volkl48

Mississippi currently takes the right to vote away from 10.6% of it's voting age population (worst in the country), and 16% of it's black population (3rd worst in the country), due to past felony convictions. And there are many ways to earn yourself a felony in MS, often for things that wouldn't be elsewhere.

National averages are 2.3% and 6.3%.

https://mississippitoday.org/2020/10/19/study-11-of-all-miss...

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While there are both legal and legislative attempts to change it, as of now:

Mississippi currently has no provisions for re-enfranchising those with a past felony conviction, other than by a direct act of the legislature or governor for that specific individual (which is very rare).

Steal $1,001 of stuff when you're 18 and you'll likely never get to vote again in your life even if you never have another encounter with the wrong side of the law.

They normally use a couple million gallons of water a day. That they didn't notice <1% of it leaking out improperly instead of going through whatever their normal treatment/disposal processes are, seems plausible.

This has some more details: https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/samsung-facility-aus...

Willful ignorance is certainly always a possibility, but I don't find it to be implausible that it was unknown.

Ah, but you should, as MA has increased infrastructure spending (at least in this area) and started to see results for it.

MA bridge condition improved over the past decade fairly significantly, about $3bn was spent on the Accelerated Bridge Program that was authorized in 2008 and concluded around ~2017. You can look at the more details and the results here: https://www.mass.gov/service-details/accelerated-bridge-prog...

Last year's transportation bill (which passed) cues up various additional infrastructure investment, including another $1.25bn for state bridge work (+$70m for small local bridges), and is projected to reduce the % of bridges in poor condition further over the next couple of years.

There are some nice slides here about where things are projected to go over the next few years thanks to that (11 + 14 in particular). Generally speaking, you can expect to see continued improvement in roadway infrastructure in the state. https://files.engineers.org/file/ACECMA-2021-Highway.pdf

And that was all before the federal infrastructure bill.

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I am less familiar with PA, but AFAIK they hiked their gas tax significantly to raise infrastructure spending a few years back. Whether it was enough or not I don't know. However, as MA illustrates, it takes a while of making sustained investments to start to see noticeable results and dig yourself out of long-term infrastructure investment deficits.

Depends, what level of accuracy are you demanding?

If the answer is 100%, then yes, all user-generated content on the internet will have to be banned unless subject to manual human review before allowing the post to be seen, and even that is probably not perfect.

I collect live recordings, so there's a bunch of less common stuff I use a good bit: Date performed, handle of who recorded it, tour, a personal rating system for the recording quality, additional artists (special guests + the like), and general comments I might want attached to the file. ("clips at 0:40" or "heckler in the quiet part"). I may have 20 copies of the same song, and I may even have multiple recordings of the same song on the same night from different people.

At least for some artists, there's a huge number of show recordings out there. The guy who maintains the (unofficial, although known and tolerated by the artist) live archive for Nine Inch Nails is up to >1,000 recordings, for example.

Based on the data cited by the article, it looks like streaming services are now drawing in a wider age range of listeners than in the past. http://www.insideradio.com/free/mrc-data-top-hits-have-less-...

While it's certainly not true of every older person, many of the older people I know do not seek out new music at all. Previously, many of them were basically no longer in the "music market" aside from tours and some terrestrial radio in the car. They owned all the albums they liked and they listened to them, and that was that.

All of which is to say that I'm not sure that young people are listening to drastically less new music than before.

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The decline of the Grammys largely mirrors the decline of awards shows for other media. I'm not sure it's a proxy for how much less interested in new music people are, rather than a lack of interest in the industry anointing meaningless winners to itself in an age where there's plenty of people who's opinions that are more relevant to me that I can look at.

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Some other critique:

- Half the article is about streaming (a new service/technology/business model), then we're complaining about not enough new technology/R&D....

- Vinyl is having a resurgence as a physical format because physical formats are completely unnecessary now to listen to music, so the most tactile, interesting one is surviving. It's arguably the exact opposite of stagnation, given that the image and market for it has completely changed.

- I don't agree that record stores are particularly caught up in the same time warp. Extremely limited vinyl pressing capacity that hasn't kept up with demand is the primary issue limiting new vinyl releases and crowding out smaller acts, not a lack of willingness to stock newer artists on shelves. They're selling every record they can get produced, to be blunt. Additionally, the Apollo Masters fire in 2020 caused major and ongoing disruption to vinyl record production.

- Extremely few people care about musical holograms, these are certainly not any significant % of the market or doing anything for "making it harder for young, living artists to compete in the marketplace".

Maybe you have a different point in mind, but I am skeptical that there are any consumers of alcohol that are not aware that it is partially a depressant. This is both obvious to any consumer of it, and taught in every school that does any sort of substance (ab)use education.

Just to note, while I'm sure the relationship may still be strained - it's a different situation to any other one I can think of.

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The railroads are a special case as they are legally authorized to have their own police forces, and do. While they're privately employed, they have the same powers as a typical cop (or more).

They can get warrants, run investigations, and can make arrests anywhere in CA if the case involves the railroad.

They are not semi-powerless private security. They do not need "a real cop" to make an arrest or do the police work. (although they certainly do typically work with local authorities).

I've flown quite a bit in the past year - while there's been more cancellations than pre-pandemic, the last few weeks are outliers.

"Capitalism" can't produce new staff instantly at any price when staff are in industries that require substantial training/testing prior to being allowed to work after hiring (or after any long furlough/hiatus of not working, even if they remained officially employed).

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Anyway, you've got a perfect storm of issues.

Airlines have depleted crews from cutting too deeply in the early pandemic. Training/retraining large numbers of people takes lots of time, only so many people are actually qualified to teach or test them.

Airlines were already running what staff they have with as minimal spare capacity as they could get away with to meet demand that's come roaring back far faster than expected, especially for the holiday season. The US is currently running ~83% of 2019 passenger loads (12/20-1/4 passenger count in 2019/20 - 36.6m, 2021/22 - 30.7m), per the TSA checkpoint numbers.

And then....you have a new COVID wave that's leading to substantial portions of the workforce coming down with it and being unable to work for at least a week during their absolute highest load period.

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Are the airlines entirely "not at fault"? No. They cut too deeply in the early pandemic. And they've been too greedy chasing $$$ for renewed demand and added too many flights too quickly, cutting their spare capacity for issues that could crop up to nothing...and now they have.

But the severity of this COVID wave is significantly worse (in terms of # of people infected at once, not referring to illness severity) and pretty much every area of the workforce (that's actually in-person) is having similar issues. Many public schools in the US are basically just functioning as babysitters this week if they're open because they have too many teachers and students out to actually run classes normally.

While I totally agree about not collecting as an investment, "because you really enjoy the objects as a person who likes this stuff" is probably not actually a terrible metric for future desirability of an item in a niche area of collecting. Other fans/collectors likely feel the same. Of course, it doesn't tell you if that niche will die out and no one will want anything, although I suspect rare books are less at risk of that.

As a collector of memorabilia for a band that's been around a while: The items I was drawn to, either because I just loved the look or because they were from a show/tour/album I particularly found special, have often turned out to be the ones that have appreciated much more in value than the average thing of that level of rarity for the band.

Possibly of interest to some - NYC actually has an official live map in beta. https://map.mta.info/

I don't like some of the UI decisions with where it's currently at, primarily not showing the trains and their directions very prominently (the trains are there if you zoom in, but they're just unlabeled rectangles moving on the lines), but it's a start.

It does do a pretty decent job at showing what services are actually operating right now and what stops they're serving, though.

The overall dryness is not normal, but Denver/Boulder does not generally have snow on the ground consistently in winter. (Up in the mountains is obviously a different story).

The joke in Denver is sometimes that the city's snow plowing plan for the sidestreets appears to be "wait for it to melt" ....which works most of the time. Even in January the average day is over 45F, which combined with the sunny climate often makes short work of snow.

As a similar person - I've got a couple TB in Backblaze B2, encrypted on my end before upload.

The /r/datahoarder subreddit and it's wiki is a decent starting place for figuring out backup options.

Where you live, perhaps. Not every state functions that way.

My state (NH) has no early voting, and absentee/mail-in voting is only allowed for a few specific reasons. (in 2020, COVID was an acceptable reason, but it is not expected to be in future elections).

Looking at the actual manual + FAQ for the thing, and the company's comments at the bottom of the article:

- You need to turn it on when you're going to go ride.

- When you do that (in brief summary): You get a green LED if you're good to go, a red one if you're not, and if it's dead you get no LED, obviously.

- If you're in the no subscription state or it's otherwise not connecting to the app, you get two LEDs flashing red when you go to turn it on. You've got a 30 day grace period on the subscription expiration and it won't cut out out mid-ride even if that's when it hits the 30 day mark, just the next time you go to ride it'll give you the error instead of green.

- There's a battery light that comes on with 30% of battery left, which looks to be about 7 hours.

I would say that "when I hit the power button to go ride, I get a green LED if it's working as intended" is about as foolproof as is reasonably possible.

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I'm not a huge fan of the subscriptions for everything model, but IMO their policies are about as safe and reasonable as you could get for the product.

Vest (FAQ at bottom): https://www.klim.com/Ai-1-Airbag-Vest-3046-000

Manual for the inflator/controller(?): https://www.inemotion.com/en/support/user-manual-inbox/

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I'm also not a lawyer, but I'm not sure "I picked up a safety device I don't know how to use, didn't read the directions on how to use it, used it wrong, and it didn't protect me" is really the legal standard.

At risk of stating the obvious: There's a pretty much infinite number of ways you could improperly use any safety device and have them not work as intended, plenty of which "reasonable" people could think to do.

They didn't conduct a study on subjects, it's a literature review.

The author's repeatedly demonstrated inability to discern valid information from not makes them fundamentally incapable of conducting such a review. Whether that's out of malice or incompetence, the result is the same.

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They've repeatedly promoted debunked information and fraudulent studies on their Twitter, and a quick skim of the sources for this paper indicates that they've cited such "studies" in this paper.

For example, the "Dr. Mercola" previously exposed as a fraud is...cited here, citation #84. And what a shock, his "study" was also published in this same journal and remains unretracted by it.

Two "independent researchers" with zero academic affiliations, neither of which seems to have any other recent publications, publishing in a poorly regarded journal with questionable standards don't exactly inspire a great deal of confidence in their results.

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In addition I see one of the authors's Twitter promoting other discredited research and retracted/removed papers over the past year, such as the now infamous "Dr. Mercola".

https://mobile.twitter.com/bernd_glauner/status/127549493530...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/technology/joseph-mercola...

I don't see any reason to think this author is capable of actually conducting a review of this topic, given that they are clearly easily misled by misinformation on the topic (to be charitable).

I'll point out that:

- LA is already building various large expansions of public transit, as well as walking/biking infrastructure.

- Generally the shops basically come along with the housing. "Activating" the ground floor - putting retail or other public uses into the ground floor of buildings that are residential above is standard practice when building those taller residential buildings along main arteries, on busy corners, and so on.

Not really the same tier of seriousness.

While they've always sold dimmer switches at the store for the average homeowner, they're better "known" for commercial installations. Think the lighting controls and software to manage the lighting for an entire office building, corporate campus, museum, etc. The expectation in terms of reliability and scalability is a bit different.

Apple has always had a self-servicing program for medium-sized and up clients. They don't need this program at all for that and it's not how any Fortune 500 will be doing their servicing.

https://support.apple.com/self-servicing-account-program

That's not new and the requirements for participation haven't changed. Minimums are 1,000 Apple devices in the org and 25 repairs per year minimum, only service equipment your organization owns, and a line of credit to pay. Next day shipping of parts (subject to availability).

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To the extent that this new program fills a gap, it's for small organizations that want to do in-house repairs for their stuff, or at least have the option of doing it (and doing it with legitimate parts).

It's the cheap stuff that you normally find in the bathroom at an average office building, fast food place, etc.

With the world shutting down the companies that supply those kinds of places had a warehouse full of inventory and most of their usual customers either were entirely shut or going through a lot less product.

I'll wager your grocery store called one of them up and got a few pallets to resell, creative move on their part.

ESS recently went public and has some good sized deals for their iron-flow batteries. If they're what's claimed, they ought to be a pretty scalable technology without too many materials bottlenecks.

This is pretty much a press release, but a bit of a summary: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ess-sb-energy-softbank-reac...

That said, it's entirely out of my realm of expertise for vetting how good their tech or plans are.

Are we talking about Intel's plans for a standalone GPU?

Intel hadn't shipped a dedicated GPU in >20 years (until the low-end DG1 last year) and their integrated graphics were anemic at best for most of that time period.

"2-4 years behind Nvidia" would be pretty impressive of a leap to have been aiming for in some meeting a few years ago.

I don't expect to be purchasing their DG2/"Arc Alchemist" when it launches in a few months, but if it's remotely competitive with mid-range current generation cards (as has been rumored/claimed), that'll be pretty impressive to my mind, to basically enter a completely new market segment for them and have a product that's even worth discussing.

For a bit of context:

This happens to be in the same vicinity as the most popular ski resort in the state, and a number of other popular outdoor attractions.

It's not quite your average rural economy that's desperate for any sort of new business/jobs/investment.

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A mine has to be weighed against the risk it represents to their existing economy - both in actual impacts of environmental disasters, and reputational if there's any negative stories coming out about it.

Tourists don't want to go have their destination wedding in the town that's in the news regularly because of X or Y pollution, even if they can't see it and it's not a risk to them on their visit.

The port is a government operation already, so that doesn't seem like much of an argument.

While I have no particular expertise as to where the bottlenecks lie, I don't think capitalism has any special solution to a limited pool of existing skilled labor, a large increase in demand, and a long lead time to train new skilled labor.

And at least some of the bottleneck occupations in question are regulated (and for good reason) about how long they can work, removing one of the most obvious ways to immediately get "new" labor - pay the existing labor whatever it takes to get them to agree to work more hours.

Not exactly the detailed reporting you are looking for, but:

People normally spend a lot of their disposable income on travel/bars/dining/concerts/experiences/other similar categories that don't involve a lot of imported goods per dollar spent. Last year they shifted a lot of that spending to stuff, and when much of the population does that.....that buys a lot of stuff.

Anecdotally, among most people I know, that balance of how they spend their disposable income still hasn't returned to it's pre-pandemic state.

Discord does not require a phone number, just verifying an email address.

The end of the one-child policy brought just about zero improvement in birthrates or the demographic trajectory of the country.

I would not be very confident that any of what you are talking about is going to fix China's massive demographic problems, and such policies have generally had limited success elsewhere.

Additionally, with the new entrants to the workforce in 15-20 years already having been born, even if improvement was seen, you're talking many decades before you're going to have that said improvement in births be sufficient to stop the workforce from shrinking, dependency ratios getting worse, etc.

China loosened it's policies about 20 years too late.

Depending on what you define "Blackberry like" as, the F(x)tec Pro 1 is that. Physical keyboard (slider style, though) and officially supported for LineageOS.

There's in excess of 100,000 public off-street parking spaces in Manhattan below 60th St (as of 2009 - Manhattan Core Parking Study). Plus street parking.