UIUC_06

Tell me you know the true meaning of Christmas, without telling me you know the true meaning of Christmas.

> I usually just tap my toes quietly within my shoe

Right. The conductor will hate seeing you tap your feet. So just don't let them see.

OMG, yes. Any conductor will tell you they'd much rather you play or sing the wrong note in time than the right note with the wrong rhythm

I was at a recital of adult piano students. "Kill me now" was my reaction when one of the students had that habit of stopping and playing every note "right" before continuing.

The secret sauce of a union is, they bargain over wages & working conditions for you. Especially the "wages" part.

Non-union companies are acting perfectly legally if they create workers' councils to discuss working conditions. That is not an "employer union." If they submitted a new salary schedule to the council -- that would be an employer union.

Telling employees that these discussions would not be permitted with a union is similarly legal.

Yes. I won't subscribe to anything (well, hardly anything), certainly not Adobe's bloatware.

TV series: I kinda liked the free sample of Tulsa King, but I'm for sure not subscribing to Paramount+ to see the rest. Not with a 7-day free sample, not with anything.

> makes the know-it-all tone even more insufferable

Oh, you mean that he refers to actual business costs where no one else does?

Well, I think it illustrates that you don't really believe they're making obscene profits. Otherwise you'd swallow your virtue and buy some.

There is. It's the transformer you connect to. Their final point of presence before the product leaves the "store" and enters your possession.

You must not know much about actual PG&E equipment.

A neighbor here told me there was a 6-month wait to get solar & its associated metering, because PG&E doesn't have the equipment on our lines that can accept power back from the customers.

Sending humans out to fix things is costly.

Maybe you have heard of looking at annual reports to find out some actual numbers?

If you think $$$$ are flowing to investors, the thing for you to do is buy their stock.

I don't know if this is a general question or specifically about carrots, but:

Carrots keep under refrigeration exceptionally well. They transport well. They're not like peaches, which are either in-season and fantastic, or out-of-season and thus flown in from somewhere else, really expensive, and lousy.

Good chefs know this.

I think you want PG&E to be a government-owned company. It's not, though.

That's worth discussing, but right now it's a regulated monopoly, entitled by law to make a "reasonable" profit, AFAIK.

... and that's relevant how?

I suppose you hope it's relevant because, "the solar power comes just when they need it the most" ?

They don't seem to do the math quite so happily, though. Maybe it's #1 and #2:

First, Safeway buys in very large lots from certified suppliers, who can commit to (almost) always having carrots.

Second, those suppliers have to deliver at a loading dock, and maybe at a central location, too.

Suppose a small farmer went to Safeway and said, "Hey, I have 100 pounds of carrots every couple months. I want your cashiers to buy them from me at the retail price!"

First, Safeway buys in very large lots from certified suppliers, who can commit to (almost) always having carrots.

Second, those suppliers have to deliver at a loading dock, and maybe at a central location, too.

Third, Safeway pays them wholesale prices, not retail.

All of those analogies apply to selling power back to PG&E at retail prices. It's in small lots; it's undependable; it comes from many sources, not just a few; and it's priced wrongly.

Yes, PG&E can be read as Pricks Grabbing Everything, but they're what we've got.

There's a great book by Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke, where an author of a well-received book decides to be his own publisher for his second book.

It's not long enough, so he does almost all those things you mention. It doesn't end well for him.

They have little codes that designate the genres they're interested in, like MG (middle grade) and YA (young adult). And of course, LBTQ etc.

> Books are no longer commodities whose primary purpose is to be read. Rather, they are meant to capture an upswing of interest in a particular topic, and then become more widely celebrated than widely considered.

Well said. A book to display on your coffee table, not necessarily to read.

> He left home to join a traveling medicine show literally selling snake oil

The old weird America.

https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-old-weird-america/id4171...

Edit. Lest anyone perceive that as denigrating (you never know what people are going to think online): the old weird America was precious. We should never lose it.

It is true that literary agents are less likely to take on a book that's "difficult" in any way, and "too long" is one of those ways. As slimy as they are, they do have a sense of what publishers want, who in turn have a sense of what readers want. And lots of people do not want to read books anymore, broadly speaking. There are too many other entertainment options.

I canceled my PayPal account. There's no particular reason to keep doing business with them anymore.

We can now expect Tom Friedman, Joseph Stieglitz, and Paul Krugman to write new books explaining it all for their readers. Of course they will tell us how they knew it all along.

The truth is that geopolitics has not gone away. The world is not "flat" but bumpy and separated by big oceans.

I didn't, either. From what I can tell, they have a fairly light touch with their acquired companies (Zappos, Goodreads, IMDb). At least at first.

Well, those never had any problems, while all four window regulators on my 2002 BMW had to be replaced, at $900 each.

There was a safety reason why they got rid of the flip-up headlights.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mazda-mx5-miata-history/

still, those were super-cool. You could flip them up without turning on the lights, and one Miata driver would greet another one in the oncoming lane by doing that.

Hey. I had an old Miata. A friend said it looked like a jellybean. Maybe that's feminine; I don't know. I also haven't seen any current ones, I don't think.

An awesome car. A MG Midget / Triumph but with great engineering.

As a 501(c)(3) Harvard (and most universities) have to file a Form 990 with the IRS, which anyone can read. Here's theirs from 2021: [1]

it's 373 pages and not (easily) searchable. Go crazy.

[1] https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_...

You've just restated exactly what the article says, but yeah.

I had a modest proposal, and then decided to fact-check myself. The proposal was "Charity Navigator should do a health check on Harvard."

Then I found they already had! https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/042103580

Harvard gets a 100% rating. I didn't see right off a way to distinguish "cost of all those administrators." Maybe they allocate it to the various "programs" so it's hidden?

Here's their IRS 990 form for 2021, all 373 pages of it:

https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_...

If anyone wants to dig through all this, have a big time.

Right, as I said in a separate post.

They used to be sort of a fun Mythbusters for the Web. Now they're just a site trolling for clicks from left-wing users.

Aside from the truth or falsity of the claim, which is amply discussed in this thread:

Snopes is, supposedly, a neutral Mythbusters site for the Web.

"Urban street gangs initiate members by making them drive at night with lights off and kill anyone who flashes lights at them" -- busted!. Great stuff.

Instead, they bend over backwards to cite irrelevancies about political figures they like: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-us-mexico-border...

> But we were unable to find a documented Biden visit to the U.S.-Mexico border during his presidency. We reached out to the White House to learn more and will update this post if we get more information.

> We should note, however, that Vice President Kamala Harris visited the Texas border in June 2021 and toured immigration facilities. In December 2019, before the presidential elections, Jill Biden also visited asylum seekers in camps on the Mexican side of the border.

How is relevant that Harris went to El Paso? The press secretary said Biden went there. We "reached out to the White House to learn more" -- what more is there to learn? They already busted it.

.. and investigate, scrupulously, anything favorable to their side:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/walker-texas-resident/

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cnn-musk-could-threaten-fr...

It's fine for Snopes to be a "fact checker with an agenda." They just need to disclose the agenda.