RhysU

> ...traumatized by...

I think you meant to write "...paid well for..."

Some tools we don't get to choose. Part of any job.

Are you not also paying attention to the gate itself and to departure boards? Why do you need your phone to tell you what's posted on numerous displays that you walk past?

> It's clear, in the Health community, that pregnancy can be avoided with contraceptives and instructing the population (adults and teenagers) on how to deal with this issue.

It's not clear to me that the Health community is winning that battle based on abortion rates.

For 2023 Guttmacher estimates 1,037,000 abortions were provided by clinicians in states without total bans [1].

Compare the 2022 CDC leading causes of death [2] which starts Heart disease: 702,880; Cancer: 608,371; ...

That is, if one thinks of abortion as an avoidable disease it's one hell of a disease. And the rates suggest the Health community hasn't solved the root causes by a long shot.

[1] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-unite...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

The audio is awful. The old landlines advertised hearing a pin drop. And no one laughed at that concept. Imagine trying to hear something comparable with today's mobile phones.

How long do the tax authorities sit on those payments before reimbursing them?

Who collects the float on the VAT for these intermediate businesses between when they pay it and when they are reimbursed?

Why does one need a looming Alzheimer's issue to get one's affairs in order?

Wills, etc should be done decades before that stage of life. As soon as one has any spouse or dependents one should do all that jazz.

Find a recruiter.

"My friend, I see your life is falling apart but don't put down the bottle" is something no rational person says.

My Bayesian prior has been sufficiently updated to effectively know: I don't know a single mother with a restraining order for a son who doesn't smoke too much weed. I have met a bunch of mothers and sons in my life. In a Popperian sense we can all only assume so stop splitting hairs.

Clearly, smoking a shit ton is bad for people with marginal mental health or marginal emotional health.

Heh. Can one eliminate the high from THC without removing its other impacts? This would be akin to taking pills preventing alcohol inebriation.

(Or, use high school freshman for the study and really convincing upperclassmen as actors to convince them it is a real bag.)

Anecdatum: I personally know a mother who has a restraining order on her son, whom I also personally know, due to a psychotic episode. And the son's been smoking way too much weed for a long time. Heartbreaking.

So, I know.

Some drunks drink more as they approach bottom. Is it the booze? Is it being the sort of person who becomes a drunk? Does it matter? More booze ain't helping.

You're really going to call for a double blind study here checking if excessive cannabis is bad for people conditional on their lives falling apart? How do you propose to get that past an ethics board?

That's why one records the check amount in a ledger kept electronically or physically with the checkbook. You will then always know what you have even if the pesky landlord waits 3 months to cash a check. It's old school but works flawlessly for one person.

(Dunno if banking apps have the ability to record written checks then automatically reconcile when those checks clear. It'd be a nice banking app feature but would reduce revenue obtained from overdraft fees, on which banks gorge.)

For a couple, one needs the has-the-checkbook? mutex to write new checks. Each spouse having a credit card paid down monthly reduces the mutex contention for negative cost (considering float and rewards, ignoring credit-only prices).

Supposing the above fails from time-to-time, there's a defense in depth approach: If you write those checks from a margin-enabled brokerage account, anytime you make a mistake you self-fund the overdraft. This can be useful if the checks you write in a month are small relative to your margin collateral. This can also be useful if one occasionally needs to write a check for larger, one-off purchases where it'll take a few days to move the money around to satisfy the check. This is conceptually nice because a negative checkbook balance stops being haltingly terrifying if you know a regular paycheck will land before some checks clear. Do not trigger margin calls on yourself!

But not fifth?

Seconded. Any bank that does is not a bank I would use.

I am glad that she's still managing okay despite her ET. Kudos to you for helping her navigate which interfaces she can use now.

My father's ET makes me terrified of gradually losing my own ability to interact with any technology as I become his age and as interfaces "progress".

I am always surprised the extent to which "accessibility" does not include people with poor fine motor control.

Did you intend to ask if being story- vs fact-based is story or fact?

I find it fun that you posed this then said you identify as fact-based. This dichotomy is a story (regardless of whether or not it has any basis in fact).

Why should the transit system butt into the jurisdiction of the traditional government just because transit is built somewhere?

As a silly dystopia, imagine that a transit agency could grab revenue as you suggest it might. Then everything becomes a transit land grab.

Then the people have spoken. They can speak again and differently if they like.

Property taxes include that, generally.

> Just imagine if the public could capture the (financial) upside it produces...

Like through taxes on the sale of the property or the increased business income it produces? The public will.

"Comedy Writing With Small Generative Models" by Jamie Brew (Strange Loop 2023)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M2o4f_2L0No

Spend the 45 minutes watching this talk. It is a delight. If you are unsure, wait until the speaker picks up the guitar.

Wildfires in forests are indeed burning trees.

Wildfires in suburban communities are burning non-wood materials, including many things made from hydrocarbons.

Not remotely the same experience. One never picks up the pointer finger during input with the nub. The thumb on the track pad looks like one is a crab, constantly twitching and lifting.

..until proven inconvenient when exercising raw power.

Anyone want to renege on his word to pardon his son?

Exactly. If they can't calculate it how do they know they're not losing money? If they know they're not losing money how do they know that?

Definitely biased. The older things we read tend to be great works by smart people so we attribute that style to intelligence. But it was just written style, among a certain class, once upon a time.

English styles changed. For example, Hemingway was brutally brief.

I believe (but don't know) that the further from the Anglosphere one goes today the longer and more ornate the written language tends. Anyone know how to confirm or deny? I have only anecdata from those who were high-school educated in Farsi or Russian before moving to the US.

> Also, no computers in their rooms - everything is done in more shared space, with monitors facing the rest of the room.

Seconded.

I saw an older friend have a dedicated computer room for the desktops of everyone in his family. It was a family space where any family member could plunk down at any time.

We approach the same via a communal laptop in the kitchen.

It's terrible and the humanitarian aspect is awful.

Still, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds tells me

> "The strongest Santa Ana winds yet recorded occurred in early December 2011. An atmospheric set-up occurred that allowed the towns of Pasadena and Altadena in the San Gabriel Valley to get whipped by sustained winds at 97 mph (156 km/h), and gusts up to 167 mph."

The 2011 Citation 24 from that Wikipedia article, if one looks it up, includes the line

> "We haven’t had this kind of event in more than 10 years,” said Stuart Seto, a weather specialist for the National Weather Service in Oxnard, Calif. “This system is particularly special because there was cold air being pushed up, and it makes them even stronger. Some are going to be hurricane force, but all of it will be felt.”

So, roughly every 10 years there are hurricane force wind events in Greater LA out on the tail of the normal weather distribution. And documentation of those stretches over at least 20 years. And everyone interprets it as special at the time.

I quickly tried digging up historical Santa Ana data from peer-reviewed publications. The obvious article I found had data only back to the late 1960's and it was from 2003: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/eint/7/8/1087-356... I can't figure out if right now is a 1- or 2- or 3-sigma event when combined with changes in human living patterns and forest management patterns. That shouldn't change aid or the systemic response to helping the people involved. But it should inform how we collectively speak about these circumstances when they arise.

I grew up in an area that had awful flooding roughly every 30-40 years (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood). It's presently overdue to happen again. That such disaster is infrequent doesn't change the humanitarian scope of the catastrophes when they happen, of course, but it does suggest that humans tend to discount the tails of historical weather patterns.