bregma

At least playing Factorio 18 hours a day would keep them out of our faces for the duration of their term in office.

This is an incredibly disingenuous and specious argument.

The discussion is about US wine production and consumption. You present the aggregate total vale of all US exports in US dollars to 6 significant digits. Does the variance of the volume of wine exports in litres even show up in those 6 signifcant digits?

Consider: (1) is six significant digits of precision justified, or is it insignificant accurancy? (2) Do those aggregate numbers take into account inflation? (3) Do those aggregate numbers take into account the (not insignificant) devaluation of the US dollar? (4) Do those aggregate numbers include both goods and services?

No, if you were to make an honest argument by quoting US exports, you need to limit it to the volume of US wine exports in litres. Misdirection can be a great tool of propaganda but is not a useful contribution to interesting intellectual discourse.

Then you stack the courts with bent judges. I mean, what's the point of taking all that money if it doesn't get you what you want?

Do you really think he'll bother running for a third term when all he needs to do is declare the election results invalid and stay in office?

A bolt of broadcloth is far less titillating than the thought of touching someone's smalls.

In other words you could say constraint is the progenitor of creativity.

Is there a named meat option?

Sure, ultraviolet photoreceptors are cool. You know what would be cooler? What if birds, and their dinosaur ancestors, had evolved infrared phototransmitters that can lase? The world would be a different place. Imagine how upon hearing the distinctive call of the Red-Eyed Vireo animals and people would scramble for cover lest they become its next charred meal. On the other hand, self-roasting chickens would be a godsend for the industry.

Thank goodness birds are not real or this might have been a thing.

So does social media. Keep scrolling man, just one more hit.

Without fish and brewis Newfoundland is just... a big rock.

I don't think it is difficult to accept that fundamentals should be taught.

We spend years learning basic arithmetic like the addition of integers. You could very well argue that there is no need for that either because everyone has a calculator app on their phone. This is how dark ages begin.

They made programming so simple any idiot could do it. So they do.

"Ohh, soo cute! Here little kitty! OMG... RUN!!!"

The catch is that native North American pollinators are adapted to native North American flowers and have a great deal of difficulty pollinating introduced species that are native to Eurasia. Given the vast majority of commercial crops are not native plant species, the only way to mass pollinate them is to use non-native pollinators.

Also, few native North American bee species are eusocial. That's another quality one would need to be able to use them the same way as commercial honeybees are used today.

The there is the issue of honey production.

You know what they say: ship a village 1000 bicycles and they ride for a day. Teach a village to make bicycles and they ride for the rest of their lives.

The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"

It's because the more important question of "how can I personally profit from this?" usually takes precedence.

"Lymne" refers to an infection by the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi, a bacteria closely related to syphillis. There are plenty of other tick-borne diseases (including localized staph infections at bite sites that can lead to necrotizing fasciitis)

Just like with syphillis, there is a cheap and simple cure that is more effective than any known vaccine. If it's caught in time. Prevention is even cheaper.

The standard treatment for Lyme also just happens to be the standard treatment for many of the other tick-borne diseases, so you're still better-off taking a course of doxycycline after a tick byte than getting a vaccination against Lyme.

Ottawa summers are hot and very humid but the ticks disappear during that season.

The black-legged tick season in Ottawa is March through June and again September through November. Summer (deerfly season) is just too hot for them and they go to ground.

We do all the best camping in January and February. Why, you might ask, when it's usually colder than -20 C? No ticks. Also no mosquitos, blackflies, or deerflies but mostly no ticks.

You want the wrinkles to be conspicuous. It lets everyone know you can afford linen.

Perhaps a nice relaxing week at my private Caribbean island will help cure you?

I'm willing to wager most CTOs would agree with you.

A site to report tick bytes.

Is there a similar site to report mosquito bites? They also carry many debilitation or fatal diseases.

I live in prime tick country. During peak season (March through June and again September through November) I can get 3 or 4 tick bites a day. I don't always get them all because they're completely painless while they're embedded (although I react strongly after they've been removed) and I've been diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease twice after developing all the classic symptoms. I am not alone in my area. If there was a site where you report tick bites here it would need to be pretty robust to handle the load and it would serve no purpose.

The local authorities have acknowledged the rampant outbreak of Lyme in the region. You do not need to provide the tick to authorities for identification. All you need to do is go to any pharmacy and tell them you've been bitten by a tick and they'll write you a prescription for Doxycycline on the spot.

It depends.

We have a few sewing machines that are finicky. Tension goes off rapidly, binds a lot, lint buildup constantly has to be cleaned, clunks mysteriously sometimes. We also have a Singer manufactured in 1899 that just does what it's supposed to reliably (and you can still get parts for it!). Now mind you, it doesn't do fancy stitches or buttonholing or anything but straight stitching and a basic zigzag and you do have to keep the treadle properly lubricated but it even works during a power failure.

Sewing machines, like stand mixers and vacuum cleaners, in the end are power tools as much as radial arm saws, hammer drills, and routers are. It's great to have all the fancy features, but sometimes lowest tech is the best.

> I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on.

It's a holdover from the days when people used to type without looking at their keyboards or waste time and effort taking their fingers off the home row to find and stab around with some kind of multi-axis valuator device sitting on their desk somewhere.

They're also used where I am with milk to keep the outer bag closed.

It is my experience that it's the opposite. LLMs are very very precise but wildly inaccurate. They might give you 17 significant digits but be off by 10 orders of magnitude, to use a metaphor.

Get used to it: I think we're going to be pretending to predict the future for many years to come.

The American political "left" is way to the right of centre compared with everywhere else in the world.

I live in Canada, winter is 6 months and we get a few weeks below -30 and deep snow November through March. It's a different story.