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3·10 hours agoBonus points if you work in the medical field!
https://jurassicpark.fandom.com/wiki/Dennis_Nedry
Dennis Theodore[1] Nedry was the main antagonist during the first half of the original Jurassic Park film. He was a computer programmer at Jurassic Park. Due to his financial problems and low salary, he accepted a bribe from Biosyn to smuggle dinosaur embryos off the island.
In both the film and the novel, he is slain by a Dilophosaurus. He was directly responsible for the events that happened in both the novel and film. A combination of factors led to his demise: despite working in a career around dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, he had a limited knowledge of them, and greed, which was intertwined by desperation to pay off his debt collectors and make himself rich after that.
While true, I would point out that the low mortgage rates that increased housing prices — low mortgage rates permit people to borrow more and tends to drive up prices — in the decade-and-a-half before 2022 was unusual for the US. Prior to about 2008, interest rates were at or higher than they are today.
Here’s a graph of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
Here’s the Case-Shiller Home Price Index. This measures same-home prices — that it, it attempts to factor out changes in types of home being built, so new homes being larger won’t drive it up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPISA
It’s not adjusted for inflation, though.
Here’s an inflation-adjusted graph:
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-vs-inflation/
Between about 2011 and 2022, the real price of a given house rose rapidly in a low mortgage rate environment. In 2022, mortgage rates returned to something that’s more historically-normal.
I expect that to sell a house in this environment, a homeowner will probably have to cut what they’re asking.
5·19 hours agoConsumer acceptability is key, acknowledges Mr Eiden. Most people don’t want to look like cyborgs: “We need to make our products actually look like existing eyewear.”
looks dubious
I can believe that most people want something that they consider stylish. However, I’m skeptical that most people specifically want something to look like existing stuff. Clothing has shifted a lot over the years and centuries; it’s not as if every person putting something on their body said “it has to look like the stuff that’s come before”, or present-day vision equipment would look like this:
Or this:
I was pretty irritated when I noticed that myself. I’m guessing that there’s some form of attack or class of attacks that this is designed to avoid (e.g. IIRC a webpage opened from a file:// URL can have Javascript access files via file:// as well, and I imagine theoretically could upload them somewhere or something), but it sure is goddamn obnoxious.
My guess is that you can probably fire up a local HTTP server on your phone and view it via that. I don’t think that Android phones set up a firewall by default, so have it listen on a loopback address, like 127.0.0.1.
Based on this, you can use a file manager to share the HTML file with Firefox.
6·2 days agoI’m assuming that you’re guessing “female”?
https://sexualityandthecity.com/2016/11/26/when-women-wanted-sex-much-more-than-men/
In the 1600s, a man named James Mattock was expelled from the First Church of Boston. His crime? It wasn’t using lewd language or smiling on the Sabbath or anything else that we might think the Puritans had disapproved of. Rather, James Mattock had refused to have sex with his wife for two years.
Looking at other sources, the expulsion was in 1640.
IIRC, border agents do have some expanded authority within a certain distance of the border, and that might affect some of California, but not Los Angeles.
kagis
Ahhh. Apparently water borders count. Doesn’t need to be a land border.
Agents are granted by federal law the ability to stop and question people within 100 miles (161 kilometers) of the border, including the coasts. They have heightened authority to board and search buses, trains and vessels without a warrant within the zone.
That encompasses vast swaths of the country that include about two-thirds of the U.S. population, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Los Angeles is well within 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean.
4·2 days agoThey’ve apparently got an above-ground railroad, though.
14·2 days agoYou typically need to notify other members of a treaty of your withdrawal, and then there’s some time delay until you’re no longer bound by the terms. You can’t just secretly withdraw, or treaties wouldn’t be very meaningful.
EDIT: Yeah. The submitted article says that it happens in six months from today, and here’s the treaty text on withdrawal:
Article 20
Duration and withdrawal
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This Convention shall be of unlimited duration.
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Each State Party shall, in exercising its national sovereignty, have the right to withdraw from this Convention. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other States Parties, to the Depositary and to the United Nations Security Council. Such instrument of withdrawal shall include a full explanation of the reasons motivating this withdrawal.
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Such withdrawal shall only take effect six months after the receipt of the instrument of withdrawal by the Depositary. If, however, on the expiry of that six- month period, the withdrawing State Party is engaged in an armed conflict, the withdrawal shall not take effect before the end of the armed conflict.
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The withdrawal of a State Party from this Convention shall not in any way affect the duty of States to continue fulfilling the obligations assumed under any relevant rules of international law.
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2·2 days agoI don’t know how the Dutch see it, but I’m pretty sure that the US considers extreme ultraviolet lithography to be a technology with strategic importance. That is, it’s more than some company’s sales at stake.
IIRC, they no longer print it, but you can probably buy used collections.
kagis
Yeah. The final print edition was 2010:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for ‘British Encyclopaedia’) is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1768, although the company has changed ownership seven times. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes[1] and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com
Printed for 244 years, the Britannica was the longest-running in-print encyclopaedia in the English language. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, in three volumes.
Copyright (well, under US law, and I assume elsewhere) also doesn’t restrict actually making copies, but distributing those copies. If you want to print out a hard copy of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica website for your own use in the event of Armageddon, I imagine that there’s probably software that will let you do that.
91·2 days agoOh, that’s interesting. Didn’t know about that.
I don’t think that there’s a way to list instances that a PieFed instance has defederated from, unlike Lemmy; while both have a list of instances at /instances, only Lemmy indicates which ones have been defederated from. It was a helpful tool to help me guess the sort of content an instance had.
Like:
https://lemmy.world/instances (under “Blocked Instances”)
https://piefed.world/instances
EDIT: It does show the last time that the instance sent data, and I guess you could sort of guess that if a large instance that probably has activity hasn’t sent data to the PieFed instance recently — like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net on piefed.world — then they’re probably defederated. But it doesn’t clearly indicate that this is the case, either.
ragingHungryPanda
And poop while I was doing it.
looks skeptical
Bamboo is pretty fibrous.
I mean, the bar to go get a reference book to look something up is significantly higher than “pull my smartphone out of my pocket and tap a few things in”.
Here’s an article from 1945 on what the future of information access might look like.
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm
The Atlantic Monthly | July 1945
“As We May Think”
by Vannevar Bush
Eighty years ago, the stuff that was science fiction to the people working on the cutting edge of technology looks pretty unremarkable, even absurdly conservative, to us in 2025:
Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go. The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.
Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.
Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition, costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the cost of materials.
If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.
A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2016/10/18/puritans-and-sex-myth/
Debunking the Myth Surrounding Puritans and Sex
The Puritans weren’t prudish. In fact, they were passionate.
From the beginning, Puritans maintained sexual intercourse was necessary for procreation, but also asserted sex was an important way for couples to bond in a loving relationship.
“They talk about the duty to desire, that you’re supposed to engage in intercourse with your married partner and that this is good,” says Bremer. “There will actually be some people in early New England who are censured by the church because they have deprived their married partner of sex for three months or more and this is seen as bad.”
I don’t think the Puritans had any issue with pregnant people having sex.
The U.S. Navy had (in)famously outlawed alcohol aboard ships in 1914, six years before Prohibition, but it still needed to fill the gap in morale boosting power a sailors daily drink left behind. As any noncommissioned officer who has overseen junior enlisted Americans will tell you: if you don’t give them something to boost their morale, they can get into anything … and you might not like what they find.
Luckily, they found ice cream. Airmen in the Army Air Forces were using open seats on B-17 Flying Fortresses as ice-cream freezers during bombing missions (where temperatures could be as low as -25°F). Navy and Marine Corps aviators would mix canned milk and cocoa powder in fuel drop tanks, then fly missions, returning to their otherwise tropical or desert climates with tanks full of sweet treats.
After an assistant to then-Under Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote that “ice cream, in my opinion, has been the most neglected of all the important morale factors,” the secretary made getting ice cream to those troops his highest priority. Thereafter, any ship large enough would be fitted with a so-called “gedunk bar” (gedunk being the World War II sailor’s word for ice cream, but now just means any junk food). The ice cream had the triple benefit of providing calories, helping beat the heat and boosting morale.
Funderburg writes that by February 1945, at the same time the Allies were preparing to invade Germany in earnest, the Army began building ice-cream factories to bring half-pint cartons “right into the foxholes.”
https://www.thefoodhistorian.com/blog/world-war-wednesday-ice-cream-is-a-fighting-food
By the Second World War, ice cream was firmly entrenched aboard Naval vessels. So much so, that battleships and aircraft carriers were actually outfitted with ice cream machinery, and by the end of the war the Navy was training sailors in their uses through special classes.
QuickCheck: Did a submarine’s crew steal a battleship’s ice cream maker?
Yes, this really happened when the US Navy submarine USS Tang was docked in San Francisco at the same time the battleship USS Tennessee was also in port.
As explained in the Unauthorized History of the Pacific War Podcast by The National WWII Museum staff historian Seth Paridon, ice cream machines were generally only carried by ships like battleships, aircraft carriers, and heavy cruisers with one or more ice cream machines on board.
Paridon then said that the Tang’s skipper - then-Lieutenant Commander Richard O’Kane – gave an order to the sub’s Chief of the Boat, William F. Ballinger, to “go find me an ice-cream maker, by hook or by crook and get it installed aboard this submarine.”
“Ballinger went and ‘liberated’ the ice cream maker aboard the battleship Tennessee that was tied up in San Francisco at that time, and literally just a couple of hours after Tang had shoved off, the shore patrol showed up looking for their ice cream maker that was now aboard a submarine,” he said.
https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-trending/navy-tradition-ice-cream-pilots/
The Navy tradition that rewards ice cream for rescued pilots
Imagine you’re a Navy torpedo pilot in World War II. Your life is exciting, your job is essential to American security and victory, but you spend most days crammed into a metal matchbox filled with gas, strapped with explosives, and flying over shark-filled waters of crushing depths. But your Navy wants to get you back if you ever go down, so it came up with a novel way of rescuing you: ice cream bounties.
So, carrier crews came up with a silly but effective way of rewarding boat crews and those of smaller ships for helping their downed pilots out: If they brought a pilot back to the carrier, the carrier would give them gallons of ice cream and potentially some extra goodies like a bottle or two of spirits.
The exact amount of ice cream transferred was different for different carriers, and it seems to have changed over time. But Daniel W. Klohs was a sailor on the USS Hancock in World War II, and he remembered being on the bridge the first time a destroyer brought back a pilot:
I told the captain (Hickey) that it was customary to award the DD with 25 gallons of ice cream for the crew and two bottles of whiskey for the Capt. and Exec. We ended up giving 30 gallons of ice cream because it was packed in 10-gallon containers. This set a new precedent for the return of aviators.
4·3 days agoDrivers can face a $25 fine, even if there’s no posted signage or painted curb
It seems like it’d help avoid a lot of confusion, especially with drivers who may not live in the city, to paint the curbs.
The US manufactures them for considerably less than $4k/round.
https://www.reddit.com/r/army/comments/u9012h/how_much_does_a_155mm_m795_round_cost/
IIRC the EU is paying something like $4k for their domestic production, which I assume may relate to the fact that they’re building new capacity and paying for it out of the shell price.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/06/20/european-ammo-firms-tell-eu-to-hurry-up-with-155mm-shell-aid-top-up/