oh absolutely, overpackaging is ridiculous. One of the ones I find most stupidly ironic is Impossible Burgers. They go on about how environmentally friendly they are as opposed to actual meat, which is probably true, but then it's in this absurd plastic blister-pack thing...there's got to be a better way to do that. I guess they have to start somewhere with this stuff though, and shopping bags are probably one of the easiest (comparatively) things to go after.

It's a function of density. Even if it was legal to do right on red in Manhattan, I'd never even try it, just way too many pedestrians. Other places with fewer people walking it makes far more sense. People do need to be way more attentive when they're doing it though.

As long as they're in good shape, offer them on something like a community Facebook page. Whenever I see them on mine they're usually gone pretty fast.

Okay, but that's a much lower number than "everyone". Even if it's as high as 50% of people still need those bags to clean up after their dog or for trash, which I seriously doubt, it's still half as many bags being needlessly thrown away. Also, for cleaning up after dogs, shopping bags were always a horrible choice. You can get rolls of biodegradable bags that clip onto your leash for a couple of bucks that take up less space than a single grocery bag in your pocket and won't leave you hanging when your realize you forgot to grab a bag on the way out or a hand full of shit when you realize that there's a hole in the bag.

> Oh I know it will not happen. Because pig headed NJ towns won't give up their fiefdoms. You'd rather drowned in taxes and make grand speeches rather than regionalize schools, fire, police, ems.

We're talking about EMS and Fire, not police and schools. How exactly do you think volunteers who don't get paid for their time are driving up taxes by having them be town based? And before you say equipment, it'd be the same amount either way and it would be even more expensive because the volunteers do fundraising to cover part (or sometimes even all) of the cost. Firehouses service an area, you can't just close them all and send them from the "central" firehouse 40 minute away. Same goes for ambulances. Police have patrol areas so you could do that but, just in case you weren't aware of this, fire trucks and ambulances don't just cruise around looking for fires or patients. So, do tell, what are these great savings that you imagine could be had by switching to a paid, regionalized EMS or Fire service?

> Because it isn't. Not to this issue. I live in a part of NJ where we have actual, paid EMS. The ambulance comes when I call it. What a miracle. Can I or the city control insurance? No. Are we better off for having a public EMS? Yes.

This may be shocking to you, but...the exact same thing happens here only without the bill for however many thousands of dollars the ambulance company or hospital charges. I've lived in NJ for nearly 5 decades, always in towns with volunteer ambulance corps, and that's always been the case. If for some reason a crew can't be raised, one from a mutual aid town comes. And don't tell me that that "can't" happen with a paid squad, because it absolutely does. Economics dictates that they run as close to the minimum number of rigs as possible and sometimes that isn't enough and they need backup from another company or hospital. Further, EMS pays shit. It's embarrassing how low it is and they're having problems with both high churn rates and difficulty hiring so you know what happens? Empty rigs because there's no crew.

> You want to solve all of healthcare... I applaud you and we'd probably agree. I just want normal, functioning emergency response.

Yes, you're fucking right that we should "solve" healthcare. I just think it might be a good idea to do it before we do something that will make things objectively worse.

> It is idiotic when it breaks down and no ambulance responds when called.

And yet I never actually see that happening. But yeah, lets throw out a system that works and saves money for a clusterfuck nightmare that has people literally begging rescuers to call them an Uber for their crushed leg because that's preferable to them than adding to their already crushing bills. Great idea.

I don't care if you mean towns, regions, continents or stellar clusters, it will not happen. How do I know this? Because what I described isn't a hypothetical, it's what actually happens.

You're brushing off the issue of insurance as if it's not really relevant, but it's central to the whole issue which is in towns with volunteers the service is free and done by people who genuinely care, as opposed to people being charged thousands of dollars and provided by people who ironically often can't afford to be transported in their own ambulance is something happens to them.

Imagine calling a service run for the public good by volunteers "idiotic" and yet being completely ignorant of the consequences of your own staggeringly stupid "preference".

You haven't stumbled across a great new idea, you're asking for something that is literally helping to bankrupt people right now. Towns will NOT create their own funded regional EMS, they'll go with private contracted services or or services run by the hospitals and those are expensive. You say insurance will take care of it. Gee, great if you're insured, and if the EMS that picks you up takes your insurance.

Here's what happens when you get the paid ambulance services you think you want. I'll stick with our amazing volunteer services thanks.

So you're in favor of yet more crippling medical billing for people? Because that's what you get when the volunteers close up shop, either private ambulances or hospital EMTs, both of which will potentially cost you around a grand or more. Towns will NOT stand up their own EMS that comes out of tax money like the police and we know this for a fact because it happens over and over. Nobody in my town, with its dedicated volunteer squad, will ever be heard begging people to not call an ambulance for them because they can't afford it.

EDIT: So the coward blocked me right after he made his last comment so I can't read his comments or reply anymore. Support your local volunteers!

Yeah, I got that letter as well after 8 days. The kids each had 3 days out for random colds, then tested positive for COVID. The school nurse told us minimum 5 days out after testing positive, so we kept them home for the week as requested even though they seemed fine after 2 or 3. Then we got a letter that seemed vaguely threatening regarding "truancy". You know, because we did what they requested.

> Some of the more technical commentators now refer to Chat GPT as being merely “spicy autocomplete” which is a pretty on-the-nose description.

That vastly understates what it does. Chat GPT can be a very convincing conversationalist. It can't always convincingly pass as human, but the fact is that it can make someone feel like they're talking to an intelligent entity and it has the potential to be hugely influential. Take a look in some of the subreddits for AI Chats like Replika or Chai and you'll see plenty of people who treat AIs like actual friends and companions. The potential for someone to take control of these things and use them to subtlety influence people is a very real concern going forward if they become widely used.

It depends specifically on what kind of "hacking" is happening. I'd be far more concerned with someone who can compromise a "trusted" AI and get it to start trying to influence people with targeted propaganda than I would be about someone standing up "RusBotGPT".

None of those examples relate to the usage that's being talked about. "Rice Burner" came into wide use in the 80s as a disparaging term for Japanese cars, and was especially popular with fans of American muscle cars. The implication is that they literally use rice as fuel instead of gasoline because rice is a stereotypical staple in Asian diets. Definitely started as an insult, and pretty similarly racist to linking black people and fried chicken and watermelon. At this point it's become such common usage that it might be headed in the direction of "Paddy Wagon" (a slur referring to lawlessness among Irish immigrants), meaning that the original disparaging intent and meaning is becoming forgotten and use is fairly mainstream.

Riverdale - I guess it's okay for what it is. Seems to be in better condition than the other NJ Walmarts I've been in, but that's not really a very high bar. The only time I go there is if I have an immediate need for something specific that I can't get somewhere else.

There are legal restrictions on who can direct traffic, so standing there with a flag at a roadblock might be okay but that person can't actually direct anyone to do anything unless they've been certified for it. Also, people are assholes. If they think there's no consequences for just ignoring your roadblock, they will - I've manned roadblocks during storms and had people call me an asshole, drive around me, and go straight into 5' deep flood water. Same type of roadblock with a cop at the end of it doesn't usually see problems like that. If I had a construction site going that I really really didn't want people driving into, I'd prefer to have a cop doing traffic control over a flag-man any day.

> exactly a year ago yesterday we had a massive snowstorm.

Massive? I don't know where you are, but I had that come up in my Facebook memories thing yesterday. It was a picture of my new snowblower, which I only used because I'd never tried it before. It was barely enough to bother and if I didn't want to test the machine out I probably would have done it almost as easily with a shovel. Scrolling through my pictures, there was barely any left at all a couple of days later. It was hardly more than a dusting.

> Do they have their own vaccines?

No

> Or do they not vaccinate their population?

It's unclear what they're actually doing, but they may be vaccinating at least part of their population with a Chinese made vaccine (the effectiveness of which is very questionable)

No, but odds are if you've been vaccinated you're much less likely to get seriously ill or die from it.

I'd be stunned to find out he isn't fully vaccinated, probably with either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines. They're not available in NK, but it would be trivially easy for him to get his hands on whichever ones he wanted for himself and select friends/family.

It's really not though. It shares no actual code from proprietary UNIX, and UNIX is an actual certification which Linux doesn't have. If anything, calling Linux UNIX takes away from all the work that Linus and the others did; they didn't simply repackage UNIX code, they wrote it from scratch and did an amazing job.

> Essentially all servers run in unix, mac os is unix, and Android phones are unix.

Not quite. MacOS is a certified UNIX system, but Android is Linux which is a UNIX derivative clone. At this point, in sheer numbers there are more Linux servers than there are UNIX ones.

Linux was built to be a UNIX clone by Linus Torvolds and a host of open-source developers, and has no direct links to UNIX, which was developed originally by AT&T. Linux is a fully open-source OS, while UNIX is a mix (BSD is partially open-source, but as far as I know none of the others are).

Edit: Okay, this isn't a debatable point. Only systems certified by The Open Group are UNIX. Others can be similar to UNIX, or clones of UNIX, but they are not UNIX. Linux has never been certified as UNIX, and even if they requested certification they would not pass the requirements because while Linux is very similar to UNIX, it doesn't meet the benchmark requirements. Downvoting me doesn't change reality.

Fun fact...what Al Gore said about his role in the internet is largely correct. The actual quote that people turned into "I invented the internet" was:

> "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system".

This is true. He was the first major politician to publicly recognize the potential of a large interlinked network, and he pushed hard for the expansion of ARPANET and public access to it. Would we have the internet today without him? Probably, but arguably it would be a number of years behind where it is and might not look like it does now since the drivers very well might have been the large "walled-garden" systems like CompuServe and America Online rather than public infrastructure. Without the expansion of ARPANET into the Internet, there would have been no common infrastructure for the World Wide Web.

Vint Cerf, co-creator of TCP/IP which makes him one of the actual original "inventors" of the internet, wrote a piece defending Gore on this topic. This part gets pretty much to the point:

> "Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

>No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time."

Basically, right-wing radio took a significant accomplishment that Gore made and turned it into an insult. It kind of reminds me of the McDonald's "too hot coffee" lawsuit in that way.

Counterpoint, stop forcing conscripts to do a job that they claim is critical.

I personally wouldn't put a PIN number into a gas pump, but that's kind of beside the point...using a debit card for purchases is a bad idea. You don't get the same protections as you do with a credit card, and any reimbursements you get if someone skims your card can take time to process and you're out the cash in the meantime. I get not wanting to carry a balance on a credit card, but just pay it before that happens, you can pay it off as often as you like to make sure you don't run up a balance. It also improves your credit score to use and pay on a credit card regularly.

> Google says the card number can be stolen using a skimmer, then use a magnetic card writer on a blank card to create a cloned physical credit card.

This is almost certainly what happened. The last time I had this, I used my card at a restaurant in Ridgewood and within 20 minutes I got pings that it was being used (and declined) at stores in Paramus and Ramsey. Luckily this was back when I used a Google Wallet card, so I'd only keep a few bucks on it and transfer amounts onto it as needed for exactly this situation. My guess is that the waiter in the restaurant skimmed the card and gave it straight to a couple of friends to try to use it right away, but Ridgewood PD refused to look into it and when I tried to give the restaurant owner a heads-up that someone was skimming cards in the place she just screamed at me over the phone and said nobody there would ever do that. At this point I almost never use a physical card anymore to avoid this crap.

I just read the thread in /r/Ukraine, those people were waiting to welcome two Ukrainian soldiers that were coming to be fitted for prosthetics

EDIT: wow, who's the asshole that would downvote this? Ukrainian troops who need help are welcome here, if that's a problem for you, perhaps you're living in the wrong place.