The part where he complains about how “it’s such a callous indifference to the sacrifices made by (Trump’s) supporters on (Trump’s) behalf” just sent me. He thinks Trump is being callously indifferent now? Amazing that they’ll never allow themselves to realize or admit that Trump never gave a shit about them in the first place.

Not the person who made the comment, but here’s my understanding. A “third place” is somewhere you spend a lot of time when you’re not at home (the first place) or school/work (the second place). Third places such as community centers were vital to the civil rights movement in the 60s, it was where much of the movement’s meeting, debating and organizing took place.

The Reagan administration systematically defunded any of these politically active third places that were receiving federal funds, probably because they were worried that they’d be infiltrated by those scary communists. They were so worried about what the organized people might do in the future that they did everything they could to kick the financial struts out from under these community organizations. In many cases this destroyed some or all of the local community benefits that those organizations were actually providing.

This trend cut across the political spectrum too. The Clinton administration did its own wave of defunding, though I suspect that was more for economic (i.e. neoliberal) than political ideology. Combine the lack of community investment with the rise of the internet, and you arrive at the situation we have today where third places are becoming increasingly scarce. It’s hard for communities to develop and maintain a cohesive identity when there’s no longer any metaphorical “town squares” where the people in that community gather.

Same for my father in law. If he were a US citizen he’d probably be bankrupt right now, or more likely just still be in pain because he couldn’t afford the surgery in the first place.

It depends who you’re comparing. For the average US or Canadian citizen, I’m sure you’re correct. If you look at income levels I bet it’s a different story. The poor and middle class (whatever’s left of it) have to wait, the rich have the option of paying out of pocket. If I wanted to have a whole-body MRI scan done, I could get one next week for $3200. Wouldn’t even need to be sick! Requires a referral, but you can “obtain one virtually from (their) physician partners” and you know their “physician partners,” aren’t going to turn away business.

As a Canadian, I’ll be the first to say that our system isn’t perfect. If you’ve got a chronic but not life-threatening condition, like a need for knee or hip surgery, you could spend a long time on a waiting list. There are certainly lots of affluent Canadians who opt to step out of that line to get treatment at private for-profit clinics, both domestically and abroad. There’s always a shortage of something. Qualified doctors, nurses, family practitioners, CT or MRI machines, etc.

That being said, if you do have a life-threatening condition, the Canadian healthcare system can work pretty well. My step father had pneumonia Nov./Dec. last year, chest xray revealed something concerning beyond the pneumonia, by early January biopsies has been done, by February he’d started radiation, six or so weeks of that, then monitoring for a while and now he’s in remission. Everything moved fast, because he had a time-critical condition. Total cost to my family: zero dollars (setting aside costs for gas, parking, snacks for stress-eating, etc.). I couldn’t imagine a family going through the same situation in the US.

I’ve always felt that “have more babies but also fuck you for ever having sex” was a bit of wildly contradictory policy stance.

Bet they wanted a Shapiro VP pick so bad. It would’ve been antisemitic space laser conspiracy theory bullshit 24/7 until the vote. Now all they’ve got is “how dare this man ensure school children have full bellies and necessary sanitary supplies every day.”

They smell like plastic, metal, complex hydrocarbons, and death.

It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).

All due respect to Michelle Obama otherwise, but I think she was flat out wrong when she said ‘When they go low, we go high’. It’s the paradox of tolerance applied to the political realm. How do you ensure a tolerant society in the face of intolerant people? It’s impossible if you’re not allowed be intolerant of intolerant people. How do you ensure that political discourse sticks to concrete policies and objective facts when your opponent refuses to engage with either but instead stoops to conspiracy theories and personal attacks? Also impossible if you’re stuck talking about difficult concepts and nuanced facts while your opponent is free to sling personal insults and cognitively sticky memes that may have absolutely nothing to do with reality.

The solution is to apply social contract theory. Tolerance doesn’t have to be a rule that you’re not allowed to break. It can be a social contract instead, so when someone breaks the social contract by being intolerant you are no longer bound by the contract, freeing you to not tolerate their behavior in return. Similarly, sticking to policy- and fact-based political debate doesn’t have to be a rule you’re not allowed to break, it can be a social contract between political opponents. If the other candidate won’t debate policy or facts then you’re free of the contract, which means you’re free to say they’re weird. Which they very much fucking are. Once you get most of the figurative children out of the room, you can go back to making actual progress amongst the contract-adhering adults who remain.

Trump said of Harris, “Don’t forget. Four weeks ago she was considered, like, the worst,” and that she had had a “personality makeover … All of a sudden she’s considered the new Margaret Thatcher”.

Literally no one is comparing Kamala Harris to Margaret Thatcher… except Trump I guess. 🤣 I bet there are a significant number of voting Millenials who don’t even know who Margaret Thatcher is. The ol’ weirdo’s references are weak and long past their best-before date, just like him.

Am I understanding this right that the scalper buys a legit ticket to extract the token, then it can be used any number of times to get in a venue? I thought their system should be able to identify a token/ticket has already been scanned after it’s first used? That’s why there are no re-entry rules at most venues.

I don’t think the intent of the scalpers is to allow ticket reuse. Like you say, there are likely additional checks at the gate when a bar code is scanned. If a rotating barcode is cloned, only the first person to scan is going to get in. Everyone else who tries to use a clone of that now-used barcode is going to get denied entry because the door staff’s scanner is going to throw a “ticket already used” error of some kind. So while it’s technically possible to clone one of these rotating barcodes, just like it’s possible to have multiple authenticators producing the same OTPs, there’s no point in doing so.

What the scalpers are after is a platform that allows them to resell tickets without giving TicketMaster a cut. TicketMaster allows their rotating-bardcode tickets to be transferred to a wallet app like Google Wallet. Wallet apps like Google Wallet have features to allow you to transfer tickets to another user’s wallet, but the wallet specification also includes a flag for whether wallet-to-wallet transfers are allowed. TicketMaster sets that flag so you cannot give (or sell) your ticket to someone else using your own wallet, instead you have to go through something that TicketMaster controls. For transfers to friends and family, TicketMaster forces you to use their app. For reselling tickets, TicketMaster forces you to use their reselling site. TicketMaster’s primary motive is obvious: they want to take a cut of ticket resales, and this is how they do that.

The whole thing is a legal fight between two utterly shitty groups, TicketMaster and scalpers. Here’s hoping they somehow both lose.

I’m not sure it fits 100% with what you’re looking for, but I’ll take chance and recommend Slice & Dice (Google Play, Apple App Store). Free demo, no ads, single in-app purchase to unlock the full version. This game is easily the best value-for-dollar mobile game I’ve ever purchased.

Oh for sure, those are a communal resource.

Because the toxins your body is reacting to are already in your bloodstream. It’ll take time for those to get metabolized by your liver, and how much or little you vomit won’t change how much work your liver has to do.

One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn’t throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn’t need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica

Looks like you can read the article, without a paywall, here: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/am-radio-is-a-lifeline-lawmakers-say-tech-and-auto-industries-disagree/

Hey, leave Laura Palmer out of this, she’s been through enough already.

“Pungent bouquet, with an earthy flavour.”

Good for cheese, depending on your tastes. Almost certainly bad in other contexts.

The plow. It allowed early river valley peoples to generate semi-reliable food surpluses, and those food surpluses triggered everything that came after. I can’t take credit for this argument, I first encountered it in this episode from the first season of Connections.