slipperydippery

Yep, I open Xcode several times per year, but haven't done it on purpose since... uh, 2014 or so?

If a take-home or anything else (automated half-hour online test or whatever) taking more than a couple minutes and not requiring as much time investment from them as you comes before they've winnowed down much of the field—if it's used as any kind of screener—I'd be out. That time's better spent sending more applications (or, IDK, drilling leetcode) if there are more than a very-few candidates still in the running for a given position.

If you want early stage bulk screeners, go for it, I'm sure you need them, but don't take much of my time or the math don't math.

In his first campaign especially, he talked exactly like a normal Republican voter. They say shit like "why don't they just build a wall?" (or they might suggest planting minefields along the border, super-common suggestion from R voters) and hate trade with China (so does a good chunk of the left... neoliberalism was never popular, "both sides" of politicians just agreed on it, until Trump) and want to lock up all the democrats and simply round up and deport all "the illegals" by any means necessary. His stuff he's doing with the military, sending them in to cities? They love that shit, they've wanted it to happen for years, they don't understand the legality, that they have hilariously wrong understandings of what cities are like due to propaganda and their own lack of experience with them, any of that, they just want "scumbags" beat up and thrown in vans. Truly, talk to them, I'm not exaggerating.

That's how he won, he exploited the gap between Republican voters and Republican politicians. As soon as I heard him sounding exactly like your average R voter chattin' at a diner, I knew he was dangerous and we were in for a wild ride.

We used to limit local market monopolization and total reach of, at least, public airwaves broadcasters.

That was a good idea. But we stopped.

The current far-right effort started with the postwar "think tank" boom, and that crowd has been working (successfully) to bend policy and law so they can enable and guide the creation of massive right-wing propaganda networks since the 70s. Fox News, Sinclair Media, a handful of dominant AM radio and now podcast production & distribution networks, and so on.

This isn't recent; we've been heading this way for decades, and not by accident.

When I had a bad experience at a chain pharmacy 10-ish years ago I spent less than an hour, googled "independent pharmacies" and found the National Community Pharmacists Association. They have a locator for locally-owned independent pharmacies and I switched to one of those.

The sole local thing I've been missing around here is a pharmacy that's not fucking CVS, which is awful (and Walgreens isn't better). I hadn't been able to find one using Maps.

Just tried this tool, very hopeful. There are six CVSs closer than the nearest independent pharmacy, literally a dozen towns closer to me than any of these independent pharmacies, and not a one with a non-megachain pharmacy in it :-/ Not driving 25ish minutes each way when we have to go two or three times a month (kids with regular prescriptions). Bummer. I really, really hate CVS.

And before you say "there's no other option" you're wrong, unless you live in a deep rural area where the nearest store is 20 minutes away and is a Dollar General, you are wrong.

This varies greatly regionally. From what I can tell the places with the healthiest local business options are ones where not just some neighborhoods or a town or two are (relatively) rich, but the whole area is rich, and at least somewhat densely populated. Which makes sense, but is sad for all the small towns out there with people really ideologically dedicated to "local business"—there's a reason those struggle and often fail within a year or two, in those places, and it's because there's no money in the area.

The noun sense does not.

I don’t get drawing a distinction. If a company has it, there’s at least one government out there that either also already has it (some telecom companies just give them data portals, for example) or can any time they choose.

Corporate surveillance is government surveillance. Always has been.

I think the author needs to shop at "richer" places for the treatment they want. Service is rich-people shit, and they're evidently not spending rich-people money. Inflation may recently have fucked up their expectations. It's been rough, I get it, I feel like I've dropped a "class" or so, too, just as I was clawing my way into upper-middle.

$300 full-retail for two pairs of sneakers in the downtown of a major city is not rich people money anymore, the goddamn trash-tier sneakers for my kids at Kohls often cost like $50+ a pair—on clearance. That's dead-center middle-class spending now, and the middle class has had shit service a long time.

I get it. $100 sneakers should be premium. $150? Pft! If you're somewhere that stocks those, it's gotta be nice, right? I mean damn. But not so much any more.

I suspect there's something similar going on with the rest of what they're seeing. Though yes, I agree that the middle class once again receiving any amount of actual service instead of constant attempts to fuck them over and nickel-and-dime them would be rad.

Yeah this is like saying Aldi “automated” cart return. They didn’t, they got every shopper to do the work themselves. Automated cart return would be if you just gave the cart a little “giddyup!” when you were done and it found its way home. Or those cart conveyor belts at Ikea, it’s only part of the process but that part is automated.

[edit] Aldi did automate the management of getting shoppers to do that work, because there’s not a person standing there taking and handing out quarters, but (very simple) machines. Without those machines they might need a person, so that hypothetical role (the existence of which might make the whole scheme uneconomical) is automated. But they didn’t automate cart return, all that work’s still being done by people.

I read it as the word aff-ect, not uh-ffect (American pronunciation; both are spelled “affect”). Noun sense of “affect”, not verb.

But it’s possible I was reading too generously and this was a botched attempt to employ “effect”, which would also fit (and better, I think).

I did a ton of looking into this over the years. That everything is a little bit at fault, is why if you exhaustively eliminate (say) insurance overhead, it leaves a weird amount of the elevated costs intact.

Thinking you’ve found the one main reason makes it easy for opponents of reform to dismiss your solution, because you haven’t found it, because there’s not a main reason. It also means “cut private insurance out of the process” doesn’t fix it

Consider: public insurance schemes in the US spend far more for some given amount of care than peer states do, even as provides complain these programs don’t pay enough—that latter part is because all their vendors, suppliers, and personnel demand more money than their counterparts in the rest of the OECD states. Every single part of the system costs too much.

Switzerland pays more than us for doctors, barely, but also has unusually high healthcare costs for Europe (though not as bad as ours) and is richer than the US. Luxembourg is close but is an outlier for basically everything, they crush us in median income and such as well. Bermuda, a little lower, but it’s an island nation (everything’s more expensive) and, like Lux, richer than the US, another outlier. Nearest comparable looks like Australia, paying doctors an average (this avoids missing the effects of crazy-expensive top-end specialists, as a median might) about 76% what we do. The rest of the OECD’s lower than that.

You want one thing that is contributing, but such a trivial amount that it’s hardly worth addressing until everything else is fixed: it’s doctors’ liability insurance. They really want to reduce that cost, for obvious reasons, and Republicans want to fix it because… they hate poor people who’ve been harmed being compensated “too much” I guess… and it does contribute to higher costs, but very little compared to practically everything else. That one gets way more attention than it merits.

The unifying factor of other countries’ healthcare schemes that keeps them cheaper than the US doesn’t seem to be that they’ve minimized the role of private insurance (some haven’t!) but that they have explicit (like government-set price lists) or or implicit (via e.g. monopsony) price controls. It seems like you can use any of several approaches, some of which keep private health insurance in a prominent role (Switzerland! Though they at least have the good sense to force them to be nonprofits, IIRC) so long as you have, one way or another, price controls.

The only near-exception to this I’m aware of is Singapore, but… it’s Singapore. Plus they do have some explicit price controls, and I think it’s fair to say healthcare providers there might consider there to be a persistent, credible implied threat of more price controls or even harsher measures from the government, should prices rise too much, because… it’s Singapore.

[edit] FWIW I do think fixing the insurance situation is an excellent place to start, even the best starting point, and that the insurers in the US are probably beyond salvaging through integrating them into a better system, and should just be eliminated or their role drastically reduced; I think this would make less progress toward fixing prices than some suppose it would, though would still do a lot for that, but it’d, crucially, fix most of the hidden costs of our system, like patient-hours lost to waiting on hold to try to get insurance to pay what they’re supposed to, HR folks messing with insurance-related issues, et c, which are huge and don’t make it into straight cost comparisons with other countries because those aren’t “healthcare costs” (putting a dollar value on that would make us look even worse than we already do)

I do their work. No work got automated.

It 100% is one of the reasons. We pay medical personnel way higher wages than peer states.

US healthcare is so expensive because basically every single part of it costs more than it "should", by quite a bit. Including, yes, doctors.

What's the error? I'd hyphenate "poorly-composed" (most wouldn't these days, but they can go to hell) and I think it's a bit too wordy for what it's communicating, but I don't see what I'd call an actual error.

I would personally avoid writing that "poorly composed sentences" have an "affect"—rather than the writer having or presenting an affect, or the sentences' tone being affected—as I find an implied anthropomorphizing of "sentences" in that usage, which anthropomorphizing isn't serving enough useful purpose, to my eye, that I'd want it in my writing, but I'm not sure I'd call that an error either.

What did you mean?

Commas and parentheses can do it all, and an excess of either is a sign of poorly edited prose.

This attitude, however, is a disease of modern English literacy.

Nah, I've been using them correctly for years. My preference for them came by way of reading a lot in generally, but especially from Salinger.

I do them without surrounding spaces, because that's... how you're supposed to use them, and it's also less typing.

They also used to be a really good Shibboleth to tell if someone was using a Mac—the key combo on there is easy, and also easy to remember, so Mac users were far more likely than the median to employ em-dashes. It wasn't a sure tell, but it was pretty reliable.

Self check-out machines aren't automation.

Even my home wifi sometimes has enough packet loss to kill SSH connections. And if my computer sleeps for a even a quarter-second, yeah, connection dead.

Mosh means a lot less, "Sigh..." up-arrow, enter. A small thing, but why live with it when you can just not?

Is that an actual problem we've had?

Nb announced revisions aren't a problem at all, and not one that "blockchain" prevents anyway (you can publish new stuff on a blockchain, no problem)

Yeah this is entirely pointless.

You can put anything "on a blockchain" but the cases in which that does anything useful versus any of several simpler and cheaper solutions are fairly narrow.

To put this in very-online terms: this is a skill issue.

Your life will be richer if you learn to take more things in, and to appreciate them. And it may require actual learning! And practice!

More relevantly, it’s an open secret that a lot of churches are heavily into political advocacy directly for candidates, which they’re not supposed to do under their tax status, but they’ve been playing with the boundaries unchecked and are now really obviously past where they’re supposed to be—but nobody’s got the guts to go after them, so they just keep getting bolder.

Black hole goes into a barbershop.

Barber goes, "You're kiddiinnngggg mmmmmmeeeeeeeeee, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii...."

I thought the return vehicle was a to-be-developed direct-return vehicle from both SpaceX and Blue Origin (both got contracts, and supposedly both's versions will fly)?

[EDIT] Apparently there are multiple plans involving even more spacecraft, because why not I guess? It's as you describe for Artemis III, but then gets way more complicated with Artemis IV, involving more spacecraft for some reason.

IIRC, the expected return payload for this is lighter than Apollo. In no small part because they're dropping all their return fuel and their entire return vehicle into the Moon's gravity well, rather than leaving it in orbit. Subjecting themselves to extra abuse from the good ol' rocket equation.

One of many wacked-out things about the plan.

The mission is wildly more complicated than the Apollo missions. There's a whole oddball-orbit space station that has to be placed as a way-station, for one thing, and none of that's happened yet (remember how long it took to build the ISS?). Also, landing all your return fuel instead of leaving it in orbit, so a way heavier lander (with a smaller return payload than Apollo!), which is a pain in the ass. Multiple space ships launched by different rocket systems involved. The SLS still has to be finished for it to go forward. Orbital refueling of large fuel tanks is a hard problem that remains unsolved, and this goes nowhere without fixing that. The contracts for the return vehicles are disturbingly light on parts about making sure they can reliably work, including surviving re-entry.

I'm with you. Not happening. We're more likely to come up with a totally different, simpler plan, and do that instead, before this happens.

If you've talked to many "real American" Republican voters, Trump is exactly what they've wanted since at least the 90s. "Traditional" Republicans were just all they had as an alternative to Democrats, who are obviously going to make your kids gay and take all your guns and impose sharia law and implement communism, so you can't conceivably vote for one of them.

What's new is someone had the money and platform and good idea to leverage that huge gap between what Republican voters wanted, and the Republican platform, to judo-flip and pin the whole official party apparatus in the span of a couple years. Republicans, the voters, didn't change, or if they did, it was years and years before Trump.

I can't imagine wanting to go to even a local conference unless it's a paid alternative to doing real work in a shitty office. Like sure, it's better than that. But certainly not wanting to travel for it. Like if it's just "getting me out of" WFH, lol, no, I'll pass.

I like social events well enough, but Christ, I'd rather go to some other profession's conference than a tech conference. If I started showing up at them it'd be a sign of distress, that I was desperate for a job and my existing network had failed me.

Before his take-over, like 50% of my attempts to load a linked tweet in a browser failed with an error, which would sometimes, but not always, be resolved with a few refreshes. If the tweet loaded, I couldn't see the discussion, to include follow-on tweets for "tweet threads", which meant it was often useless even if I did get it to load.

He fixed all that for, like... a month. Then went back to blocking lots of content without a login.

I haven't seen the errors since then, but it is back to not showing me the discussion.

"Modern" Web UIs to make backpack-portable supercomputers feel slow operating on text files that wouldn't have been challenging to work with by 1990 standards.

The Cloud to make single-digit-seconds operations on a local Raspberry Pi 2 and home Internet take a few minutes.

What a time to be alive.