downut

Yeah, um, there's a difference between "the client" and "multiple clients". Multiple clients racing can't be fixed.

I begin to wonder about this programming culture. Speed at generating LOC, doesn't necessarily have to work IRL...

Your nuanced plan of paying for things yourself completely falls apart once you or a loved one contracts stage II or higher cancer, suffers life threatening injuries from a car crash or any of a panopoly of unfortunate situations that would completely exceed your ability to self insure.

I am also not impressed with all of these just asking questions it's so complicated asides; there are dozens of existence proofs that demonstrate a diverse set of approaches that more or less solve this problem at the nation level. But that would require a bit of curiosity about how the rest of the world works, I suppose.

The problem with health care/insurance in the US is not because of unanswered economic theories (or lack of half baked econ 101 approaches), rather it's because of hard ideological commitments to maximize rent extraction based on historical contingencies.

Ever wonder why US corporations generally provide health insurance? World War II something something.

Essentially handmade bikes cost 2-5x more than $1500 now. $150 will buy you a Wallmart piece of junk. A utility bike suitable for bombing around a city is going to cost somewhere around $1000. I own three that each have a > $2K replacement cost, even with me building the wheels and installing everything but the bottom bracket. Yep you can easily spend more than $1500 for a single speed bare bones bike, and the people that build them have waiting lists years long.

If the island is privately owned then hard to see how "future generations" will be able to study and enjoy it. Maybe, but probably not, eh? That's the point of it being privately owned. Now if the State of Hawaii were to assert eminent domain, acquire it at fair market value, and then turn it into public park lands as designated wilderness, well that might work for your intent, I think.

Oh I know where you're coming from, but a point of stocks is that they can be the basis for many things. Think of the flavorings as a "tilt". If you use star anise right from the start it tilts toward (to my taste) a generic Asian direction. If this is where it ends up, mainly, that's awesome. Otherwise you can easily make a tea of those star anise and add that later.

All three points are true, except for the bit about "exterminated to the last". Ideally the size of the deer population would reside more or less within the carrying capacity of the ecosystem but the eradication of the apex predators (wolves mainly) has led to an explosion in the population. This has knock on effects that are very destructive to the point that deer in most places might accurately be called "vermin". Those who disagree might consult an authority such as Aldo Leopold on the subject. He knew this a long time ago.

About the hunters: unfortunately there's a lot trash hunters out there now that don't follow norms and what formerly was considered socially aberrant behavior is considered cool, even righteous.

Noisy drones in the forest/desert/canyons wherever truly suck for everyone not the drone operator. Who knew the choppers that flourished in the skies above the Grand Canyon would proliferate to fill every former natural refuge from the clamoring industrial noises of modern life.

Inconvenience? Hunter here, trying to understand why that would be.

I ran my own postfix + [lots more brain tiring things here] for 15 years with very few hitches and felt quite satisfied with my successful caveman lifestyle. But then I got too busy and settled on migadu and my gosh what a fool I was. My wife and I use email like SMS these days and always force commercial conversations to email. signal for the truly trite things.

I don't remember what I pay, not going to look it up, but the money for monetizing email is truly well spent: happiness base level permanently raised.

The only stupidity left in my email setup is Thunderbird killing off the ability to use emacs as the editor. Enshitification without revenue... genius.

Ah. You also have reading comprehension problems, on the face of it, but I don't believe that either.

I believe that you are smart enough to understand the power dynamics in the House, and you understand that I don't think you're stupid. Quite the contrary.

Although... maybe you're a political "centrist"? That would explain a lot about your comments. Then I am sadly compelled to agree with you about what I think about you! I mean that means I'm an idiot myself for engaging with you. Sorry! Look around on the intertubes for what people who study this stuff think about US political "centrists".

Those "democrats" are not preventing a vote on the aid, which appears would pass with a large majority. The actual power here resides with the MAGAts, from the Speaker on down, directed by Trump.

I am not sure I can be charitable enough to think you really don't understand this. The reaching is extreme.

The MAGAts in the House from the Speaker on down are blocking all Ukrainian aid concretely, not rhetorically. That's literally pro-Putin, and it comes 100% at the direction of the leader of the MAGAts.

I think that as long as a) the effects of the measure were well communicated and b) there were no significant impediments to actually voting, then the percent that vote is immaterial and the result of the vote should stand for everyone.

After all this is the way the US conducts its elections. Many elections have very low turnout, yet the results are binding.

I used one for decades until I got a high end gas stove. A few months of perching it on the edge and I still cooked the handle. So I got another Italian gem, a Rancilio Silvia. Now people talk about the ritual of the Moka pot but with the Rancilio there's another attraction for the engineer/mechanical tinker types: the Rancilio is built to be maintainable and so once a year (after 15) I end up taking it apart and replacing something. It turns out a lot of people do this.

We moved from AZ to suburban Atlanta last year, and were familiar with interlibrary loan for rural libraries in AZ. But wow! PINES is sensational. We get books and DVDs, even some BluRays from all over GA. Been watching The Wire again, it's great.

And the inventory isn't censored either. I started a reread of Gravity's Rainbow and that came from Carrolton (college town). Certain gory/raunchy murder mystery series come from the oddest places. Series like Game of Thrones. And highbrow academic stuff like Anne Hollander.

Reminds me I got to log on and extend a couple of titles.

But yeah, we still buy dead tree books, occasionally, from Amazon, but only if we want to keep them. It turns out PINES is great for that, too. Just put it on hold, review it in person, and if it's actually good, buy it.

I just find it almost impossible to believe that you regularly buy vegetables or other bulk goods via checkout and have few or no problems.

How about that bar code label on the spinach/parsley/cilantro? It's paper and it gets watered regularly so it is not uncommon for it to be illegible, even to the expert parser, the human.

Those stickers do fall off.

Is every brussel sprout going to have a sticker? Jalapenos? Okra? Mushrooms? Cherry tomatoes? Now according to the industrial/minimize human costs imperative you buy a prepacked batch, and in that batch are stinkers hidden below the visible top layer. Onions have dry skins that occasionally shed... whoops there goes your sticker.

Let's talk about lentils. Obvs they're going to be batched "for you" now, and how big a batch do you need? How about 3 lbs, if we're following along with the Costco Walmart paradigm. I mean you're all happy with your 3 gals. of Walmart dill pickles for $3, yes? No more does the pantry maintain a steady less than a 1 lb inventory each of a dozen different legumes for you... well who does their own cooking these days, that's what door dash is for!

And now for that "oh just look it up on helpful screen!" Except for at least a half dozen times the screen, either via the picture section or the "type the name" option, does not have the item in its inventory. For instance Pasilla/Poblano and Anaheim/Cubano chiles (names not precise anywhere) are often not present in the system. In our stores there is a small section containing up to half a dozen specialty types of tomatoes. You know, the ones that potentially have flavor. Since these inventories change more rapidly than the straight industrial space ship foods, I know those are at risk of not being in the system. Contrast to at the checkout line the checker either knows the name or takes my word for it, and occasionally just asks me the price and we're good to go. At the automated checkout, I just pick something close as presented (but cheaper, oh yes) and I move on to the next indicated item. Maybe I enjoy the frisson of being an industrially nudged criminal... it's certainly novel.

All this said, for some reason where I live, in suburban Atlanta, the automated checkouts are quite a bit more popular than the human checkers, so there's typically a 10 deep line for the automation, and maybe 2 deep occasionally but usually less for the humans. That's a no brainer.

Haven't driven in the suburbs and beyond, I'm guessing. A lot of places a PU is more common than, um, a "car". Most quite a bit bigger than my Tundra, too.

"However, as someone who has been driving for 30 years, cars are better in every way now than they were before (From a driving, efficiency, reliability and safety perspective)."

Right. Sure. 2001 Tundra V8 owner here, and you're just flat out wrong.

Maybe you've had uniquely bad judgement in the vehicles you've acquired over the last 30 years. It happens.

That report is mainly about the upper Mississipi (Midwest) not the lower, or points east (Southeast).

And it is only supposed to run during large scale flood events, which the report cites as lasting ~80 days, worst case? Looking at flood event frequency, this report cites: 1912, 1913, 1927, 1937, 1965, 1973, 1982, 1993, and 2008.

So, let's be generous and double the event length to 160 days and double the event frequency to ~20 per century (increasing, to be sure). That's a time utilization of the infrastructure of ~9%, if Ima doing the math right.

It is apparently true: water runs uphill toward money. In this case, literally multiple miles of vertical elevation gain to get it to the Navajo Nation.

I mean I could see maybe pumping to Denver, or maybe over the continental divide past Denver, but... direct to almost the NM, AZ border?

Maybe just start with baby steps and for instance charge those good enterprising folk who farm alfalfa with nearly free water in the AZ desert and ship it to Saudi Arabia.

This is HN in 2024, and people are complaining about aspect ratios? For about 15 years now I have been feeding physical DVDs & BluRays into < $100 USB DVD/BR players, filtered through makemkv, and then through mpv or whatever which understands AC3 pass through to at first a NAD pre-amp and currently now that my NAD died, Denon receiver, which does the down mix to 3.0. Looks and sounds glorious, aspect ratios are not a problem at all, and a backup drops out, huh.

I loved greencine and physical netflix but those killed themselves, seppuku, it seemed like, a long time ago.

Does "the app" mean the site's app?

With a touch login on the phone and (say) google authenticator IMHO it's considerably less inconvenient to login into something online with the desktop than what Chase does to me. The phone is sitting right there anyway, and 6 digits to type in by hand is not that big a deal. I do it all the time.

Basically the phone is the 2FA generator.

> I solve that, by not doing banking with my phone.

Even though some scum corps like Chase make it a PITA to manage my account from a desktop through firefox, that's the only way I'm going to interact with them.

"Download the app!"

Hard no!

In fact these are the only apps I think that appear regularly on my phone, but only when I'm traveling: AirBnB, Uber/Lyft, and whatever airline I'm currently flying on next. I think if I'm crossing borders I've installed whatever gov spyware makes TSA/Global Entry easier. They're already groping me hard, why not.

LA Fitness gets to stay because it's dumb and silent. I don't see anything else not security related. On mobile I talk to the outside world with K-9, firefox, signal, whatsapp, sms. I'm happy.

Oh yes I am sorry; I didn't mean to imply that I thought that the DB was throwing an error. What the filing process email message body stated looked something like approximately "Form line xxx violates schema requirement such and such: <more gibberish>".

I was thinking when I scanned the message was that I bet I could reverse engineer the problem from this back end generated text but why not do what the instructions say and just feed it into the parser box? And every time the next email message gave me exactly the thing I needed to do. It was cool, for a weird sort of nerd.

So no, I was casting shade where the process was right in the sunlight: I made the mistake, and the business logic caught it, and told me correctly every time what I needed to do to fix it. I liked the whole process a lot.

Now our family unit is not cash starved and can afford to wait, so in the past, before I started using the US Free Filing system I described in another comment, I always mailed in both US and AZ income tax forms. Sometimes it took a couple of months. The US form I think was pretty prompt occasionally.

Now we're also not talking a lot of money. +- a couple of thousand, usually less. But you would have to compare apples to apples which would be the e-file fee vs. the compounded inflation rate for the time difference in receiving, presumably, your refund. I suspect it's a wash.

You need to also factor in the ${turbotax} fee and/or the accountant, as well, if you don't actually fill out the forms yourself.

Fun fact: We moved from AZ to GA last year, and dutifully filed in each state. I am pretty familiar with AZ due to filing our own taxes for most of 25 years, but GA is much more complex, verbose, and quite stupidly, even aggressively, vague.

I produced a spreadsheet for my wife to evaluate that presented my first time interpretation of the GA partial residency filing. We're both B.S. ChE, she's an MS ChE, I'm a MS App. Math. So we know our numbers. The tables were low risk, low refund, medium risk, medium refund, high risk, high refund. She chose medium risk. Fine with me.

Both AZ and GA refunded something like 50% higher than what I filed and expected.

Some sort of emoji here.

I've used the US Free File Federal Taxes for the last five years and it just wasn't a problem, and I have yet to see anything that looked like programmer incompetence.

Now, that said, the way you debug your submittal is to paste an entire page of error gibberish that looks like very low level database error output into an entry box they point you to. Sounds gross! Ewwwww! Well actually I've been debugging c++ templates since forever and hohum it doesn't bother me. However... every single time it decoded the problem and told me exactly what I needed to do. It has taken me 2-4 tries each year to get it debugged and then it sails right through. The final result I've fed into two different state forms and that has sailed right through too. All free, and not that much of my time.

Now if they can get the UI for normies painless, which I suspect is the main programming problem (I don't say that UI programming is trivial), this will take off like a rocket ship and the US can the join the coterie of civilized nations that do this for all their citizens.

The flip side of this point is for non-trivial distances the people in the ICE vehicles with 400+ mile ranges mostly invariant to speed only now begin to realize how amazingly convenient it is to only have to stop for < 10 minutes every 5-6 hours or so.

Do people who think the only use of a vehicle is the home-work-supplies circuit? Don't you ever take a weekend off and go out of town? You really want to deal with the whole rental car scenario when you're supposed to be off? Or, oh well, I'm just gonna commit to spending a good chunk of my time on this vacation sitting around twiddling my thumbs at a charging station. I got an acquaintance who drove a decaying Tesla with <200 mile range from Atlanta to NYC and back and then bragged to me "it wasn't that bad". Yeah, I was polite.

Lotsa magical thinking going on here. And I haven't even pointed out that in vast swathes of the country the rental car option isn't even remotely convenient.

So because she ignored both the beep and the reserve light turning on you spend quite a bit extra up front. More than once!

I'm willing to bet she isn't that dumb.

I will admit that I ran a car out of gas once in the last 40 years: driving to Flagstaff AZ in a Prius there aren't many gas stations and I ignored the reserve light and the beep because I thought I could make it. Nope! 5 miles short. Maybe the 3000' grade I had to climb just before had some influence. However... never again. OTOH, that Prius that ran out of gas traveled several thousand miles over the years at over 90mph across the West, getting ~40mpg which works out to ~400 mile range. That right there is the entire argument, done.

procomm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datastorm_Technologies

About 1986 or so. Worked perfectly.

Anybody can cook the recipes in "Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook" and "The Food of Sichuan". I would caution people unfamiliar with authentic Chinese food that these are not the flavors of 99% of US Chinese restaurants. To our palette they are vastly better. Sometimes shockingly so, as for example her General Tso's chicken. You cook that correctly you'll get nauseous thinking about American/Chinese General Tso's chicken.

What you will probably have a problem with is getting the more exotic ingredients. I could not find some things in Ranch 99 markets, and now that I live in the Atlanta area it's quite a bit harder. Fortunately quite a few items are available on Amazon.

Right. I've been eating tofu in the US all my adult life, since about 1983 or so. Everywhere I've lived (FL, GA, NC, AZ, CA) it's been available in standard grocery stores, generally with several varieties. Asian markets, as you note, have many varieties.

I have a number of vegetarian tofu recipes I like but... my favorite Ma Po tofu recipes (there are innumerable versions) have meat in them.

I really dislike how common, ancient foodstuffs get tilted into ideological pigeonholes. There's a galaxy of vegetarian Chinese dishes, of which tofu is just one component. I've started to learn about Asian pickles and oh dear how deep it goes. Just fantastic, and delicious!

Anyway it never occurred to me that people shy away from tofu because it's vegetarian; people cook with eg beans and vegetables, right? I always thought it was because hardly anyone cooks traditional Chinese dishes at home. I didn't do it much myself until I discovered Fuschia Dunlop.