version of Capital.

  3. ·

    Edited by TwiceHorn

    On 12/20/2025 at 11:36 PM, atomheartbevo said:

    Thomas Massie files some good legislation, like the Epstein stuff.

    And then he files legislation to pull us out of NATO: 

    Fucking idiot doesn't realize that a huge part of why we have these alliances, and why we maintain such a large military is not because somebody is going to invade us from overseas - two oceans and nukes on subs, missiles, and aircraft, are a fairly good deterrent.

    We do it because we want to project power around the globe, because we want markets around the world open to American companies, and we want access to resources in those foreign markets, whether they be oil or metals or whatever.  And if we don't, then we leave a vacuum that China will gladly fill, and that's not good for our economy. It's why England did it for years, why Spain and France did it.

    I was reading this author named Barry Eisler, whose crime fiction I have been guardedly enjoying. https://barryeisler.substack.com/

    He seems to be appropriately liberal, was a CIA agent for a while. Raises a few good points here and there. But he's a bit of a look and a disestablshmentarian.

    But in one of his screeds, he did declare NATO expansion to be a legitimate and sufficient provocation to Russia, analogizing it to Russian behavior during the Missile Crisis.

    Therefore, I had to consider that "talking point" rather seriously for the first time.

    All of that assumes that dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact eliminated all threat to the tiny countries of Europe that have twice been subject to a continent-wide war in roughly the last century. It assumes that a non-communist Russia is no kind of threat. That might possibly have been true briefly at the end of the Soviet era, but was never realistic, as events of the last decade have shown. Putin is all-Soviet, all the time, minus the Comintern and Politburo.

    Russia remains opposed to "the West," rather than being a part of it. Its western neighbors behave accordingly. It's not like NATO really represents an arms buildup or aggression, it's a defensive pact.

  4. 6 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

    These are the kind of people who are going to make it easy to get at redacted text, because you know that they are pissed that D.C. is telling them to give up their holidays.

    Morale in the SD Fla office apparently is at a low due to the indefensible Russiagate investigations headed up by Trump lickspittle Jason Reding.

    Sorry for the source, but it's telling.

  5. 18 hours ago, HenryJames said:

    I'm curious why it's the CIA all of a sudden, and not the USN or other DOD military, making these strikes.

    I have thought all along that it would be CIA doing these things because they're used to being lawless. And outside the military chain of command.

  6. ·

    Edited by TwiceHorn
    Corrected for pedantry

    17 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

    But there are state universities located in those cities.

    Actually known as California State University, _____________.

    Although they certainly seem to be all-in on the ___________ State, but that's not the official name.. It doesn't seem to be like SUNY, where everything Is now ________ University.

    https://www.calstate.edu/

  7. ·

    Edited by TwiceHorn

    2 minutes ago, C-Man said:

    I’m admittedly behind on this situation due to the holidays and what-not. But I was reading a bunch of rebuttals on this on Threads last night. Was this situation already being addressed/prosecuted by Biden’s DOJ as many of those posters were saying? Or is this something completely different?

    I say all of that with full knowledge that if the right-wingy blogosphere/influencers world is pumping it incessantly, it’s likely BS talking points — and a means to distract from Dementia Donny’s Epstein involvement.

    Yes.

    It's not a new thing. It is being politicized.

    It's just too convenient: you got Minnesota and Walz, Ilhan Omar, dark brown immigrants, some of whom are on TPS. It's a quadfecta for Trump.

  8. 14 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    Folks, sometimes things are as they seem and one needs to surrender to reality before deciding that the NYT is being manipulated by Trump and tricksy Somaliland activists.

    It should surprise absolutely no one that an insular, clannish set of first and second generation immigrants from a notoriously corrupt and crime-ridden locale, who are virtually all dependent on state welfare, have become the focus of massive welfare corruption in a high-openness, high-social safety net society. This sort of thing is replicable against time and space.

    The comparisons to Italians are hilarious because all of that was completely true! Generations of overlapping clan/criminal networks completely took over entire public and semi-public activities in northern cities and hid within an ethic community thanks to a combination of fear, mistrust of the outside, clannishness and cultural solidarity. Those networks bought and installed local politicians, and even legit politicians were afraid to take it on because of the power of the groups and voting blocs. The Feds had to engage in generational crackdowns to get a handle on it and the same deflections got tossed out.

    I can agree that the DJT tactic is distasteful and politically motivated. Success against other similar crime rings and phenomena depended on a pathway to pull ordinary people out of insularity and into the mainstream and things have gotten toxic because the right doesn’t want to allow in and influential swathes of the modern left has determined that actively pushing for integration and assimilation is violence.

    Both things can be true.

    It's funny though, how Italian-Americans survived anarchist and mafioso stereotypes to essentially flourish here.

    Anyone want to hazard a guess how Somali-Americans are going to weather such stereotyping?

  9. 1 hour ago, VABuckeye said:

    "We have charged 98 individuals in relation to fraud in Minnesota. More than 60 have pled guilty or been convicted. More to come," the department said on the US social media company X’s platform.

    How do they have convictions already? That is one fast process if true.

    Because this whole deal has been going on for years. One of the reasons the numbers are so large is they are cumulative over nearly a decade.

  10. 4 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and Fundamentalism and American Culture are sober, critical, but not jeremiad culture war examinations of Evangelicalism and fundamentalism in America, including how to tell them apart. Highly recommend. These are serious histories and not tracts. I honestly don’t know of any serious studies of Prosperity Gospel stuff. It was pretty new when I was doing my religion reading.

    For a peek behind the veil, The Late Great Planet Earth is deeply influential and insane and a direct line to the conspiratorial, politically chapter apocalyptic version of fundamentalism we have today, and Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life for a more meaningful look at what mainstream Evangelicals actually consume and aspire to.

    I am not Evangelical, BTW. And Anastasis is basically right that almost any unusual church with no clear denomination you see is basically just Baptists in a different costume. Sometimes you get lucky and it’s something fun, like a holiness inspired bunch.

    Down the road the real growth industry is in the Spanish speaking Evangelical and holiness groups. Everyone is in for some interesting times.

    Ay Dios mio.

    goes to YouTube to watch espanish pentecostals

  11. 4 hours ago, CTC2 said:

    This is so common it gets lost pretty often.

    But he's sharing the stage with BB Nuttyahoo, ostensibly something about Israel or peace or some shit. The Israel Prize, something.

    Yet he's blathering about the Fed renovation and his stupid-ass ballroom.

  12. 22 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

    Don't know her but I was at UVA undergrad. Didn't get in as a non-resident (and finished law school in 1990).

    She also apparently is spelling impaired. Weaponazation?

    Oh shit that's right, sorry.

  13. 1 minute ago, Foosters said:

    It did?

    I don't think Brits have the same general level of affection for Israel that Americans do.

    First, Israel killed quite a few Brits on the way in; second, they generally lack the species of fundagelicals that believe Israel's existence essential to the second coming.

    So, their Nazis continue to be raging anti-Semites, while ours are only partial anti-Semites.

  14. So, it seems this stems from the unsolved murder of a PI named Daniel Morgan in 1987.

    The ensuing investigations seem to have been a complete clusterfuck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Daniel_Morgan

    Starmer was involved in dismissing a large prosecution against suspects.

    A big independent report was released in 2021 that has several footnotes referencing rumors of Freemasonry tainting the investigation, none of which seem to have any basis in fact. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/60c89983d3bf7f4bd4662c62/_HC_11-I__-_The_Report_of_the_Daniel_Morgan_Independent_Panel__Volume_1_.pdf

    This looks like an almost Trumpian deflection effort by Starmer to "do something."

  15. Some context to the above.

    Trumpco is running up investigations against Brennan and others relating to the "Russia Hoax," all of which occurred in the 2016-2017 timeframe, long past any statute of limitations.

    They're also doing it out of Florida and angling to try to get it in front of Cannon. Well, none of the defendants reside in Florida or did at the time of any alleged offense, and no element of the offense occurred in Florida, so there is no way a criminal case could be properly venued there.

    Grisly detail. https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2025-12/BrennanAltongaLetter12-22-25.pdf

  16. Also,

    She apparently thinks there/s a discovery rule on the federal criminal statute of limitations.

    Except as otherwise expressly provided by law, no person shall be prosecuted, tried, or punished for any offense, not capital, unless the indictment is found or the information is instituted within five years next after such offense shall have been committed.

    Dumbfuck. UVa Law 1993. @DDD Dad ?

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