cpt1138

I ordered something from a Chinese company and they quoted me 5USD per unit and 35USD shipping. I accepted and the units were shipped and delivered and of excellent quality.

Sometime later FedEx sends me a weird bill for some random seeming amount of money I owed. They had a link or email or something to basically refuse to pay. I did refuse to pay. The shipper ended up communicating with me to determine I was going to refuse to pay and I found where Fedex had on the website that indicated the shipper was responsible for all fees. I assume the randomness of it was related to tariffs but I wasn't going to pay anything like what they sent me.

I do hope that some repercussions come of these terrible economic policies and the shipper gets their money back from Fedex, but as a company or as an individual I don't think a company's policy to send random bills after delivery is valid either.

Pure FAFO. Love it. Hating Musk before it was cool has its upsides but I really can’t help thinking about how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Are amino acids not present in rocky planet oceans?

All I can take away from this is that it really doesn't matter where it came from. The real problem is dealing with something like this was a failure on so many levels regardless of where it came from. The OP definitely finishes with the emotional desire to blame that still doesn't change the fact that the despair is not from where it came from but rather our global dealing with it.

Never liked Musk

The Nikon Monarch 7 is good. For birds you want something with a lot of light and less magnification (easier to hold steady). I also like the Vortex Viper HD for lower budgets. 8x42-50 is going to be your best bet for birding.

Doctorow says "But there’s something we can do about this! The part of the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act that authorizes agencies to assess fees runs out in Oct 2023, and when Congress renews it, they could add an amendment to block Booz’s junk fees."

What exactly are "we" supposed to do about it?

I think I would pay for all these services for content if I could be assured of watching the content how I want. I don't like the monthly fees, but Ill put up with it, I prefer the rental model and I'm willing to wait (like we used to for rentals). That said the way I want to watch content is downloaded for offline viewing, on our projector, with the sound split since my wife is hard of hearing and likes the sound going directly to her hearing aids. The content providers see that as pirating and disable it. Its frustrating to find that out, when you are no longer anywhere with service (the reason for the downloading the first place) and can't do anything about it. Netflix has worked like that for a while and the problem is finding good content. Amazon Prime "works" and is the rental model and I like that the best. Disney does not work at all. And I cant be bothered to try every service to see if it works like that. I would love an aggregator and would be happy to pay monthly if they could provide EVERYTHING. In the meantime, Ill often even pay for the content somehow and then pirate it to watch it how I want.

Are all these questions related to Javascript? In some instances number vs object I guess I could talk about it wrt to Java or C but in terms of what Javascript’s notion of anything is unknown to me.

On all these sites, including this one, why is the engagement model to comment on things? At family gatherings, prior to COVID, I always noticed real life chit chat to be bizarrely opinionated and biased as soon as it veered from the weather or traffic. What is the value we are getting from commenting, that makes it “worth it” to us to give up anonymity?

Since 1/21 I have identified 153,423 attempts to gain access to some servers I run. All from unique ip addresses. It's one thing to identify bots, it's quite another what do about them.

Since Java 7, try with resources handles this in a much cleaner way than the example.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions...

It sounds trivial but exercise and a moderate diet affects my well being more than anything else.

Is the question just whether invertebrates have consciousness? It may be a forcing function of our desire to impose consciousness on things but it really seems like my cat and my dog both have a level of consciousness.

What a perfect story. Very nicely done.

MacBook Air: right price, good selection of ports, thought the screen would be an issue after 15" MBP (late 2011) but it was good enough, keyboard.

Do have any data to back up that claim? I assume the "California stop" is not isolated to California.

I keep hearing this dismay at the cop not getting consequences. If we assume comparative negligence and the cop that actually pulled the trigger is say 90% responsible. Then are you arguing that that the cop should get 20 years for responding to a shooter threat and killing someone that he thought was reaching for a firearm and the kid that perpetrated the prank gets 2 years? Or are you saying 100% cop that pulled the trigger and nothing for the kid that pulled the prank?

Java is just a C based language for all intents and purposes. The ecosystem is why Java is popular. For a very long time Sun maintained a stronghold on the way things were done and all the libraries and frameworks followed suit. What this means in practice is that most of the libraries follow strongly opinionated conventions.

Any time you are trying to solve a problem in a domain you are unfamiliar with, you have two problems. One is understanding the problem, two is understanding the framework's bizarre way of solving it. Java mitigates this in that most of the libraries and frameworks seem "familiar" and do things in a similar way.

I do see a lot of programmers that seem to eschew the ecosystems available to them and prefer to write all the code themselves. In that case, maybe Java is not compelling.

"Dissociation is a vague psychiatric symptom where you feel like you’re not real, or the world isn’t real, or you’re detached from the world, or something like that. It sounds weird, but if you explain it to someone who’s had it, they’ll say “Oh yeah, that thing!” It’s usually unpleasant, and tends to occur in PTSD, borderline personality, and extreme stress."

That really spoke to me. I have very bad allergies and as the doctor was trying things to help me out I spent about 3 months on Singulair. I had severe disassociation. It was very unpleasant and I stopped it. But yeah, that thing.

At least for me personally this is a gross oversimplification. While we do like cooking, we don't like planning or shopping for ingredients. We also don't like buying a head of red cabbage and using 1/8 of it and throwing out the rest. There are jars of god knows what in the fridge that are a year old or more that were bought for 1TB of something in a recipe.

Also the recipes BA does seem to me like eating in a good restaurant 3 times a week. Take out doesn't even play in the same ballpark.

I was watching the NOVA episode on placebo and the definitive physiological effects placebo had for depression, similar to SSRI's. I could not help wondering if the sugar in the sugar pills actually did make you feel less depressed and wondered if an experiment could be carried out with something inert.

Can you provide the feature to order by highest to lowest percentage. I used to love showing people another site that did this in aggregate (deadpooled atm) and it was clear the US spent most of its money on old people (Medicare) and war (Defense) and the paltry amount spent on Education, Science and Infrastructure was much more clearly showing how our money is spent.

The MacBook Air is still pretty reasonable. I thought moving from my 15” MBP would make it seem way too small but so far it’s been stellar and far more portable. Got a 2TB external SSD and run a lot from that (VMs).

Seriously tune out. Go for a hike. The wild turkeys on the hillside don't care, my cat seems to not care. Go outside and get some air.

Google maps definitely shows 140 open. Not sure what they are going on about.

Can you explain this? I’ve always been of the opinion that some solutions proposed over the years have tried to do this but fail because the trusted entity is unknown a priori. I don’t see how you can invent a trust model that is basically “trust me the user and whatever choices I have made.”

Your point about the left being dumb. Have you ever tried to change a Christian’s mind? There is no rational argument to be made for an irrational belief. In much the same way as theists, the “right” has irrational beliefs bolstered by constant misinformation (targeted). What, in your mind, would you have the “left” do?

Anything on the Food Pyramid

https://i.stack.imgur.com/RAOEu.jpg

I’m glad you confirmed this. I don’t know much about Go but I do know programming. My gut told me there was a mistake but imposter syndrome kicked in and I assumed Go had some non-intuitive proximity rules like ‘it’ refers to the last iterable in scope or something.

I have mentioned this before but the reason I like Java so much is the mature and cohesive ecosystem. Every single problem has been solved in Java and all the solutions look similar so you can readily pick them up. I don’t find that to be the case in other languages.