Stealthisbook

The North American bits are a little weird. Colorado has an entry for Bent's Fort but not for Fort Vasquez, though both are rebuilt tourist attractions. Then there's Bishop's Castle, an actual norman style castle built outside of Pueblo by some crazed guy

Sadly, my computer has apparently rebooted multiple times this week. I didn't do it, but Microsoft decided it was for the best. I remember when a restart was something you were asked to consent to, and before that you had to affirmatively decide to perform an update.

The justification for many of these stations is emergency preparedness. They're maintained for the ability to receive and transmit emergency alerts despite power outages or transmission line cuts. The daily programming is mostly incidental beyond maintaining listenership

I remember the exploration of alcohol consumption stats from one of Michael Hobbes' podcasts and how hard it is to untangle both self-reporting and confounding factors. Like, the population of reported non-drinkers is dominated by both religious abstainers who may otherwise differ culturally from the broader population, and alcoholics who've needed to cut out drinking entirely

The quoted number is awfully specific. Monthly active devices? Why not licenses since that's what they are theoretically in the business of selling? Active devices would be relevant to their ad revenue, so I'd be interested to know what's the context for the statistic and what they're actually tracking. Are enterprise and other installs that block ad telemetry included?

The Copyright Office doesn't have much to do with copyright enforcement. That's almost entirely hashed out in court. If anything, the office provides one of the few streamlining mechanisms in an unwieldy system by maintaining registration records so you can track down ownership and at least arrange licensing for works that would otherwise represent an unknown rights minefield.

There are so many layers of fraud to make this scam work. Fake enrollment seems easy enough, but financial aid requires a valid identity with real tax info. If you've already stolen an identity to snag a tax refund, I guess might as well file a FAFSA. But, the lion's share of financial aid goes directly to the school while only any remainder after tuition and fees goes to the student. I feel like unless this is happening at scale committed by relatively few actors, the return isn't worth the effort... if there isn't some further institutional coordination helping things along

AI necessarily offers strategies that are already available, and at this point can't be expected to reason out if anything is especially effective. There are services like rocketmoney that can identify subscriptions that you may no longer want or gain savings through mechanically gamed processes, and AI could certainly copy that.

It's true that the top line tuition is generally discounted through financial aid, but that's been the case for decades. People aren't shocked at the absurd tuition, but at the rate of increase that vastly outstrips aid, making the normal discounted cost increasingly unaffordable.

The actual shocking costs are buried well below the top line as services and facilities that you'd expect to be paid through tuition are separately charged but mandatory fees.

The sticking point isn't the value of the tax, it's having to individually generate the paperwork for each shipment.

YT Music is generally as good or better for casual listening. There's a potential deal breaking quirk in that some tracks are user uploads. You can find obscure stuff that's not easily available elsewhere, but I've found quite a few tracks that are low quality CD or vinyl rips, and concert bootlegs. If you build a playlist, it's not easy to weed out the trash.

The article outlines the research into how effective dazzle paint was in disguising ships from u-boats as they question the new dazzle paint jobs on Ukrainian ships. I doubt the Ukrainians are trying to fool Russian sailors so much as drones using machine learning algorithms

The de minimas threshold allows for lots of things that would otherwise be difficult to document or not worth the effort, from grandma mailing a sweater for Christmas to getting a replacement part shipped directly.

I wonder how the accounting nets out when you consider quite a lot of the costs are likely billed internally for use of Amazon infrastructure. Charging market rate for AWS hosting, billing services, etc, could helpfully make a low margin profitable operation into a tax deductible money pit.