You think your making a joke, but Beer is actually the best food source of Uridine. Uridine Monophosphate is sold as a memory enhancing brain supplement. It makes sense, because I know a 90 year old who drinks âoeone and only oneâ beer every day, and has the best memory of anyone else that I know at that age.

The Vitamin D connection to COVID severity has been known since March. It also explains why dark skinned people suffer more severe effects from COVID. If we had leaders that cared, there would be a huge campaign to encourage Vitamin D supplements, especially for dark skinned people. It would be a lot safer and more effective than hydroxycloroquine.

It almost looks like our âoeleadersâ donâ(TM)t care ?

Raspberry Pi's suddenly became much harder to sell after Brexit.

They can connect them all together to make a "Supercomputer" ;)

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.techworm.net%2F2018%2F...

I ordered the 4G Makerphone for similar reasons:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kickstarter.com%2Fpr...

Its only powered by an ESP32 microcontroller, so its primitive, but probably very secure.
Runs Micropython, so I should be able to do funky stuff with it ;)

Its only $180 (assembled :)

Its been delayed, but it is supposedly ready to ship any day now.

My sister has one, I drove it about 10 feet in her driveway and was very put off by the vendor-locked software, vendor-locked maps, vendor-locked network connection.

I still feel that I have control over my tech and can get privacy when I want it. (it is getting harder and harder).

If I owned one of those cars, it would mean surrendering a part of my soul to the tech overlords.

Now, I read that Tesla is open-sourcing a lot of stuff. Does that mean we might get control ?

Classic PARANOIA -- cool it on the brain hacking drugs !

Peter Thiel is a big proponent of all sorts of nootropics and longevity treatments, including micro-dosed psilocybin and LSD.

I am too -- but I also know when I've overdone it -- mania and paranoia are common symptoms ;)

“Just one major telecommunications company refused to participate in a legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later, its CEO was indicted by federal prosecutors. He was convicted, served four and a half years of his sentence and was released this month.”

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com...

"None of the phone companies that handed over communications metadata in bulk to the National Security Agency ever challenged the agency on its data requests"

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com...

I NEVER use Windows anymore, and I rarely use Macs -- except to do my taxes every year.
There are the free web versions -- but I'm never gonna trust those ;)

Supposedly, they only sell "anonymized" data.
But there's fast growing shadow industry of data "de-anonymizers".

Tax data is easily one of the most valuable data sets out there.

Ever wonder why there's an explosion of "free online tax" services ?
Must be data harvesting. . .

I'm politically active, so I always TRY to do my taxes in "tin-foil hat mode".
It's getting to be more and more insanely difficult.

I get the TurboTax disk, put it on a clean VM or hard drive, run the updates, and do all of the rest offline.
At the end, I create a PDF, put that on a USB stick -- then print and mail.

TurboTax continuous bugs you, trying to get you to connect to the internet.
Two years ago, TurboTax would not let a Mac "print to PDF" without connecting to to internet. (for PDF drivers ?)
That set off a bunch of alarms in the forums !

This year, on an old Windows laptop, I'm doing my taxes and -- I swear -- something keeps enabling WiFi that I deliberately left turned off !

I love software testing, but I quit and moved on cause the field just doesn't get the respect/resources is needs.
Developers and managers are always trying to "reign in" the testing staff and make them stick to a stupid script --
written by the same developers that made the mistakes in the first place.

My most important bug discoveries were almost always the result of informal testing, or thinking about the test script
and "trying something" that wasn't on the script. Overnight "random monkey testing" with the automated test harness was
very effective at finding real world problems -- but invariably got a rebuke from some manager, "Why were you doing that?"

This sounds a lot like that, but with the added bureaucracy of Aerospace+gov't.
The development process then adapts to minimize bureaucracy, instead of maximizing safety.

So as I see it, one of two things happened:

    1. There was a test engineer somewhere who thought about these failure modes before the first crash. He was ignored and didn't have the power to escalate the issue.

    2. The tests were stupid and were run by stupid people.

There were enough red flags -- I think it was #1.

Test Engineers -- throw off your chains !
The safety of the world depends on you.

AOC impresses me more and more every day.
She has clearly done her homework and understands Socialist theory (as taught by the DSA).
Not only that -- she sticks to those principles and does not adapt to the popular wind direction of the day.
I have less confidence in the DSA and the Democrats, but so far, AOC is solid!

Now let the trolls pile on -- it does not change the fact that Capitalism is failing (and threatening to take the world with it).

I can't believe this BS.
Who are these people who think they can preach to China ?
Are they from a country with a huge percentage of its population in jail ?

China has had a civilization for >6000 years.
They generally DON'T start wars try to tell the rest of the world how to live.

They are incredibly smart and industrious.
The have universal health care, guaranteed employment, and very low crime rate

Sure they have problems, but they have shown time and time again that they can solve big problems.
Most all of us could learn a lot from the Chinese, if we would just get to know them.

I see robots taking care of *all* the menial tasks -- especially taking care of the infirm and elderly.

When the time comes I'll certainly want to be able to "customize" that beast.

My comfort, my life might well depend on it !

My wife and I have been depending on Obamacare subsidies for our healthcare while she takes care of her elderly parents and I take care of mine.

First of all, the new administration demanded a lot of extra paperwork this year to prove that our part-time jobs did not offer healthcare.

Now, after a lot of hassle, we've uploaded our documents -- but now -- there are no federal workers around to approve them and turn the subsides on.
Because of our age, we're now paying ~$2000/mo for heathcare.
We are lucky -- we have savings to cover it and get it back with next year's tax refund.

But, for the folks the subsidy was intended for -- poor low-income workers -- they will be losing their insurance.

Yup, same stupid argument was made to promote the Pono Music Player, which is now discontinued.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ponomusic.com%2F

They, had their own music store, with everything remastered in digital "high resolution".

Thing is, they didn't address the LOUDNESS issue at all.
Everything is still squeezed to the top of the dynamic range.
Good for most pop music (?), bad for most everything else,