Ironhold

Carb's from Houston, which is not exactly a very nice place to live due to decades of local government mismanagement. I'm up in Copperas Cove, which is almost four hours away by car, and we're a bit leery of Houston. The families would have to relocate outside of the entire metroplex to find an area where the cost of living is far more reasonable, but that in and of itself entails a *lot* of potential problems in the sense of needing to find new employment, needing to find new housing that's able to support someone with disabilities or limitations (there's a *massive* housing shortage in my part of the state due to everyone flooding in and various out-of-state landlords trying to profit), actually relocating, and getting all relevant paperwork - including the social security - adjusted accordingly. It's not a cheap or easy solution. Hence the family needing the help and support of the ward as much as people are able to.

Yes folks, this is real. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funeral_potatoes Funeral potatoes are a big enough thing that Wikipedia has given them their own separate entry. Note that the sample images they have are of the "crushed corn flake topping" variety.

As far as the five questions go, remember that when Musk took over Twitter he discovered that a very large percentage of the work force was getting *paid* for 40+ hours a week but were only at their workstations for a fraction of that time, some as few as 10 hours a week, due to these individuals instead spending their time in the company-provided recreational areas. That's what he's taking into his position here at DOGE, the concern that a lot of the people on the federal payroll are people who might not actually be earning their pay. Thus, we have these e-mails, in which he's asking people to give a brief job description so that he knows who is actually doing what. I myself have had to do something like this in the past at the newspaper I'm with given that we're so short-handed I'm actually doing *several* jobs that in a larger, healthier newspaper would each be done by different people.

The whole bit about government employees being sent e-mails asking them to list five things they've done as part of their job? I'm seeing individual people riff on the concept by asking them to list five things they've done in their personal lives, in support of the church, and so forth. So if nothing else, perhaps this might get a few people doing some needed soul-searching.

Earlier today she once again made mention of wanting to find someone, jokingly asking a fellow indie creator if their character, some sort of wizard, could conjure someone up for her. I asked if she was willing to consider long-distance relationships, noting that I'm at a point where I'm thinking of doing the same owing to how the local scene where I live is a bit of a mess. She responded by saying that she wasn't interested. I'm going to take her at face value and let it go unless she says something otherwise.

For me, success is all too often "did I make someone's head asplode today?". Sometimes the best way to deal with a critic of the church is to just let them keep talking. Either they'll confound themselves and thus have to fight their way out of the quagmire they created for themselves, or they'll make such a spectacle of themselves that other individuals - including their co-religionists - will round on them and call them out in public for their actions. In the process, there will be witnesses, especially if it's on the internet. A person might not *directly* get any baptisms that way, but they will expose the haters and potentially make onlookers ponder what they've just seen.

As I've been having to explain to people - I spent the better part of two years as a branch finance clerk. I got audited every six months, and those audits were quite intense. The more I hear about what's going on in Washington, the more it becomes clear that there are entire agencies that couldn't pass the kind of muster I had to go through.

As I've noted elsewhere, when I was younger the local stake presidency spent the better part of a decade chanting "all young men must serve missions; all young women must regard any man who did not serve a mission as ineligible for marriage, no excuses". We basically lost an entire generation of young men because of it, and those of us - myself included - who stayed were made to feel less than. It's been 15+ years and we're still feeling the consequences.

What's most important is the converts themselves, not the number that get brought in. Four people converted to the church in whole or in part because of me. I physically baptized two of them. I've lost contact with all of them, with three of the four going inactive *at best*. If we look at it from the standard of what a previous stake presidency was trying to drum into everyone, I've done naught for the church. If we look at it from the perspective of "I helped make it so that the internet was relatively safe for members of the church to gather, was part of a group that convinced a former member to look the church over again, and am one of the more prominent members of the faith in regards to public awareness", however, then one could argue I've been rather successful even if I'm not the one actually performing said baptisms.

During the DNC vs. GOP "debates" over Obamacare, the GOP reps noted that if Obamacare included Texas-style tort reform into the law it'd save a certain sum of money. Obama responded by declaring that the sum of money in question was "too small to consider" compared to the overall expected cost of Obamacare as a whole. I went looking for numbers after that, and found that the sum of money he regarded as "too small to consider" was bigger than the entire to-date US government outlay for the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber program. It would have saved the nation more to implement that tort reform than it cost the nation to develop one of the most expensive weapons systems in history. But Obama said the amount was "too small to consider". That should say something about how certain politicians and their supporters view the national budget.

They swear that their husband is a developer and that from what he's saying redoing the entire system to move it away from COBOL is just too massive an undertaking to ever plausibly happen, and that besides a lot of other agencies and businesses still use COBOL so they don't see why it's a big deal. Yeah...

The explanation I've gotten from a Biden sycophant is that this is a result of the fact that the Social Security Administration is still using COBOL to power its databases, and that whoever programmed it to use COBOL so long ago set it up so that if there was any sort of error with the birth year the system would default that person's date of birth to a pre-set year in the 1800s or thereabouts. They were screaming because it's a "known" problem and that the DOGE staff should have been aware of this before they made so much noise, but from my perspective a system like this is "beyond economical repair" and so DOGE would be justified in recommending that the government pay to have the system rebuilt from scratch rather than allowing such a wonky and outdated system to continue.

About a decade or so back, BYU-TV signed a deal with Disney that gave BYU-TV a large but eclectic assortment of Disney movies, everything from "The Apple Dumpling Gang" and a black & white print of "Son of Flubber" to "The Country Bears" and the then-recent "Muppets Most Wanted". Given the box office disappointment of the latter (everything, including the opening musical number, says that the plan was for a sequel film called "The Muppets Again" but that it was changed at the very last minute), I suspect BYU-TV was the only channel that ever aired it. Well, last night BYU-TV made a double feature of "Muppets Take Manhattan" and "Muppets From Space". This has me wondering now. Disney really isn't doing anything with the franchise aside from perhaps a token once-a-year special or occasionally licensing them out for use in commercials. This in spite of how popular everything still is. Makes me wonder what would happen if BYU-TV was to put in an overall bid to acquire broadcast rights to some of the classic TV shows or even the TV broadcast rights for the franchise itself. There's a part of me that actually wonders about the prospect of Bonneville Communications outright putting in a bid to *buy* the franchise, but that's just me.

I've seen some anti-Musk sycophants make the claim that there's a glitch in the Social Security systems that result in people whose information was entered incorrectly being defaulted in age back to a specific period of time. If true, however, it's still a very alarming situation that still merits the Social Security Administration being audited in order to discover why a known glitch of this nature has been allowed to continue for so long and how many people have been affected by it.

Shortly after Obama won in 2008, anyone who, for any reason, was critical of him got blasted by his legion of sycophants. At best, you would be accused of being racist or a bigot. But after a while, they would start to accuse you of having "Obama Derangement Syndrome" and declaring that Obama being President was somehow driving you insane, thus nothing you said could be taken at face value. Either way, as far as his sycophants were concerned, he was indeed Deity and anyone who said otherwise was the enemy. *To this day* you'll find people who will tell you to your face that his time in office was "scandal-free" even after you show them the astoundingly long list of scandals his administration actually produced. That's where the whole talk of "Derangement Syndrome" started.

As I've mentioned before, when I was in my teens and twenties, the local stake presidency made "All young men must serve missions and all young women must regard any young man who doesn't as ineligible for marriage" a mantra. Every fifth Sunday and Stake Priesthood saw that being driven home repeatedly, to the point that virtually an entire generation of young men either left the area or left the church because of how fire & brimstone the leadership was about it. I was one of the few who stayed, and I basically spent a solid decade in misery. My maternal grandmother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's my senior year of high school, and if I had left it would have been a hardship on my parents because they needed my help taking care of her. I was repeatedly told time and time again that I was lesser for not having gone on a mission and that there was no excuse to justify my actions. Even my own parents sometimes contributed to this, as since I was the only one of my siblings still at home I was all too often the one who bore the brunt of their anger and frustration with having to care for her and the aftermath thereof. They also couldn't understand why I was feeling the way I was feeling until one stake speaker finally went too far and talked about how "worthless" anyone who didn't serve was, at which point they finally realized what I'd been dealing with. Thing is... I graduated in 2002. I got online in 2000, and at the time members of the church who were online were few and far between. The church website was barely functional on a good day, and so most of us had to find the handful of apologetics websites & learn from there in order to combat the horde of cyber-bullies and Christian counter-cult types who would swarm us every day. I spent the 2000s and first part of the 2010s doing online apologetics work for the church simply by virtue of being on the internet, and so made *that* my mission field. Despite being a nobody from nowhere, by the time things were said and done I had *ministers* in a panic because I knew how to respond to the then-current lists of anti-Mormon material that were in circulation and could destroy their arguments thusly. I actually broke several people psychologically because they couldn't understand how I was actually holding my own against their precious canned arguments, let alone how I was successfully challenging various points of their own beliefs just by turning their own arguments back on them. Everything people enjoy now about being a member of the church online came about because people like myself fought long and hard for it. I'd say, then, that I did far more work for the church than I would have if I'd have worn that name tag. That brings us to your situation. Find what you're good at, find something only *you* can do, and do it. Make *that* your mission. If anyone tries to dog you about it, invite them to read the "lift where you stand" Conference talk from a few years ago.

happy birthday

It was in the paperwork that the lessons were delivered online, right? Did they just not read the paperwork?

Right now, translator jobs are in *very* high demand. This is especially the case in the entertainment industry, as there have been repeated fan revolts over the way that companies like FUNimation (now a part of Crunchyroll) and Seven Seas have mishandled the various foreign-language franchises they've gotten the rights to. If you're fluent in another language, you can get some pretty solid job offers.

As I think I've noted before, I know several individuals from Canada via social media. Most of them agree that Trudeau has been a national embarrassment at best and a blight on the nation at worst. Some of them were even wanting to see him before The Hague in response to how he and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police handled the truck drivers' protests a few years ago. They're all in favor of the tariffs if they mean he's gone, but they fear that he'll use some behind-the-scenes ploy to keep his policies alive long after he's gone.

At the time I was serving as branch finance clerk, there was a big to-do in the news by way of the announcement that the California State Democratic Party was broke. They had one single person handling all of their finances, and due to an absolutely astounding lack of oversight this person had been embezzling money left, right, and center. The party officials only discovered the situation when a check bounced and they had to ask why it bounced. I remember joking with a few people about how the church had tighter standards than some political parties.

The more free a society is, the more free it is to make questionable decisions.

As I've noted before, I'm high-functioning autistic. One of the issues I face is that when I'm stressed or exhausted, the language centers in my brain will malfunction. Best-case scenario is that I'll forget words and have to struggle to recall them. Worst-case scenario is that the muscles governing my mouth, throat, and tongue will physically seize, leaving me unable to speak. I've had to go a few rounds with my parents over this, because they don't understand the kind of stress it takes to make this happen and so just assume I'm being dramatic when this happens. There are days where it's a near miracle for me to be able to go without having any issues for more than a few hours at a time, especially if I'm trying to communicate important information to people under stressful situations.

The big thing I'm seeing is allegations that USAID money was going to support various US and foreign media outlets. A few people, like online activists Lunar Archivist (who I've collaborated with before) and Grummz, have noted that many of these same US media outlets were the ones pushing the "Gamers Are Dead!" and other anti-Gamergate narratives back in 2014 / 2015. This has already started conspiracy theories going as to whether or not the pushback against Gamergate was actually a government-funded operation. For obvious reasons, I'm now pushing people a lot harder to subscribe to their local newspapers and other local-level news outlets.

Right now, the big push for increased "sin" taxes on various items is the belief that if you tax something highly enough it will discourage people from engaging with it. Not only does this *not* work as well as folks would like for it to work, in extreme instances it can actually cause people to find work-arounds or get creative. For example, there was a bit where a major city tried to impose a sin tax on soda, only for people to hop over to the *next* major city and buy in bulk, something that the first city couldn't tax and couldn't stop. Yeah...