In Amsterdam, seniors and those with disabilities can drive tiny cars (like the Japanese Kei cars, I think) on bike paths. They have the protection they need for their health issues, they go slow so their slowed reaction times aren’t a safety risk to themselves and others on a regular car road, and they have full access to groceries and medical appointments and social visits. Win-win.

In first-past-the-post election systems, campaigning on fear is well established as the winning strategy. In this case the fear the D candidate is playing on - loss of health care access - is more fact-based than the fear the R candidate is playing on - xenophobia - but both campaigns know fear-driven turnout is the only way to win.

I hope ranked choice voting makes more inroads. I am under no illusion it would break the two party system (Australia has used it for eighty years and still has two main parties), but by making second choices relevant it gives a winning election path to a pro-cooperation, get-things-done style of campaign.

You see the same effect in person, too, with HOAs being the most notorious example. But there are many volunteer-based organizations that do incredible good work. Power tripping is a thing to watch out for and build guardrails against, but thankfully it’s not universal.

Insider trading is a bipartisan rep problem for sure (legal! since they make the laws!) Not sure it’s any better or just different: in the case of the reps, the corruption wealth gains are not direct money from taxpayers. Stockholders get the short end of the stick on that one.

But the president historically has held to higher standards. What Trump is doing is a new level of corruption, both for the specific office of president and for the direct taxpayers source of his wealth gain. It’s reasonable to have fresh outrage over it, even for people with outrage fatigue on the Congress insider trading issue.

Trump famously slammed Obama’s frequent golfing at a rally in February 2016, promising that, as president, he would give up visiting his courses in Scotland and South Florida.

“I love golf, but if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again. I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again,” Trump said. “I don’t ever think I’d see anything. I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.”

And this is a conservative estimate!

Most of the costs come from military and law enforcement salaries, which haven’t kept up with inflation, so the figures aren’t adjusted to current dollars… the real costs are almost certainly higher than these unadjusted estimates.

What do you mean by “it” that they all do? Because it’s definitely not spending this much time, or amount of money per trip, that they’re all doing.

In contrast, former President Joe Biden’s trips to Wilmington, Delaware, and Rehoboth Beach cost far less than Trump’s golf trips because he used smaller aircraft or helicopters, as the local airport cannot accommodate a 747.

Former President Barack Obama was also known for his frequent golf outings, but they were far cheaper than Trump’s, as he would also use smaller aircraft or play at nearby courses, including on the course at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews.

Obligate ram breathing is kind of mind-blowing. They have to swim to flow water through their gills because their gills have no muscles to flap like most fish have.

Only a few sharks are obligate ram breathers, though. Many species are able to take breaks from swimming.

The website revamp was part of a larger overhaul of BoM’s IT systems dating back a decade that has cost taxpayers $866m after a 2015 “serious cyber intrusion” exposed vulnerabilities in its systems.

You threw out four years as an estimate of the time period involved, but if I am reading the article correctly this was more like ten years.

I work at a large company that is critically dependent on VAX software written in the 1980s for almost every aspect of functioning. This was recognized as a problem. A replacement coding and testing team was established. It included a full-time team of contractors - a handful US based and I believe dozens located in India - along with a few full-time dedicated employees and maybe a dozen each of people brought part time out of retirement (the people with the 1980s knowledge!) and people with other main jobs who had to start dedicating significant time to support.

It ran for two years, then two more years, then another year. Very much a case of “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know” in that the more functions were programmed and tested, the more edge cases and sub-function requirements were uncovered. This program has been upgraded in pieces by so many people for so many decades that no one realized how hugely complex it had become, and what an enormous undertaking it would be to replace it. But after five years - more than double the original two-year projection - it was coming together, more things being really finalized than new needs being uncovered.

And then the software that the replacement program was being written with lost support. It was too old. Documents were written to try to give some future team a better chance of success, and everything was disbanded and shut down.

Being peripherally involved in that really made me more sympathetic to fiasco large tech projects.

If it gave party leaders more in depth knowledge of which candidates had broad appeal (which is likely - knowing how popular each first + second choice combination is gives power to data analytics), they could more accurately spend resources to win more general elections. Actually giving the party more power.

Eventually. They would have to completely rebuild many of the established campaign strategy tools. I think sunk cost fallacy (we invested in these tools, we can’t switch to a system where our expensive software and stuff isn’t used!) is a more powerful block here than power hunger.

Amendment. Or as the other comment alluded to, interstate compact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

They believe the other option would have resulted in even worse outcome. As long as they can imagine it being worse, they can believe voting for their (misguided, but not as much as the other) team is the right thing to do.

The silver lining is that if their team is less inspirational, some voters will become discouraged and stay home instead of voting.

The 2026 optimistic projection is House Democrat majority, and Senate Republican majority (but narrower majority than now). And Trump will still be President in 2026.

How are Democrats supposed to imprison (executive branch) or impeach (Senate required for conviction) in 2026?

I rarely see blue jays at my feeder, and never any other corvid, but your experience shows that isn’t universal.

I did a quick search, and this post seems to say usually they only come to feeders with peanuts, but sometimes in spring and summer they will come to regular seed feeders. https://thecottonwoodpost.net/2022/05/02/the-maddening-truth-feeding-crows-and-jays-harms-other-birds/

Corvids are also good problem-solvers and learn from local flock experience, so your local population might have innovated a behavior that isn’t common to the species in general. I have seen reports of crows putting walnuts under tires of cars at red lights to crack them, or using a plastic lid to snowboard down a roof for fun, but unhooking feeders so they fall to the ground and break open is a new one for me.

Now I need the bird species to be part of the story. Most songbirds are unable to learn new whistles. Corvids (crows, ravens, magpies, mockingbirds, cat birds, etc.) are a common family that is an exception, but generally they don’t come to feeders. If it was a corvid, what was this guy putting in his feeder? Parrots are another major exception, and they will come to feeders, but they aren’t native wildlife in many parts of the world. If it was a parrot, where did this guy live?

I mean, enough that manufacturing of homogenizers is a thing. https://improbable.com/2021/05/13/shakespeare-and-the-whole-mouse-homogenizer/?amp=1

The ad features the comforting headline: “Only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds”

Insurers do this to doctors, too. They take a large “convenience fee” for electronic payment to the doctor. And they have no option to get physical checks. The relevant US regulatory agency briefly declared it illegal, but was convinced by lobbying their rule wouldn’t hold up against a lawsuit, so they withdrew it. And Congress doesn’t care to make the law more clear.

My husband and I told family what we wanted for occasions was a gift in our name to charity X. We picked one each year that takes online donations and sends cards “Person donated to us in your name!” They went along the first two years, they didn’t donate the third year, and my husband and I stopped announcing charities after that and we all went along happily without gifting.

I, a vagina-haver, had no idea until a Catholic friend in college mentioned NFP. The secular Fertility Awareness resources I ended up finding all supported my impression this isn’t widely known. That was twenty years ago, though, maybe young people these days are more body-aware?

Agree it isn’t really gross, I think it’s cool, but it seemed gross-adjacent enough I could get away with sharing in this thread.