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We have very few effective antifungals, and discovering new ones is an order of magnitude harder than discovering new antibiotics due to fungi being more closely related to animals (what's toxic to them is often toxic to us). Resistance is an ongoing problem and will worsen in time; Sporothrix already has strains that are resistant to mainline treatment. I recall reading that at least one developing fungal pathogen of concern is in practice impossible to clear from the body fully once established with existing antifungals.

A further issue still is that some fungi exhibit extreme resistance to sterilization; one of the nosocomial emerging fungal pathogens of concern, for example, can easily survive the peroxide fogging technique often used to clean high-risk hospital rooms even at several times the standard exposure duration and concentrations.

Additional issues include treatment compliance - clearing fungal infections can require taking the drug for months without missing a dose.

We should be very concerned about emerging pathogens in light of anthropogenic climate change, but with proper funding and attention this is not necessarily apocalyptic.

In practice, 100%. In theory we could likely design "good enough" anonymous systems that work like buying alcohol or tobacco in most countries (buy a scratch token in cash at a corner store after showing ID, picked at random from a box of them - contains a number, possession of which is theoretical proof that you had your ID verified at purchase)...but of course, the real purpose of age-gating is exerting a chilling effect, so we'll never hear about privacy-preserving methods.

(NB: I am firmly opposed to any of this. The solution for parents concerned about their kids is parenting and parental controls, not giving authoritarians of all stripes the means to snoop and ban whatever they decide is obscene or troubling.)

"They are shrinking from responsibilities such as marriage, homeowning and child-rearing because “adulting is hard”, as one of his students put it. Western culture, Mr Hayward wrote, indulges childish fancies."

Yes, it is surely that young people are just wusses and not that they're also much poorer than previous generations, which forces them to postpone things like marriage, child-rearing, and purchasing a home.

FWIW, your Enterprise key for Win10 should also work to install Win11 enterprise (the MAK keys for the two versions are identical, even), so you can test this fairly easily if you're inclined. That said, I can aver that domain-joining in Win11 doesn't require an MS account - corporations would flip out if that requirement was extended to them.

When I'm carded in RL, it is atypical for my ID to be stored, and I must be informed of the fact. A clerk examines the birthday line, and that is that. There is no record. The purchase is de facto anonymous; if I pay in cash, there is no record correlating me with the transaction.

As a gay man, I am profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of one or more private companies having a durable record of the content I look at, for what I would hope are obvious historical reasons. Additionally, age-gate laws will inevitably be used for oppressive purposes - remember, a substantial number of conservatives view ANY mention of the mere existence of LGBT people or families as inherently pornographic, sexual, or obscene, and those people would absolutely seek to have all LGBT content age-gated. Hell, even without such laws we see this in libraries and schools. The harm that would be averted from age verification online is not proportional to the evils it would give rise to, plain and simple.

The only form of age verification I would ever be OK with would be on the same basis as being carded in RL - something like, at a corner store I could buy a tag with an ID number on it that would count as proof of age for as long as I had it, for online purposes. The clerk would verify my age and then give me a tag in a sealed box with a random number, thus preserving my anonymity from both angles: the clerk would not know what number he sold me, and the state would not know who bought the number, only that the retailer averred that I had had my age verified.

This. They're following the Orban-Erdogan-Harper (International Democratic Union) playbook - purge the judiciary of independent judges, control the news media, and open culture-war fronts to distract and sap the strength of opposition while riling up your base. The situation in the world's largest democracy is a very dire one.

HaveIbeenpwnd says it was just passwords/usernames/emails, so seemingly not. (My company just got an email from them about the breach and I confirmed I'm in there with a quick search on their website.)

Foobar2000 2 years ago

I do -- I use WinAmp myself, mostly, but xmplay was updated as recently as 2020 so it's still a thing.

Re: Publishing in Mandarin, just in case you're curious:

Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Wu, etc are spoken languages (or dialects, or varieties), but the writing system is common to all of them, albeit in two major forms -- Simplified and Traditional. If I write 恭喜发财, a Mandarin speaker will read that aloud as gongxi facai, a Cantonese speaker as gung hei faat coi, and a Hokkien speaker as kiong-hi hoat-chai, though I left off tone markings even though they're important. In that sense, unless something's romanized, written materials are pretty much just written in 'Chinese', and not any particular variety.

Learning Chinese is funny that way: the spoken language has very simple, regular grammar, but then you also need to learn how to read, write, and pronounce ~3,000 characters to read a newspaper, with a well-educated reader in the language typically recognizing between 8 and 15 thousand characters of the 80,000-100,000 or so that have ever existed (including obscure characters, obsolete characters, regional characters, and variant characters).

It's similar to how if you show a Frenchman, an Englishman, a German and a Pole '456', they'll all know the meaning even if the Englishman thinks "four-hundred fifty-six", and the Frenchman thinks quatre cent cinquante-six.

It varies by market a lot. In my part of Canada -- for example -- appliances are almost always included with a house or apartment purchase. Similarly, I only recently learned that in large parts of Canada, it's the norm to rent or lease your water-heater either from a third party or from a utility. Out here in BC, that's not really a thing AFAIK.

Northridgefix? Tronicsfix? TheCod3r? (Louis Rossmann, of old?)

There's several of them, but it really depends on the value of the device more than the cost. A lot of what Northridgefix repairs is valuable for the data being recovered more than anything, where the value proposition isn't clear. That said, if someone's paid $2000 for a GPU, I can understand their willingness to pay $300 to get someone to painstakingly microsolder some components back on.

Snake-oil and moralizing. Dietetics suffers from the same issue that mental health does: there's an underlying stigma that causes people to inflict a moral judgement on the ill; fat people - or so the old line of thinking goes - are immoral. A shocking number of people, including many doctors and scientists, view diabetes as a "fat people disease," and that diabetics are in effect being punished for their gluttony. This isn't always a conscious bias, but it has very negative effects.

It reminds me of the studies they've done in Canada and the US about how natives (American Indians) die a lot of the time in the ER because they're immediately written off as alcoholics or drug-addicts, and so their complaints are evaluated through the lens of "this person just wants opiates."

If they can get the attention of a sufficiently well-connected person, they can probably scam their way into patronage via some form of bundling either via a well-connected private entity or government.

"Most-favoured browser of the RSS" or some similar gross nonsense.

It's funny, because in Old English ('Anglo-Saxon'), vowel and consonant length are both semantically important.

For those of you who want to have a better handle on the distinction, you can think of it as the sound having an extra 'beat', where a beat is the amount of time pronouncing that sound normally occupies.

It's easier if you take advantage of the one place English still distinguishes this: word boundaries.

Listen how you say, for example: Tibetan nitwit (you're holding the 'n' for two beats because your brain treats the distinction as important /when it's at a word boundary). You can do this with vowels too as an exercise, though they're a bit harder because English has a lot of vowels and finding good matches is a bit difficult.

I once happened across a Github where all the repos were subtle little bits of anti-Semitic cant relating to the Holocaust. More than subverting them, they also often function as dog-whistles for fellow travelers.

(For those not getting the specific one used above, Lovecraft had a black cat and a common name for black cats at the time combined a now nigh-unprintable racial slur for black people with the word 'man'.)

Nicely put.

At its best and its worst, reddit reminds me of a more impersonal version &TOTSE's forums from the web of the 90s and early 00s: a community of communities, where you might see familiar faces from one spot to the next, but they were largely their own little worlds with their own norms, regulars, moderation, etc.

It was infamous at the time for the Bad Ideas forum where things like explosives and shoplifting techniques were discussed, but it also hosted flourishing communities dedicated to books, literary criticism, movies, politics, etc. Many people were quite content never sticking their heads out of the nicer places into the more 'interesting' areas, and it remained markedly welcoming and collegial throughout most of its existence.

It and reddit also had the benefit of easier discoverability: it's trivial to move around and discover new, related communities, which IMHO was also the charm of IRC and something rather missing from Discord and the like.

FWIW re the mangling: According to foone, the reason they blank out the name is to avoid it showing up on searches for the game (automated or otherwise), which they say has led to a subset of fans of the game sending them transphobic comments because of the past drama and the presence of a trans flag on their twitter page.

But as you say, people can do what they like.

Foone is a them, not a him.

And yeah, you're right, it's definitely easier for the reader, but the author isn't required to make it easy for their audience -- if it was, Judith Butler wouldn't Judith...Butle and James Joyce wouldn't James Joyce. Foone writes tweets, 149k people have chosen to read their tweets. Personally, while I agree a blog'd be nice, I'm just glad foone makes their knowledge available.

Lots of banks and law offices, a lot of bigger name accounting/auditing/consultancy firms, and a substantial amount of government/quasi-non governmental organizations. When I started at my current government position, the only department exempt from wearing suits were Admin and IT Services, and even we had to wear polished black leather shoes, dress socks, pressed pants (trousers for you brits), and button-down long-sleeved shirts. When we won the right to wear polo shirts it was a big deal.

Fortunately, a new CEO came in and revised down our 4 page dress code to a single common-sense paragraph: "Employees are prohibited from wearing sweatpants and offensive t-shirts in the office. Personnel who are meeting with clients or presenting at court should wear business-formal attire for those meetings/events. Use common sense for all other times."