Yeah, if this is what it takes to get new design nuclear facilities in the US, then I’m counting it a win, but I won’t count it either way until the watts come out. Who knows: if they run ok, an actual power company might even try one.

I’m not sure that one 69-year-old wall puncher really counts as ‘going up,’ but bones that old get pretty brittle.

“Corporate meterologists” basically just put pretty graphics on top of NOAA forecasts.

Yeah, it’s the screening that’s free. If that turns something up, then it transitions to “care.”

I’ve had the same experience with “wellness” check-ups: if I mention some complaint to the doc during the visit, it suddenly becomes “visit with complaint” and costs me $120.

Fun fact: for people over 45, colonoscopy screening for cancer is always free. If your insurance tries to make you pay for it, report them to your state insurance commissioner or the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. ACA made a lot of preventative medicine & screenings free.

I’d say colonoscopy, esp if you’re over 45, but those are required by law to have no out-of-pocket costs, regardless.

As an old fart, I actively dislike photorealistic graphics in most cases. I’m playing a game, and I kind of want it to look like a game, which generally means more surrealistic - exaggerated contrast, high saturation, low texture - than realistic. I’d rather play where the characters look like caricatures than my next door neighbor. And that doesn’t even go into great games with sprite-like graphics.

Enough is enough. You’ve saturated the art budget, it’s time to pay writers more.

I got my current number around 3 years go, and the vast majority - easily 95% - of calls I get are still real estate, political, or job search spam for the previous owner. It’s on permanent DND, but I’ll check the text log every day or two.

There’s a new theory going around that we age stepwise at 44, 60, and 78. Plus/minus a few years, individually, because biology is fuzzy.

And exercise isn’t very good for weight loss. There’s about the same calories in a 15 minute run as a 12 oz beer or a 30 gram “serving” of potato chips.

Maybe you can find a way to couple activity to something else that you do want to do. Exercise for its own sake is tough for me, but I don’t mind walking 15 minutes to get lunch, and then, obviously, 15 minutes back. The meme’s message is that you don’t need to sweat, get out of breath, or get swole to have meaningful physical activity.

Fun fact: armadillos are all born as identical quadruplets. If you saw 5, then one was either a parent or adopted.

Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.

The relevant text of the law is

The products must be available to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12 according to a plan developed by the school district.

so, I think “boys bathroom” only in the case where a school has trans-boy without puberty blockers or hormone therapy. Clearly a very edge case, but right-wing propaganda depends on blowing up rare events or special circumstances, pretending they’re happening everywhere, all the time, and therefore an immediate threat to the way their audience has always done things.

Typical cat just knocking things off shelves - the library is an inexhaustible playground.

I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.

I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for ‘eggs’, ‘yogurt’, ‘steak’, etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven ‘recipe of the week’ type thing.

You’d need some way to cache that video, though, because it’d take 24 hours to write 8TB at SD card speeds of 80 MB/s.

It’s like a bear-sized Matchbox car. And when they take it away, he starts eating the fluff, like a 2-ton toddler.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of people in this thread who learned about the secret service from Hollywood. They rely a lot on local law enforcement, especially for former-POTUS and for unelected candidates.

I assume they thought they had visual coverage of the rooftop from the position they used to kill the shooter, and just didn’t see him in time. Fuckup, but hardly monumental or inexcusable.

Universities have historically been institutions of class structure, and not just in the US. I doubt that will change any time soon, and can’t honestly think of how it could. Tertiary education requires that a person give up some part of their potentially-working day to activities that don’t pay rent or put food on the table. Nevermind direct costs of education, if you don’t pay people to be students, then it will continue to reinforce class structure.

Personally, I think it’s in the state’s interest to encourage every individual to pursue as much education, of whatever form, as they choose. Tertiary education through university, college, or trade school ought to be without direct cost, and we ought to have enough social safety net to secure people while they pursue it. Do that, and some new structure will develop so employers can identify upper-class candidates, like unpaid internships.

Once you have a microcontroller running things, adding new features is just a matter of software. Doesn’t add to the BOM, doesn’t complication production in any way. There’s almost no marginal cost to techify everything, and the people who don’t want those features can just not use them. The small minority of people who want a repairable car that they can understand and maintain in their own garage are undesirable customers who reduce after-market revenue.