maxlybbert

I remember when President Obama suggested “maybe you’re better off not getting the surgery but taking the painkiller” ( https://youtu.be/rin4h4cRs6Y ). That seemed to surprise many of the people who wanted a single payer option. He stopped suggesting that kind of cost-cutting that very quickly.

I also remember when a few people received anthrax in the mail. Every news story said that people who had any contact with the letter had received Cipro to avoid developing an infection. After a couple of weeks, the government actually announced that other (cheaper) antibiotics were effective against anthrax, but it was obvious that no company was going to hand their employees something other than Cipro.

Incidentally, my autistic adult son has Medicaid. I don’t think I’ve yet found a doctor who will accept it. Luckily he’s also on my health insurance.

The only real question is which kind of flour to use. I'm sure it ought to be whole wheat or a blend of whole wheat and white.

The FDA does require manufacturers to keep track of the most common allergens ( https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-food-labeling-and-critica... ), but if somebody has an uncommon allergy, they're on their own. Restaurants are regulated by state health departments instead of the USDA. California, I believe, has some allergen labeling requirements for its restaurants. Most large restaurants worry enough about liability that they disclose the information (for common allergens) voluntarily.

Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year#Annunciation_Style :

“Despite the unification of the Scottish and English royal crowns with the accession of King James VI and I in 1603, and even the union of the kingdoms themselves in 1707, England continued to use Annunciation Style while Scotland used Modern Style. This led to the act being recorded at the time in England as 6 March 1706 (rather than 1707), because in England (unlike Scotland) it fell before the new year began (on 25 March).”

It apparently caused trouble for travelers (from the New Style Calendar Act https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_1750 ):

“WHEREAS the legal Supputation of the Year of our Lord in that Part of Great Britain called England, according to which the Year beginneth on the 25th Day of March, hath been found by Experience to be attended with divers Inconveniencies, not only as it differs from the Usage of neighbouring Nations, but also from the legal Method of Computation in that Part of Great Britain called Scotlond, and from the common Usage throughout the whole Kingdom, and thereby frequent Mistakes are occasioned in the Dates of Deeds, and other Writings, and Disputes arise therefrom.”

Although, I think “common usage” in that statement implies that it was common to just do what other countries did, except when filling out legal documents.

1752 is late enough that Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others were born before that change.

I think that’s the reason that programming languages tend to adopt the proleptic Gregorian calendar and leave it up to the programmer to figure out when the calendar was adopted in the countries they care about.

Except that countries apparently had to answer various questions when they adopted the Gregorian calendar, and they didn’t all chose the same answers. Ideally, we’d have something like tzdb but for calendar adoption. But I guess the need doesn’t come up all that often.