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.

But I occasionally, like once a month or less, run a short load if they really need me to. That makes me still exempt and is still legal for them to do.

That could be illegal, depending on what state you’re in. I don’t think it’s right that laws about this can vary so much from state to state, but the difference can be night and day.

Even if you’re in a state that’s better about protecting workers, you have to be ready to put up a fight. It can take years, and it’s not uncommon for a company to keep doing the same thing after the case is over.

Yeah, it’s kind of like eating raw flour. But extremely bland and weirdly minerally. Still better than kibble.

There’s feddit.it in Italian and feddit.ro in Romanian.

Oh wow, that’s definitely a tongue twister!

If the R is giving you trouble, you might try starting with a CH like in “Buch.”

Start with “Brot” but add an extra vowel, so it’s like Bo-chot. Try to reduce the air flow to almost zero when you say the CH. You should end up with an R sound.

You could do a trilled R too if that’s easier. People will understand you fine. The vowels are way more important to get right.

Yeah, it really is. “I’ll have the pig, please” sounds kind of humorous. “I’ll have the pork chop” sounds totally normal and way more elegant.

What really fascinates me is how English lost its cases and endings. Old English could outdo modern German, but then the Vikings came along, and later the French.

I think most of the declinations were already gone by the time the Normans invaded though. Supposedly Old Norse and English were pretty mutually intelligible, so if you drop the pesky endings, you end up with something that everyone understands pretty well.

It can be pretty confounding, the words that look the same but are pronounced differently. Through, though, thorough, tough, trough.

There are no rules, you just have to learn it. And it could be confusing if you mix them up. Through and throw, for example.

English has never had a spelling reform, but you can see the “real” spelling in informal language sometimes. Through = thru (in texts and chats). Tough = tuff (in slang and brand names).

I haven’t been on since June, but I noticed it for the last 1-2 years or so. Especially on the smaller subs where any given comment would only get a handful of upvotes. Someone would write a long helpful explanation, I upvote, and nothing happens. The score would stay at 1 or whatever.

It’s not like I was spamming votes either. I would make a point of only voting on one comment per post so my vote would count. But it was still usually 50/50. Vote fuzzing was there for years, but this was different. The comments that were less popular seemed to be affected the most.

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

I lived on the same floor as a couple Airbnbs for a while and it was the same way. Lots of trash and noise. More than the usual big city noise. Like bass cranked up at 3 am and they probably won’t hear if you try to knock.

For a while there was a steady stream of men coming in and out of one of the apartments. And a sign on the door that said something about massages.

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.

Browsing Lemmy and kbin. There’s lots of interesting stuff when you sort by new. Today’s unexpected find was banjo music with duck sounds.

Once in a while, I try my hand at translating.

Thanks!

Any favorites that you would recommend off the top of your head? I’m open to any kind of food.

I look for good food and things to see and do that are unique to the area.

New Orleans, for example. The French Quarter is interesting. I like the food, art, and street music. But it’s also nice to see the bayous. Lake Pontchartrain. Plantations and oak trees. Trucks full of sugar cane driving down the road. People fishing in lawn chairs at the side of the road.

Or taking a tour of a destroyer in July. Sunny, 95 degrees, and like 115% humidity. Those nice thick metal walls absorb it all. AC in only one corner of the ship. That sweet-ass Southern iced tea feels just right after that. Gator meat isn’t bad either.

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.

I looked through the Laws of LT and didn’t see any mention of a license or restrictions on how people can use the translations that are posted. They don’t allow posting other people’s translations without credit. That’s the closest thing I saw. I checked the FAQ too.

If you do a search for “creative commons” site:lyricstranslate.com, you’ll see some people who add a note that their translation is licensed under Creative Commons. Not everyone does that.

I have to say, LyricsTranslate is the best site I’ve found for song translations. It actually HAS translations, unlike a lot of other sites that show up in the Google results but don’t actually have anything. The quality is usually good, plus it lets you read both versions side by side. I always get happy to find translations there, especially from Romanian to English. Those are pretty rare. So if you’ve posted there already…thank you!