babalulu

While there might be some short-term positive effects for certain areas of the globe, in the long-term it will be negative for everyone. Having watched two very good interviews with climate scientists recently, both were warning about the collapse of current global systems by mid-century. As things get warmer and climate shifts, many places currently important for producing food will get too hot and too dry for consistent agriculture, and we'll start to see food shortages. Drought and heat will also begin to make some parts of the world unlivable, and people will migrate out of necessity, which given the current political climate, you know how that will go. One of the scientists said that, at current warming trends, the world will reach that level of heat in the 2040s, and we'll start to see the breakdown of current social, political and trade systems. Everyone will be negatively affected at that point.

In my city, the ambulance service is run by a private contractor, but the city government offers ambulance insurance to residents. It's included on my monthly water/sewer/trash bill and costs about four dollars a month. All ambulance services are free. A friend has taken two ambulance rides over the past few years, with nothing out of pocket for either of them.

The insurance is optional. If you don't want to pay the four dollars each month, you don't have to, but it's so cheap and easy why wouldn't you for the peace of mind it offers.

I am not a fan of what's being done to the Department of Education, but the linked article states nothing about anyone's payments increasing 4x. Also, the 41% is in reference to the default rate in the 1980s when for-profit colleges abused the student loan system. The new policies will likely allow for the same abuse that we saw then due to lack of oversight and an understaffed review system.

I can find courts in Oklahoma by entering "Oklahoma" in the search box and selecting Oklahoma from the dropdown menu. Are you not getting the dropdown? It sometimes takes a few seconds for it to appear after you enter your search term.

One of the reasons we've used it for centuries is that in the days before treated water it was safer to drink. Microbes in water had the potential to make you very sick or even kill you. Even today, if you're traveling to a location where the water supply is suspect, it's safer to drink beer instead of water.

They scaled back at one store only. This hardly seems like a trend. The Wal-Mart near my house just finished a major remodel this month, and they increased the number of self-checkout stands and cut down on the number of manned lanes. Only one manned lane ever seems to be open. They clearly are pushing people to use self-checkout.

Gumroad might work for you. They take a flat 10% fee.

While I'm pro-union in general, not all unions are equal. Some are powerful. Some are weak. Back in the 1990s I worked part-time for a unionized grocery store chain and was a member of the UFCW. There were four contract negotiations while I was there, and each time the union rolled over and approved pay cuts, decreasing the top pay rate and slashing insurance benefits. Long-time workers saw their pay cut from $11.11 an hour to $7.50 an hour over the course of a few years. Many left or took an offered buyout during the last pay cut. The last cut finally affected me as well and I took that same buyout.

No one at my store liked the union, and I have to admit that it turned me off of unions for a while. The UFCW was weak and had little bargaining power over a company that was losing money and, as we later learned, was being embezzled dry by its president.

There are several license plates missing from Oklahoma. A quick glance shows that the Cherokee Nation and Pawnee Nation plates aren't included. There may be others as well, but I didn't look beyond those two.

They're just not digitizing hit songs, they're digitizing forgotten artists and rare recordings. The Internet Archive is extremely valuable to music historians like myself in finding and understanding artists who have never been reissued and whose recordings are difficult to find. If they're forced to pull down these recordings from public access, it will be a huge loss to cultural history.

The website for one of my local news stations, the one I prefer for severe weather coverage, causes Firefox to freeze. That started happening a few months ago, so I now have to use Chrome to check the weather. And last month my electric company's website stopped working with Firefox. It no longer displays any user data, such as amount owed, so I have to use Chrome to pay my bill. I've encountered a few other sites here and there while surfing.

I've been heavily using MuseScore 4 lately and haven't noticed that type of latency on the Linux AppImage. My only gripe with 4 is the inability to open multiple scores in tabs. It opens them in separate windows instead. It makes closing scores in that situation difficult. If you have two open windows and quit one of them, both quit. If you instead just close one of the scores the window remains open with nothing in it. It seems to be a can't/won't fix problem as it has to do with their new soundpack system. It's probably the number one gripe users have with 4.

Cool Worlds did a great piece on this a few weeks ago. It's worth watching if you have an interest in this subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHgAcbpsujI

And as of this minute, your comment is the number one result for that search.

If you're using Firefox, there's an add-on called |Disable JavaScript that allows you to just click a switch on the toolbar to turn js on and off.

Google Books has issues of Billboard magazine dating back to 1942. It used to be valuable for research, but it's become much less so over the years. Currently, search results that return actual magazine issues are limited to the first page. After that, it's just normal Google links. Even searching for something like Elvis or Glenn Miller, both of whom should have been in a crapload of issues, returns only one page of relevant results.

Trying to search by date is very hard. Limiting search to "Glenn Miller October 1942" might return one or two relevant results, or it might not return any. Trying to search by issue date doesn't work at all.

They have an index of Billboard issues which allows you to go to individual issues and read them, but the index stops at 50 pages, and for a weekly magazine, that limits the index to only a handful of years. Using the index, you can't go directly to issues before the 1980s, and with search by issue date useless, that means you're just out of luck if you want to see a particular issue in the 1970s.

This reminds me of Lovecraft. His mythos was based on the premise that Earth has been inhabited by a series of alien and native civilizations, mostly malign, over the past billion years. Occasionally an artifact or part of a city is thrust to the surface by geologic forces. According to Lovecraft, after humanity falls a race of intelligent beetles will arise.

It's not a question of legal authority. It's a matter of if a company wants to do business in the EU, they have to follow EU laws. The EU isn't imposing laws on other countries. If a company does no business with EU citizens and collects no data on EU citizens, they don't have to follow GDPR. If they do collect data on EU citizens, they have to follow the law, regardless of where they're located, or face fines. It's a consumer protection law. It's no different than, for example, requiring products from Chinese companies to pass US safety regulations before they're allowed to be sold in the US.

I bought a 32-inch dumb TV just a couple of weeks ago. It was only $77US, on clearance at Walmart from $129US. The brand is Element, which I'm unfamiliar with, but it works nicely and has absolutely no smart capabilities. So you can find dumb TVs on the low end these days if you look for them.

The problem with moving away from SMS authentication is that not everyone in the world has a smartphone or is able to use something like a Yubikey. SMS is the lowest common denominator that allows most people in the world to use 2FA. If you require 2FA and don't allow SMS, you cut off access for a lot people, including the poor and likely the elderly.