newport
1mo ago
NY presumably has some law on the books like the Migratory Bird Treaty (which bans keeping owls hawks geese etc as pets in addition to hunting them) but for other wild animals. I believe lots of states have laws like that even if they're rarely enforced. Somebody either had a Karen moment or otherwise was trying to troll him and reported him, and whatever office is in charge of enforcing that law said "finally we have an excuse to exercise our authority!"
newport
1mo ago
Already priced in. This "gaffe" is so benign compared to everything else going on that it doesn't rise above the level of background noise.
I predict it will sway zero (0) votes.
newport
1mo ago
I wonder what the reasons are for the LA times owner saying don't endorse Kamala
The rumors I saw when this dropped were that the owner has some kind of family connection to Palestine, but I don't know whether those rumors have since been substantiated.
newport
1mo ago
Never mind 2G. The Nokia 2720 Flip that I bought a while back advertises 4G and Wi-Fi, but when I tried a T-Mobile SIM in it recently, I got a message saying that "this phone is only partially compatible with our advanced network"; and I wasn't able to make a call or send a message when I tried.
Band compatibility issue. It looks like they only made an EU version and a MENA/Asia version, and the band support on both models has close to zero overlap with the frequencies used in the US. This is a little surprising, because these days (afaik) it's pretty cheap and easy from a hardware standpoint to include as many bands as you want on a phone (at least for 4G/LTE; 5G is a bit of a different story). I guess they didn't anticipate any US sales.
Bands 5 and 41, the latter only present on the MENA/Asia model, are the only supported ones used in the US. T-Mobile US does not have any band 5 licenses as far as I know. You could get away with using it on AT&T or Verizon, but you'd have to determine which one of them owns the band 5 licenses in your area (confusingly this can be both AT&T and Verizon, one of the two, or neither of them) and it would not work nationwide. T-Mobile does have band 41 licenses (almost) nationwide, but they're in the process of repurposing that spectrum for 5G (and it was never meant to be used for full-coverage voice even when originally deployed as LTE).
If your only concern is voice and text, the bands you want for USA 4G/LTE compatibility are 2, 4, 5, 12, 13 (Verizon-only), and 71 (T-Mobile-only).
newport
2mo ago
It was annoyingly difficult to track down the exact terms.
https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904#technology
It looks like spacex bid specifically for the 100/20 tier, and that this is indeed a hard cutoff. It's unfortunate that there's no partial credit, and the inherent stability advantage of wireline over wireless means the former is more likely to maintain advertised speeds over time.
newport
2mo ago
We've had multiple simultaneous elections. E.g. municipal elections, provincial elections, water board elections, district committee elections, the EU parliament elections, and referendums back when we still had them.
If only it were that simple
See the 181(!) ballot styles for Wake County NC (home of the state capital, Raleigh, and one of the state's 100 counties) starting on page 11. Your ballot depends on exactly which districts you live in for various things, which usually don't line up. These ballots this year are actually on the small side IME; it's usually 3-4 pages rather than 2.
newport
2mo ago
I have sampled a lot of them and I generally agree. The walmart sam's choice brand ones were mostly edible, the great value brand ones less so. Unfortunately I think they discontinued the former. Red baron is okay if you're already tipsy when you start eating it, which has usually been the case when I've had it. Digiorno was forgettable and not worth the expense over the cheaper ones. Some of the expensive ones can be pretty solid, but at that point you aren't really saving money over getting takeout and they only make sense as something to bring to a remote and isolated vacation rental or something like that.
The last one I had that I actually kinda liked was one of the latter, a $12(!) california pizza kitchen-branded frozen pepperoni and honey thing. Tasted pretty good but absolutely not worth $12 when I could pick up a substantially larger hot and freshly made one from $mid_tier_national_chain or a similarly sized hot and freshly made one from $local_good_pizzeria for the same price.
newport
2mo ago
I was waiting for someone to bring up the fact that, outside of Buncombe and Watauga* counties, the affected areas are deep red, very very white, and very very poor.
*it's only blue because of the university located there, which is also the main economic driver in the county
newport
2mo ago
In the case of Helene, it got all the way into parts of western North Carolina that haven't had flooding of this magnitude since 1916 and absolutely do not routinely experience this type of disaster. I believe they have a lot more experience with snowstorms.
If we were talking about the eastern half of the state this would be very different.
newport
2mo ago
Depending on local policy (and the mood of the cop) you might get forced to show up in court over that. At least I know that's theoretically supposed to happen where I live (but probably rarely gets applied unless you're violating some other law simultaneously since it's a huge waste of time both for you and for the government).
newport
2mo ago
Modafinil and armodafinil are both scheduled, but enforcement is practically nonexistant for quantities below a kilogram. See gwern's modafinil explainer for details.
If I were buying I'd stick to unscheduled adrafinil to be on the safe side but risk is probably minimal either way. Absolute worst case scenario you get a letter from customs telling you to stop importing unapproved drugs.
newport
3mo ago
Also, who can't eat in front of people?
A surprisingly large proportion of women in my experience. Not a ton of them, but enough for me to categorize it as A Thing.
newport
3mo ago
I increasingly suspect that google's image search is artificially handicapped less for political reasons and more for copyright lobby reasons. Reverse image search barely works as originally conceived and the ability to find alternative crops and resolutions for an image you already have is long gone. I don't have much of a reason to believe this other than the fact that these two features seem like they'd attract a lot of ire from stock photo publishers and media publishers in general, and these two features are also the most conspicuously broken/absent.
Yandex notably still has perfectly functional versions of both features.
newport
3mo ago
I haven't seen one myself, but my parents actually did a month or two ago while walking their dog at night. They hate elon for all the same reasons reddit hates him these days (and mumbled something about space junk), but they still thought it was a neat sight.
newport
3mo ago
I think this line of argument gets into the issue that a lot of people driving cars in cities (probably the vast majority) do so because they are employed in the city yet live in the suburbs dozens of miles away. Which is kind of an intractable problem unless capping the density of commercial real estate (or ratio of commercial to residential) is on the table.
newport
3mo ago
My wife really wants to make one with inane or insane things on it
newport
3mo ago
Paradoxically, nicotine products designed for quitting nicotine are often significantly more expensive than regular nicotine products unless your insurance or employer or whoever is subsidizing them. I assume this has to do with FDA approval overhead.
newport
4mo ago
"Section 174"
newport
4mo ago
That's the only one that I've actually heard of an irl woman in my irl social circles actively using and reading routinely, but there are presumably others. Makeup subs and subs for certain varieties of reality TV are probably also big ones.
And then based on what's been happening over at rdrama lately, the redscarepod subs are at least somewhat comprised of women (female).
newport
4mo ago
A cursory Google search suggests that 15 to 20 percent is the standard range
That's the commonly held definition by most people, but there has been a noticeable push towards making 20% the new standard. 20% is usually the default suggested amount on POS systems when I use them, and in some cases it's the lowest option displayed aside from "no tip". This is probably favored by both tipped staff and management, because it leads to larger tips and it reduces pressure for management to raise wages.
This is dumb for all kinds of reasons, chiefly that percentage-based tips are inherently indexed to inflation. And "muh inflation" is the most commonly employed defense of this movement by advocates.
I remember when a flat 15% was standard and 20% was reserved for exceptional service. It wasn't even that long ago. Bah humbug.
newport
4mo ago
People who made $10 an hour pre-COVID now make $25
This is a nitpick but it was more like going from $8 to $13 outside of HCOL areas and/or areas with obscenely high minimum wages. I don't think this has much bearing on your point however, given how these things scale.
newport
4mo ago
The big obvious one is boosting or restricting federal funding for related (or unrelated for that matter) stuff, which is how they went about sidestepping the 21st amendment and forcing every individual state to raise their minimum alcohol purchase age to 21.
In that case they withheld federal highway improvement funding on the order of dozens of millions of dollars per state until the state raised their purchase age to 21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_Act
This is easier to apply to state level than local level obviously, but there are still plenty of federal dollars going to programs carried out at municipal levels. In fact such programs are probably concentrated in the unaffordable cities.
For my anecdotal two cents, it feels like it's a mix of legal liability and the great PR obstacle. Normies won't accept autonomous vehicles until the accident rate is zero, not merely slightly better than the average human driver.
Elon's chud arc may also be a factor in reduced enthusiasm.
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