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.
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
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
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
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
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
10mo 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.
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
10mo 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.
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
9mo 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.
newport
8mo 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.
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
8mo 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.
newport
8mo ago
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.
newport
7mo ago
overly fawning
I like how you broke this down because I don't think I've ever heard anybody explain it so straightforwardly. It makes sense.
At the same time, I am left facepalming at the eternal incongruence between male preference for directness and female preference for a million layers of build-up and plausible deniability. If it works out and a longer term relationship forms, the not-initially-called-a-date meeting will probably end up being retroactively referred to as a date.
newport
5mo ago
To echo a sentiment from the pink site, I am surprised the would-be thieves did not notice it was a government vehicle. Even if unmarked, it's hard to miss a lightbar under a windshield if you're within car theft distance of the vehicle.
newport
4mo ago
Any idea why this is the case? I don't know what the situation is in India, but I have read about other countries prohibiting medical amphetamines and allowing medical phenidates. I've never seen an explanation for the distinction though. Is it just fear of the second order effects of introducing a legal path to acquiring the, ahh, better stimulants?
They're legally (and for the most part medically) considered equivalents in the US. Though as you note and in my own experience, one is a lot better than the other in terms of side effects etc.
So the status quo allows ADHD to be treated without introducing the wildcard of amphetamines. This makes sense. From what my Indian friends and acquaintances tell me, mental/psychiatric health awareness in general is minimal there so I'm not surprised there is no urgency to make changes to a system that provides at least some avenue for treatment.
I know multiple people that purchase all of their pharmaceuticals, from OTCs to scheduled drugs like modafinil, from online Indian pharmacies (mostly as a work-around for various insane US pharma and insurance pricing) so that also makes sense. Thanks.
That's actually kinda keyed all things considered, might have to adopt that
newport
4mo ago
It's Scrooge (1970) for me as well! I had no idea the whole thing was on youtube, thank you so much and merry Christmas!
newport
3mo 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.
I have the last few days 2/9 4am EST to 2/10 6pm EST of the feb 5th thread and most 2/12 6am EST to 2/13 5:30pm EST of this week's thread in open and loaded firefox tabs if anybody can tell me the best/easiest way to dump them
Pasted the raw text into a word doc in case microsoft decides now is a good time for an update but this obviously breaks formatting
Edit 2: microsoft did, in fact, decide it was time to update on the way out of hibernation after the battery died so I no longer have the tabs. The raw text was preserved however, and is now in the dump thread.
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.
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