bigbacaloa

Everyday people ... sing a simple song ... mama's so happy ... mama starts to cry ... papa still singing ... you can make it if you try ...

That song helped me survive an awful childhood.

I would be less of an a*** and a bit braver, but otherwise mostly the same.

Most students see education as a video game - the goal is to score as many points as possible in a framework controlled by some apparently arbitrary rules. That educators fail to distinguish school from video games is mostly the fault of educators. And video games are more fun.

I did not see much fear. I was at work and it took about two hours for us to realize the outage was not just local. The cafeteria had gas burners and served everything they could to empty the refrigerators. We all at lunch and discussed whether those who lived far away (train trip) would need to sleep at work (they might have, I don't know what happened to them). I made the relatively short 75 minute walk home across the city.

The atmosphere was quasi-festive and most people were quite relaxed, enjoying an unexpected afternoon off. Younger people filled the bars which were serving everything they could. There were long lines at supermarkets and an occasional fellow toting a box of supplies, but mostly there were just huge numbers of people in the street and completely collapsed traffic flow (the police were out in force almost immediately, directing traffic). In the part of Madrid I was in about 1/4-1/3 of the population is from South America and I suspect most of them have seen this all before anyway. The only real stress I saw was from people that need a train to get home (because the trains weren't running) and a had a walk of more than 2-3 hours.

I got cell phone signal when I was near two hospitals which were fully operational.

It was interesting that almost immediately, while I was still at work, everyone said power was out in Portugal and France too. After an hour or two some were claiming problems in Germany, but this seemed already to be unfounded rumors.

Some younger people couldn't walk home because they didn't have google maps ...

"Bar" doesn't mean the same thing in every country. In Spain although a bar serves alcohol of all kinds it is also where one eats breakfast and lunch and gets a coffee. They are indispensable social centers and even a tiny town of 150 has one.

While it may be true that margins are independent of the buyer at a given scale, margins certainly do depend on scale. If 15% of the population is buying 75% of the alcohol (these are not ridiculous numbers), cutting that 15% out would put many alcohol producers (in particular those who sell cheap) out of business.

These percentages are similar to those that one sees for alcohol consumption or problematic gambling.

The business model of the casinos and the drug dealers and the alcohol venders is the same - you need a huge pool of unproblematic recreational users to find the problematic users who generate the bulk of your profits.

The same model works for video games and social media.

"Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides."

Nonsense. Good reporting is about carefully filtering the evidence and reporting the essential stuff. Sometimes that's heavily skewed to one "side" or the other. What's suspicious is when it's always the same side.

Folks used it to clear old tree stumps too.

Some of those fbi agents are active participants and true believers too.

That's because a bar is generally required by law not to serve someone already drunk.

You're ignoring the costs of buying and selling and supposing incorrectly that property always appreciates on a relevant time scale.

Students often produce this algorithm by mistake in first year programming. It works in spite of the fact that they don't know what they are doing.

If you have to count on the military to save you, you are lost already.

Folks who don't run may not appreciate how ridiculous this is. For most normal people this speed is near an all out sprint ... for 21 km. Most folks you know who run 10ks can't keep up with this guy for more than about half a km, if that much (a typical 50min 10k runner can't run a 1k in 3 minutes).

VAT is the most regressive sort of tax and gives the lie to the myth of Europe as a socialist paradise. In Spain it's used because it's much easier to collect than are income taxes, which lots get away without paying.

For those that don't know, Wang hunting wrote that in 1991! Now he is one of the top dogs in the Chinese government ....

This kind of strategic, war is always possible, thinking is deeply embedded into US institutional-governmental culture and in US education. It's part of the quasi-fascistic thinking that was assimilated by the entire population - independent of political leaning - during the Cold War.

Better to make it law and enforce the law than to trust large companies to do anything ethical.

Realistically no if you think about how teen social groups work.

People own mobile devices because they must in order to function in contemporary society, not because they trust the agents behind them. I can't do banking, park my car, buy transport passes, etc. without a mobile device. That doesn't mean I trust any of the tech actors behind the programs I use on it. In fact, using it regularly makes me more suspicious of them than I already was.

In Spain by law all eating establishments have to provide tap water for free if asked.

That's true if the cohort is MIT grad students. It's probably not true if the cohort is Random Western State Institute of Technology. On the other hand the relatively high percentage of postdocs who survive according to the cited article probably reflects that in the analogy many of the hiring institutions are closer to second division clubs than to first division ones. The analogy breaks at this point because salary structures are quite different. The marginal difference between working at Research I and Research II is not so great, while the marginal salary difference between playing in Division I and Division II is huge.

It's like being a professional athlete. Until you get to the first division you don't know if you have what it takes and no one else does either.

I think there is some requirement of a sort of good faith in the popups. What you describe is essentially deceptive behavior, and in a good legal system that should be seen as circumventing the law so itself actionable.

Obliging clients to answer multiple popups will irritate them and drive them elsewhere.

This sort of tracking is considered normal in the USA but not everywhere else.

When plate tectonics was first proposed the low quality of the original models of the underlying mechanism led many very good geophysicists and geologists to reject it or to express well founded skepticism of the model. They knew the details and subtleties and the original models didn't deal well with them the proposal was nonetheless correct grosso modo and with time more adequate models of the underlying mechanisms were proposed and a more nuanced view of the model came into place. Now it is considered well established.

One should consider the possibility that Gil Kalai is a similar sort of skeptic making well founded objections to weak arguments, but that nonetheless in the long run the extraordinary claims will turn out to be more or less correct. It's true that those involved in plate tectonics didn't have Bitcoin to sell you, but they were looking for oil.

In the US one is not taught about US support of dictatorships in the past and present.

But it's a bad nonsolution. The problem persists. It can be fixed by decent form design.

When I was a kid I had to keep several quarts of oil in the car in order to replenish when necessary. Also a bottle of antifreeze and several bottles of water.

Genocide is always motivated by simple things like theft.