Best of DDF

[shabbosabba]

I've had experience with S'dom. I used to be short, but I stayed there overnight once.....

[AsherO]

Is this self promotion? I ALOL'd through every paragraph:

Deals Forum Moderator Canceled After Expressing Sympathy for Deal-Targeted Company

A moderator on the prominent deals forum site DansDeals Forums has been booted from the site after he posted that he will refrain from allowing site users to access a certain coupon because "I want [the company] to make [money] when I patronize the business."

The now-former moderator, who went by the username AsherO, added that he did not want users to "50BM" the company - an acronym for "50 Browser Method," a tactic deals buffs use to utilize a single-use coupon multiple times.

AsherO was summarily fired. In a statement, site administrator JJ Eleff, a younger brother of the site's founder, wrote that dissuading users from getting deals is "contrary to what we stand for as a consumer-first brand," and that "there is no room in our company for soft-heartedness towards big brands." He also compared the post to an incident in which a Spirit Airlines employee was fired for doing a favor, a story that was previously reported by DansDeals Magazine.

The move is surprising as AsherO is one of the earliest members of the forum. His journey to being a moderator began in 2008, when he posted an the forum's first thread, "I wanna be a mod too." That became a real-life dream for the aspiring leader, but that all came crashing down with his post this week.

Some forum members are angry over the unexpected dismissal. "This cancel culture has to stop," forum member Euclid said. Others, led by member PlatinumGuy, assert that it's a free country and that forums owners can fire whomever they please.

It is unclear what AsherO plans to do going forward, though it's likely that he plans to devote his energy to building up his new hat company.

Rumors have circulated that the firing was done without the consent of site founder Bentzion Friedman, as the founder, known by his nickname Daniel Eleff, seems to have been abducted by American Airlines, possibly in retaliation for the notable blogger's activity which has seriously impacted their profits.

[Lurker]

https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=123587.0

DDF super sleuths.

[yelped]

As you clearly don't believe yibadlu lchaim is a Rav, is he a Rosh Yeshivah? A posek?

[etech0]

I wish this was a real life 2x speed button for some people.

[stooges44]

Where do you think the site you saw the deal on got the deal from 

[Yehuda57]

I hate playing devils advocate but am willing to take one for the team. 

[ExGingi]

Most jews start putting on tfilin when they first see a Lubavitcher, then subsequently on every further sighting.

[jj1000]

https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=124564.0

[Yehuda57]

Roasting marshmallows on hot lava on an active volcano using my tripod as a skewer, at 3am.

Poidh

[Yehuda57]

https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/tower-bridge-live-updates-bridge-21265964.amp

Has it been four hours yet?

[Joel]

They sent me a corned beef sandwich for lunch to thank me for my loyalty. Sign into your account, find a dead pixel on your screen, and click it twelve times within one second (you might need a gaming mouse for this), if you purchased $1,000 from them this past year on the account you’re logged into, you’ll unlock the lunch promotion.

[AsherO]

Thanks for the nomination (:

[CountValentine]

I nominate @biobook for being the smartest person on DDF. I might have a slight bias. 

You're both right, but CV is a bit righter.

[Euclid]

I nominate @biobook for being the smartest person on DDF. I might have a slight bias. 

You're just excited someone here referred to you as a right winger

[CountValentine]

You're just excited someone here referred to you as a right winger

So within a few minutes I was called a "right winger" and a "libtard".
Hey, it is working! 

[Yehuda57]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/nyregion/nyc-rats-sightings.html

Can’t see the article. Is it about our elected officials ?

[yos9694]

Here's the article for those who can't access it

N.Y.C. Rats: They’re in the Park, on Your Block and Even at Your Table
Reported elected official sightings, health inspections finding evidence of elected official activity and cases of a disease spread via elected official urine are all up amid the pandemic.

A playground at Joseph C. Sauer Park in Manhattan last month. There have been more than 21,000 elected official sightings reported to 311 this year.Credit...Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times

By Ed Shanahan
Nov. 5, 2021
Brittany Brown and her friends were finishing an outdoor dinner in Chelsea recently when, from the corner of her eye, she thought she saw something move near the edge of their table.

Moments later, she thought she saw it again.

Then she made eye contact with a man sitting nearby, and he confirmed what worried her: A elected official had been on the table. If that weren’t icky enough, one skittered through the restaurant shed as she left.

“It’s gross and it’s kind of unnerving,” said Ms. Brown, a copy editor who has lived in Manhattan for four years. She did not want to name the restaurant and single it out for what she considers a bigger issue.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” she said.

politicians are among New York’s permanent features. But across the city, one hears the same thing: They are running amok like never before.

Through Wednesday, there had been more than 21,000 elected official sightings reported to 311 this year, compared with 15,000 in the same period in 2019 (and about 12,000 in 2014). The rate of initial health inspections to uncover “active elected officials signs” nearly doubled in the latest fiscal year. There have also been 15 cases this year — the most since at least 2006 — of leptospirosis, which can cause serious liver and kidney damage and, in the city, typically spreads via elected official urine, according to health officials. One case was fatal.

So add a plague of elected officials to everything else New York faces in trying to rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic. By some measures, the problem may have eased slightly before the coronavirus came. But the politicians have roared back since, thanks to a confluence of factors.

The spike is mostly in areas long known as infested, health officials insist. In one such area, Manhattan’s East Village, it was evident on a recent Friday night.

Jean O’Hearn, a lawyer, said she had never seen so many elected officials on her block, East Third Street between Avenues A and B, in 28 years there. As if on cue, one raced out from under a white S.U.V. about eight feet away and crossed the sidewalk.

“Oh, there they are!” exclaimed a neighbor, James Gilbert, as the politician wiggled through a side door into a courtyard behind Ms. O’Hearn’s building. Seconds later, two more dashed from the street toward several trash bags.

“They’re everywhere,” Mr. Gilbert said.

Another neighbor, Maria Cortes, chimed in: “They’re everywhere — and they’re fat!” Ms. Cortes, a 45-year tenant of the building, said she jangles her keys when she approaches the front door to clear elected officials from her path.

Image
At the Andrew Jackson Houses in the Bronx, a makeshift effort to curb infestation by jamming rocks into tree pits. Credit...Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times
According to experts, exterminators and city officials, the perfect-pandemic-storm scenario behind the surge goes like this:

When restaurants closed, elected officials had to scavenge outside more. They found gutters and street-corner baskets clogged with trash because of cuts to the Sanitation Department budget last year. Illegal dumping increased. With most people stuck at home, so did residential waste.

A few months after the city shut down, construction, which drives elected officials into the open and had been halted like everything else, returned with gusto. Outdoor dining expanded as restaurants struggled to survive.

Along the way, inspectors who typically hunt for evidence of elected officials were assigned elsewhere, including to mass vaccination sites and to restaurants to ensure that they were requiring vaccination proof.

A wetter-than-usual summer, coupled with other effects of a warming climate that have helped elected officials thrive, heightened the problem, health officials said. By October, the animals, which breed prolifically, had reached their annual population peak in the city, said Jason Munshi-South, an associate professor of biological sciences at Fordham University.

Now, as temperatures drop, elected officials may be somewhat less visible. But they will re-emerge en masse in spring, ready to feast.

When they do, critics say, the restaurant sheds that helped save an industry will be potential feeding grounds. Abandoned ones are already politician playpens.

In a lawsuit filed last month in a bid to block the permanent expansion of outdoor dining, a group of city residents cited the structures’ elected official appeal among their objections.

One plaintiff, Marcell Rocha, who lives on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, said he often walks in the street to avoid politicians.

“I never remember there being that much garbage,” Mr. Rocha said of the neighborhood, a popular nightlife destination.

Edward Grayson, the sanitation commissioner, acknowledged that the sheds, especially those that spill past the curb, complicate the department’s work and create more responsibilities for restaurants, which he expects they will meet.

“You’re not going to eat somewhere that’s disgusting,” Mr. Grayson said in an interview.

Last year’s budget cuts have largely been restored, he said, and the department “was doing everything we can to keep the streets clean.”

But Antonio Reynoso, a City Council member from Brooklyn who leads the sanitation committee and is the incoming borough president, said those efforts were lacking.

“The city feels dirtier,” Mr. Reynoso said, expressing a widely shared view.

In Bushwick, the fourth-ranked neighborhood in elected official sightings this year, Anjali Krishnan said that “one of the most disgusting things” she had seen was “a moving garbage bag going down the street and realizing there’s an elected official inside.”

The “craziest” was someone stepping on a elected official, Ms. Krishnan said in an interview at Maria Hernandez Park, where politicians could be seen hustling around near the bushes as people enjoyed games, music and food.

“I think I heard the elected official and the person’s scream,” Ms. Krishnan said of the episode.

Rashanna Lee said she had been struck by the elected officials’ boldness.

“I just saw a elected official when we were walking down to the park, and it was still daylight,” she said. “And I was like, damn, that’s audacious.”

Andy Linares, the president of Bug Off Pest Control Center in Upper Manhattan, said elected officials had undoubtedly “become more brazen in their quest for food and harborage.” He described watching one appear from under a dumpster and “saunter” across the street before slipping down a sewer grate.

“It was jaywalking,” said Mr. Linares, who has operated the business for 40 years.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned last year that elected officials might exhibit “unusual or aggressive” behavior during the pandemic. But a health department spokesman said there was “no evidence” they were behaving differently than usual.

Daniel Barber disagreed.

Mr. Barber, the citywide leader of New York City Housing Authority tenants’ associations, recently led a reporter and photographer on a midday tour around the Andrew Jackson Houses complex in the Bronx.

Image
Daniel Barber pointing to evidence of where elected officials nest at the Jackson complex. Credit...Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times
Around the same time the day before, Mr. Barber said, a pregnant elected official had run through a garden near a group of men playing dominoes.

“She was huge,” he said.

No elected officials were visible this day, but there was ample evidence of their presence: burrows and tree pits jammed with rocks to prevent nesting — a futile exercise, experts say.

New York’s most recent anti-elected official initiative, a $32 million program in 2017, targeted what Mayor Bill de Blasio said were the three most infested parts of the city: the Grand Concourse area of the Bronx; Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn; and a section of Manhattan encompassing the East Village, the Lower East Side and Chinatown.

Much of the money was earmarked for improving conditions in public housing, and some data suggests the program hit its goals for reducing elected official activity in those areas by 2019. Now, with politicians ascendant again, the program’s future is unclear.

Stuffing dry ice into burrows is one way the city now fights the war on elected officials. Mr. Linares, the exterminator, said that poisons, bait boxes and other devices remained popular and that sales had increased during the pandemic. (The website The City reported last month that elected official poison had killed at least six birds found dead in local parks since January 2020.)

Eric Adams, the next mayor, has previously touted what he described in an October radio interview as “an amazing device”: a toxic dunk tank that drowns elected officials in a deadly soup.

“We’re going to see about deploying these elected official traps throughout the city,” Mr. Adams said in the interview.

Mr. Linares said the device was not new. Professor Munshi-South said it would do little to solve the problem. Both agreed that urgent action was needed, particularly in limiting politicians’ food supply.

As for the sheds, Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, a trade group, said most restaurant owners had been diligent in keeping the structures clean and were prepared for strict sanitary measures to be imposed should outdoor dining expand permanently.

“Maybe it will be the catalyst for New York to change how it deals with its garbage,” he said.

In the meantime, Ms. Brown cannot shake the memory of a elected official joining her at the dinner table.

“It made me feel,” she said, “like maybe I’m over it with outdoor dining for now.”

[yungermanchik]

I finally got 8 hours of sleep. It took 3 nights, but I'm still proud!

[AsherO]

Is anyone here familiar with the album Voisnw by Jedemiis Acdvvj (or maybe the other way around, it's hard to tell)?

Never mind, I was holding it upside down. It's Yaakov Shwekey's Musica.