There’s also the self-imposed delays. How many days of waiting are racked up by Americans saying “let’s see what happens” because of the prohibitive cost of accessing care?

I wonder what it looks like if you start the clock not at “You need hip replacement” but rather “My hip is acting up”.

Or even “the women’s room is out-of-order, it’s an emergency, use the men’s room”.

So what’s the replacement in the schedule?

I had high hopes for Zach and Cody: The Re-education Camp Life but that seems to be in development limbo.

The “80 year old main character who looks 90 and acts 120” bit is played out. I hope the next time they roll out an ancient character, they at least pull the “I’m a vampire so I’m 450 years old but with the body of a smoking hot 24-year-old” trope.

The terrible secret is that immigrarion is the secret sauce behind “American Exceptionalism”

High recent immigrant populations essentially select for people willing to put in the extra effort to migrate, which is a close proxy for to things like “entrepeneurship” and “seeking out better education/opportunities for their children.”

MTP is awfully slow on my Nokia G20 at least. OTOH, it has a uSD slot so I could just pop it out and transfer that way.

$150 phones are better than $1500 ones.

Since so much of Trump’s rationale is to get into a position where he’s out of legal jeopardy, U’m amazed nobody’s tried the plea deal switcharoo: end your candidacy and we’ll give you immunity. Come November 6th, the judge throws out the deal. I’m pretty sure there’s been at least one Law & Order doing that, although the President was played by a guest star in an orange wig.

With American comics, it’s not even the shattered continuity, it’s that availability is a mess because some of the franchises are so ancient and collectible.

If I want to read through One Piece from the 1997 start, my library probably has/can inter-library loan all 105 volumes, or I can go to mainstream retailers and get any I’m missing without a huge fracas.

If I want to read Batman from the 1940 start, I’d better hope some of the rarer issues come up at auction in the near future AND that I can mortgage my house to afford them.

I’m amazed they never put out a DVD-ROM collection that’s “Everything Marvel/DC did prior to, say, 1990, as PDF scans” just so mere mortals have a chance to enjoy the experience of completionism.

Creativity as a muassively-multiplayer endeavour.

I might not be able to write/draw (insert famous large work) but perhaps I can correct one clunky sentence on page 279. And when thousands of people are free to do so without the original artist beung able to gatekeep, the work can move in exciting new directions.

After wrecking some JIS screws on a vintage reciever, I bought a nice Vessel-brand JIS driver set, and use it for all my crosshead needs.

Is it a GE product?

It has some of the design cues of the export models of the UxxC series models.

I always found it fascinating how the law is such a unique and cloistered ecosystem.

The sciences and arts encourage self-education and self-discovery. Constructive disruption is admired and moves the fields forward. Those who make it accessible and reachable are celebrated.

I love your phrasing “law-priests”. The law is the religion in a secular state. It has all the same trappings:

• The ranks and orders of clergy, where only they are fit to interpret the sacred scripts, with strong bias and penalty for trying to do so as an uneducated layman
• Adherence to doctrine and continuity (precedent) even as the environment it was established in no longer exists
• The constant urge to obfuscate and revel in exclusive language, to continue the air of mystery and impermeability.
• An overall attitude of fear and submission encouraged by the impenetrability. Even our richest and most powerful still fear the legal system for its caprice, and attempt to ward themselves from it with sigils and charms made of contracts.

Someone needs to nail up some theses to the door of the Supreme Court.

TBH, I sort of wonder the history of why they push the LGBT repression so hard in Russia.

In a place like the US, where you have culture war manifested through elections, it’s an easy way to score points with a specific and identified demographic/donor group. Demonize the gays and then you don’t have to lean on other voters who will ask about why the schools are failing and the economy is spiraling.

Does the Russian political system have such pressure groups?

I could sort of see it as part of a larger suite of “traditional values/restore past glory” messaging, but even there, it seems low on the checklist, and again, is there even meaningful campaigning where it pays dividends?

The immigration angle is bait and switch politicking. Has been for decades.

People feel economically stagnant and culturally disconnected.

Couldn’t be the capitalist machine grinding you to dust while gnawing away any sort of social institutions or greater visions than “line goes up”. It’s clearly Juan or Abdul who are scrabbling to send a few dollars or Euros to their family. Excluding them is gonna roll back the clock to when a single worker could get a no-degree factory job straight out of high school and raise a sitcom-style family of four, you know!

Chromebooks maybe?

I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.

Back in the Windows 8 era, I bought a little 8" tablet PC from Dell. It was flaky from basically day 1, and after ~2 weeks it bricked entirely.

I go to RMA and they ask “If we refund you $50, would you be willing to keep the unit? How about $75?”

Admittedly, they did give me a refund, but that was so the wrong branch to follow on the chat script, honey. If I’m going to be out over three hundred dollars for a paperweight it better at least be made of something cool like meteorite.

I think 2049 is the 100th anniversary of the current PRC, so a reasonable target for ceremonial goals.

No different than saying an American leader said he wanted a Mars landing for the tricentennial in 2076. It’s good symbolism, not necessarily a technical merric.

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

If I’ve learned anything from GTA… just drive the news van around and hit pedestrians until you make budget.

I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.

“Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan.” is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.

I’m sick of “unlimited” services that really mean “there’s a limit but we aren’t going to say what it is.” By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!

Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare’s product matrix. Everyone loves the “contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan” model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn’t it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there’s value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.

I was under the impression thar’s what the mid-grade petrol was for; it had a high-enough octane factor to be non-knocking in engines designed for leaded.