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MY PERFECT MOURNING ROUTINE
  • Those are X in boxes next to those in step four. I believe they're saying "no phone calls, no emails and no dealing with notifications".

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    Horrors We've Unleashed
  • Most modern plans for eradication involve creating a virus that handles it, rather than a pesticide.
    Have the virus introduce a gene that takes a few generations of breeding in the impacted population before it starts to debilitate or sterilize the mosquitoes. That way your virus can start to kill the population even as it spreads to areas that were missed.

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    Horrors We've Unleashed
  • All of our best data on the impact says that it really wouldn't matter. Sometimes a species is a linchpin for the ecosystem, and sometimes it isn't.

    Sucks for mosquitoes, but there's a very real chance that we'll smallpox them, and the biggest concern will be our confidence that the virus we use doesn't impact other species unintentionally.

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    What is an extremely wholesome fact that could help brighten someone's day?
  • if you technically pull people out of poverty by outsourcing to the lowest paying, least labor regulated parts of the world, is the fact that extreme poverty went away in those areas even a good thing?

    Yes. Your prospects of a healthy life increase when going from not being able to provide for yourself to being barely able to provide for yourself by working in fantastically poor conditions.

    If a sweatshop didn't provide more worker value than extreme poverty, people just wouldn't work there.

    The bare minimum of improvements is still an improvement, and that we should strive for better than the bare minimum doesn't make the bare minimum worthless to the people who got it.

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    GOG will let you bequeath your game library to someone else as long as you can prove you're actually dead
  • "In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we'd do our best to make it happen. We're willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system."

    That's a very fancy way of saying "we'll comply with a court order", which is what any business would do.
    This is marketing fluff. DRM free is good enough reason to like them without framing them as fixing literally every problem with steam.

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    Steam's new disclaimer reminds everyone that you don't actually own your games, GOG moves in for the killshot: Its offline installers 'cannot be taken away from you'
  • I get that. DRM free is great and better. I just don't like the advertisement that casts it as "you own the game", or entire articles built around posts by their marketing department.
    It feels very ambulance-chaser-y.

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    Steam's new disclaimer reminds everyone that you don't actually own your games, GOG moves in for the killshot: Its offline installers 'cannot be taken away from you'
  • These articles are basically just advertising for GoG.
    They have the same issues as steam does regarding only selling licenses, or not having inheritable or transferable accounts.

    DRM free is great, but as a service they aren't fundamentally different from steam. They just like to market themselves like they are.

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    NASA beams home cat video from 19 million miles away
  • Oh, certainly. But common language has a term for high latency already, it's just not speed related. Everyone knows about a laggy connection on a phone or video call.

    Fun fact: TCP has some implicit design considerations around the maximum cost of packet retransmission on a viable link that only works on roughly local planetary scale.
    When NASA started to get out to Mars with the space Internet, they needed to tweak tcp to fit retransmission being proportionally much more expensive and let connections live longer before being "broken".

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    NASA beams home cat video from 19 million miles away
  • When talking communication, most people think of the speed with which a unit quantity of information is transmitted, not the latency of that transmission.
    Referring to bandwidth as the speed of a communication system is pretty normal, even for people who know how to use the term bandwidth.

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    Biden announces 10-year deadline to remove all lead pipes nationwide
  • Yup, it's not ideal.
    For slight contextualization on why it's not the worst: for the most part, the lead pipes have a layer of scale (material from water reacting with the pipe) that keeps lead out of the water.
    We stopped installing new lead pipes quite a while ago, and the program to fully phase them out was started in the 90s. This was relatively routine for developed countries, as lead pipes were extremely common across the world.

    After Flint, it became apparent that this wasn't the "slow fix" problem everyone thought after we saw how easily it could go to full "problem". So everyone accelerated the timeline.

    So while it's definitely a problem, it's not an entirely novel or extremely critical problem.

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    Ok boomer
  • check out is the part where the actual sales transaction occurs. It really is materially different

    Like a vending machine? Or the gas station? Or the grocery pickup, where I pay online?
    What makes a human being present for me giving my money to a machine different if it's a grocery store as opposed to one of those?

    Sorry your experience sucks. Stores near me regularly have both open and the self checkout is invariably significantly faster. It's not like I just didn't notice that something I do several times a week actually sucks.

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    Biden announces 10-year deadline to remove all lead pipes nationwide
  • If people thought we lived in a society, than we wouldn't have used lead pipes in the 1950 or before?
    In an era where we didn't know there was as much risk as we found out over the following decades?
    What the fuck are you even talking about? Do you know when these pipes were even installed?

    Do you think that people should be held responsible for the votes of their great grandparents? Or, more specifically, that their children should get brain damage because of how their great great grandparents voted?

    What do you think we gain by letting poor communities be potentially poisoned? That hurts all of us.
    Hell, Flint (the prototypical example) didn't even vote for the people who screwed them over. The state government imposed them on the city against their will.
    I suppose you think they deserve lead poisoning because they didn't have the good graces to have a flourishing economy after the biggest employer in the city left?

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    Biden announces 10-year deadline to remove all lead pipes nationwide
  • Because we live in a society.

    I don't know how to convey that you should do things that keep people, particularly children, healthy even if they don't live in the same municipal tax jurisdiction.

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    Biden announces 10-year deadline to remove all lead pipes nationwide
  • The program has been going on for decades. The Feds put money in a big account the EPA manages that gives grants and loans to areas that need it to get the process completed faster.
    As loans get repaid over the years, the money is leant out again. Most areas have enough income to afford the project, but not enough cash on hand to afford to pay all at once.

    This is the first batch of additional money being added to the fund along with a mandate that the problem be resolved in a fixed timeframe.

    Currently the fund has used about $20billion to provide $40billion in upgrades over nearly 30 years.

    https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-issues-final-rule-requiring-replacement-lead-pipes-within

    Funding: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides $50 billion to support upgrades to the nation’s drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. This includes $15 billion over five years dedicated to lead service line replacement and $11.7 billion of general Drinking Water State Revolving Funds that can also be used for lead service line replacement. There are a number of additional pathways for systems to receive financial support for lead service line replacement. These include billions available as low- to no-cost financing through annual funding provided through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) program and low-cost financing from the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) program. Funding may also be available from other federal agencies, state, and local governments. These efforts also advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which sets the goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain Federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.

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    Ok boomer
  • I've never understood the people who seem to not get that some people actually don't mind scanning their stuff and putting it in bags, and insist that that's the line between what the customer does and the employee. They also used to carry your groceries to the car for you, and you can also get them to pick everything up, bag it and bring it to your car or house. It's not like the checkout process is the special part that can't change.

    Yeah, they want to save money by having fewer people get more customers checked out faster. I don't really care since the part I like, getting finished at the store, happens faster.

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    Conservative thinks having a stepson is cuckoldry
  • Based on the bird behavior it would be closer, yeah.
    Looking at the etymology, it seems the middle English just used the word for the whole situation, and not a strict analogy.

    For pure bird-ness, it would apply best to a case of a woman adopting a step child, even more to adoption, and most of all to a single mother with three kids who one day realizes she's not sure how long there have been four babies in her house, and even though one is three times the size of the others and looks very different, they all have similar lower faces so she can't really tell and feeds them all just to be safe.

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    Daylight savings
  • Even better would be the various laws relating to things that are geographically bound.

    Labor laws for teenagers over 16 typically state that they can't work during the hours of 0700 to 1500 Monday through Friday, 2200 to 0600 Sunday through Thursday, and 2330 to 0600 on Fridays and Saturdays during the school year.

    Imagine the nightmare of what that all turns into when day change happens in the middle of those blocks of time.
    A lot of labor laws and accounting in general become terrible.

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    Daylight savings
  • Then it's really weird that people typically ask "what time is it there?" before they ask "when are you free?" isn't it?

    People orient themselves to each other as part of communication. Sure, it's weird that we often like to know when in the day it is for the other person, but we do.

    Nothing is stopping anyone from talking about time in UTC, yet people essentially never do. That doesn't make them wrong, it just means our requirements for "time of day" are more nuanced than coordinating business meetings.

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    Daylight savings
  • "what time is it" is the natural way that people have asked about where in the typical day night cycle it is for eons. We don't really have another way of formulating the question that flows naturally.
    It would be the same time everywhere, but you'd only know what that meant in places you were familiar with. Otherwise you'd have to look up the difference in a big table, which is exactly what a timezone is.

    We have a system for a uniform clock that's synchronized everywhere on the planet. The people for whom it has benefits already use it.

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  • crochet fox drinking hot tea, cinematic still, Technicolor, Super Panavision 70

    Not quite what I was going for, but super cute regardless.

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    Been having fun trying to generate images that look like "good" CGI, but broken somehow in a more realistic looking way.

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