newport
1yr 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.
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
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
4mo ago
For the benefit of the unaware, South Africa is a particularly interesting case w/r/t nuclear technology: they already have a single 1980s era nuclear power plant (supplied and partially owned by the French nuclear power company Framatome), and formerly had nuclear weapons until dismantling them in the lead-up to the end of Apartheid/power transfer to the ANC.
I wish I were knowledgeable enough to provide commentary on this state of affairs but I don't know much beyond what's on these wiki pages.
newport
9mo 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
11mo 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.
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/
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".
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.
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