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
2mo ago
Louis Rossmann has built a 2 million subscriber youtube channel complaining about this specific issue. Apple designs their laptop displays such that they cannot be repaired without replacing the entire upper half of the laptop, and has also made it basically impossible to source the replacement part from anybody besides themselves. This makes third party repairs just as expensive as repairs from Apple themselves.
newport
5mo ago
unable or unwilling to enforce this
It's probably this. Large metros across the US have mostly stopped enforcing laws related to license plates and traffic more generally, because the violators are disproportionately racial minorities and enforcement quickly becomes a PR nightmare. Here in [boring but large US city] it has gotten to the point that the local subreddit makes memes about fake temporary license plates and police forces of surrounding smaller towns troll the borders to make easy fake tag citations (because the smaller town police don't have to worry about the political fallout).
newport
5mo ago
I don't see why they don't invest in (nuclear?) desalination plants
California is (unsurprisingly) anti-nuclear. They were planning to shutter their final remaining nuclear power plant (Diablo Canyon) last year, and the only reason it didn't happen was because the resulting blackouts would have been a political disaster for Newsom et al.
newport
7mo ago
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.
newport
8mo 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
8mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
10mo 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
10mo 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
10mo ago
My wife really wants to make one with inane or insane things on it
newport
10mo ago
"Section 174"
newport
10mo 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
10mo 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.
newport
10mo ago
The phenomenon of information that should be hosted on a wiki or forum ending up locked behind a groomercord discord login wall is frequently complained about on rdrama, of all places. They even have a rule (inconsistently enforced) against mentioning personal use of discord in order to prevent the site from turning into nothing but discord in-jokes. I've observed it countless times myself mostly in the sphere of video game mods, where you have to join a discord to view any documentation or instructions related to a mod.
This is stupid and a downgrade in standard of living compared to the information being on the (googleable) public internet. Alas, as the internet becomes more normiefied, it seems the median internet user is more inclined towards consuming information in a conversation format rather than article format (see also popularity of ChatGPT). So this will probably just get worse.
newport
11mo ago
I think a lot of it is the silo'ing of users into algorithm-mediated feeds on the small handful of social media websites that make up 80% of internet traffic. People are segregated (both by choice and by force via algorithm) into bubbles that don't overlap much.
Plus it seems like most of the new slang and acronyms are generated on X.com these days, which you miss if you don't have an account you actively use there. I don't have one and so I have to absorb these new phrases second-hand through the motte, rdrama, and irl friends that send me twitter links and screenshots.
newport
11mo ago
I think we're actually in agreement about all of this; the deaf ears belonged to the unprincipled blue-tinted cancellation mobs which, as you point out, had no central authority to push in any particular direction.
I'm mostly just riffing on the futility of appealing to reason, compassion, or MAD here, when the unprincipled red-tinted would-be cancellation mobs have been watching this play out for a decade and know that the strategy is very effective. I don't think this is a solvable problem in the short term either.
newport
11mo ago
I think almost all of us, here, would. But I don't see how we go from the current situation to that norm coming out of a decade of opposite-valence random cancellations, and immediate calls for a detente come off as absurdly out-of-touch with ground reality to me in that context.
To me, it seems like there has to be some kind of intermediate step. I don't know what that would look like.
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.
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