9,936 karma · joined January 2, 2010
Alex Jones is directly inciting people to go harass the plaintiffs so he bears liability for his actions.
Earnest question: is it possible that the people asking were genuinely curious?
And a follow-up: why should they grok your lifestyle?
People have a thousand different things they need to deal with on a weekly basis. Having a full understanding of how someone who lives a hundred miles away probably isn't high on the list.
Every time I've traveled and it's come up that I'm from Seattle people tend to ask me the same things: where is Frasier's apartment, how many Starbucks are there really, and do we all throw fish or is it just for special occasions. A coworker from Texas gets asked if they own a horse.
I guess my underlying question is how is this anecdote relevant? Maybe I am misreading but it feels, to me, like you're just having a go at "those silly urbanites", which, if I'm right, seems unfair. Do you know how to get from Queen Anne to Columbia City on King County Metro?
Avanti's ticketing system would flatly refuse to sell me an "anytime single" for virtually any route. I had to scroll through and finally find one that claimed to have a seat reservation available and then I could use the actual train I wanted--which, I might add, had buckets of unreserved seats. Once I got griped at by a conductor for taking the "wrong" train when he missed that I had any anytime (1st!) ticket, which was the only thing their own booking engine would sell me.
This month, every Avanti West Coast train I've tried to use has been canceled, and they seem utterly incapable of running direct trains. I've seen the inside of Crewe quite a few times more than I originally intended.
(I understand that it is partially due to "industrial action"--such a nice phrase for "striking workers because they don't get paid enough"--and partially due to limited overtime by those same workers. That's, frankly, not my problem. Pay your people and run your trains.)
Efficient for whom? The person who has a one-off need for housing every few years? Or the person who already has the time, money, and connections to leverage money into bundling up more housing for themselves to loan out to that first group?
This also presumes that housing, at least primary residences, should be a market instead of a utility, which is not at all a given considering how the "market" is working out (or not) for a lot of people right now. Tools like this further increase that gap.
> That's uncalled for.
Don't care.
> You're letting your envy through.
It's not envy. It's watching rampant real estate speculation, hoarding of properties by landlords--big and small--and the four-generations-and-counting idea that owning housing is the only "stable" asset in this country turn my city into a place where my adult kids can't afford to live, many of my friends have had to move away, and largely the only people populating many of the neighborhoods around me are from the mono-tech-culture.
All while the crisis of housing people who need it yet who have fallen off of the increasingly-shaky bottom rung of society continues unabated.
It's fucking terrible and I don't really have a spare thought for anyone who insists "oh, exploiting real estate, that's how I'm going to make money" is their way out. I reserve the right to think and express the idea that it's morally wrong and that tools that enable that behavior are, by equivalence, also wrong.
(Before someone says: "Well, your city could just zone for more housing." They could, but that a large quantity of "net worth" is wrapped up in people's housing makes that almost impossible from a political perspective. So we wind up with nothing but rented apartments next to loud arterials, safely away from the areas where the people who can afford to live or who have lucked into generationally living in detached housing are living.)
Most of the travel eSIMs don't provide a local number (esim.net is the only one I can think of off the top of my head) but getting a SIM at a corner store after getting out of the airport always does.
https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2020-03-03/costco-food-co...
However, this was intended to benefit border cities--Vancouver, WA in particular really liked it--but Washington State has no income tax and so is heavily reliant on sales tax. So, as of July 1 2019, the exemption (on state sales tax; local sales tax isn't covered here) may only be claimed post-transaction by the buyer: https://dor.wa.gov/taxes-rates/retail-sales-tax/sales-tax-ex...
That sounds a lot like Boeing Employees Credit Union and is one of the dozen or so reasons I can't understand why they are so popular around where I live.
I use Seattle Credit Union (formerly Seattle Metropolitan) and not only do they handle cash in branches, they were open the whole pandemic though some branches needed an appointment to make sure someone would be there.
It just amazes me that a credit union can get so popular while effectively outsourcing (for example, when someone like you would go to "a non-cashless credit union") a basic function of banking. I know of a couple of credit unions in the Puget Sound region who have dropped out of the co-op credit union network in response to BECU only doing shared member activities via their ATM. BECU's customers would turn around and come to those other credit unions, increasing their load.
This has the air of "That One Weird Trick" that used to work in the early 2010s before everyone had heard of it. But now that it's the lead paragraph in every single "how to buy the exact car you want, for so much less money" blogspam, of course it no longer works.
I'm not sure why people expected it to continue when the entire business model of car dealerships is to turn suckers into money.
"Having to interact with a dealership" is around number 4 or 5 on my list of why I will never buy a car again, after years of not having one.
[support . apple . com]
"Hello, my inquiry is whether or not AppleCare+ covers spontaneously throwing my laptop out the window thus it falls down three stories into a storm drain. No, this is purely hypothetical. Yes, I'll wait while you research."
The irritation is tripled if it's an un-skippable "let us walk you through the nineteen changes in a slowly constructed slideshow!"
This is second only to applications that don't properly retain state--especially after an update--so every time I open them I get a brief glimpse of what once was (and what I probably wanted to go back to) before I get a 50/50 split of being dumped to the application home screen or "oops, something has gone wrong! lol, software, yannow! Please to be logging in once more, thx."
Genuine question: Why is it that whenever someone on a forum mentions the phrase "public transit", inevitably someone comes along under ten minutes later to tell them how they're obviously wrong?
I am in my 50s. My wife and I have raised children in a city. Many years ago, before transit got much better, we hauled them up into the high-stair buses and strapped their strollers into wheelchair spaces. Trips to the mountains were an annual affair, at best, on poorly-documented shuttle buses. These days, my kids routinely go hiking in the Gorge or out to the Peninsula on nothing but a transit card and a day pack.
My children are now adults and none of them have learned to drive nor have any interest in doing so. Almost our entire friends group is the same, even through the pandemic. The most common reason to be an exception and having been required to learn how to drive is because they got priced out of where they live.
Perhaps it is time for the auto-responders to transit posts to adjust to a wider view of society?
But there's been nothing on it since. Given how Oliver's show tends to run, I figure the topic will be back towards the end of the season.
Starting in March 2020, due to, well, you know, all of our doctors started doing consultations via video chat and picture-enabled text messaging. This service continues to this day, particularly for our most vulnerable patients (which included, until very recently, children under five who could not be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus).
Children come down with a lot of things that look strange to parents, especially new parents who have never had a child before. Especially parents who are staying home with their children to avoid a new (that's where the "novel" part of "novel coronavirus" comes from) disease that they don't want to give to themselves or their kids.
What you've advocated for is a world where parents can't communicate with doctors except by showing up in person. This is something we demonstrably do not want for a whole host of reasons. For a period of almost a year, unless you were basically bleeding from an artery or your arm was hanging by a thread, you could not see a doctor in person, at least not through our group.
It should be common sense that we are intelligent, thinking beings with the ability to discern right from wrong and that those are not binary choices. There are myriad reasons why someone might take a photo of a naked child that are free of malicious intent and, legally, are perfectly valid. Medical assistance is just one of them.
Plus, I can edit the metadata for tracks that come from Apple Music to my own tastes so I can tag that a song from the service is one version while my copy of it is a different version.
For me, Music is one of those things I hope Apple never "modernizes" because I feel like a lot of this nerd-level functionality would be lost in a major rewrite. It's certainly light years ahead of Spotify's truly pathetic "local files" function.
I wish we still lived in a time when being scammed or spammed wasn't so prevalent, but we don't and I'm not doing anything that might tip off either of those groups that my number is ripe for the picking.
This is what happens in my (non-tech-industry, but heavily invested in tech stacks) employer. A previous manager decided we were no longer System Administrators but now DevOps Engineers. But none of us develops code for our features and none of us wants to develop code for features. We want to build and maintain the infrastructure on which the code runs. Some of it has to be run in-house because we deal with medical information and all that entails.
Our current manager describes not as Developer Operations but Developing Operations. We develop the infrastructure and tooling that our code writers need and do everything we can to get the moving parts out of their way. If the code written by the code writers fails, it is their responsibility to deal with it but if the infrastructure underpinning that code fails, my team has failed.
Or, put another way, Austin might be the deepest blue on the entire continent but that means little when the state government is in direct opposition, and has been for decades.
The main difference between BGP and all other tools is that if you mess up BGP, you've done a very visible thing because BGP underpins how we get to each other's networks. But it's not a sign of BGP being fragile, just very important.
I'm a bit older than the usual HN person, I imagine, and I remember flying before airlines decided that checked luggage was a profit center. Most people only carried on a briefcase or a camera bag, or a small day bag usually with supplies for their children. Everything else went into the hold.
Of course, even in the 80s we had the Samsonite ad with the gorilla acting as baggage handler.
All the law wound up accomplishing was to cause landlords to put "we do not accept reusable tenant screening reports" on the footers of all of their web sites.
Gotta get that fee income.
Which makes sense to me, but people still raise a stink that retail isn't seven days a week "like it used to be."
A lot of people still remember the early 2010s when Seattle was open later than it is today. There used to be a lot of 24-hour or late-night spots. Beth's, Lost Lake, 13 Coins, North Star, Third Shift Bar, and the like. QFC, Metro Market, and Safeway all had 24-hour grocery shopping. The big Starbucks in University Village used to be open 24/7, then got trimmed back to "just" 2am, and is now 9pm.
But this comes with trade-offs: people don't want to work miserable jobs with crap scheduling and low pay (hoping for tips) and not get appreciated for it. The pandemic showed people they don't have to do that, but those who are used to plentiful services are salty because, hey, it turns out service employees are humans, too!
> Light rail is closed from midnight to 5
I agree that Sound Transit needs to explain exactly why they need 35 hours a week for maintenance when other agencies manage to pull it off in a fraction of the time.
But, to be fair to the rail, buses do still exist and we did a big restructure of our overnight bus service such that the routes actually exist and make some sense. Having ridden the 83 or 84 home more than once, those old owl routes were a travesty.
I completely agree with this. In Seattle, our city council proposed an ordinance requiring minimum wage and hour standards for so-called platform workers (your nominally independent contractor staff for companies like Uber and Lyft and Amazon and the like). Everything was, by Seattle political standards, going smoothly until DoorDash put the "the cost of your delivery will go up because of meddling by the Seattle council" blurb in their app. Then, immense pushback.
I hear this fairly often from people I work with. I work for a medical practice group and patients, of course, want to be seen outside of the hours when they work, so we have some clinics that are open until the ungodly late hours of 7 or 8pm. One clinic is, because the clinic director is a Khan-level tyrant, open for four hours on Saturdays.
The amount of moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth by some of my colleagues, and some of the medical staff, when their turn in the rotation comes up is deafening. To be asked to work anything other than 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday is an affront to dignity.
Yet these same people think nothing of also complaining when their favorite restaurant spot trims its hours back from midnight to 11pm. Or when the grocery store closes at 10pm. Or that places are crowded and have slower service on the weekends.
Where, exactly, do they expect all of those employees to come from and why should those employees "suffer" to work nights and weekends?
It grates on me.
Well, as with many things in life, it depends on the location. The odds of there being a non-familial occupancy limit are a lot lower in Loving County, Texas than they likely are in Harris County, Texas, simply because more population tends to beget more situations where society has decided we need more rules.
While overall percentages are likely low, the percentages in the areas where homelessness is most acute are almost certainly higher. For example, San Francisco's occupancy ordinance says that, in general, the upper limit is two people of occupancy per bedroom. While San Francisco has repealed its rules about non-familial cohabitation, Dallas still has some limits (though they are sparsely enforced).
Further, areas where homelessness is most acute also tend to have a higher percentage of people who rent, since the barriers to building any kind of housing make all but the most expensive kind of housing--rental units with long-term ROI built for "luxury"--the only kind that get built. According to media reports in 2021, people who rent make up 65% of San Francisco's households. Same for Seattle, where 50.3% of households rent their dwellings. It is likely the case that not all of these rental agreements have restrictions on who can move in and at what time, I would bet one months' rent that the overwhelming majority do.
> It's literally thinking "thoughts and prayers" for homeless people will help them, and deriving some kind of smug moral superiority for that.
I agree that simply having empathy but not backing with efforts is the most hollow of gestures. However, simply saying "well, why don't they live with you" isn't helpful. For another reason beyond what we've discussed, why is it automatically the case that someone who is unhoused would want to live with a stranger? There are myriad justified complaints about congregate shelters and short-term transient housing. The answer isn't "find roommates for everyone," it's "build housing at the rate and income levels needed to house people." But for the howling NIMBYs of the group, we could probably do this. So would it not be more effective to get many of the BS rules blocking housing out of the way?
It's not a short-term fix, but we already know what other short term fixes are that aren't people taking in roommates: buying hotels and converting them, for one; tiny house villages with proper doors and sanitary facilities are another. Not sweeping people from one "unsanctioned" campsite to another with nowhere to go is a third.
Because there are often laws or rules against that sort of thing. Taking in a long-term boarding guest who is unrelated to you is against city ordinance in many smaller jurisdictions, and if someone rents (like many do) their leases often prohibit such arrangements.
So now instead of one person looking for housing, you have two or more.
(Note that my reply omits all of the other arguments about how individual action for collective problems is very unlikely to solve the problem in a meaningful way and this is why we have societies and governments, and so on.)
I would like to see this be a more broad-based rule. No, I am not moved by "SMS is easy" or "getting a number that can receive SMS is harder for scammers to do in bulk." If you must, give users the choice but not the obligation to hand over a mobile number.
0 - https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2...
For example, no one (well, perhaps we should say few) would argue that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not a country, yet it operates ccTLD .uk which is not a country code assigned to a sovereign entity. GB is the country code for that country; UK is an exceptional reservation.
An incredibly simplified overview of this doctrine is that a person cannot claim equitable relief (that is, win a civil suit on the basis of equity) in a situation where the person has also acted wrongly or unfaithfully. A common example is that a landlord may not pursue eviction of a tenant if the landlord has violated the tenant's rights.
The clean hands doctrine is very nebulous and since I'm not a lawyer I don't claim to know all of the twists and turns. In my reading, the doctrine does not mean someone must be "completely pure" in an area in order to prevail. Generally there has to be a relationship between the thing the person wishes to sue for or defend against and their own actions. So while Disney might be abusing copyright in other areas, the doctrine (probably?) would not stop them from claiming copyright privilege in unrelated suits, such as against someone selling derivative works.