Johnny555
Joined 11 years ago
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Member since
Jul 23
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 days ago
Comment · 3 days ago
The hand-filled ballot seems safer, few people are going to check every single race to make sure the printed ballot matches -- my ballot had about 2 dozen races to vote in (it included a bunch of judges, school board positions, etc), that's a lot of double checking. Make the person fill it out by hand first, then read it by computer.
Comment · 3 days ago
And they should use paper ballots. Use machines to tabulate, but keep paper ballots as a record and for recount.
Comment · 3 days ago
We always raked our lawn when I was a child (and I did a lot of the raking), as did my grandparents who lived in their house for 40 years before I was born, yet there were always plenty of fireflies. I don't think you can blame raking for killing them off.
Comment · 5 days ago
>“Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release
That's probably true, but kids want a lot of things they shouldn't have. I'm sure I would have loved to have a real phone as a toddler, but my sister and I got a lot of mileage out of our Fisher Price phone, making lots of pretend calls, which was probably better for our developing brains than a real phone.
Comment · 6 days ago
To be fair, this likely only affects millions (if that many) devices -- most people don't sideload apps, and of those that do, most of those users are more than capable of reenabling it through developer tools. The vast majority of Android users don't want to sideload (and shouldn't sideload since they don't know how to validate the safety of the app and they'll sideload anything a website tells them to)
Comment · 11 days ago
I've found that it's better than most service status pages -- Downdetector shows when users are reporting problems, while most service status pages only post significant confirmed outages, but there can still be service affecting issues that don't show up on the status page yet (or ever)
Comment · 12 days ago
It's likely that Iran will come out a loser, but also likely that the USA will lose too -- winning a war is more than making the other side lose which is what keeps getting the USA on the hook for multi-trillion dollar, decades long wars. Removing unwanted leadership is only effective if there's a viable plan to replace that leadership.
Yet the chronic 'loser' US is somehow the superpower hegemon
And the USA is even losing its hegemony with the Iran war that's causing global pain without global consensus that it was neccessary, but the real loser in the USA is the American taxpayer who gives up domestic social benefits to fund these wars.
Comment · 12 days ago
While the war was unnecessary (and likely illegal), I think it should still be an eye opener for the US Military (or at least their civilian overseers) that war is changing (well, has already changed) and pitting $5M long lead time interceptors against $5,000 drones is not sustainable.
And, the lesson that the USA never seems to learn is that just having air superiority doesn't win a war.
Comment · 13 days ago
if somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, why should you get to take their house away for that?
Because they signed the paperwork saying they wanted to be part of the little club and gave that little club the power to take away their house.
Comment · 14 days ago
You should probably use a browser that has a "reader mode", Firefox even lets you change the "reader mode" font.
Comment · 16 days ago
We have removed the product and will use our patent on it to prevent anyone else from making one in the future.
Doesn't the patent just document how it works so individuals can create and release 3D models of the device so anyone can create their own?
Comment · 17 days ago
That's why I used the PCP as an example, most people start with a PCP, and though the doctors he refers out to may want to do a procedure to maximize their RVU's, the PCP gets no incentive for referring out that patient (and anti-kickback regulations prohibit that kind of compensation even if the PCP and specialist are in the same practice). So the PCP helps keep this in check.
Even ignoring RVU's, most specialists will want to treat a problem with their speciality if it would be an effective treatment so a second opinion is almost always a good idea. I shopped around for treatment for a procedure I needed, the robotic surgeon recommended robotic surgery, the laser specialist recommended laser surgery, the general internal medicine doctor gave a few less invasive alternatives. I researched them all, went back to my PCP and picked the procedure I wanted to have done.
Comment · 17 days ago
Most doctors don't have as strong a profit motive as a dentist.
Most people see a PCP that doesn't really have the means to recommend you for thousands of dollars of treatments that he'll oversee. Instead he refers you to a specialist, but you still have your PCP to rely on to say "Hey, this specialist says I need surgery for this, is that reasonable or should I get a second opinion".
But when you go to the dentist and he says you have 15 cavities and need two root canals immediately and he can get you an appointment as soon as tomorrow to get started, a lot of people will just do it without seeking a second opinion since there's a lot of friction to finding a new dentist and undergoing a second exam.
When I needed a root canal, I self-referred myself to an endodontist both as a second opinion and for his expertise at doing the procedure. My dentist's dental tech seemed surprised I wanted to go somewhere else for the root canal, she said "Well, most people like Dr Xxxxx do it, he's very good at root canals".
Comment · 18 days ago
That depends on what they want to use it for, but we got an Echo Show 8 for my elderly mother in law years ago for video conferencing and she loves it. Other than video conferencing she mostly uses for voice tasks like checking the weather, setting a timer or playing music so the screen doesn't need to display any text.
If not for the need for video conferencing, she'd have been fine with an audio only device.
I stopped using them when they switched to instacart -- the instacart shoppers really don't care about service, they're just trying to deliver orders as fast as possible so they can more to the next one. They'll pack ice cream with a warm rotisserie chicken so you end up with molten ice cream as it sits in their trunk for 45 minutes while they make 2 deliveries before yours. And in the half dozen or so times I used them, not a single order was correct.
Now I use Amazon Whole Foods because even though they use gig drivers for the delivery, the food is well packed (and they use foil lined bags for cold products that do a decent job of keeping cold foods cold.