hrunt

In the flag examples given, I agree they are almost all uniformly uninspired. The six- and eight-pointed stars must be clip art, and the flat, solid colors and geometric abstractions are boring. It says more about the lack of design education over the past 50 years than anything else.

But that Newton, Kansas, flag is excellent. I only know two things about Newton, Kansas, and that is they grow wheat and have trains. And I learned 100% of that from that flag.

I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out?

It wouldn't matter, because the ultra-wealthy generally don't have much income relative to their wealth. Elon Musk (in the article listed at $817B of wealth) was reported to have had $1.52B of net income between 2014 and 2018, and had no taxable income in 2018. 95% of $0 is still $0.

The ultra-wealthy's wealth doesn't grow because of income (as the tax code defines it). Trying to tax income to redistribute their wealth (or even just slow its growth) is not going to address wealth inequality.

In my school, I was part of a group of students who hand-programmed games on TI-81 or TI-82 calculators using TI-BASIC. No cable transfers. Games included: Hangman, Missile Command, Minesweeper, and R-Type. Looking back, it was really amazingly impressive. Both what those calculators could do and how much free time we had to make them do it.

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comments responding to that. All obvious bot accounts.

It's obvious on the channels, because these reply sets usually don't contain a lot of replies to comments (if there are any comment replies, it's almost always from the channel owner). It's so obvious, in fact, that I'm surprised YouTube hasn't done something to address it.

If the problem with being a car company is that they'd have to compete with China, then I have some bad news about being a robot company. China is already farther ahead in both technology and volume of humanoid robots.[0][1][2][3]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/cnbc-china-connection-newsle...

[1]https://www.unitree.com/g1

[2] https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/limx-humanoid...

[3] https://www.bgr.com/2083491/china-agibot-humanoid-robot-us-c...

Yes, people expect SCOTUS to rebuff Trump on the tariffs. [0]

Lately SCOTUS has been providing stricter textual interpretations of Constitutional questions. Many of these have aligned with Trump administration arguments based on the power of the executive as outlined in Article II. The text says, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," and, "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." One of the key arguments is that Congress can't take that power away from him. For example, Congress can't tell him that he can't fire executive-branch staff, because the executive power rests with him, not with Congress.

One thing the Constitution is very clear on, though, is that only Congress can impose tariffs ("The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises"). Furthermore, recent rulings of this Court have established the major questions doctrine, which says that even if Congress delegates the specifics of implementing its powers to the Executive branch, that delegation cannot be interpreted broadly. It can't be used to create new broad policies that Congress didn't authorize.

Therefore, because the text of the Constitution explicitly grants the right to impose tariffs to Congress /and/ Trump's imposition of tariffs is both very broad and very substantial, many people believe that SCOTUS will deny Trump's tariffs.

The case as argued is about Trump's right to issue tariffs under the IEEPA (a law Congress passed to give the President some ability to take economic actions due to international emergencies, which do not explicitly include tariffs), and there is some debate about what a negative ruling would mean for the return of tariffs to merchants who have paid them. Both of those points require careful consideration in the decision. Will the ruling limit itself to just tariffs issued under the IEEPA or to the President's ability to establish tariffs under other laws? If the Court rules against the tariffs, will the government be required to pay people back, and if so, to what extent? It's not surprising that the decision is taking some time to be released. There's a lot of considerations, and every one is a possible point for disagreement by the justices.

[0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/prediction-market-trade...

Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.

An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.

What was the test for citizenship before the 14th amendment?

Basically, the same. Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor's Snug Harbor (1830) established:

The rule commonly laid down in the books is, that every person who is born within the ligeance of a sovereign is a subject; and, e converso, that every person born without such allegiance is an alien. . . . Two things usually concur to create citizenship; first, birth locally within the dominions of the sovereign; and secondly, birth within the protection and obedience, or in other words, within the ligeance of the sovereign. That is, the party must be born within a place where the sovereign is at the time in full possession and exercise of his power, and the party must also at his birth derive protection from, and consequently owe obedience or allegiance to the sovereign, as such, de facto.[0]

It excluded slaves and it excluded Native Americans. Native American US citizenship was established in 1924 by statute.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_Clause#cite_ref-4

[1] https://www.bia.gov/faqs/are-american-indians-and-alaska-nat...

This is not what's happening in these schools. Many children have no outside-of-school work -- at all. My two children have had many classes with no homework up through 8th grade. And this is in a highly regarded, very competitive school district.

From what I can tell, this is mostly a parent-led thing, well supported by overworked teachers who are more than willing to avoid even more work grading out-of-school assignments.

You are wrong. The fuel shutoff switches are directly beneath the throttle levers, and they move down to cutoff, which is exactly the direction a hand beneath the throttle would move to accidentally switch them to cutoff.

Secondly, while the FO was flying the airplane and thus would have control of the throttles during rollout, the captain would certainly have his hand beneath the throttles in an observer position during at least part of the takeoff. And during takeoff, procedure would have the captain take over control of the throttle levers until rotation while the FO handled the yoke with both hands.

blancolirio[0] has two excellent video examples of 787 takeoffs within the cockpit showing FO-pilot takeoffs and both officers' actions during takeoff.

Page 10 of the Air India preliminary report[1] shows a picture of the fuel cutoff switches -- clearly labeled "FUEL CONTROL" with "RUN" in the up position and "CUTOFF" in the down position -- directly beneath the throttle levers.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA_UZeHZwSw [1] https://aaib.gov.in/What's%20New%20Assets/Preliminary%20Repo...

Bitcoin and Ethereum don't have "insiders", and the ownership pool is sizeable and diverse enough to make pump and dump difficult to perform with them.

It's important to recognize that pump-and-dump coins (scams), memecoins, and (for lack of a better term) cryptocurrencies have separate characteristics.

Pump-and-dump coins have insiders that control the majority of the coins and know when to exit. They are "in" on the game, and they specifically manipulate others to exit with a windfall with no expectation of the coin to last past the exit. TRUMP is an example of a pump-and-dump coin.

Memecoins have enough diverse holders that there's nobody with enough coins for a dump to kill it completely. Memecoins are volatile because they still respond to hype and the people involved acknowledge their questionable value, but there's not a person or group of people that know what's going to happen to the coin. DOGE is an example of a memecoin.

The more classic, well-established cryptocurrencies are like memecoins where the market sees real value in them or their future. Not only do they have a large and diverse pool of holders, but they serve general use cases that the holders perceive has having value (note, not the same as the holders perceiving the coin has value, but that the use-cases for the coin drive its value). BTC is an example of a cryptocurrency.

BTC and ETH may still have as much inherent value as pump-and-dump coins, but if they take a ride to zero, it will happen differently than a pump-and-dump.

What control do they need beyond normal copyright?

Money. Content partners pay to have NFL content on their platforms, NFL content is highly valuable, so the NFL doesn't want anyone else to monetize it without the NFL getting their cut.

I accept that /other/ people are idiots, so please, don't restrict /my/ access to guns. /s

Planet Money did an episode[1] on People Express, a low-cost airline that sprung up right after deregulation in the 80s. The history of People Express as told in that episode mirrors Spirit. Once the major carriers decided to compete, it sunk the upstart's business.

[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197960905

Yes, workers are required to pay taxes on that income. Whether they do or not is another question. When tips used to be mostly cash, workers would often just pocket the cash. The government can't tax what they don't know about. More often, though, tipped workers often work at the lowest income scales and thus fall within income brackets that require little taxation.

Note that of the two states currently splitting electors, neither do it in proportion of votes. They award an elector to the winner of the vote in each of the state's congressional districts, and then the overall statewide winner receives the remaining two electors. In that sense, it's identical to how representatives are sent to Congress.

More meetings: both the cause of and solution to our problems!

What we do know is that SpaceX was able to deliver the requirements 4 years (and counting) earlier than Boeing. And they continue to deliver. Yeah, they could be losing money hand over fist, but at the very least they delivered.

Underground

It was supposed to be 830 persons per dollar.

Here's a fun thought experiment.

How much should National Public Data have to pay the people affected by this breach? The article says there are 2.9 billion people impacted. Let's take that at face value and assume that there are no duplicates in there. How much should each person receive? The article also says that USDoD tried to sell the data for only $3.5 million, so they value it at roughly $830/person.

Now, in class actions, not everyone takes the deal. Most people ignore it or never pay attention to the notice. Let's say, very generously, 10% of those affected take the deal. That would be 290 million people. If you gave each of them $100, that would be $29 billion dollars. Do you think National Public Data even has that kind of money? What if we gave everyone just your $3? That's $870 million. I don't think this data broker probably even has that much money.

Your only real hope of getting a sizable payout from this class is either a) NPD is sitting on a mountain of cash or b) a very small percentage of users get paid. Anything else and the money isn't there.

When people say that there need to be criminal, go-to-jail type repercussions for not securing data, this is why. People value their freedom much more than businesses value staying solvent.

Planet Money just did a great episode on how class action lawsuits actually work, from both sides[1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197961271

I agree that the governor's efforts to remove homeless encampments is a good thing.

But the worst part about homelessness is the quality of life for homeless people -- full stop. Framing the problem of homelessness as a financial burden of much wealthier property owners dehumanizes the people most affected by homelessness and perpetuates the lack of effort to address the problem.

You would expect teams to game the system and use longer splitters if photo finishes happen often enough. Tried taking a look at the regulations and it seems that they're not publicly available.

NASCAR cars are standardized and measured before and after every race. Failing a race inspection severely penalizes the team (loss of points, driver or crew chief suspensions, fines). Failing a pre-race inspection means the car doesn't race until it passes inspection. Teams aren't allowed to install splitters with different lengths than their competitors.

NASCAR, however, will mandate different splitter measurements for different racetracks. Still, all cars at each racetrack must use splitters that match NASCAR's requirements.

In effect, you can win a race while having traveled 1 or 2 laps less than the others if you benefited from the lucky dog rule once or twice.

The driver still has to travel the full number of laps to win the race, same as any other winner would. The lucky dog just gets to drive faster than anyone else is allowed to during caution. The driver actually has to drive their car all the way around the track. It's the same as if the driver was able to drive faster than the leader in the middle of the race and get their lap back the hard way. No one would say he traveled fewer laps. They would say he drove faster.

22.5 light HOURS. Imagine pressing a button on your old desktop calculator and waiting 2 days for the number to show up.

I'm not a musician and I'm a Rick Beato fan as well. I especially like his "What Makes This Song Great?" series of videos breaking down how well-known songs are put together.

I think he explains what he's saying in the video, but it takes about 3/4 of the video to get there. When he de-tunes his C-string and plays the chord, it very obviously sounds dissonant. Even to my untrained ear, it sounds bad. When people say, "I've never heard this song before?" what they really mean is that they don't know if the bad sound they are hearing is intentional or not. If you watch a lot of Rick's other videos, you know he has not only a trained ear but also an understanding of chord sequences. Even if he hadn't heard the song before, he would know that a chord sounded bad based on what notes were played before it.

To your last point, Rick's thought is that people /should/ be more sensitive to out-of-tune-with-themselves instruments given how perfectly tuned most commercial music is these days, and that's why he's surprised that people don't hear it (or think that it might be intentional).

Related to your unrelated, I also used Free Tax USA this year. I ended up having to use TurboTax to complete my taxes because FTUSA didn't handle calculations for a Schedule K-1 correctly and did not support all information provided by said K-1 (as confirmed by their support staff).

I thought it was a great product, but alas, I need it to handle those things properly if I want to dump TurboTax. I would actually be happy to pay for FTUSA if the features worked.

Why? They already used up all their luck escaping the accident.

Tsar Bomba was detonated in October 1961. That means that for any civilization to have seen it, that civilization must be within 63 light years of Earth. In addition, unlike the Pyramids, Tsar Bomba was a momentary flash, so if a civilization within that distance started looking today, they wouldn't see it. They probably wouldn't even see evidence of it, since here on Earth we can detect only traces that it specifically happened.

What the paper talks about is constantly visible evidence of human life. Civilizations up to 3000 light-years away can see evidence of the Pyramids because they were built 3000 years ago and have been visible from space ever since.

These make analogies make no sense. The author is a self-described expert in fraud and security. It's totally reasonable to ask why he didn't use base-standard advice like, "Don't accept incoming calls," and "Don't give an incoming caller information about your card." This is basic security stuff we tell our parents and grandparents.

The analogy is more like, "Why would a car mechanic put a part in his car that he didn't choose himself?" or "Why would a doctor take pills some rando on the street gave him?" Most people would look at that car mechanic or doctor and think, "How good a mechanic or doctor are you?"

Yes, the expert was "manipulated", but only in the sense that when his "CU" called him, he didn't heed the initial advice experts give everyone -- hang up and call the number of the CU directly.

That said, I'm not piling on him. His article provides a great lesson about how easy it is to ignore one's own advice and knowledge and what the consequences can be. In this case, he /knew/ the right thing to do, but he also knew so much about how the systems worked that he ignored the base knowledge because he thought he "knew" what was happening. In a way, he manipulated himself.