lapetitejort

In California, property tax can only go up 2% every year based on the original purchase price (prop 13). For my neighbor who bought their house in the 60s, this must be peanuts.

Even if they are required, who will hold them accountable? The FCC?

Every time a city thinks flooding problems are fixed, nature invents a bigger storm

My dream is to one day own a Curta. I want to find an algorithm to approximate pi, one crank at a time. I had a chance to hold one at a vintage computer festival once. Smaller than I expected. Truly pocketable.

I just had a thought. Why hasn't a Curta simulator come out for the Playdate? I guess I am cursed with creating it

To be more effective, all drink prices should be reduced by 10 cents, then a 10 cent surcharge added for every disposable cup. The price remains the same for all customers, but the extra line item reveals the external costs.

With what we are learning about how gut flora, can a brain be considered conscious while detached from the digestive system?

The point is that we may not have plastic forever. Oil is a finite resource. An easy, cheap replacement hasn't been found yet. Either we abide by reducing and reusing (where we should be focused), or we should actually recycle.

Cross examination is one of the vanishingly few times you can see billionaires and executives act like human beings instead of sentient PR scripts.

I uploaded a PDF to archive.org that auto-OCRs with plenty of mistakes. I have found no way of updating the entire stack of documents produced. I wonder if Project Gutenberg is similar

Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds

I am surprised that a lawsuit started in 2021 about maintaining emission standards survived up to this point. The DOGE search terms must have misspelled "emission"

If you are wary of all the smart features in your next car purchase, consider buying a bicycle. We do not have to entertain the creeping invasion of our privacy

While all of this in happening, Metrolink, the rail service that connects LA, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties, is having their own budget crisis manifesting in "temporary" reductions in service. More info: https://calelectricrail.org/metrolink-is-facing-service-cuts...

> A member, officer, or employee of the __Senate__ shall not receive any compensation, nor shall he permit any compensation to accrue to his beneficial interest from any source, the receipt or accrual of which would occur by virtue of influence improperly exerted from his position as a member, officer, or employee.

Emphasis mine. This does not cover the judicial or executive branch

Would Martha Stewart be sentenced to prison for lying to federal investigators regarding her "prediction" of the release timing of her next cookbook?

We must eradicate mint plants. Over time the dilution of mint particles in the air will become so small that all diseases will go extinct

Can you give an example of a well-known homeopathic and/or folk remedy that has been adopted into regular medicine, maybe in the last 20-50 years?

Some other historical street view websites:

https://yesterdays.maprva.org/#11.5/37.5438/-77.4392 (specific to Richmond, Virginia, however deployments for other areas are in work)

https://pastvu.com/

Before focusing on rats, who are too light to set off mines and live long pampered lives, I would focus on the 73 million pigs and 87 million cows in factory farms [0].

[0]: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...

Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?

As a naive tourist, I did not know this. I drove up to Sequoia National Park in March 2011 hoping to camp. The roads were plowed, with eight feet tall snow on either side of the road. I drove up to a visitor center and asked where to camp. The park ranger said I could camp anywhere I wanted. Maybe he assumed I knew what I was doing. But I did not. After walking around the parking lot for a bit, with nowhere else to go, I drove out.

The observer effect prevents Booson particles from traveling towards the observer

Public transportation solved this before cars were commonplace. Implement ubiquitous and free public transportation in every urban center (where 80% of the American population lives [0]) and you'll save billions from not having to manufacture (and store!) cars.

0: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

I just visited the closest one to me during lunch. There was just a single dot in the middle of a huge county building. I had to walk through security to get there. I asked if there was a payphone around and the guard said no. Luckily someone else knew. One out of two phones didn't work. The other did, so now my best clean original joke can be heard by anyone.

There are three other phones in my city, two in a hospital, one in potentially a corrections facility? I'll stop by on my way hope.

You might be interested in Poe's Law [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

When has a state AG successfully cancelled a merger? Did any state try to prevent Microsoft and Activision's merger?

Yesterday I had two hours to work on a side project I've been dreaming about for a week. I knew I had to build some libraries and that it would be a major pain. I started with AI first, which created a script to download, extract, and build what needed. Even with the script I indeed encountered problems. But I blitzed through each problem until the libraries were built and I could focus on my actual project, which was not building libraries! I actually reached a satisfying conclusion instead of half-way through compiling something I do not care about.

All of this without pack animals or the wheel.

Fort Pulaski in Savannah, Georgia also has cannonballs embedded in the brick walls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Pulaski_National_Monument