astroid

Especially on the verge of the depression at a moment when some people are going to be seriously wondering what Article 4 Section 4 implies.

You must suffer through this existence alone, afraid, and dependent.

You aptly pointed out yourself that this stuff gets rolled out when things are going bad for basically everyone - probably a thread worth pulling on there.

This kind of surprised me though: https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/shelter-services-pr...

I knew that the government was paying big money to buy up hotels and other migrant shelters, but had no idea $640 Million was spent out of FEMA's budget on this year alone.

This will surely turn into a powerful right wing talking point if the word gets out to that side of the media.. (assuming it hasn't already)

I'm not going to lie though, given the current situation and in hindsight how poorly Maui and East Palestine, OH were handled I think it's probably reasonable to ask whether this is what we want/expect from our Emergency Management services.

It seems at first glance like they are creating the emergency via deliberately imported avoidable costs, then short changing the tax payers when they are most likely to need their help in a genuine life or death situation.

It feels like this money should be coming out of the ICE budget or some other agency, but I'm just a proletariat.

The relevant bit: "For Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will provide $640.9 million of available funds to enable non-federal entities to off-set allowable costs incurred for services associated with noncitizen migrant arrivals in their communities.

The funding will be distributed through two opportunities, $300 million through SSP – Allocated (SSP-A) and $340.9 million through SSP – Competitive (SSP-C)."

I haven't even gotten to the other areas where they almost certainly had a similar level of waste, but I suspect over half a billion could be mighty useful right now.

EDIT: Looks like once you know the magic number the news talking about it is easy to find, and it's not just right wing media highlighting this issue: https://www.newsweek.com/fema-migrant-funding-hurricane-disa...

If this doesn't stir the pot, I don't know what will. No matter what happens, people are going to be irrationally (or I guess maybe rationally to an extent) angry.

People like you literally cannot be happy about anything. Good grief.

I mean, Comcast and Xfinity will probably not go down the next time this happens, right? At worse this is nice gesture that will result in a slight market correction and better outcomes for all next time.

I think the majority of this country views them as the go to for "Emergency Management" at the federal level.

Are they using their money on other things that are not related?

Way to contribute - you are going places. (nowhere I'd want to be though)

He fucked up in multiple ways, outside of the cloning.

The animal (or 'parts') he imported was illegal and engangered. And he was set to further endanger the Montana flock with it's introduction.

This guy is a menace, F him.

EDIT: Oh yeah I forgot - all this effort was to sell the illegally imported / created animal which endangers the native animal population to bolster his business of raising unusual animals specifically for closed big game trophy hunting.

So he is fine with risking Montanas wildlife population to enrich himself and 'create' new franken-animals specifically to kill them when they are the right size.

I hope this guy perishes of old age in jail and this has a chilling effect on anyone else pulling this crap.

I know a lot of addicts as well, and every single one of them was so happy when it became possible to get Narcan easily and to get it without fear of extra charges if caught with it.

However - it doesn't work if you also took xylazine with your fent-oin, so that's a whole new problem.

But you are absolutely wrong in that statement - it may just be that your group of addicts is not particularly high functioning.

I have no idea what Zuckerberg will or won't do in the future, but this statement is so absurdly loaded and divorced from reality it is a genuine shame the first post is likely going to stay the 'top post'.

Maybe next time you want to throw baseless accusations and generalizations disparaging half the population, take a moment to look at 'your team' as well.

Cause right now it's not exactly looking good.

I say this as someone who is generally viewed as independent (Bernie, Ron Paul, RFK, Vivek etc. would be recent politicians I at least largely align with, although there is no one I fully agrree with or support.)

A foreign government that flatly refuses to registrer it's influence organization under FARA has taken away one of the most important rights of all Americans, whether they realize it or not.

This isn't like an audiophile with golden speaker wire or whatever -- it's literally the components and software are inferior in every measurable way.

Also, real hearing aids generally have about 2x as many microphones and speakers (so they can better isolate the frequencies and replicate them), down to the amplifier -- where the cheaper one has worse frequency control.

Apple does a little better than the similarly priced costco-type $300 hearing aids, but the hardware is still vastly inferior.

Just look up the spec sheet and validate if you don't believe what I am saying. It's not hidden - they literally just changed definitions so they could be grouped together and get covered by Medicaid. These "hearing aids" existed as of the shelf 'hearing amplifiers' prior to the definition change - the only purpose is this change is to dilute the meaning of the term, score a political win, and ensure the government medicaid programs can cover the $300 device instead of considering the actual medical device as a viable option.

It's a huge bamboozle.

The lower quality amplifier means worse ability to tune, which trickles down to the other products.

The markup is probably closer to 300% which is no more egregious than Apple in this case (probably less tbh given their $2,000 wheels and $2,000 ram) -- with REAL hearing aids costing about $350-700 to manufacture for the more entry level 'real ones', which can go up as those components increase in quality.

Note the source you used also going back to early pandemic times, before the world experienced 30-40% inflation on everything. AND it's quoting a 2015 report. This is USELESS in terms of evaluating a comparison today.

NO ONE has tried to say Apple shouldn't be able to offer these products -- I have enthusiastically supported all of the developments assuming the consumer is fully informed. This is not happening, by design.

And then you have people like you with complete blinders on pretending its 'A or B' when its really 'A-Z'.

There is nothing wrong with critiquing the WAY a change happened, especially given all the other 'definition' changes we have been subjected to forcefully by the media and the state the last 5-7 years.

Go ahead and buy use 'acceptable' hearing assistance devices with apple, from costco, or wherever you feel like you are getting a bargain on your physical and mental health.

It's doing a huge dis-service to those who actually want a rock-solid product and to avoid succumbing to dementia because they can't hear anymore because they just kept jacking up the volume on their apple "hearing aids" (lol).

Anyway I'm done here because you have tunnel vision and are only latching onto shit to argue about instaed of the whole message. Enjoy your hearing-loss-induced dementia!

I'm all for easier access to medical assistance devices -- I am against the erosion of established terms for political points, especially when it leads to ridiculous statements like you just made:

"My parents just got absolutely robbed buying hearing aids for my great aunt that I’m sure cost in the tens of dollars to manufacture." -- this shows you know nothing about hearing aids and the absolute bleeding edge technology that goes into real ones.

I'm sure it cost a lot and it hurt to pay the price. I'm not arguing these products shouldn't be available -- I'm arguing it's essentially false advertising to lump them in with 'hearing aids' especially with the FDA badge of approval.

Give the consumers choice - but don't hide that choice behind falsely equating the product classes. Make it clear they are in fact getting lower end everything, and that's why the price is so low. And make it clear that without an audiologist, you are at risk of damaging your own hearing and eliminating or worsening additinoal frequencies if tuned improperly.

Then let the consumer decide. Simple.

It's great that apple is offering this, I am not opposed to that at all. I am opposed to them changing definitions for political points, resulting in a degradation of the meaning of the original term.

If they called it 'hearing assistant' or something else that makes it clear there is a real difference in these cheap / low end products rather than expanding the term to include everything under the sun that can amplify sound it would be different.

They are basically tricking consumers into believing that suddenly hearing aid technology and audiologists are not necessary at all, and I guarantee it is going to result in many people further damaging their hearing as a result.

This is why you can buy 'hearing aids' from costco now, without ever seeing an audiologist.

I think this is great that the tech is more accessible, IF the consumers are informed about how and why things changed.

Adam Currey (of the No Agenda podcast / headbangers ball fame) did a really good critique about this when it happened, and it was one of Nancy Pelosi's pet projects that made her a bunch of money.

He made a strong case (as a person deaf in one ear and an audio specialist given his work with tech, MTV, inventing podcasts, and suffering from hearing issues himself).

I would be very very wary of any device claiming it is a hearing aid that is not tuned by an audiologist, as you may just make your hearing problem worse.

This is what set this trainwreck into motion (picked at random with a quick search): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/health/fda-hearing-aids.h...

When you just change the definitions of words for everything and anything, all the sudden nothing matters because nothing can be trusted.

Women CANT be sexist, because 'men' have more privilege and historically have less authority. So as the oppressed sex, they can't be sexist because they 'lack power'. So statements like "I hate all men, they are stupid violent thugs" are not viewed as sexist.

The same goes for race -- while you didn't call it out specifically, it's the exact same mindset. It doesn't matter if a BIPOC person literally kills a White person and says "I hate all white people and I killed them because they are white". This is not racist to these people, because that person supposedly lacks 'power'.

They (hypothetically) had and utilized the power to kill, but that isn't 'real' or 'institutional' power, so it simply does not count.

Both concepts are equally stupid and fly in the face of reality. And the inevitable outcome is CONSTANT conflict.

The conflict stems from being 'critical' of these different institutions and people who have 'power' or 'privilege' -- but the cycle never ends, so even if you manage to remove all Men or White people from existence, a power vacuum will exist and the criticism will be levied on whomever fills the role.

It's the perfect way to perpetually conquer and divide, where you get to claim perpetual victim status, while ensuring the voice of the majority -never- matters because of their supposed 'institutional power'. The end result of this thinking will be less tolerance, less diversity, and more asinine stuff like this python situation.

They mean EXACTLY what they said, take them at their word.

https://upperstory.com/en/spintronics/

This is more about learning about electicity in a tangible physical way, using puzzles to learn -- so it's maybe a level lower than your intent, but it is for kids 8 and up and seems like even adults could learn quite a bit from it.

It's really hard to describe though - I strongly recommend watching the video at that link or at least looking at a picture.

I honestly think at this point, Climate Change as a whole is being used as a club to try and force the poor / proletariat class to behave a certain way, while giving the billionaires / 1% (or 0.1%) class carte blanche to do whatever they want, perhaps with a carbon tax on top.

I want to see the natural environment thrive, and health for humanity as a whole. Rather than fighting the nebulous 'climate change', we should be going directly to the source and ensuring environmental pollution / hazards are properly managed directly. Instead we are playing these weird abstraction games, where we are allegedly fighting an invisible enemy.

Whatever politician pulls away from the 'climate change' / 'carbon tax' narrative, and actually provides tangible solutions to the environmental / poulltion crisis has my vote at this point...

I don't need billionaires flying from city to city discussing how best to manage cow farts and reduce meat consumption. I need tangible changes to how meat itself is produced (reducing the cruelty, and improving the environment in turn) and factories prevented from dumping forever chemicals in our water, food, etc.

I'm not going down the 'climate change' is or isn't real rabbit hole - I am just so effing sick of it being the only target that matters. If industry is the problem, lets fix the industry. If agriculture is the problem (big ag anyway), lets fix the problem.

Instead we are expected to throw the baby out with the bathwater and just pledge allegience to the climate change cult.

Clear air, clean water, healthy food etc. can be strived for without all the theatrics and doomsday scenarios -- and you don't have to try so hard to 'convert' people to your cause. Just ask people: Do you want 'forever chemicals' in your drinking water? Me neither. Let's fix that. Do you want pollution spewing directly into your breathing space? Me neither. Let's fix that.

I know that gets a bit hard when you are looking at global trade - but I still think this outlook can be used to address the issue globally.

Instead of common sense individual measures, we are left where its this game of 'all or nothing' and if you aren't on the side of 'nothing' you are the carbon that needs to be reduced.

Super frustrating.

Stripe is Headquartered in US / and I believe Ireland - not Israel. Sorry for the confusion.

I don't know about this company specifically, but I know it's common for the government to essentially act as an incubator for tech companies, so the concerns probably weren't unwarranted.

I guess even with the switch, some people probably verified prior so it likely has some impact on X still -- and maybe this is actually what moved the needle internally, since the users were calling it out as a concern for quite some time.

I had no clue uber and tiktok used them though, so that's good to know - thankfully I haven't given them my biometrics as of yet.

No technical details, nothing interesting -- it's like the author's entire purpose was to advertise for certain businesses in Las Vegas, but they needed some reason to describe them all in nauseatingly boring detail.

THen 'oh btw the phone issues he was ignoring on the trip turned out to be a rival startup using shady companies for corporate espionage'.

I regret trying to read through to the meat of the story, as now I am left hungry and irritated.

To pretend like this announcement is like 'every person on the planet voiced their displeasure about something happening' is so incredibly disingenuous.

The Intercept started out with noble goals and intentions, that at least one of it's founders felt have gone so far astray he cut ties very publicly with the company he founded, and now we have another journalist there corroborating his take.

The organization that broke the Snowden Files, along with many other uncomfrotable stories (for those in power anyway) is now a husk of it's former self, and the author is basically telling you if you read closely 'I left because the organization has been coopted and now refuses to run stories that make certain powerful people uncomfortable', and you are hand waving it away as if it's the equivalent to some random twitter using complaining about their coffee this morning.

Glenn Greenwalds statements and actions around The Intercept should have been a wake up call that it cannot be trusted and has likely been co-opted by some Mockingbird-like program, and now we have further validation of the muzzles being put on staff there. If you can't see the forest from the trees here, I don't see how it can't be due to deliberately putting your head in the sand.

Doing a quick search, I found several articles detailing how this is becoming more common, with this story being the first one I recalled as the video is nauseating: https://www.voanews.com/a/east-asia-pacific_china-tries-muff... "Editor’s Note: China’s government is expanding its censorship controls by targeting Chinese citizens overseas who criticize Beijing on social media. The pressure tactic is called “zhulian” – an ancient punishment meaning “guilt by association.” It usually involves police threatening family members in China for the actions of their relatives overseas.

This happened to “Zoo” (short for @HorrorZoo, her main handle on Twitter), a Chinese student pursuing graduate studies in Australia, whose father has been repeatedly summoned to the police station because of her criticism of Chinese Communist Party leaders on social media.

But instead of censoring her Twitter account, “Zoo” has become more outspoken, providing multiple videos of police intimidating her via video chat. Her story provides a rare look at how China tries to use the families of dissidents to silence them."

Another instance: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/overseas-chinese-1021... "Police in Beijing have contacted the family of a Chinese student studying in the United States after he expressed support online for the "Bridge Man" protester, who unfurled banners on a Beijing bridge calling on ruling Chinese leader Xi Jinping to step down on the eve of the 20th Communist party’s congress."

I'm sure I could find hundreds of these - it has nothing to do with loyalty, and everything to do with external sources of pressure and coercion.

Something else I want to point out though since you mentioned "It isn't just communication with a human I wanted to restrict, but any external system. Databases, helper systems, anything like that."

This is going to be another deal breaker for true poker bot players -- they are all tapping into hand databases, recording every play they have ever participated in. I'm not sure if this is still possible since I have been out of the game, but I even ran a separate machine just for observing games I was not in.

Hand History is necessary for a proper bot logic - it needs to be able to 'bucket' player behavior, and that doesn't exist in a vacuum. A huge part of gaining an edge is programming in that behavior.

For example -- how can you possibly assign a player to be considered 'aggressive', 'passive', 'heavy bluffer', or 'only goes in on nuts' etc. without a hand history database? On top of that, there are other applications such as Sit N Go Analyzer that can help give you 'by the books correct' plays for end games if you are playing tournaments for example.

Any serious botter is going to be taking advantage of -some- historical data, absolutely no one is playing a blind strategy -- that's not poker.

I hope this isn't discouraging, and I'm glad my initial comment was helpful -- I'm genuinely curious to see where this goes, as I really miss those days. It felt so wonderful to be living off the logic I wrote, possibly the freest I have ever felt. And the rush of being at the point where it was time to raise the stakes/buy-in, which always results in tweaking to the playerbase at those levels. It was so fun. Had I been maybe 3-6 months ahead of where I was when Black Friday hit, I probably would have left the US to keep playing. So close..

I guess I don't get why it is important to filter 'real' players for starters, and I definitely don't get why you'd land on just running uploaded Python code... the entire approach seems so needlessly convoluted.

I also don't understand why you are so worried about the cat and mouse game with the 'big sites' if you are just using play money. I haven't followed developments here in years, but back when I was earning a living it was enough to just run a screen scraper on your machine, that then passed of table state data to a seperate device (which is running the actual bot logic / storing player hand history databases, etc.) -- and even that wasn't strictly necessary unless you really raised some red flags.

Maybe take a look at some of the open source botting platforms like OpenHoldem, and use that as inspiration to re-evaluate your approach?

https://github.com/OpenHoldem/openholdembot/releases

This just seems like such an unsafe and half-cocked approach -- even if you got this python bot site up, I can tell you as a former pro poker botter that I would never ever have considered uploading my bot to your site, aside from your code execution concerns. You'd then see all my logic, and that's the biggest leak a poker botter could have.

Even if you pull this off, no one doing serious work on their bot logic is going to trust you with it -- for you it may be an intellectual exercise, but for that community it's a lucrative job where the only thing that makes you stand above the rest is a dynamic strategy that you are going to protect just as tightly as the key to a bitcoin wallet. The only submissions you will get are toy bots that have no chance of being competitive anyway... which kind of defeats the purpose of 'bots only' I think.

I don't mean to be discouraging, but as someone who made a living doing this for a few years I can say without a doubt no one who has put even a moderate amount of work tuning their bot is going to upload it for you to be able to rip the logic off.

If nothing else, you should be re-evaluating this in a manner where the only data exchanged between you and the client is the table state as it changes, as well as an API for submitting their action on their turn. Otherwise this is dead on arrival.

For what it's worth: Watching her videos, I'm not sure I necessarily believe her claims - but that position goes against every tenet of the current cultural landscape, so the fact it is being completely ignored is ringing alarm bells for me.

If the CEO of any other massively hyped bleeding edge tech companies sister claimed publicly and loudly that they were abused as a very young child, we would hear about it - and the board would be doing damage control trying to eliminate the rot. Why is this case different?

Now we have a situation where all of the current employees have signed this weird loyalty pledge to Sam, which I think will wind up making him untouchable in a sense - they have effectively tied the fate of everyone's job to retaining a potential child rapist as head of the company.

I debated getting something like the Freestyle 2, but I had a suspicion the the curvature following the shape of your hand was going to be a key feature, and I think I was right. No regrets.