AlbertCory

OK. All you see when you hit Threads is what YOU said. Not what the person above you said.

> I take it you're being purposefully obtuse

No, but you're being purposefully hyper-sensitive.

If you're replying to someone higher, you should hit Reply on that comment. Not on someone lower down.

This seems ideologically rather than evidence-driven.

Smokers used to claim that it suppressed their appetites. Not being a smoker, or obese, I wouldn't know. But it seems plausible as a (partial) cause.

Who's "they"?

This is in no way to defend smoking. I've never smoked, and good riddance to it.

However:

Amidst all the talk about the causes of obesity, surely "not smoking anymore" is in there somewhere?

> Porter, who had initially polled well, lost decisively in the primary, coming in third, with just fifteen per cent of the vote.

She was running against Adam Schiff, who had much broader name recognition. It also didn't help that she's overweight and "Porker" became her nasty nickname.

This is a shoddy piece of reporting. Tech lobbying didn't start with Chris Lehane, Uber, Lyft, or crypto. Anytime government is capable of helping or hurting an industry, they form a lobbying group. The more money involved, the bigger the lobbying effort.

Amen. You could look at the Acropolis and be unimpressed, too. That says more about you than the building.

It's called "beauty." If you don't have an eye for it, well, that's your taste. You aren't going to convince anyone with utilitarian arguments, any more than "those shoes are uncomfortable!" will convince anyone to wear sneakers instead of high heels or wingtips.

I've been to both Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax building. They're both beautiful.

> Many of those houses have required work as well

and the owners were quite happy to do that work. I don't think anyone hired FLW expecting to get a regular old tract house.

The authorities could always bring over some other ones, if that's really what they want.

In any case, the drive to mate is pretty powerful. I would think a female in heat would swim back to the mainland if that was the only way to find a male.

I have kinda mixed feelings on this. Protecting an endangered species against human hunting, habitat reduction, or other unnatural dangers makes total sense.

But what's unnatural about grizzlies? Were they introduced onto the island by man? Nope. For that matter, the bears on Kodiak -- how did they get there in the first place? They have plenty of salmon so they probably don't need to eat marmots, if there are any. But maybe they wiped out other species we don't know about.

What are you going to do to protect them against other natural predators? And why not introduce them into other suitable habitats, like we've done with wolves in the US? Then we wouldn't be so dependent on one island.

Edit: this is in marked contrast to New Zealand trying to eliminate the stoats and other introduced mammals who are not native and are wiping out the bird species who are. The bears got there on their own.

I should have mentioned that sometimes afterwards, some solution drips out of your nose when you incline your head forward. Super-embarrassing.

I think the grizzlies will take care of that on their own. Either some bears from the island will swim to the mainland, or vice versa.

Note: don't ask for a link on that. I just suspect animals prefer not to mate with their siblings.

That's it exactly for me. Squirt bottle seems more effective than Neti pot, just because there's some force in the water.

You DO need the powder, though; otherwise the water burns like hell.

This sounds science-y.

In fact, I use NeilMed, a commercial saline & bicarb powder together with distilled water, and I know from past exchanges on HN that lots of others here do, too. My own doctor said it was fine and lots of her patients do it. The solution runs out the other nostril, which is gross so you do it in private.

I have very few colds, allergies, or sinus infections since starting it, although it doesn't eliminate them all.

This Fort Detrick guy, though... that might be misinformation. I use the spray once a day, twice if I have a cold. Definitely not constantly.

Whenever some theme gets broad advertising, I get suspicious. "Helps boost the immune system!" -- WTF does that mean?

"Probiotics for gut health!" -- yeah, right. Get back to me in 10 years when you have some actual evidence.

How is Vancouver "controlled"? The grizzlies can obviously swim back to the mainland if they don't like it.

> we almost drove to extinction

In the Lower 48, yes. Not in Canada and Alaska.

I'm sure, but the question is, do the populations intersect? Looking at the map, I see three Provincial Parks up in the north, plus towns and roads. That will mean vacationers will encounter them.

Whereas on Kodiak, there is nothing on one side of the island.

I've been up REAL close to grizzlies, on Kodiak Island [1]. However, that has a population of 13,000 [2], whereas Vancouver has 840,000, according to that article.

That means on Kodiak, the bears have the land mostly to themselves, and humans aren't much of a threat to them. You wouldn't try this in Yellowstone, where fatal bear-human encounters happen regularly. And probably will on Vancouver, too.

[1] https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/travel-disasters

[2] https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-a...

The only solution to CYA is a written policy: this is the criteria for when we Code Three, and only then.

"Why didn't this incident get Code Three?"

"Because it didn't meet the criteria."

You'll still get complaints, but at least it's in writing.

Point us to a "real" communist country, either existing or in the past.

Great, thanks. Taking over from Judge Gilstrap the Darth Vader role.

Well, legal matters are a different kettle of fish, as it were. They tend to be a little touchy about what you say in public.

It used to be the Eastern District of Texas, with Justice Rodney Gilstrap. I never went to Marshall or Tyler, but I knew a lot of people who did. They're small towns.

I don't know when it shifted to the Western District. Waco is not nearly as rural as East Texas; it's halfway between Dallas and Austin.

> Passion can't win them all.

If you do the numbers, yes it can. There are a lot of people who could do this searching.

I was a "technical advisor" in Google's patent lit dep't. Searching prior art was my favorite thing to do, but not the whole job by any means.

(If you're wondering: my least favorite task was finding the sections of code that supposedly infringed someone's patent, and then getting the PM's approval to turn it over to the other side. They can't actually say No, but they can be a PITA.)

I killed this patent:

https://searchengineland.com/google-maps-might-be-banned-in-...

after many, many people failed to find the prior art that I found. It's only easy once someone tells you.

Interestingly, now I can't find it! Maybe they took it down. It WAS the first result on scholar.google.com if you searched "client-server maps." This is the same project:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040006300/downloads/20...

There are, in fact, startups working on using AI for legal matters. I know one of the principals in one personally.

I don't know if they're tackling this issue, though.

At Google we did a comparison of many, many "patent search" firms: giving them all the same task. Unfortunately I couldn't tell you the results even if I remembered them (which I don't). Most were garbage but a couple were spot-on.

It's more than $3,000; I can tell you that.

Secondly, it's detective work; you might get the answer right away, and you might spend days searching fruitlessly. Making a claim chart is what take the time: you have to hit every single element.

That's because it's not published, plus a conclusion without any supporting data and methodology is pretty worthless.

copyrights are different from patents.

> I really wish we could publicly shame the people behind these abuses or provide some other incentive to correct bad behavior other than speeding-ticket sized fines.

They are beyond shame, believe me. There have already been TV news segments about how their "place of business" in West Texas is just a PO Box.