oceanghost

I was shocked to see a 2L bottle of Dr Pepper that cost $3. I'm not going to be drinking it anymore out of principle.

The really insulting thing about McDonald's is the service is bad and the food is worse than it ever was. The last time I went in So Cal, we waited 5 mins to order (there was no line-- just no attendant). Ordered, my daughter got the pancakes. 10 mins later when the order came up there were no straws, napkins, or syrup. My daughter asked me to get some syrup, another 5-min wait. She knocked over her drink (no straw, she's little and clumsy) and absolutely nobody that worked there noticed. I tried to clean it up with napkins, but it was clear it was just too much liquid for that to be effective.

I waited another 10 mins and told the guy at the counter what happened, I even said, "If you can get me a mop I'll clean it myself." He assured me that wouldn't be necessary.

I went back to my table, ate my sad mcmuffin-- which was dry and weird and the “cheese” doesn't melt anymore. And they forgot the hash brown which was now worth $4, apparently, but I wasn't going to wait again.

When I left, absolutely nobody had cleaned the floor and I was terrified someone would slip, but it wasn't my problem anymore.

Last time I will ever go to McDonalds. They ruined Chipotle too.

I have never heard of this with regards to PTSD, I will investigate. Thank you!

I hesitate to write this, but PTSD is a bit more complex than that.

In some cases there's damage to the hippocampus, which doesn't get better. I've had 40 years to make peace with the crappy accident I was in. But the things like an exaggerated startle reflex, an aversion to chaotic or unplanned sounds and other triggers remain. I always carry a pair of noise-cancelling headphones if I think I might need to be in a noisy environment.

I admit my memory on the subject is imperfect. :-)

I bought half a dozen of these from Radioshack they were more or less giving them away after the fall.

There were lots of library apps that sprung up where you could scan your DVDs barcodes, or CDs etc.

I can't remember what hair brained idea I had for it.

So the folks who own all the stocks want the government to bid up their assets?

Yup. Use one every day for Fusion360 and Blender.

Despite the rosey memories, it encoded the audio in ATRAC. I don't want a lossy audio format in my life.

I might be able to dig up pictures but they'd be of the iPhone 3G variety.

I've been to the Keck (back 15 years or so ago). It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience seeing that telescope which was in so many PBS specials (the astronomers comes to mind)… but I couldn't help but feel we took our lives in our hands.

As a Californian, I was not prepared for the bitter cold at that elevation. We drove up in an old suburban--the roads were treacherous. If the car had broken down, or we'd gotten delayed past sundown, we would have simply died up there.

I don't know if it is still there, but there was a gift shop at the base of the mountain that you were advised to stop at for 20-minutes to acclimate to the pressure.

When we got to the telescope, it was essentially self-serve. There were a couple of exhibits, and we were able to see the telescope itself, but there wasn't anyone up there as near as I could tell.

It doesn't surprise me that it’s closed.

I had a similar experience in the 5th grade. We had a creative writing assignment (write x many pages), and I wrote a short story about "space spiders" that spun giant webs between planets and moons to catch something. I can't recall.

The only thing more mundane and unimaginative than that two pages was my teacher, who accused me of plagiarizing it.

I don't speak Armenian, but I dated an Armenian woman once, and she told me they have words for familial relationships that we didn't really have concepts for in English.

I worked for a lab that did IR research 20 years ago, so I don't know if this is still the case. But at the time, the IR sensors were made with a rare mineral only available in a remote region of Russia.

At the time (late 90s) I bought (on behalf of my employer) a FLIR camera that had a 512x512 sensor for $70k. I remember the cheapest camera we could find was 15k, it had almost no optics and the sensor was noisy as all get out.

I have a thermal inspection workstation (FLIR) that cost about $2700 and has a 320x240 sensor.

So there really has been a cost reduction. It's just more linear than exponential. A few years back, I got a camera for a friend which had a 90x90 sensor, and I think it cost $165 if memory serves. When I worked at that lab, it was inconceivable that a normal person would ever own an IR camera. They were the exclusive domain of researchers, large corporations, and law enforcement. I have 5 or so.

Also, the average person doesn't understand the electromagnetic spectrum, or concepts like emissivity or reflection. They think they're seeing an accurate temperature from their device, not understanding that every material they measure has its own k value.

** BTW: I tried to research this mineral/element and could not find any documentation on it. If you happen to know its name, or if I'm completely off base and its not used anymore, I'd love to know about it.

Precisely.

I got a new land-line-number in the early 2000s. One day, I got a collection call for someone with a Mexican surname. I explained I had just gotten the number and I didn't know who that person was. So naturally, they called twice a day for months. I disconnected the line because I was basically paying $20/m for them to harass me. And here's the part I can't explain-- even after being disconnected, the phone would ring but only for the debt collector.

EDIT:

Another story. Solar Panels in the late early 2010s. The ex-wife's father died years ago, once or twice a week, someone would call her cell phone, ask for her dead father and then try to sell her solar panels. They would not stop. It escalated to calls 6 days a week.

I eventually got fed up and told them I'd be happy to come down there with a pistol if they kept calling. I know, not the best choice, but keep in mind this is after 6 months of daily harassment.

The guy on the other end of the phone flipped out, told me “I was committing a federal crime, and he was going to report me to the police and to expect them shortly.” Then, as an intimidation tactic, he read my full name and address-- except it was my dead FILs information.

I told him to go ahead and put his name on a police report so I knew his name.

The calls stopped for one month, and then started again.

It came from here... correct or incorrect.

https://byjus.com/jee/diamagnetic-materials/

A diamagnetic material.

"In simple terms, diamagnetic materials are substances that are usually repelled by a magnetic field. Electrons in an atom revolve around the nucleus, and thus possess orbital angular momentum. The resultant magnetic momentum in an atom of the diamagnetic material is zero."

Thank you, I will look into this.

I am just confronting this now. My daughter is 6, and I'm trying to teach her math and reading. She's excelling at reading. The thing about math is, I have to teach her math the way the standards specify. The problem is…

The common core math is just strange. I find it confusing, and I did a full tour at an engineering college.

Math is a “procedure”. That's why programs like MatLab/MathCad can solve equations-- they just have a set of rules that solve problems. Learning math is the process of internalizing these rules.

The common core stuff seems to be the opposite of this. I want to build with my daughter a set of skills (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, exponents etc, eventually moving on to trig, linear algebra and calc) she can build on. But common core hopelessly confuses even simple things like adition.

> So either you’re being an unreliable narrator or Grubhub in particular has gone off a cliff.

This is one of the dumbest comments I've ever read. You're taking a premise you have no evidence for (UBER and GH have good customer service) and using faulty logic (assuming there are only two possible explanations) to make a conclusion that fits your wrong world view (that my literal direct experience must be incorrect).

I have a story I'm fond of telling-- I ordered a pizza from GitHub for pickup. The restaurant was literally closed when I arrived. GitHub customer service instantly "resolved" the issue by ruling in their own favor (I even showed them pictures of the restaurant with chains on the door).

So, of course, I did a chargeback and never used Grubhub again.

Disney uses all this data to "optimize" the park-- for profitability. They're not interested in you, exactly. They've gamified the park, which is what sucks about it now. I was very blessed to have the means to live near Disneyland and be able to afford yearly passes for a decade. I've been to Disneyland at least a thousand times-- and if you think surveillance is a new idea there, you are mistaken.

True story-- I worked as a sysadmin for a number of years, and as such found it useful to carry a knife with me to open boxes-- as receiving equipment was a daily duty for me. My weapon of choice was a CRKT "snap lock" mini knife with a blade no larger than an inch. It was completely inoffensive, but it could open a package quite well and due to the design it was quite safe to keep in your pocket. They don't seem to make this knife anymore-- but be aware it was not the quite large "snap lock" knife CRKT still makes-- this guy about the size of a key.

So, I arrive at Disneyland like any other day. Park in the mega-structure and when I arrive at the security gate, a very respectful gentleman in touristy clothes says to me, "Excuse me sir, can you come over here for a moment?"

He pulls me aside-- he says, "The knife in your pocket. You can't bring that into the park."

I am floored. How could he possibly know about a knife I literally keep on my key ring that doesn't even look like a knife? This is the day I learned that Disney employs security staff to pretend to be park guests.

I said, "Yes, I do have a knife, but I think if I was allowed to show it to you, you might agree that it's not a weapon. If you disagree, then I'll give it to you, so it doesn't enter the park, but don't throw it away because it's a great knife, so consider it a gift."

To his credit, I showed him the knife-- and he said something to the effect of, "That's fine. Have a great day at the park."

To me, this was security done correctly. The guy identified a possible problem (my knife), and was allowed to exercise his own judgement about the situation.

I worked for a university here in So Cal. Our lab fell on hard times and we were scrapping equipment. We had a Crimson series (if memory serves) server that had originally cost like 40k. My boss was screaming at me to sell it for something (think early 2000s).

I had to explain to him that we could pay to have it recycled for $85.

So, I'm 42 at the time this took place. I had just gotten a divorce... I met a nice, 24 year old, and we began dating.

She was a great person, but very much a SJW. She had no compunction about making outrageous demands about my personal speech patterns.

Two incidents that stuck out:

I have a cousin who has FAS or is autistic, or both. He texts me 20x a day at least, and I happened to mention it and say my cousin was "retarded". She lit me up saying I should know better than to use that word-- and I explained to her that was the clinical term for people such as him. Was not meant as an insult.

Another time, I made a joke by answering a question she had in a pseudo-gay accent-- a lateral-lisp. She lit me up again for making fun of gay people-- which I was not doing at all. And I explained to her that I went to speech therapy for YEARS to get rid of that exact lisp and it was something that I owned because I was born with it, as opposed to folks who adopted it to indicate group membership.

We didn't last long as a couple :-)

This is my favorite book. I have a signed first edition.

I'm super happy to see someone else appreciates it :-)

I ask for a truth table for AND or OR. You won't believe how many programmers can't answer this question.

What about food is not "qualitative"? :-) Where on the spectrum are you?

She's got someone doing good PR for her. I've been a subscriber for years and never seen her on HN except for the last few months.

I'm probably an order of magnitude less intelligent than her, but her arguments seem extremely reasonable to me. She seem to me to be a bridge from the PBS, pop-science mentality to more serious considerations.

Also, she's a fox. :-)

There's this concept in economics that regulations last about as long as human memory-- that we create a law to stabilize a problem we saw, then the memory of why we did that is lost, and someone comes in and says "this has always been fine, lets deregulate it."

In the case of crypto, we experienced 500 years of economics lessons in a decade.

I had a very similar experience while EXTREMELY high. The realization came as follows:

"I" am a story I'm telling myself about about a conversation between different drives in my head, and I am free to dis-invite those drives from the conversation, or create new ones.

Yep. I was once advised by HR to "try not to offend anyone." I asked the HR woman, "How do I know what offends any particular person?"

She looked genuinely stumped.