Yeah, I don't think there is unless there's visible corrosion, and just plugging it in won't help because this one was charging for some time before it started clicking

Yeah, or at least plan to replace the battery before using the thrifted item

Yep, and it was a huge problem the last few hurricanes because so many people have e-bikes and electric golf carts

For instance, Piker has repeatedly exhibited a soft spot for left-coded expansionist authoritarian regimes. When he was asked recently if “there is a country that has done socialism in a way that you’d like,” he did not cite the Nordic states favored by the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders. He said, “China is probably the closest,” while acknowledging “plenty of issues within the Chinese system” that he did not detail before launching into praise of the country’s high-speed rail. Piker has likened China’s subjugation of Tibet to the North’s crushing of the South in the American Civil War, and argued that the takeover helped civilize the territory. (He has also compared Taiwan to the Confederacy.) He once referred to China’s mass-detention facilities for Uyghur Muslims as “concentration camps,” only to quickly revise that to “reeducation camps” and claim that they “are all closed now.” (They are not, and the detentions also continue throughout the formal justice system.) Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps Piker’s apologias for left-wing autocrats are not restricted to contemporary ones. Last month, he told his viewers that “Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world.” And at the Yale Political Union this month, he declared that “the fall of the U.S.S.R. was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century.” The tens of millions of victims of the Soviet Union went unmentioned.

Obsession over Piker's most contentious opinions about Israel and Jews has diverted attention from his broader worldview, which is deserving of just as much discussion and scrutiny. For example: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

I guess the moral of the story is to be careful with thrifting lithium ion battery powered not-a-wheelchair devices.

Also, I'd be doubly careful with thrifting something with lithium ion batteries in Florida because you have no way of knowing if it sat in hurricane storm surge.

‘Ball of fire': Video shows electric wheelchair exploding in Hollywood driveway Video shows the moment an electric powered wheelchair exploded in the driveway of a Hollywood home minutes after the homeowner said the wheelchair was inside her house.

Calling this an electric wheelchair isn't entirely accurate because the brand website has disclaimers that it's not really a wheelchair, but this lady thrifted this not-a-wheelchair for a relative, woke up to the battery clicking while charging, and it went boom seconds after she took it outside.

Yikes, backstory on the anti-Wegovy lady got significantly worse

It's extremely weird

If that account pops up in my mentions because of the above post, there's no way it's not him name searching on a sockpuppet from behind a block

I was trying to figure out why I had interactions on a very old post mentioning Noah Berlatsky's name and discovered an account exists that sure looks like his sockpuppet and pops up in people's mentions to "fact check" whenever anybody mentions he worked for that sketchy "virtuous pedophile" org

Moot was a child who was in over his head and parents who didn't understand the internet enough to know what he was up to, which can cause a whole lot of harm, but not nearly as much harm as the world's richest man intentionally trying to reshape the world in his image.

There was a hurricane a while back where somebody near me was clearing trees with a chainsaw while wearing a full Spider-Man costume

I'll have to add them to my list

At least it's an improvement over the British Airways flights that require transferring by bus between Heathrow and Gatwick

I haven't, I might need to check those out

I avoided an expensive missed flight in Beijing once because I got there early enough to discover that the travel agent had put the wrong terminal on the ticket, but I was able to get the bus to the other terminal and get through security with enough time to spare.

x is objectively worse than 4chan. 4chan is at least a free-for-all. the x platform goes out of its way to amplify garbage, and even provides tools for its users to manufacture csam.

Plus, it turns brigading into something anybody can do easily, where it took work and coordination for 4chan to brigade people

yeah, that’s right, albeit with caveat that i think x is worse than 4chan. you take the atmosphere of a particularly nasty 4chan subboard and then scale it up to a website where heads of state and ceos of leading corps all post

I was thinking that they're imagining hunkering down in their bunker and doing nothing but watching porn all day

Yikes, that's so controlling. People really need to get it through their heads that other people's choices aren't about them, and that just because something isn't right for them doesn't mean it's not right for anybody

Reading her essays about the feeder ex-boyfriend really took it from a run of the mill first person confessional that The Cut shouldn't have run, and raised it to something way above the internet's pay grade.

you have to do what is right for yourself. if a situation is so intolerable that you have to separate yourself from it or rebel in a messy way, only you can really judge that. but keep in mind that people that care about you want you to live, not to become that "beautiful flower" of destruction

this was vastly worse on Twitter than it was here. Twitter in Trump I was a really dark place, a carnivalesque of the grotesque. But some of it does carry over to Bsky.

at the end of WWII, a Japanese official mused "would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?" I feel that is the purpose here, would it not be wonderful to see Joe Poster, Anyville, USA, be destroyed like a beautiful flower?

and that's kind of the subtext behind even banal things like "make scene! overturn the table at thanksgiving! leave your family in an explosion of righteous danger!" type stuff

part of the way modern US political conflict works is that one person has to do something that much larger groups of other people desire but can't. so they get to watch and enjoy it vicariously

they get to watch someone who really needed better help than thousands of cheering strangers implode, and it produces an ecstatic rush

me and @irhottakes.bsky.social have noted over the years that the hive mind keeps on trying to spur vulnerable people to destroy themselves in public for the benefit of social media audiences

this is a holdover from twitter, along with one other thing unfortunately that goes farther than what sky is saying