snowgrove

It gets bad. In Janesville, Wisconsin when the GM plant closed:

The fabric of hundreds of families unravels, as an itinerant class of fathers — “Janesville Gypsies,” they call themselves — start commuting to G.M. factories in Texas, Indiana and Kansas, just so they can maintain their wage of $28 an hour. Those who stay home invariably see their paychecks shrink drastically. One of the men Goldstein follows, Jerad Whiteaker, cycles through a series of unsatisfying, low-paying jobs, finally settling in one that pays less than half his former wage and offers no health insurance. His twin teenage girls — to whom I’d also like to send awed notes — share five jobs between them, earning so much money for their family that they compromise their eligibility for student loans.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought/comments/67lg2q/in_j...

As other commenters mentioned there was a “high Bayesian prior” for lab leaks, too.

It’s not polite to assume ignorance of all this on the part of my friends, either, but here you are.

If Signal didn’t suck as much, my friends wouldn’t have left and I wouldn’t have followed them. It’s really that simple.

Yup, and I don’t care. If I ever organize a protest I’ll do it on Signal, or another end-to-end encrypted platform. For daily banter I’ll use whatever a majority of my friends prefer. That’s currently Discord for the above-mentioned reasons.

I stopped using Signal, along with my adult tech-oriented friends, when we all had bad experiences migrating our accounts to new phones. That plus the phone number requirement, intrusive contacts integration, and the weird crypto side projects killed my interest in Signal entirely. My friends and I use Discord now.

You’ve flown far beyond the original comment’s context, which was Valve’s entire history from way before there was Steam. I don’t know whose point you think you’re responding to.

Valve predates Steam by a number of years, and Steam wasn’t always in the dominant position it’s in now.

They did it all without outside investors or stock sales.

I think Sam Hyde’s TED talk, or even just his introduction, is the final word on that group’s lack of speaker vetting:

https://youtu.be/9cflCyyEA2I

As the other commenter mentions, neural network-driven speech recognition represents the current state of the art and powers products like Alexa and Google Home.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/11/improving-on-device-speech...

Not the first “fireless locomotive” to see service in railyards. Historical versions ran on steam reservoirs or compressed air, replenished by a central power plant. Some are still in use today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireless_locomotive

I love Worms, but if there’s a runner-up for “Britain’s most tenacious indie games company” then surely it is Hello Games. They launched No Man’s Sky in 2016 to universal disappointment and fan outrage, but kept working on it post-launch (under extreme stress and with little income to speak of) for years until they met & exceeded fan’s original expectations. Gratified fans eventually paid to put up a “Thank you Hello Games” billboard on a road near their office. The whole story is incredible and worth your time:

https://youtu.be/O5BJVO3PDeQ

The number of deleted episodes is now up to 113.

Magic Leap has offices all over. They had one in Mountain View just a few blocks from where Rengstorff crosses Highway 101, over by Google. That was a few years ago, dunno if it’s still there.

This is one justification for racial admissions quotas. It ignores how black students admitted to Harvard often come not from the descendants of enslaved Americans but high-income first generation African immigrant families, or how many white students such as the children of coal miners and steelworkers have also suffered historical disadvantages. It also ignores how economically-disadvantaged Asian families have successfully used merit-based admissions as a ladder out of poverty, and how racial admissions quotas pull that ladder out of reach for many.

It’s bizarre that universities are banning caste discrimination while at the same time actively discriminating based on race. See recent Harvard lawsuit over Asian student admissions.

Your flippant dismissal of the GP comment perfectly illustrates their point.

This piece is entertainment to be enjoyed by white folks in Alexandria cozy on their couch with their cafe-au-lait.

Or the Asian and Indian folks who increasingly make up NoVA’s “front row” communities. Source: growing up in Alexandria and living there for a decade.

There are elements of truth to the author’s racial generalizations, but one defining aspect of NoVA and DC is how different groups and races intermix (my middle school was more than 50% black and Hispanic, my high school more than 50% Asian). This aspect is entirely absent from the author’s just-so analysis.

Paramotors are great, but they’re absolutely as bulky as a jetpack and at least as loud as a lawnmower.

The other American networks are no different. Just yesterday CNN’s Jim Acosta called Virginia under Republican Governor Youngkin a “Soviet-style police state.” I don’t see how that’s better or worse than any of Carlson’s hyperbolic statements. CNN in particular has spread plenty of misinformation, such as in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion or during 2020’s “firey but mostly peaceful” riots.

People have the ability to remember and compare similar statements and events. Double standards applied unfairly tend to get remembered for a very long time. I think the best thing would be to apply even standards across the board for “misinformation”, and tend towards less rather than more censorship.

Yep, that’s Bruce Simpson. He still uploads regularly on his YouTube channel, mostly about RC planes and NZ drone regulation:

https://youtu.be/o10FzfI4zLA

Restrictions on the underlying drone tech would be effective for now.

RC planes have been around for decades and are mechanically very simple. High-performance quadcopters and their component parts and widely available on sites like Ali Express. Everything that’s difficult to DIY in a modern UAV- microchips, gyros, cameras, radios- are necessary component of any regular smartphone. This genie isn’t going back in the bottle.

It’s hard to say beyond anecdotal impressions. There are rankings out there of average breast size by country, perhaps drawn from brassiere sales numbers, but I’ve never seen one which disambiguates cup size (itself an incomplete indicator) from overall BMI. An obese white European woman may have a larger chest on average than African women of a healthy weight, but it’s not clear which example theater audiences would find the most attractive on the basis of their bust.

That’s my juvenile speculation for the day.

I don’t see how not wanting my friends and family to die in someone else’s far-away ethnic conflict makes me an “arrogant fool.” Were you also a fan of the democracy squad’s 2003 Iraq invasion? South Vietnam couldn’t “afford anything” either, and Ukraine’s democracy is at least as corrupt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Ukraine

Subjecting your population to multiple genocidal events seems worse than 70/30 to me. Many leaders who we hold in middling esteem have managed not to murder tens of millions of their own people.

You’re assuming that I or most Americans agree that the war in Afghanistan was worthwhile. Probably true at first, certainly not true after the initial objective of getting Osama bin Laden was achieved.

In any case, no NATO country has been attacked or invoked Article 5, so your observation is irrelevant. Ukraine cannot invoke it because they aren’t a member of NATO. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia etc. haven’t invoked it because they haven’t been attacked or invaded, nor do I expect them to be.

In my view NATO should not have been expanded once the Cold War ended. The US should have reduced its financial commitments to the alliance when it became clear that rich countries like France and Germany were acting as free riders. These countries reap the benefits of American military spending while contributing less than their fair share, and criticizing America at the same time for the size of its military:

https://money.cnn.com/2016/07/08/news/nato-summit-spending-c...

To make the principle work, all countries are expected to chip in. NATO's official guidelines say member states should spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense. Of the 28 countries in the alliance, only five -- the U.S., Greece, Poland, Estonia and the U.K. -- meet the target.

The rest lag behind. Germany spent 1.19% of its GDP on defense last year, France forked out 1.78%.

According to NATO statistics, the U.S. spent an estimated $650 billion on defense last year. That's more than double the amount all the other 27 NATO countries spent between them, even though their combined GDP tops that of the U.S.

You’re right, they also enlist for free college and the signing bonus.

My entire extended family has connections to the military. I grew up on Army bases. I know friends who enlisted and others who did ROTC. I nearly did Air Force ROTC myself for purely financial reasons (ended up going to a cheaper school, still paid for largely my father’s post-9/11 GI Bill benefits). I’m familiar with the subject matter. Access to Tricare and the VA hospital system is a big part of the military’s recruitment appeal.

No NATO country has been invaded or attacked and Article 5 has not been invoked.

Why is the U.S. sending troops to Europe at all? It’s been 70 years since the end of World War 2, 30 years since the end of the Cold War. Let the wealthy democracies of Europe fund their own collective defense. They can easily afford it. France and the UK have credible nuclear deterrents. Young Americans from poor rural towns who enlist just for healthcare have no business in Ukraine or Bulgaria. Send the young Germans; maybe they’ll stop looking down their noses at countries with functioning armies.

Sankara took power in a military coup himself. While he led positive reforms such as literacy and vaccination campaigns, he also banned trade unions and the free press. His Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and Popular Revolutionary Tribunals engaged in torture, execution and arbitrary detention. It’s hard to find unbiased accounts of his rule, as anti-communists tend to ignore his achievements while communists have practically declared him a saint, but I’d take hagiographic accounts of the man with a grain of salt.