newport
1yr ago
I wouldn't think any of the CW elements would extend to passport issues for existing US citizens with all of their documents and no criminal records but I guess I'm just wishfully naive. Has anybody tried campaigning on this particular issue? (I don't really keep up with mainstream politics obviously.) This is clearly causing serious problems for people that need to travel internationally for reasons other than vacationing.
Why is the US passport application process still so ludicrously, unacceptably, insanely backlogged?
Some friends are considering an international trip during the holiday season so I took a look at how to get a passport. The wait time for non-expedited processing is three months. Paying an extra $60 for expedited processing takes this down to two months if you're lucky. The state department is still blaming covid (which I can understand on some levels; there's more demand now that international travel is allowed to happen again) but this has been a problem for a year now.
Nobody seems to know the specifics as to why this is happening beyond "record numbers of applicants". Asking about this without qualifiers on reddit is liable to get you labelled pro-trump. I'm seeing comments that just a decade ago the process only took a few weeks at most.
I've been meaning to get one for a couple years now simply to have a backup form of ID but never had a compelling reason to apply until this potential trip entered the equation. It looks like it's already too late for me to get one in time. Guess I'll try again in a couple years.
On top of all that, the postal service's online appointment scheduler is either broken or incompatible with both Firefox and iOS safari.
newport
1yr ago
With younger people especially, a lot of climate activists seem to lean towards an extreme, almost fatalistic view of the situation and consequently advocate things like mass deindustrialization and other civilization-suicide-adjacent solutions. As much as I appreciate the writings of Kaczynski, these solutions seem absurd without even getting into practicality.
The number of people with these views seems to be steadily growing at a rate I'm not sure I can fully credit to media coverage. Is it cyclical? Can anybody here that was around in the 70s provide some context? Maybe it's just edgy kids using twitter as an unprecedentedly powerful megaphone and we're still at the same base rate of this sort of thinking. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of greater general polarization.
See also: this stonetoss edit. Being nuclear-optimistic is now right-coded somehow.
newport
1yr ago
Ryan Gosling (via characters he has portrayed) is a sigma male zoomer meme, and so is Cillian Murphy in the same sense. This context is at least partly responsible for the unlikely combo popularity.
What if the 50-year-old white guy grimaced visibly upon seeing this death-trap and demanded all kinds of expensive tests and redesign work?
https://abc7chicago.com/missing-titanic-sub-oceangate-lawsuit-david-lochridge-submersible/13409850/
Exactly that happened. And they fired him.
I don't think the firing had anything to do with his race or age though, it appears to have happened purely because he was saying "wait a minute, I don't think this thing is safe".
newport
1yr ago
If the API crackdown is really about LLM training data (which it probably is), old.reddit is almost guaranteed to be either eliminated completely or cut down to nu-reddit levels of functionality (only showing 3 comments at a time) because it is so easily scrapeable in current form.
I expect this to happen as soon as the hype around the API lockdown dissipates.
The trees in my parents' neighborhood have finally matured enough for barred (not barn) owls to move in, and now I hear them every time I visit. One night about a year ago I woke up to find one sitting on a branch outside the window, maybe 8 feet away from me. Its size was awe-inspiring.
newport
1yr ago
Maybe it's diluted by a bunch of users who only use it for a few minutes per day.
I strongly suspect this is it. API requests are measured in exact numbers, so a reddit addict that spends 10 hours a day scrolling on Apollo will rack up roughly an OOM more request cost than a causal user that spends an hour or less scrolling on RIF. I'd hazard a guess that heavier users may prefer a different interface than casual users.
newport
1yr ago
I played viola for 7 years in grade school, up until I graduated high school. I was naturally good enough at it to land ~second chair +/- 1 up until it got fairly competitive in later high school, and if I'd actually applied myself at all I probably could've played in the competitive auditioned extracurricular orchestras. Alas I am chronically lazy.
I miss it sometimes, mostly for the type of people it surrounded me with.
newport
1yr ago
Of the twentysomethings I know that use nicotine (myself included, see username), almost all of them follow the same pattern that I do: vaping regularly throughout the day, and infrequently indulging in smoked tobacco only in social/ritual settings. I get through a pack of actual cigarettes every month and a half or so. This results in drastically less physical smoking than we'd engage in if cigarettes etc were our only option, holding nicotine dependence constant.
newport
1yr ago
A more comprehensive cataloguing of these shootings by category (lone wolf terrorism vs gang related vs romance related vs accidental discharge etc), as well as by national news coverage, would contribute a lot to this discussion but I don't have time to trawl through 50+ incidents. From a cursory look at the 2020s list by no. of deaths I hadn't heard of any of the top ten besides Uvalde and Nashville, which I find odd.
newport
1yr ago
The feature you're talking about is called "truescore" in the codebase this site was built off of; it appears to be disabled on profiles but does already exist in the code.
Not sure whether it would need to be retooled; by default it counts both upvotes AND downvotes as +1 truescore unless this has already been patched over.
Whether it should actually be enabled? I dunno, I could see arguments from either direction.
newport
1yr ago
Since the IRS already has W-2 data for filers, it's probably not very hard for them to notice when someone reports their income wrong.
IANAAccountant, but I have taken a tax accounting course. This is, IIRC, precisely how it works. It's called the Document Matching Program, and it dispatches notice letters to taxpayers when a discrepancy is detected between the filed return and the IRS' copies of the taxpayer's W-2s and 1099s.
https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-irs-tax-compliance-activities#Underreporter
https://www.hrblock.com/tax-center/newsroom/irs/upfront-information-statement-matching/
newport
2yr ago
For anyone looking, Walmart is about to sell the SE for $99
Tangential to your post, but it appears this deal is only for a model locked to Straight Talk Wireless (a prepaid contract-less Verizon subsidiary). I haven't been paying very close attention lately, but I thought carrier-locked phones were practically extinct in the US at this point?
I have no idea what Straight Talk's unlock policy is (maybe they'll unlock it if you ask nicely), but annoying regardless.
newport
2yr ago
This is a very minor issue but on iOS mobile devices with a screen notch, the notch area is shaded hot pink regardless of login status and theme settings. On rdrama, the notch area shading is tied to the theme color setting which appears to have been hidden/disabled on themotte.org's profile settings page.
Otherwise fantastic job on the site and thank you for all the time you put into this.
I probably will once I find a browser that USPS.com tolerates and/or they fix their website (uBlock is not the culprit, I already checked). But I'm fed up enough that I need to take a break from trying. Might try county services instead since they're actually closer to me than my post office and it appears that they can handle them.
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