nabbed

  “US business continues to boom,” S&P Global Market Intelligence chief business
  economist Chris Williamson said in a statement. “To put the growth surge in
  context, barring the spike in demand following the opening up of the economy
  after the COVID-19 lockdowns, the latest improvement in business activity
  is the greatest recorded since early 2015. Business is clearly booming now in
  both manufacturing and services.”

Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.

Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?

Imagine, say, Framingham Massachusetts contracting the FBI for their local police services.

I imagine that could be a big problem if the national police force suddenly had a corruption problem: many cities would also suddenly have a police corruption problem. As far as I know, that's not currently the case, although somebody might correct me.

Some BC cities, like Vancouver and Surrey, have their own police forces (Surrey is actually in the middle of phasing out RCMP usage in favour of their own police force).

Edit: Interestingly, Ed Bishop and Michael Billington both died within five days of each other in 2005, despite Billington being quite a bit younger.

I get lots of stuff intended for other people (including a mildly famous person with my name whose actual email address is last.first@gmail.com).

A few years ago, someone set up a shopify account with my email address. Overnight while I slept, the shopify account was created, did some bad stuff, and got suspended for fraudulent activity. The whole story was told through the series of emails coming in over a couple of hours. Shopify did not required the fraudster to confirm the email address to activate the account.

When I asked shopify to unlink my email address from this fraudster account, they instructed me to click on the "forgot my password" link on their login page, click on the "change password" link in the resulting email, and then login and remove my email from the account. This was my only option, they claimed. Obviously, I was never going to connect my IP address with some fraudster's Shopify account, so I just left it as-is.

I guess services feel it adds too much "friction" to force a user to verify the specified email account before allowing them to use the service.

'the Pentagon said that the document, titled “Clinical Guidance for Health and Human Performance Optimization,” had been temporarily rescinded on September 3 to allow for updates.'

"The counter-trade is Taiwan. Beijing has wanted a public American recalibration on Taiwan for two decades. "

I guess this went over my head.

Unlike the author, I kept the ad in a box for 35 years, at which point I scanned it and threw out the hard copy.

Edit: Also, the resume I mailed to them was printed by a print shop.

About 15 years ago, I decided to know as little as possible about the musicians/artists/writers whose work I was consuming, because I didn't want my enjoyment of their work to be influenced or spoiled by what I knew about them (even superficial things, e.g., how they looked).

I remember mentioning that to a co-worker, when discussing a band I had just learned about and enjoyed, and he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person. I figured if the person was bad enough, the information would get to me somehow.

I never received the formal job offer. I called after a month and was told not to worry, it was still happening. I think I called again after 3 months, but stopped thinking about it after that.

Eventually I went to work for an internet company (which also delayed the formal job offer for several months. Deja Vu! But only because the background checking firm was having trouble completing the background check).

This was in the mid-aughts.

Oh, I'd love to know why this is a thing.

I did work for a mutual fund company for 18 months, one of those companies where the title Vice President simply meant nothing more than "employee" (although it was fun showing my business card to my friends and family, who were impressed by the title even though it had no meaning), but I didn't notice anything special about employee retention, probably because I was in a tech team.

At that time, I was on an opioid pain killer for an abscess. The next time I was on an opioid pain killer, years later, I also had an afib episode. So I wonder if maybe I have some sensitivity to opioids.

One the other hand, I find that dark chocolate has more negative heart effects: I associate dark chocolate, maybe unfairly, with premature beats (several 1000s per day). For that reason, I've avoided dark chocolate, which I love, for almost 25 years.

Also, is one watching "The Real Housewives of <place name>" on Bravo or an author interview on CSPAN.

There's more variety of content on youtube, whereas I think TV sometimes caters to lowest common denominator (although that's less the case in the era of streaming: TV is much higher quality than it was when this study started in 1987).

On youtube, you could watch lots of silly dancing videos, car crashes, etc., possibly rotting your brain. Or you could watch history lectures, book reviews, documentaries, etc.

I've seen lot of bizarre, hard to understand or weirdly formulaic writing pre-2023, so I guess that's why I don't assume anything is AI generated.

[1] BTW, I am not.

Just to drive that home, "Study participants also did not undergo a baseline MRI", which of course could mean that they already had some of these brain changes, which may have driven more TV watching.

>Sedentary activity is correlated with slightly faster degradation of multiple brain measures.

It seems to matter what you do while you're being sedentary, at least according to this study. From the article: "Strikingly, the sedentary element of TV watching didn’t appear to be the main driver for these changes."

Maybe the cookie banner was the CAPTCHA in question ;).

The article seems to change its title from time to time. The above is the title I saw when I last checked the actual link (the archived version has a different title).

A few interesting tidbits:

"Imagine that, in 2076, you’re walking through a residential neighborhood in La Mirada, California, a midcentury, southeastern suburb of Los Angeles, one of the regions at the epicenter of today’s housing crisis. [...] Some bigger houses have been subdivided into two homes. Other lots now hold triplexes, fourplexes, and small apartment buildings that sit comfortably among single-family homes. [...] the hard wall between home and commerce — which is near-universally mandated by local zoning codes today — has softened. Near the neighborhood’s edge, where local streets meet a larger main road, a neighborhood grocery and clinic have opened on what used to be strictly residential lots. And, yes: That is a donut shop running out of a neighbor’s garage. [...] more of the rituals of daily life mixed in, the suburb has gained a richer, more connected public sphere. There are simply more people around — walking, talking, and lingering."

Living in a place where you can just walk for 10 minutes to get to a coffee shop or grocery store, but still have the option to drive, is a joy. Unfortunately, there seems to be a QAnon-style of conspiracy theorists who protest the idea (I've even seen small groups of such protesters on a stroad where I currently live in Canada, even though I've heard no plans to make our stroad-heavy area the least bit walkable).

Also:

"“You have to ensure that every neighborhood is connected to another,” Alain Bertaud, former principal urban planner at the World Bank, told me. “The market does not provide that. The job of the planner is to get involved much less in what is private, and much more in what is public.”"

That sounds great to me. I don't really love the new "carved-out gated community" style of building that seems to be all the rage in Nevada (for example) these days, where you might have to drive for 10 minutes and go through two gates just to get to a house that borders on your backyard (but exists in a different gates community).

I commented back, maybe with a little too much confidence, that if their input file changes daily, then their program changes daily. That is, from one day to the next, it may take different paths (or a different combination of paths) through the code's logic. In that way, I claimed, her program was like a language interpreter, and her input files were like programs.

She didn't seem completely convinced, but apparently they got the job running again because there was no follow up on that particular issue.

I started by looking at well written tickets (to-the-point descriptions, minimal reproduction examples), but that method got me no work: some expert on the project would have a pull request for that kind of ticket in just a few hours, whereas I would need at least a week to figure out the root cause and another few days to craft a fix and a test.

So I started looking at ignored tickets, i.e., tickets that had been sitting around for weeks or months with no activity. Those often turned out to be very poorly written tickets with either very little information, or a huge wall of text with much business domain-specific info. If those tickets contained repro examples at all, they were often complex and very long, using external libraries I never heard of, and devoid of table schemas and example data. Sometimes I could get the author to provide more information, sometimes the author would not respond. I might have to infer schemas and make up my own data, try different things based on a stack trace, install libraries I would have preferred to not install, etc. I would work on trying to reproduce the problem for a few days, and at least a few times I struck gold. Then I would work on a self-contained, minimal reproduction case, followed by a week of sussing out the root cause. It was pretty time-consuming, but I was able to get a few fixes merged using that method, such that I was no longer a total stranger on the project (which helped me get other things merged into the code base).