I must commend CA DMV for their wise leverage of UrbanDictionary.com, which is cited over 170 times in that file.
And I must wonder about how reliable they consider UD to be, given that UD is 100% user-generated content. Is it possible to tank a perfectly innocent license plate if someone gins up a misleading UD entry?
Licence plates are a great example where detection "algorithms" be overzealous in returning false positives over false negatives. As someone had above, if they reject SIXSPD and won't allow it, then just try something else. If your life is materially impacted by by a licence plate, it's 'long hard look' time.
(I was going to make a specificity/selectively comment but I don't think that applies here, please correct me otherwise?)
> For my wife and I we didn’t really want kids in he first place and we’re much better off for it.
And that's the crux of the issue: Individuals in most western societies are currently better off not having children, while society as a whole absolutely needs individuals to have a certain amount of children or run into serious issues down the line.
Many societies (for example South Korea) are feeling this more and more. Way too many old people and not enough young to run the country and take care of the old. In those places not enough is being done supporting those who chose to have children for everyone's sake.
Foregoing children and having saved for retirement does not mean much if in 40 years you're competing for the now extremely limited basic services against people who are in the same boat. Worse, young people may now decide that they don't feel like feeding and providing for a large population of old people through sky-high taxes and being the victim of rent-seeking. They just might throw in the towel and leave for a more functional country, using their now higher income to support their own parents, but none of the others. Who now takes care of the childless?
It's going to be human misery on a scale you would expect to see in a modern society.
It’s funny - I had lunch today with a woman from South Korea who has a phd in physics from Harvard (not MIT - confusing) and she said she “doesnt like babies” and will never have children.
Most people I know with higher degrees don’t have children even though they have the means to support them.
At a national level, it’s hard to see how (assuming the country grows enough food and has other basic necessities) it is possible for the country to be “unable to afford” children, Baumol be damned.
Just because we have more billionaires than ever doesn’t mean a lot people aren’t struggling. Back in the day, someone could pay for a mortgage, wife, and kids with one job without a college degree. Where I live, that’s not happening.
There's never been a time in the history of mankind when there was greater abundance than now, but we suddenly cannot afford children anymore? Maybe we ought to task scientists with figuring out what precious secret to raising children mankind forgot when we were too preoccupied with discovering fire and electricity. Hopefully they left us some carving in a deer antler that will give us insight into their superior budgeting skills.
There might be something patented in the modern production process. Or, alternatively, they could release the recipe as something "open source" and also potentially provide "pre-mixed concrete as a service"...
> At what point do we replace humans with software here? Obviously we shouldn't remove humans from the loop entirely, but computers should be able to do a lot of the work of detecting and flagging collisions, directing traffic, etc.
At modern airports, a lot of that is in fact handled or assisted by computers.
The US's air traffic control is incredibly technologically outdated compared to its peers. Even 15 years old ATC technology would be an improvement in many cases. Other countries have a lot more automation, allowing them to make do with much fewer controllers.
Some of the systems in the states still use floppy disks!
> The threat actor appears to have obtained this information by paying multiple contractors or employees working in support roles outside the United States
yea that is what they get. Hope this hurts them bad.
At my last job for a "casual dating" app, all new account verification stuff was sent to some shop in the Philippines. I got involved with troubleshooting some random DB locks that were causing down time. Ended up discovering that this firm tried to automate the verification process with some scripts or something that would sometimes go haywire and send over 100 requests per second to the new account admin portal which would bring down the entire site. Management just asked them nicely to be more careful which brought the peaks down to 80 requests per second which the back end seemed to be able to cope with (just barely). They couldn't careless that there were supposed to be humans looking at this data and they were clearly trying to automate that part out. Even worse, once I started looking at the data that was in the portal, it was credit card name and billing addresses, and DL license or passport scans. Before I could really further fix the performance issue, I was laid off. Then a few months later they did another lay off which cleaned out every american employee. This was an american company that had ~150 american employees and now there are none. Just two execs at the top that get to watch the money roll in while they farm out everything to overseas. Really pisses me off bad >:(
It will happen (at least attempted) with on-shore support staff too, My next door neighbour used to work for a UK high street bank and even there support staff were approached, with some of them first befriended, and eventually bribed in to passing along PII. No doubt it happens in the US too. Just costs the bad guys more.
The problem is not remote work, the problem is social fabric breaking down, causing people to take without giving in return. In the case of Starbucks, an anonymous corporation, little reciprocity is expected in the first place, but mom&pop coffee shops getting loads of freeloaders and squatters is an indicator of a larger problem in an area. Do these guys order one coffee in the morning and at lunch eat sandwiches they brought from home?
Also I wouldn't dare to take up space in a shop that's already short on space, nor would that be a particularly nice environment to work in.
I've got a local mom&pop coffee shop that I love, staff included, and obviously don't want to be a net negative to the place. Something would have to be seriously wrong with me if that ever changed and I'd hope someone would take corrective action by giving me a piece of their mind.
One of my favorite cafes has simple signage with an explanation, plus an owner/manager with the interest and confidence to enforce it. He’s really just replacing the empathy, self-awareness and social awareness that’s fading generally. It’s his prerogative: the scrambled eggs, toast and coffee are basically perfect; that’s where he puts his effort and what makes money; he’s tending his shop with care and dedication.
Corporate cafes are flaccid and indifferent. A pay toilet that hands out free coffee. Who even cares what a customer is up to?
I think it's both because of the Instagram glamourization of this sort of remote work, and the fact that more and more people are starting to work online but the public coworking spaces are still scarce and expensive.
The city I work in (Ljubljana) has recently opened a new public facility with desks, wi-fi and power outlets for anyone to use without any restrictions. They're crowded every single day. Same for all public libraries in the area, but every time such a space opens it frees up the other ones a bit.
While I don't agree with squatting coffee shops for days on end, I think we should be building more free to use public coworking spaces and libraries to accommodate this change.
That's one way of looking at it, but an alternative perspective is that it's an issue with the pricing model. Move to assigned seating. Charge for the spot itself by the hour. Include internet and a beverage in that charge.
Sure there's a bit more to it but the basic idea is a straightforward and understandable one.
At a local/mom-n-pop, if they asked, sure. At a corporate cafe no employee would care, so why should I?
In part, it’s a marginal utility problem. How do I know it’s not now peak crowded and will start to empty out if I wait 5 minutes. People can go somewhere else if it’s too crowded; I would have gone somewhere else; people with lower tolerance than me will leave before me; etc.
Unrelated, but playing around with Orca I can't help but notice how behind the times the speech synthesis is. The voice is incredibly distorted and robotic. I know the goal isn't to have a natural voice with human cadence, but there's little reason to have it sound like your speakers are dying. Maybe it's just the defaults that are bad?
As a long-term strategy, such focused distros aren't the best idea. Derivative distros often have single developers, or smaller teams, making them vulnerable to disappearing. Its usually better to get all the changes needed into upstream projects, so that all desktops/distros are more accessible by default, and then contribute to testing/fixing accessibility in independent/major distros, so that all the downstream ones are more accessible by default.
The author prefers NixOS as a solution though, so each individual controls exactly what is on their system so they can roll back if something breaks and add their own tweaks. Eventually that just results in the one-person distro scenario though.
Compared to the rest of the school system, the price of a kid's lunch is a small amount of money, and it's certainly not worth the overhead of bookkeeping, administration, payment processing, and checking eligibility for each individual kid.
Take Finland as an example. Schools are paid for by taxpayers, costing around 8,000 euros per student per year [1] (the numbers don't change much regardless of which level of education you look at). Of that just 570 euro pay for balanced and healthy meals (mostly labor costs).[2] That works out to roughly 3 euro per meal.
The benefit of a good meal probably outweigh many other things you could do with that money when it comes to educating children that are your future taxpayers.
How did they figure that one. If that's what it's supposed to mean, that reviewer is good...
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