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mynameisnoone

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Americans "want" big SUVs because they're cheaper than mid-sized sedans. Unfortunately, they pollute more and they're less safe.

The SUV protectionism of import tariffs, safety exclusions, and pollution carve-outs must end because they're killing us on the roads, killing our health through more pollution, and killing the planet.

FC and Slashdot. There was a lot less traffic in the Bay Area in 2002 than 2000, and it was easier to find parking in downtown Palo Alto, but the eBay parking lot on Hamilton Place in San Jose still looked like a supercar showroom of the PayPal mafia. (Probably because eBay was used to liquidate the detritus of speculative economy like :CueCats and Webvan promotional materials.) Silicon Valley (San Jose - Santa Clara - Sunnyvale) commercial real estate vacancy rates hit around 25%. I opted to return to finish my EE/CS undergrad and do security research and IT consulting in .edu to pay for university.

It's all well-and-good to know about local cuisine, but sourcing them affordably and easily in other areas of the world is the key gotcha.

Middle America has greatly improved over the past 20 years in international ingredient availability. It used to be impossible to find organic vegetables or tahini (fresh or canned) in middle America, but this is no longer the case. One notable regression is with Whole Foods that doesn't carry any SKUs of pita bread in their flagship headquarters location, while H-E-B contains far more variety of SKUs (not everything WH carries), exceptional customer service, and lower prices.

Balsamic vinegar (TBV, TBVM, TBVRE), olive oil, maple syrup, wasabi, and more are all ripe (pun intended) for counterfeiting and deceptive marketing of inferior products. This is why PDOs & appellations for agricultural products exist. Caveat emptor.

Apartheid South Africa also tried to ban news media. It's a sign of extreme desperation and signals political vulnerability. Hopefully, Israel will get elections soon, and center- or left-leaning coalition government will pursue different foreign and military policies that a significant majority of Israelis prefer over the absurdity of the militarists and militant settlers.

https://truthout.org/articles/media-and-the-end-of-apartheid...

EDIT: Haaretz is a good and honest news source that has been extremely critical of the current leadership. Also recommended documentary film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gatekeepers_(film)

Pretty much the Saudi sphere of influence in a nutshell.

Parts of the maintained colonial vestiges within proper China are also equally absurd in splendor: marble from floor-to-ceiling, chandeliers as large as medium-sized aircraft, hedge mazes, indoor and outdoor sport shooting, and individual bungalows in the back by the lake filled with swans... and even the "cheap" rooms came with barber service and a "masseuse".

In many things, Americans don't realize how substandard or how (sometimes similarly) unequal their standard of living is relative to the rest of the world. I don't think most Americans have an accurate perspective because 2/3 don't even have a passport, and probably 70% of the only 1/3 who have one just have it to go to tourist traps like Tulum or Tahiti, or to be assholes in another country during Spring Break more-or-less the same as Miami Beach domestically who got tired of it.

If you want to see the world, get a backpack and ride trains across Europe, Asia, Russia, Africa, and all of the Americas too. Maybe join an international humanitarian NGO. Some people join the military, but that's a bad idea as per Smedley Butler.

An inevitable conclusion of extreme corporate profiteering and reckless and absurd inequality: a populace too poor to afford to pay into the consumption Pyramid Scheme. The skewed, power-law like distribution is now more lopsided than the Gilded Age. Even American millionaires (not billionaires) are asking to be taxed more because "Who wants to live in a poor country?", but have seen little traction because the billionaires' lobbyists have regulatory- and legislative-capture of the political class.

I remember those. 4-sided either rounded bulbs or paddles that blended into the central hub. The disadvantage is that they require fine motor control and so aren't accessible to all people. The problem though is that most of the pushbutton types tend to require too great of force to be usable by anyone. I prefer the crashbar button type that requires some force to engage but much less force to remain engaged.

Pretty much. Social media and related encourage cyberdisinhibitionism and tyranny through extremism including drama, fascistic policies, and a fundamental lack of compromise or benefit of the doubt. These tendencies aren't exclusive to one app or another, but are part and parcel of the medium. These tendencies tend to reward and encourage bullying and sociopathy while crucifying random people for trivial and arbitrary transgressions.

While it's cute, it's a small business not a startup and still a gimmick that doesn't solve the problem that coffee is a commodity and so the business is fundamentally not defensible. It's equivalent to being a meal kit business, which is one notch away from being a restaurant.

The style of toilet matters in the US. The problem is that the cheapest toilets tend to also meet all sorts of greenwashing (no pun intended) certifications while being unreliable, smaller, and not very good. Tankless ones are far more expensive initially, but are more reliable, flush with greater force, and use little water.

There is a cannabis dispensary here offering delta-8 and -9 THC products (legal in Texas because they derive from hemp) takes credit cards. Perhaps they are too small to matter while living on borrowed time, but most/all dispensaries around here take CCs.

Everywhere except the SF Bay Area, Santa Cruz, Malibu, Boca Raton, and Maui.

I think it's simply a communication and logistics problem to match people from other areas to empty homes. If anything, Japan and such should explicitly incentivize and encourage migration to declining areas to ensure their own tax base.

doas exists but isn't universally available but already solves this problem. sudo has too many features and permits excessive configuration, but it also has the convenience of ubiquity. Inventing a third thing tied to systemd is absurd and unnecessary.

ECMO is often a "Hail Mary" that rarely includes a favorable outcome.

OTOH, perfusion is an under-staffed specialty offering a good career without as much academic investment as an MD. The downsides are the possibility of being on-call and sometimes having to be the one who pulls the plug.