Good news for the nation!
Posts made by Axtremus
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RE: The most spectacular garden I’ve ever seen.
How big a maintenance budget need to be for a garden like this?
How big a maintenance staff? -
RE: Polls
But “538” is not Nate Silver anymore.
Nate Silver on “Why I Don’t Buy 538’s New Election Model”:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-i-dont-buy-538s-new-election -
RE: Government Shutdown - Fall 2024
Still cannot govern:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/09/16/house-republicans-government-funding/
House Republicans have been in power for nearly two years — and they’re still unable to solve fiscal problems within their ranks.
The belligerent nature of the conference, coupled with a historically narrow majority, has made it almost impossible for any GOP leader to appease each corner of their constituency when nearly every Republican vote is necessary to pass bills along party lines.
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Hot Girls Kill Woke? Raunch Culture.
https://www.vox.com/culture/371632/raunch-republicans-sydney-sweeney-hawk-tuah-girl
... is sex for celebrating and flaunting? Or is it for regulating and decrying and shaming?
There’s a sexual ideology that holds all of these concepts together in a single place: the idea that you can celebrate Hawk Tuah Girl and use her catchphrase to degrade a female politician; the idea that a starlet in a low-cut dress is yours to objectify, while contraception and sexual education are dangerous and probably immoral and should be restricted.
A thoughtful and expansive look into the raunch culture in the 1990s and early 2000s, and how we may be retro-ing back into it now.
Long piece. Set your coffee down on it.
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Government Shutdown - Fall 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/10/us/politics/johnson-spending-bill-republicans.html
The speaker [Mike Johnson]’s first effort to avert a government shutdown ran into a buzz saw of opposition from both far-right and mainstream Republicans.
... Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, ordered members of his party to shut down the government unless they received “absolute assurances on Election Security.”
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RE: I designed a Kamala t-shirt
@pique said in I designed a Kamala t-shirt:
I changed the typography just very slightly. Can you tell?
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RE: I designed a Kamala t-shirt
@pique said in I designed a Kamala t-shirt:
But I don't have any idea if it would be okay to do this on my own.
Just do it, even if only for your own fun. You don't expect to get rich from this, you may even opt to donate all profits to the campaign, and you can always stop if/when you get a cease-and-desist letter from the campaign. Furthermore, you can also open-source it -- put it in the public domain (or some very liberal licensing terms) and let others reproduce it.
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RE: This keeps happening
Ironic that the prosecutor is also charging the father. What? You want the father to be responsible for the action of an "adult"?
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RE: Aging at Home is Expensive!
On average a person works 40 hours a week, but "round-the-clock in-home care" means 24x7=168 hours a week of dedicated labor, more than 4x of the typical 40-hour work week. IOW, it takes four people's labor to provide for one person's "round-the-clock in-home care." Of course it's expensive!
At scale, few societies can ever afford this with human labor.
It will be a long while before robots become advanced enough to be competent caregivers. May take longer still to transfer our consciousness into machines so we don't have to age in decrepit biological bodies.
Interim solutions are centralization/statistical multiplexing like nursing homes and having most people dying quickly as to not need round-the-clock care for long once they started needing "round-the-clock care.
Centralization/statistical multiplexing means giving up "in-home" care. The "die quickly" option also has its shortcomings. From a public policy perspective, support legal euthanasia to make the "die quickly" option more palatable, especially if you want such on option to preserve some dignity.
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RE: Finale for Finale
I took the "cross-grade" offer and is transitioning to Dorico.
Just ran through a few of the demos that shipped with Dorico 5.
So far so good.
Dorico takes up even more (a lot more) disk space than Finale.
If nothing else, at least Dorico is Apple silicon native -- something I suspect MakeMusic/Finale will not be able to do just because it doesn't look like MakeMusic can afford to invest enough to make the transition to Apple silicon.
At some point I will also have to try to move some Garritan virtual instrument sounds/libraries that I have paid good money (to MakeMusic) for over to Dorico. MakeMusic says that will work, but we will see. -
RE: Sneaky Ron gets caught
Phew ... I thought this was going to be a thread about Ron getting caught with a spray can in hand promoting PermaTune. Relieved to learn that it's a different Ron dealing a different scheme.
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RE: This keeps happening
@wtg said in [This keeps happening]:
@Axtremus said in This keeps happening:
a 14 year old is not an adult.
While I agree that he isn't physically an adult yet, what do you do with him from a legal perspective?
The law has a definition for "child" and a definition for "adult." Legally treating a 14 year old as an "adult" is more an exception than the norm. I'd rather the law operates close to the norm than making many exceptions.
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Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel Merger
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/business/nippon-steel-us-steel-japan.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-steel-biden-harris-trump-oppose-sale-nippon-2024-9
U.S. Steel puts itself up for sale.
Nippon Steel offers to buy it.
(But the press calls it a merger anyway.)
The United Steelworkers union in Pennsylvania say they don't like the offer.
Biden says he wants to block the sale/merger.
Harris and Trump both say they oppose the sale/merger too.What say you?
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RE: Jennifer Garner's house
@wtg said in Jennifer Garner's house:
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/step-inside-jennifer-garners-cozy-california-home
Love it, just too tidy ... I suppose they all "clean up" before letting the photographer take pictures, just a matter of "how much" each has to do before picture time.
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RE: This keeps happening
@wtg said in This keeps happening:
In the Georgia shooting, the 14 year old will be charged as an adult.
Not that I don't sympathize with the victims and their loved ones, but a 14 year old is not an adult.
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Aging at Home is Expensive!
https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/caregiving-aging-at-home-retirement-103520c7
... The 2023 national median cost of a home health aide, hired through an agency, stood at $33 an hour, up from $20 an hour in 2015, according to Genworth, a long-term-care insurance company. Those needing round-the-clock in-home care can expect a median cost of about $290,000, which is more than double the annual median cost of a private room in a nursing home facility and four times the annual median cost of a private room in assisted living, according to Genworth.
For comparison, the median hourly wage in the USA was just a bit over $18 in 2022, median household income is around $75k. It would take four median household incomes to afford one median round-the-clock in-home care.
And then there is all that stress and loss-of-freedom experienced by family members that cannot be easily translated into monetary terms.
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Democratic No-Shows
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/us/missouri-uncontested-races-elections.html
And though defending democracy was a dominant theme of the Democratic National Convention last month, in the 2022 midterms, Democrats failed to field a single candidate for fully half of all partisan offices — well over three times the rate of Republican no-shows.
That analysis of electoral competition comes from three nonprofit groups that assembled a database of races in the 2022 election cycle for more than 29,400 partisan offices nationwide, from U.S. senator to members of local airport district boards. Of those offices, 14,450 had but one candidate.