Eh, kinda a stretch to make this about Americans.
In the original thalidomide problem it was the same ‘paranoia’ that kept it entirely off the market in the US.
Beyond that, I’m not sure I get the reasoning behind "Americans are so dumb that they put safety and usage instructions on cancer medication, with emphasis on the most severe warnings!”
Why wouldn’t you want to label dangerous things that are actually, uniquely hazardous?
People very comfortably say “Company made this”, or “we made this” regarding a place they work even if not on the team if talking to someone external.
When people get houses built they often say they’re building a new house, even if it’s actually someone else doing every part of it.
There’s a part of our language that lends itself to having the cause of a thing be responsible for the thing.
The closer it gets to being something you could have personally done every part of and another person is involved the more we tend to draw back, which is why the AI art language grates a bit.
My coworker said he’s building a cabin up north: I have no uncertainty at all that he’s approving a design and someone else is doing it.
I wouldn’t say I put up a handrail on my stairs: it’s plausible I could have, but I didn’t (it’s an awkward space with weird stud spacing, and I have older family I want to be able to rely on it, so I paid someone with licensing to do it right in 20 minutes). I don’t want to take credit for what I didn’t do.
With the art, only one person actually caused it to be made. But it also feels like taking credit for something more difficult than it was.
If I drop a bucket of paint off a balcony, I wouldn’t say “I caused a giant mess to be made”, but “I made a giant mess”.
If I pointed at it and said “I have made art”, people would assume I was joking, despite a surface similarity to some art. The amount of effort is disproportional to the claim.
Absolutely no idea. I almost logged on when typing the previous reply to see if they were still offering me the “thin blue line commemorative gun holster” they were the last time I was on, but I realized I really didn’t want to.
I feel like I see it being used as a common enough way for events to share details though, so it probably isn’t just older demographics.
It’s some of that, on some platforms. Other platforms also get paid to promote posts or advertisement. Depending on who pays the most, you can see different things based on your demographics.
An important thing to remember is that they will show you something in the money making category. If they know what you want, they make more if they show you something that’s likely to be effective. If they don’t know what you want, they make more if they show you something targeting your demographic. If they’re fuzzy on everything, they show you something.
Which political geographic is more likely to target Facebook? Which one is more likely to spend demographic money to try to court younger white men from a low to middle income bracket?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N7xn5zeJ4D4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_on_hold#Cisco’s_Opus_Number_One
Cisco also sells phone systems, and one of their phone engineers wrote a song with a friend once and used it as the default on what went on to become a very common phone system.
It’s not the best song ever, but it’s definitely the best hold music. Can elicit a proper, heartfelt “not bad” from most people.
It’s also common enough that there’s a decent chance any random person has heard it and had no idea where this song came from.
I attribute it’s quality to it being an authentic piece of music, and not a corporate design creation, that was created on lower fidelity hardware, because that’s what they had to muck around with, and so it had some actual creative feeling to it and it coincidentally didn’t lose much being piped over a 90s voip phone system to a household landline handset.
This is why no one wants to go to Altoona.
I feel delighted by the implication that the pizza dough came from Cisco, and not Sysco. It’s a $300,000 pizza, with a $15,000/mo support contract. You only get that discount if you’re buying it as part of an 8+ figure contract though. It can handle 20 billion pepperoni per second though, and if you figure out how to eat it you can get a degree in it that pays pretty well.
You also get the best waiting music known to man while you wait.
Your phone fell off the dashboard phone stand, you caught it and set it in your lap.
Talk to a doctor: good. Taking random amphetamines because you’re tired: less good.
But if you’re going to ask for a med, go for modafinil. It’s more like what people want amphetamines to be, if they’re not looking for outright speed.
Feel free. There’s nothing stopping you.
The reason it’s not feasible is because most human activity happens during the daylight hours. As such, having the unit of a “day” cover what’s typically a day makes things easier.
For example, banks , businesses and schools need to have a unified schedule across a jurisdiction. If the jurisdiction specifies a utc offset that defines the official business day you just have a less coordinated timezone system.
You also make knowing roughly what part of the waking cycle other parts of the world are in much harder. Right now it’s 0100 in utc-5. So it’s 0800 in utc+2, and people are eating breakfast, at work, getting kids to school and so on. If I want to know that without timezones I need to know where they are on the planet and what the relevant legal jurisdiction has mandated as coordinated business time. That’s effectively just a worse version of timezones.
The human conception of time is intrinsically linked to spatial location. Fighting that is just making it hard for no reason. What we need to do is stop fiddling with the time. No more (major) clock adjustments. Daylight savings only sucks because of the switch , so we should just pick one and stay.
It happens every couple of decades with AI. Since it’s a broader field than most people think, we have a pretty long cycle of a new development looking exciting, people getting way too excited and optimistic, the development being exactly what it was promised to be, and then people getting disappointed and avoiding anything with the AI label. Then we decide that because we’re used to this new thing, it can be used in stuff as was originally appropriate but it no longer qualifies as AI, because “that’s not AI, it’s just ___”.
Sure. But it fit his MO and other intelligence data, so there’s no reason to doubt the claim.
Trying to replace a secret conspiracy with a different secret conspiracy that involves faking a secret conspiracy is just overly complicated for no reason, and only distracts from the actual issues around the cause of 9/11.
But no, it was definitely not the case that our intelligence services failed to evaluate a novel threat correctly, failed to properly prioritize it as a result which caused delayed responses, and that our air defense system was caught flat footed because the US is essentially isolated so readiness isn’t a priority.
Definitely not. If anything, the whole thing is actually evidence that the US is so competent that the whole thing can be nearly flawlessly faked. Except for that one building they blew up over the open radio broadcast for no real reason.
To make the trade? Not actually that long. Planning and evaluating take longer, but he’s inevitably not the one pushing the buttons or making the plan, which is also not something that needs to be done for each one.
It takes me longer to move money between my checking and savings accounts.
The concerning thing isn’t the time investment, it’s the active nature of financial involvement in a situation where there’s a major conflict of interest.
Stock trading isn’t automatically problematic for an elected official, but it’s very easy to produce the appearance or actuality of improper conduct.
The safest route is to turn control over to a third party who doesn’t know who they’re managing.
Heh, “here” is the US. We built roads next to nearly all of the train tracks and we don’t have high speed rail.
A pretty normal arrangement:
This is what freeways look like in a lot of cities:
Either that, or elevated. When you get to the suburbs they tend to start putting up sound barriers:
You can also just be on a road so remote that it takes forever for someone to even notice you.
We have a lot of people die every year trying to walk off the highways from getting hit and, in the winter particularly, there’s messaging about not leaving your car because of the danger.
As a result of all that, this is the most light-hearted way of describing how the comment landed:
Mostly I disagreed with the comparative ease you implied for mechanical troubles with cars. I’ve never had or heard of a tow truck getting there that fast outside of things like highway blocking accidents. Holding up the time of repairs and alternative transportation as specific downsides of trains also felt off, as did the remoteness.
This is a story more like what I imagine with a train breakdown. The “middle of nowhere” was a half mile from a road, ten from a city and near enough to a city that they got busses in a few hours. It’s by no means nice but it’s not quite “stuck in a mountain pass for the winter”.
In my experience cars often go to places far more inaccessible, so it seems odd to single out trains.
To me the biggest difficulty would be the slowed information flow. When my car breaks down I know exactly how much I can do to repair it before I call or start walking. I have no idea where the mechanical assessment of the train is so I don’t know when to bail.
Edit:
Oh, right: they put fences around the train tracks? They don’t do that here that I’ve seen outside of junctions. Much bigger fences around the highways.
Ah, I see what happened. You had a point about one thing. “No ac on train bad, and if they don’t let you off it’s very uncomfortable”.
You backed that up with a bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. People responded to that stuff, and you got pissy that no one listened to the part you cared about.
Can you see why maybe I would respond to statements about being stranded when that’s most of your comment? Why an article about train congestion is confusing if your point is “stuck on train bad”?
You can’t get too upset when people respond to the words that you say instead of the points you wanted them to pay attention to.
If you don’t care, why are you putting so much effort into arguing it and getting so defensive?
You’re acting like no one is understanding or accepting what you’re saying. I responded to you saying a train malfunction leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere for hours, and a car malfunction doesn’t. Which is a a preposterous statement.
You then followed up with an article about skipping optional travel due to possible delays and capacity issues and took that as evidence that the air conditioning was the problem.
You haven’t shattered my world view, you’ve made a shitty argument and then gotten sad when people said it was shitty.
It’s not exactly irrelevant when you brought up repair time and alternative transportation.
I feel like you didn’t read your own article. The AC on the train doesn’t really factor into their warning.
They advised people to avoid the train to avoid congestion of the system because trains travel slower when the rails heat up.
They advised people to defer car travel because roads will be more congested due to heat causing mechanical issues in car engines. They also said if you don’t have ac that it could be actively dangerous.
Listing a big list of cons for one and then saying the other one doesn’t have them really makes it seem like a comparison, particularly when it doesn’t seem like an equally applied standard.
https://www.gbnews.com/lifestyle/cars/weather-air-con-postpone-car-journeys-warning
It adds: “Give yourself the best chance of avoiding delays by checking road conditions if driving, or bus and train timetables, amending your travel plans if necessary.”
This has been echoed by the RAC, which explained that red extreme heat warnings are incredibly rare, and called on Britons to take them seriously.
Data from the organisation states that breakdown volumes are expected to be around 20 per cent higher today than what’s normal for a Monday in late June.
I literally just searched for it and trivially found them.
They’re specifically saying vehicles without air conditioning, while also discussing worsening road conditions, increased risk of breakdown, and a general need to limit travel.
They issue the warnings for trains and not cars because train rails expand in the heat, meaning service cancellation is more likely and deferring optional travel reduces stress on the system.
Any time there is stress on a transit system they advise people to skip using it if necessary.
Your position is not hard to understand. It’s just one-sided because you’re only considering the downsides of one method, and not considering what the same situation looks like for the other.
That’s not entirely strange. Commenting on the health of a patient is really restricted. There are circumstances where it’s allowed in limited capacities but I wouldn’t expect a doctor to actually provide information. That information would be updated by a doctor, compiled by a PA, and given to an administrator to clear with lawyers.
It’s locked down enough that I wouldn’t expect any different even if the request was coming directly from the patients lawyer. Being a high profile patient just means there’s more eyes making sure the statement is in line with the authorized disclosure.