Years is literally just the plural of a single year. Ergo, years feels like the appropriate word here. What are you suggesting they phase it as instead?
On this page [1] in the technical specifications under battery life, instead of actually saying 12-15 hours of recording or 2 years, it just says "Years of average use"
Was this with the little turle as your cursor? Seeing the "older" kids who could manipulate that program/language to make stopmotion movies might have been the moment that set me on the path of "technology enthusiast" for the rest of my life. The scene of the dimmed computer lab with a whole group gathered around someone's monitor to watch the newest creation is forever etched in my memory.
It was! I even remember it was Terrapin LOGO - which amazingly seems to still be around. [0]
None of us ever made anything as good as a stop-motion. It didn't even occur to me to do anything that cool. But I was obsessed with geometry and patterns, and benefit from a group of us being allowed up into the middle school to use the computer at lunchtime recess.
When I was older and got official "Enrichment" classes after school I tackled the same pattern and figured out how to do it with a minimum of repeated line segments. I also figured I might as well do triangular and square tilings. But those were boring, as there isn't a repeated edge problem to solve.
I have a hot take on this that I think could actually make some headway:
- We raise the congressional salary. Say, maybe double them across the board.
BUT in exchange, you, your immediate family, and any business, LLC, or other similar vehicle you are a named party to as a consultant, beneficiary, owner, or investor must divest of specific investments and can only hold the equivalent value of an index fund that tracks the general market. Or, you can remove yourself from the investment/ownership vehicle during the term you serve as a congressperson.
Problem solved? Probably not, but it's an interesting thought experiment. I'm sure there are a bunch of loopholes I haven't fully through through, too.
> Or, you can remove yourself from the investment/ownership vehicle during the term you serve as a congressperson.
The problem with "blind trusts" is that even blind men wink and nudge. It's quite hard to police a veritable horde of Congressmen who pinky-swear to never pass information along to friends, relatives and various other associates, employed by them or otherwise.
It can be. But it's quite hard. And frequently unsuccessful. The concept of "insider trading" sounds great and unambiguous until some examination, but becomes quite ripe for loophole-finding exercises afterwards.
I honestly don't know how you put a cone of silence around congresspeople such that insider trading anywhere in their sphere of influence is impossible. My intent would be to make it difficult for the congressperson to directly benefit from passing along insider info and compensate them enough such that it isn't a practical path. Sure, they could still tell friends to buy/sell, but if the friend *does* act on that, it's sure going to raise eyebrows when they try to wire $1M worth of proceeds to the congressperson for "movie & pizza night".
And I know that the next stone to be cast is "yeah, but if they help friends/business associates beat the market, congresspeople can still benefit with board seats and jobs when they're done with congressional terms". That's totally valid, and I have no idea how to combat that.
Forget pizza night IOUs. Lots of very smart people have come up with lots of clever ways to pay someone for a service, ways that don't even register when it comes to public awareness. I could have bought this house from you for 1.5 million, but I'm going to buy it for 2.5 million because I simply must have it. Man, what a sucker, eh?
> The problem with "blind trusts" is that even blind men wink and nudge.
They should only be allowed to invest in a fund that is open to public participation. This should also be public information. You should be able to pick a congresperson and invest in the exact same funds that they do.
Cool project. I've done something similar using defunct crypto Awair AQI sensors tied into Home Assistant. They have an LED panel in the front that can show overall AQI or any of the pollutants they track:
https://www.getawair.com/products/element
The sky is the limit as to what you can do with Home Assistant automations.
It's surprising how quickly a room with a closed door and one person can go from ~ambient CO2 levels to 1000ppm+.
> It's surprising how quickly a room with a closed door and one person can go from ~ambient CO2 levels to 1000ppm+.
Yeah, having seen myself how quickly it happens i've recently been thinking of finding automatic window openers that would respond to CO2 levels reported from either my aranet or on its own.
were you able to repurpose your Awair device? Mine has sat bricked since they discontinued supporting it. I'd love to use it for anything if you're able to point to any docs on how to make it useful again?
Even mundane recordings become interesting to me once enough time passes. I've watched a bunch of Nickelodeon/Cartoon Network programming from early days and to be honest, the commercials are more interesting than the cartoons because they so perfectly capture where we were as a society -- toys starting to integrate new technology, sugary cereals being touted as part of daily breakfast, etc. Fascinating stuff.
I'm just guessing but it might have to do with the concerns raised by the first commenter in the reply by textfiles (Jason Scott) in that reddit thread
tl;dr seems to be they received a massive (71,000 tapes) archive that hasn't seen any activity or communication in 7 years.
If you read further in the thread, you'll also find other concerns about Jason's reliability
This was one of my (as a layperson) irritations with this process. Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune. Myself included.
I believe that the word vaccine was misunderstood on a large scale, much to our detriment. I don't know what it should have been called otherwise, but I think the messaging around the mRNA treatments was handled poorly.
> Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune.
If you're going to be upset about word choice, the thing to be upset about is that it has no connection to cows at all.
No vaccine grants 100% immunity. Some are more effective than others. It's hard to predict efficacy for a novel type of vaccination for a novel virus and there's no vaccines for other viruses in the same family.
Certainly, this could have been communicated better, but it's not like flu vaccines have 100% efficacy either and they've been around for decades.
But "every member of the government needs to communicate flawlessly 100% of the time during a once-in-a-century pandemic alongside a never-before-seen social media misinformation environment, even in their internal communication" is just not a bar that we can meet.
Imagine if they didn't call it a vaccine. "Of course this thing won't work, Fauci isn't even willing to call it a vaccine!"
If we're going to go by this, literally every vaccine should stop being called a vaccine. That's not the right answer. The right answer is to not have a population of ignorant people.
That can be a noble goal, but I wouldn't be so hand-wavy about how people understand words and their meanings. I'm firmly in the camp that the mRNA covid vaccine was a wonder of modern science, and on the whole it had net positives for society. Don't misunderstand, it was not rolled out, or messaged perfectly and wasn't without risk that we're likely to wrap our arms around some day in the future.
But we can learn from the experience. And in my view, telling a captive, emotional, and concerned audience "we have a vaccine!" and then not absolutely being a broken record about what that means was a miss.
My point was that there was absolutely nothing different about the covid vaccine in this regard from literally any other vaccine. So I'm not sure why you're putting it into a special bin here.
If the point is that the average person is uneducated and doesn't understand how vaccines work, sure. But if the solution is to use a different word, that new word would need to be applied to every vaccine on the market. And what's the point if that's the case?
Also, I don't recall ever hearing people with actual knowledge claiming it provided a cloak of invulnerability. So again, I'm not sure what those people should have done different. I'd agree that the media distorted scientific truths, but they always do that.
It is/was a vaccine, I think the terminology is correct. It just didn't work effectively because the variants mutated too quickly because you're not supposed to vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic. This cause an explosion of variants and they couldn't make vaccines that tracked the new variants fast enough.
So instead they decided to change the goalposts and said "This vaccine that worked on the variant 2 years ago will still protect from severe symptoms" when in fact it did nothing and people kept getting infected.
It wasn't the vaccine itself it was how it was sold to us by Pfizer, Moderna and the politicians.
This is what I'd like to get to - I think I would be bored stiff being fully retired, but I don't want to need to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. A day or two would be ideal. There are numerous permutations of "FIRE" but I think this is called "Barista Fire"
I logged in just to respond to this - I could not disagree more. FB's faceted search is truly awful. I regularly search for specific items on FB and get totally different results if I run the same query multiple times. Sometimes, I'll even get "suggested" items that 100% match my search query and have been posted for weeks but still don't appear in my original search.
I loathe using FBMP, but it has been slowly absorbing all the CL traffic. On one hand, I like that CL charges for high value items now (ex: Cars) because it means you're getting better quality, but on the other hand it has absolutely hastened people's abandonment of CL for FBMP.
Maybe I have a different perspective, but I find both platforms to be absolutely awful. I had to find a car with CL years ago ... uggh, what a shite platform.
Now - FB is decidedly worse though. These walled gardens, I swear the spartan simplicity of Usenet was better than these.
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