sudobash1

> But they really can’t due to economic circumstances.

I don't think this can be the entire situation. Anecdotally, both my wife and I have grandparents who lived for extended periods of time with three kids in mini camper trailers because they couldn't get into any other housing. They really wanted children, and it was a high enough value for them that they sacrificed a lot to have them.

Additionally, economic prosperity and higher living standards are typically correlated with lower birth rates. People who technically can most afford children, are less likely to have them. This is the opposite of what I would expect if finances are what prevent people from having children.

Having children now, I cannot fathom living in a camper trailer with them, and I am not saying that people should be doing that. My point is that different people (across different economic situations and different time-periods) have varying priority levels around having children. And that is ultimately what determines how many children are born.

I don't get the impression that things have changed all that much in Catholic music publishing since this FEL Publications case. It sounds very familiar. There are still major music publishers that require parishes to destroy all books at the end of the year. Its the old story of "you don't have ownership, you have a license." This grift predates the "purchasing" digital videos on Prime and the like.

If anything there are even more requirements now. Churches must now purchase individual licenses for music sung in live-streamed liturgies or printed out in programs (through websites like www.onelicense.net).

Thankfully, liturgical music is a pretty old genre (the oldest still around), so there is a huge corpus of public-domain works.

The extension cord "alternate electricity system" as they call it seems particularly harrowing. You had better make sure that you know what the load rating is on each of those cords and what they are going to be supplying (or better yet, just don't do this). Unlike household wiring, there will be no breakers.

Personally, as someone who buys used cars, I always look for the simpler ones. I never consider anything luxury. From a practical standpoint, that just seems like many more features to go wrong on the used car.

> using these proprietary services on Linux or Raspberry Pi etc is not possibile

I can't speak to Raspberry Pi (and other non-x86 boards), but on my PC I can listen to Spotify just fine. I don't even have to use Chrome. It works as well on Firefox.

I think the point is that this is an artistic choice. I consider that paragraph to be halfway between poetry and prose. It's not the style of writing that you would want for most forms of communication, but if you think of it as being akin to a bit of poetry, then perhaps you will find it more acceptable.

I for one really appreciate seeing language being used so artistically. (Though if I was reading a technical spec, product description, legal contract, etc... absolutely not.)

The article mentions that spotted water hemlock is not particularly common, but unfortunately the same cannot be said for poison hemlock. It is a omnipresent weed around here (Pacific Northwest). And it remains poisonous for years after it dies, which makes disposal a problem. This also is a huge issue if it gets into a hay-field. I have heard that some people have tried to burn it, with very poor results.

Also, in this terrible plant family is Cow-Parsnip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_maximum. If touched, it causes your skin to be excessively sensitive to the sun. It is basically reverse-sunscreen.

I think that you should say "script" instead of "font". Font is for typesetting. Script is (often) for handwriting.

I can think of many reasons:

* Batteries are really expensive and have a limited life. If my batteries were wearing out, could I go to one of these swaps and hope for a fresher set?

* Different sized cars require different battery capacities (EV Ford F150 vs Nissan Leaf). Not a problem with charging cables, but a big issue with battery swapping.

* Battery swapping stations would be orders of magnitude more expensive than charging stations.

* This is not really useful for many (or maybe most) users. If you are driving around town or commuting, charging overnight at home should be good enough for most people. (The main hurdle here would be convincing landlords of the importance of charging).

* It is a lot easier to standardize on a charging port, than to standardize one a battery pack. A standardized battery pack would dictate how the car is structured.

* It would make innovation harder on battery packs. It could make it impractical to try a new battery chemistry or capacity, whereas these are fairly easy changes to make without changing the charging port.

I eventually found out about xdg-open, but I'm glad that I didn't know about it from the start. I learned to open things the more "normal" way (eg `soffice document.doc`).

When I got my first PC (a Linux Eee PC netbook), I remember opening an xterm and typing each letter of the alphabet, one at a time and hitting TAB-TAB to see all the commands that start with that letter. Not an efficient way to learn how to use bash, but it was exciting.

The biggest hurdle for me was figuring out "how do I open a file?" I could cd around and ls, but what if I wanted to open a .doc in openoffice? There was no "double-click" for the command line.

For the medieval period, it would have been other herbs. Hops are something of a later addition. I don't believe that they came into very widespread use until the reformation era.

On the west coast of America, I would much rather be living in a wood frame house when an earthquake hits. Depending on construction, the house may not survive, but I probably will. Cement, stone, or brick all seem much riskier to me in an earthquake zone.

These sorts of perverse incentives are sadly common in financial situations. You never want to spend less than your full budget lest your budget be reduced next year.

> The tire’s meteoric rise might have surprised nineteenth-century observers of the wheel.

To be somewhat pedantic, tires were in use for the nineteenth century and earlier. Tire generally refers to anything wrapped around a wheel making contact with the ground. Before pneumatic tires, there were iron tires. These were wrought iron rings placed around wooden wagon wheels.

Obviously the article is talking about pneumatic tires here, but I thought that I'd note that there are other, prior types.

I see lots of people with links to a home page in their user profiles (on HN, StackOverflow, GitHub, etc...) I may be in the minority here, but if I find someone particularly insightful or interesting I sometimes click through to see if they have a link.

There are some areas that have specific carve-outs to limit liability for inherently risky activities. For example agri-tourism in Oregon. If someone gets hurt or even killed on a hayride at a farm (eg), the farmer is not liable (with some exceptions). Hence when we go to a u-cut Christmas tree farm, they hand us and our kids saws, let us hop on a tractor trailer with them, and go chop a tree without signing anything.

https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_30.673

If you want to see more old-school playground structures, this link has plenty: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/dangerous-playgrounds-1900s...

As I kid, I would have loved to have played on all of these (and in a few parks got a chance to).

> litigious people

I think the blame lies even harder on insurance corporations. Medical bills are expensive, and insurance would love to externalize the blame (and costs) as much as possible.

Anecdotally I have heard from several mothers who have had serious depression and took the prescribed anti-depression pills (not this one). They all worked to remove suicidal impulses and some of the serious effects of depression, but reportedly they did so by dampening feelings altogether, removing much of the postpartum joy at the same time.

Well this is a postpartum pill so plenty of exercise may be out. Depending on how labor and birth went the mother may not be in any condition to exercise. Also I think most mothers already get more time with loved ones postpartum than other times.

Postpartum is typically a time of little sleep, rapidly changing hormones, and lots of lifestyle changes too. So postpartum depression is very common, and not something that is so trivial to solve.

> A still-tight labor market means companies can’t be grouchy when employees call in sick.

Depending on the state, I would say that it is laws that mean companies can't be grouchy when employees call in sick.

Yup. I've been on the receiving end of something like this in my small company. We were contracted with a large corp to develop a new control board for one of their products. As we were finishing up, the corporation decided that they wanted out of the market the product was for. So they spun-off that division into its own tiny company and immediately bankrupt it.

That was the first and only time we had to have our lawyer write a client. We got some of our pay from them, but certainly not all.

In hindsight we should have been worried when all of our contacts in that company were jumping ship.

I agree that the laws are over-reaching, but not to the extent that you suggest. The Wikipedia article that you cite notes that these laws take one of two forms:

> (1) contract-focused laws that condition the receipt of government contracts on an entity certifying that it is not boycotting and will not boycott Israel; and (2) investment-focused laws that mandate public investment funds to divest from entities involved in boycotts of Israel.

Neither of these are bans on "personal boycotts". They are penalizing corporations which boycott Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#cite_note-6

I was strongly reminded of the driving in Italy, except much slower (and more horses).

> ...displaying the names and faces of students allegedly affiliated with student groups that signed...

The article certainly makes it sound as though there is a definite possibility that the students who were doxxed did not actually sign anything. The accusation made by the doxxers is one that could lead to serious consequences, especially given the inflammatory nature of this.

> and two towers of New York City were hit by two large metal birds

I think that is simply the past tense (or "prophetic past" if you will). For it to be the prophetic perfect tense, it would be:

> and two towers of New York City are hit by two large metal birds

"are" instead of "were". The examples from the article are this way too. eg:

> my people are gone into captivity

Etymonline compiles the information on etymology and historical usage from printed books (eg the Oxford English Dictionary). That is what is being referred to here. They are not having humans tally up different words from books. That data is entirely from ngrams.

> on the backs of Amazon.

They were using the Amazon platform for what it was intended for, and Amazon made more millions off of them. It was supposed to be a mutually beneficial relationship.

This is the part I have been most curious about. How does the data get exfiltrated. Here is their link to explain the different levels of car connectivity.

https://privacy4cars.com/data-in-cars/p4cs-five-levels-of-ve...

According to that link, the majority of cars on the road are currently "level 1." Which can connect to phones, but cannot use them to "phone home". But that is of course changing with the cars sold today.