thinkharder

From the LA Times article: "At one point the members broke into two groups, each standing around separate pianos to sing.". If you've ever watched a choir practice, this likely meant everyone facing inward toward the piano, and you can't stand too far apart because you need to hear everyone else to harmonize and adjust your volume. Singing loudly is probably only second to sneezing in terms of projecting atomized 'stuff' from the respiratory tract into the air. So there were 30 people standing in a circle spraying droplets directly at each other.

It may very well be that it's very easy to spread this virus, but I don't think this incident is a good indication of that. It seems more an indication of how poorly even well-intentioned people understood the contagiousness and what exactly social distancing meant at the time this happened (1 month ago).

I think both the multiple app store and 'apple isn't responsible for promoting your app' are both red herrings. The issue is that the search function in the app store lies to end users. To use the example in the article, if I go to the app store and search for "weigh loss tracker" I get 5 result, none of which is Happy Scale. The default sort is 'relevance', whatever that means, but i can change that to Most Popular. Still no Happy Scale. If I search for "Happy Scale" i get no result. From my perspective as an end user of the App Store, I'm being lied to. The search is not returning honest results that correspond to what I search for. This is not what the end user expects of search, they expect true organic results based on what they searched for, or at worst, a complete list with the apps Apple wants to promote at the top. In this case they are getting a curated subset of those results and not being told this is the case. Also, consider that the app store is unusable without search. There are million of apps, so is no way to browse it to find what you're looking for. If search doesn't return it, it might as well not exist in the app store.

Unless this is thoroughly explained somewhere in the dev documentation, then developers are being lied to also.

People threw a fit when Google changed the search result UI so that it became impossible to tell paid results from organic results. This is similar but worse. Google just put the paid results above the organic ones. Apple completely removes the organic results at their whim.

The author should have been promoting the app thru multiple channels and not relying on the app store search exclusively, this was an obvious mistake. This doesn't justify what Apple did though. It's their app store, and they can do what they want, but this, although legal, is pretty sleazy IMO.

I have a tendency to let frustration build up until I lose my temper. The issue is that I don't realize I'm doing it until I'm ready to explode. My last dog was so sensitive to that, that she could tell when I was starting to get angry before I would realize it. I would be sitting at my computer, struggling with something, and I'd feel her poke me in the leg with her nose, then I knew it was time to take a break. I think she could hear that i was typing 'harder' when I got angry, but it could have been any one of a lot of tiny signals. Point is, she was consistently aware of me getting angry before I was. I miss that dog...

Most MDM's install both a cert and a profile on iOS devices that allow the MDM admin to do just about anything. Any company-owned device is going to come to the user with this pre-installed, and non-removable by the user. I'd be astounded if a company the size, and with the security stance of Tesla didn't use the most intrusive MDM available.

The definitions of equanimity and disassociation sound really similar, but they are very different things. In Equanimity, you feel a connection to everything, with the sense of self and ego diminished or completely removed. In Disassociation, you feel disconnected from everything, floating free and completely alone. To be honest, I've never experienced equanimity, so I'm going off the descriptions I've read and had explained to me, in my own attempts at mindfulness meditation. Disassociation, I've experienced multiple times. It tends to happen when one is in an extremely stressful emotional state, and it's a big relief when it happens in that context, but it's a self-defense strategy, and not a healthy state. I suspect you could achieve it accidentally when trying for equanimity, but it isn't equanimity.

That's what is known as 'feed corn' and is grown specifically as livestock feed. The specific strains of corn are optimized for producing maximum plant material, which is mostly stalk and leaves. A field of feed corn plants will usually be very tall, 8-15 feet. In contrast a field of sweet corn (grown for human consumption and possibly for processing into other foods), will be much shorter, since it's optimized to produce the most, largest and highest sugar content corn kernels, and any energy the plant spends to grow a tall stalk is wasted.

Feed corn is harvested with big combines that just cut down the whole plant at ground level and chop everything up. The results are piled up and left to ferment. Once fermented, you have silage.

I'd be surprised to learn anyone was harvesting sweet corn and saving the waste material to make silage. The equipment isn't designed to keep that stuff it just gets dumped back onto the field. And those strains of corn don't produce very much plant material since they're optimized for small plants and big cobs. Additionally you'd have to load all the waste material into trucks, which would significantly raise the cost of harvesting. And dumping that stuff back onto the field is a good thing, it helps keep the dirt down for the winter and decomposes into usable nutrients and fibrous material which helps reduce compacting, etc. It'd be expensive and labor intensive to try to capture the waste material from feed corn. It's easier and more economical to just plant feed corn or buy silage.

You're right about straw, though. The harvesters are specifically designed to leave the straw in row pile behind them. Then you run a baler over that and it leaves a row of straw bales in the field. Then you run a stacker over that (or a flatbed trailer and buck 'em by hand) and you have a haystack.

I had a good friend who just had open "hang out" time every day after work in his garage. There was a group of about 30 friends who might stop by any time between 5 and 8 PM, have a beer, hang out and BS. Sometimes it was just Paul and 1 or 2 others, sometimes 15 people showed up, sometimes Paul wasn't even there, but the garage was always open (if you had the code). I used to go almost every day between work and home, it's how i made about half the friends I have now. It was also where weekend plans got made and many a hunting/fishing/camping trip got planned there.

That's over now and I really miss it. Buddy had some health problems and ended up with an overwhelming opiate addiction and just stopped hanging out with anyone. Some of the friends still get together for a weekend poker game but it's not the same. It was so cool to have a place you could go hang out after work where you knew everyone was fun to be around and they liked having you around. You never know who would be there or what the conversation would be but it was always a good time.

I've tried to get the same thing going myself, but have never been successful. I'm not sure how you get that started. Once it's going, it's self-sustaining, but you have to reach a critical mass of participants and has to occur really regularly, even daily. I think maybe it takes a very specific kind of person to be the host.

Anyway, that's what the OP's campfire analogy made me think of. I really miss it...

I had a similar experience. I show up at the ER and they do their thing. Doctor says, "the symptoms indicate appendicitis, but the tests (which are mostly just poking you in the side and seeing how bad it hurts) are inconclusive. Normal procedure is to send you home and see how it goes, but I'd really feel more comfortable if we took a CT scan to be sure". At this point I'm in so much pain if he said he wanted to do a voodoo ceremony, I'd have been all in. CT scan reveals I had a weirdly shaped appendix, hidden behind a couple of folds of intestine, in a slightly different area than they are usually in. So the poking test didn't work cause they were poking around in the wrong area. If they'd sent me home I'd have come back with a burst appendix, which is potentially fatal. Ironically, just as they were wheeling me into the operating room, a woman came into the ER with an actual burst appendix so they wheeled me out and took her first.

I had a dog who started having a runny bloody nose all the time. 4 xrays, 2 nasal endooscope procedures and several thousand dollars and still can't figure out what's wrong. In desperation took him to a really good emergency/surgery vet clinic, they did a CT scan and it reveals a large tumor growing on the nasal cavity side of the soft palate. Confirmed with an endoscope going into the mouth and back up into the sinuses, couldn't see it from the front. Super frustrating because it was too late to do anything at this point.

I think using CT scans in the context of a checkup, to look for problems, is bad, because as discussed elsewhere on this thread, if you go looking for something, you'll find something. But if you already know there is a problem, they're the best tool we have for looking inside the body without cutting.

Exactly. A couple of years ago at my yearly eye checkup found a small hole in my retina. Pretty common with near-sighted people. The eyeball is elongated and this stretches the retina a little bit. It's also a fast track to complete blindness in that eye. You might see the hole as distortion in your vision, depending on where in your eye it is, or you may not be able to see it at all. If untreated the whole retina will detach and you are permanently blind in that eye, and there's no treatment. If I hadn't gone to that yearly checkup, there's a good chance I would have been blind in that eye before the next one.

The treatment for the hole in the retina was one of the most awesome procedures I've ever had. The doctor puts on this big headset that completely covers his face, with multiple microscope-type lenses and a visible green laser shooting out the front. Looks like the borg. He holds your eye open and using the visible laser to aim, points at the edge of the hole and activates the IR laser, blap, blap, blap (it actually makes that sound) as it stitches the edge of the hole down. It feels like you're getting poked in the eye hard each time so he has to stop after a few cause your eye freaks out and moves. Wait a few seconds till it settles down and continue. My eye felt like it had been punched hard, but that faded by the end of the day. Repair is still holding coming up on 3 years.

Go to to your annual medical checkups.

How much farmland did you drive thru as a kid vs now? I live in a small city and never get bugs on the windshield or grill. When I drive out of town and thru the surrounding farmland there are tons of them. To be fair, though, I grew up in farming country and it there used to be way more than there are now if my memory serves me. It does appear that there are fewer total insects in those areas. The farmers are getting better at controlling them, I think.

As someone who lives in a state with state-run liquor, this is the exact opposite of how it actually plays out. Prices are anywhere from 30-100+% more than across the border in a state without a state-run liquor policy. Because the government has a monopoly there is no competition to drive prices lower and since the government monopoly gets to keep the profit there is no incentive for them to lower prices. Furthermore, a big part of the reason that liquor is state-run where it is, with few, scattered stores that close at 7:00 PM and on Sunday and holidays, is to encourage reduced alcohol consumption. Raising prices is an effective mechanism for that too.

I think if you set up these kind of government-run dispensaries, you have to mandate that their purpose is ensuring product and supply chain quality (not just making fat bags of cash), and that revenue above COGS has to be restricted to what it costs to run the program and maybe a small emergency/maintenance fund. Otherwise the natural incentive that apply to any monopoly encourage them to raise prices to the max the market will bear and rent-seek. It's civically conscientious to think that the government would be advocating for the people by working to proved the lowest possible prices, but that isn't how any government-run 'vices' dispensary program I've ever seen plays out IRL.

"If they punch you in the face your options are:" "Ok so how do you de-escalate when the perp charges for you?"

In both the scenarios you present, it is far to late to draw anything. By the time the person is punching or charging you from less than 22 feet away (google the 21 foot rule) you do not have time to draw a weapon, taser or baton. Your only option at that point is direct physical altercation. If you try to draw something it's going to get knocked out of your hand during the altercation and then it's a scramble to see who picks it up. As for getting the weapon taken away from you, while it's in the holster, cops really, really ought to be using and training with level 2 or 3 retention holsters. These make it easy (if you train with it) to draw a weapon from a holster on your hip, but almost impossible to get the weapon out when it's on someone else. If a cop chooses not to use a retention holster, that's their choice, but it's trading safety for convenience.

As to the Prevention article, it seems to me that if we want to reduce the number of cops killed with guns, then the low hanging fruit is that we need to stop sending lone officers to domestic disturbance calls. This study makes it clear that DD calls are an extremely risky type of call and police should approach them extremely carefully. " they would be ambushed and they weren't prepared," Swedler says. No less-lethal weaponry is going to solve that problem.

The point I and others are trying to is that there are very few scenarios where using a taser actually makes sense. Most of the time when they get deployed it's as an alternative to deescalation, or to punish a perp for not 'complying'. They're not intended as a substitute for a firearm, they're a substitute for a baton or physically taking down a suspect, and I think the evidence at this point is pretty clear that they are not any better at being less-lethal.

But to get back to the subject of the article, the issue isn't cops using tasers (although there are issues there), the problem we're having is that Taser the company is inappropriately inserting themselves into the legal process, and using bad 'science' and the threat of lawsuits to prevent the actual real-world safety of their product from being analyzed. This is bad and wrong, I think we can all agree.