dbatten

To clarify... in the US, the property owner can be held liable for injury that results _from the property owner's negligence, etc._ even if the injured person was trespassing or committing a crime.

Then you end up insuring your canopies against wind damage... And your cars against the possibility of canopies falling on them. And still insuring your cars against hail in the event that the canopy blows off, or the hail comes down at an angle and isn't fully blocked by the canopy, or whatever.

Also, I'm imagining canopies getting in the way of 1) making inventory highly visible (both from the road and other parts of the lot) and 2) making it harder to pack cars really close together because you have to deal with all the canopy supports.

Just musings...

I'm assuming your point is that words get shortened for convenience and that that's OK. That's a fair point. It's also true that language doesn't always evolve in ways that make sense, and I get that.

With that being said, there's a huge difference between shortening "weblog" into "blog" and shortening "blog post" into "blog":

First, when "weblog" was shortened to "blog," "blog" didn't already mean something (and certainly didn't mean anything in the relevant context). When "blog post" got shortened to "blog," "blog" already had a meaning - AND it already had a meaning _in the context of the internet_. One of these leads to confusion, one of them doesn't.

Second, when "weblog" was shortened to "blog," we didn't already have a shorthand way of saying "weblog." But we've been shortening "blog post" to "post" basically since the beginning. There was no reason to shorten it to "blog" also. "Post" was just fine.

I'd argue that a more fair comparison would be if, after using "blog" for a while, we decided to shorten "weblog" into "web" instead. It would have been silly, because "web" already meant something, and because we already had a shorthand version of "weblog" (i.e., "blog") - so why did we need another?

But I guess your sarcasm and the down votes answer my question anyway. The internet has accepted "blog" as meaning "blog post." I might as well get on board.

Am I the only one who still bristles when people say blog but mean blog post? Or is this generally accepted now?

I constantly tack "-pinterest" on to the end of Google searches...

I showed up at the scene of a (small) plane crash yesterday hoping to go for a hike. Wasn't sure what the fuss was about, so pulled my phone out to check local news. Within seconds, a reporter for a local news channel was tapping on my window. I rolled it down, he told me there was a plane crash, and asked if I'd like to share my thoughts on camera.

Um, no? How could I _possibly_ have anything intelligent to say about this?

And then it hit me... this is why local news is so crazy. Because the people who end up interviewed on TV are the types of people who _don't_ realize they have nothing intelligent to say, or who are self-absorbed enough to want to get on TV however they can.

Needless to say, I didn't do the interview.

Your point is well taken, but OP's complaint is still valid. At the very least, whole milk from your local store is less processed by definition than skim milk from your local store...

IMO, your proposed second option leaves ambiguity as to whether "significant" means "statistically significant" or "materially significant." The original option is clear on that point.

However, I would argue that the original text is also misleading, because if the result wasn't statistically significant, there's no evidence that rates for females increased. If anything, the first option could perhaps say "While suicide rates for females IN THE STUDY increased after the show's release, the increase was not statistically significant, so we have no evidence that it's a real effect."

This is broken for me in both Firefox for Android and Chrome for Windows. Any ideas what might be up?

While your point about per-capita production is well-taken, I don't think the original comment was intending to score ideological points. It simply said the Venezuelan crisis was avoidable and happened due to mis-management, not that Chavismo is an inherently evil ideology...

7.100 times would be written "7,100 times" in the US. Using a cloth bag 7000 times at one grocery store visit per week is 134 years of bag reuse.

Also, your phone manufacturer.

I second this. I had debilitating underarm sweat and continually ruined shirts with pit stains. I switched from antiperspirant to a simple deodorant. I sweat SO much less in the arm pit area and I never sweat through my shirts anymore (unless I'm working out, of course).

Undershirts have been a good win as well - keeps the chemicals off my real shirt, and if you get high-end ones, they're light and breathable and don't make me any warmer.

I can't believe antiperspirant continues to exist as a product. Must be working for somebody.

Not sure what the millennials angle adds to this article, but they sure do say the word a lot.

They're asserting that Beyond Meat's success is driven by millennial ethics on the back of... absolutely no data whatsoever. Who's actually buying Beyond Meat burgers? Do other generations actually not care about health, the environment, animal welfare, etc? Is there any evidence at all to justify these assertions?

Or did you just need to include the buzzword?

Yeah... I've never heard VIBGYOR. I did a double-take because this was supposed to be "easy to remember" and that didn't strike me as such, but then I realized it was just ROY-G-BIV backwards. Is this a cultural thing?

EDIT: I find multiple Wikipedia articles[1][2] for Indian organizations/events with the VIBGYOR name, which suggests it's cultural. Some guy's/gal's blog[3] also suggests VIBGYOR is from India.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViBGYOR_Film_Festival 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIBGYOR_Group_of_Schools 3: http://nerdruid.com/druidcraft/science/physics/optics/vibgyo...

> Now women have to work just to be able to afford a house on two incomes which previously cost only one.

I frequently see people argue that you now have to have two incomes to have a normal middle-class lifestyle, but it doesn't square at all with my own experience. I come from a pretty conservative sub-culture, where it's much more common for a husband/father in a family to be the primary breadwinner and for the wife/mother not to work. Sure, a lot of our friends are highly-paid engineers and the like, which makes that easier. But others aren't - off the top of my head, I can name teachers (in a state known for terrible teacher pay), law enforcement officers, city maintenance workers, etc. All of these people are figuring out how to live a fairly normal middle-class lifestyle on one income.

How is that possible? We make other choices that support the goal of a single-income family. Most of us shop at Aldi, not Whole Foods. Nobody drives new cars (our nicer car is a 2005, for example). We do a lot of home maintenance ourselves. We share clothes, toys, and kids' supplies with each other, or get them on consignment. You get the idea. (Oh, and we also don't have to pay higher-tax-bracket taxes on the second income, high property taxes on big homes and new cars, or pay for daycare when we're at work.)

There's of course nothing wrong with women working or with nice cars or shopping at Whole Foods, and I respect the fact that different people choose to handle these issues differently. But don't be deceived - it's still possible for most middle-class Americans to live on one income, as long as they're willing to choose to make the sacrifices in other areas that facilitate that lifestyle.

(I won't claim to be able to speak to how this goes for poorer classes.)

This article talks about newer technologies being "more efficient" in terms of the brine they produce, by which they seem to mean that you get more fresh water with less brine production.

How is this possible? Your input has a certain amount of salt and water in it, right? How do you take out the same amount of water, but leave less salt behind? Am I missing something?

I don't disagree, but I didn't find this in my capacity as a consumer - I found it in my capacity as an employee of a wireless company that has a relationship with this manufacturer. Since I'm using my real identity on here and I've mentioned who my employer is in the past, I don't feel at liberty to divulge anything.

I recently man-in-the-middled a smartphone (I won't mention the manufacturer) for work purposes. It was factory reset, with no apps installed (other than what ships with the phone). Started hitting Facebook APIs within seconds of each boot. I had no words.

Judging by the quotes around overprescribe, I'm assuming the parent comment is skeptical of the idea that we were over-prescribing. Also, they're likely criticizing the whipsaw fashion in which we allowed drug companies to convince everybody these opioids were totally safe, then drastically cut off the supply without doing anything to help people who had already become addicted.

Weren't there some expensive wars around that time? I think I'm recalling that correctly.

Seriously, though, a fairer point of comparison might be the late '60s and early '70s - right when Boomers were entering adulthood. National debt as a percentage of GDP was in the 30s around then.

Still, your response to the parent comment is still somewhat justified - yes, national debt is higher now, but it's not like it's orders of magnitude higher, right?

Let me preface this by saying I don't want to diminish what these guys are doing at all... this is an incredible feat, no matter what.

However, I'm genuinely curious, and I'm sure other people are as well: Looking at the map, the definition of "across" Antarctica seems a little bit squishy to me. Does crossing one small portion of one side of the continent count as going "across" it? Is this the New York Times trying to grab attention with the headline? Is there some known definition among these types of adventurers as to what counts as "across"? Will there be debate later?

I suppose Charles Lindbergh didn't exactly fly across the widest part of the Atlantic either... still, I'm just intrigued.

Saw your email... thanks! I'll check it out when I get a chance.

The methodology used to determine accuracy involved loading GIS data on all property in a given county. Therefore building a nation-wide accuracy map using that methodology would, by necessity, involve loading all property data nation-wide. And if you had all property data nation-wide, you wouldn't need a reverse geocoder. You'd have one.

To make a nation-wide accuracy map, you'd need to compile property data from every county (or equivalent) in the nation. Assuming every county publishes it publicly (I'm sure some don't), it would still be a ton of work...

The real catch is this, though: if you actually pulled it off, you would have just built a nearly flawless reverse geocoder, and you wouldn't need to use an external API at all. You could just look locations up in your huge property data set.

In case it helps anybody else - we were recently looking for alternatives to Google Maps for reverse geocoding. We took property data from a local county, ran the centroids of a bunch of randomly selected parcels through 4 different reverse geocoding services, and compared the addresses we got back to the actual address of the parcel, as listed by the county.

Google was 97% accurate, at $4 per 1000 requests. Mapbox was 95% accurate, at $.50 per 1000 requests. TomTom was 73% accurate, at $.42 per 1000 requests. Location IQ (one of many providers simply running the open-source Nominatim project) was 12% accurate, at $.03 per 1000 requests.

To be fair to Location IQ / Nominatim, they had the right street the vast majority of the time, but were usually wrong about house number due to interpolating between address boundaries at cross streets defined in Census Data. If you need exact addresses, Nominatim probably isn't for you, but if you need a general location, it might work fine.

Also - this was one county of test data, so take it with a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, it gave us confidence that we could move away from the Google APIs, save 90% of our costs, and still have a high level of accuracy.

Is it possible that Ancestry's secret sauce was simply threatening legal action?

A couple of years ago, I was trying to get some public records from the University of North Carolina. I submitted a request by email, as their website said I could. They responded a week later and said they needed a letter. I sent a letter. They responded to the letter and said that the letter needed to include my cell phone number and email address to process the request. (There was no mention of this before. Records could have easily been mailed to me at my address, and they already had my email address from the aforementioned email incident.) So, I provided the info. I heard nothing for months. I asked for a status update. They said the request was "delayed." I heard nothing for months. I followed up, told them they were in violation of North Carolina state law, and that if they weren't going to provide the records, I'd pursue legal action. Boom, got the records within a couple of days. Like magic.

Also, during my years as a state employee, I noticed that one of the few things that could get the lumbering bureaucracy moving (as an entity, there were plenty of hard-working well-meaning employees) was a threat of a lawsuit or a fine handed down by the feds. The institutional terror around that sort of thing was almost comical at times.

I appreciated this. I've always disliked fade-outs, in particular because I grew up listening to "oldies" (50s-70s music, don't know if the term has changed in meaning since that time) with my dad, and DJs would often fade a song out artificially early in order to meet time requirements. It always felt like you missed out on part of the song.

Cool/refreshing to see that a lot of artists were legitimately using it to create novel musical effects, or add new meaning to their songs. I hadn't considered that it could be used for that purpose.

Totally agree about the forecast graph... I honestly wish somebody would rip it off so I can look at it on a site that performs well.