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Comment Re: Economic terrorism (Score 1) 178

I can only speak from my viewpoint in Eugene, Oregon area, but two of the three you name are each the third most expensive in their respective areas.

Half the stores in the area were closed in the Kroger/Albersons/Safeway merger. There is now no competition between them in any neighborhood. You get one or the other.

ATT owns all communication infrastructure in Oregon (going back to the Ma Bell break-up and the acquisition of some Internet backbone), they license to Verizon, who sell licenses to anyone else. T-Mobile has a nice pre-pay plan, but their regular service wasn't cheaper, you just got a better free phone.

There is one tower where I live, it belongs to Verizon. There is one cable company (under many names, but all are equal to Comcast, who leases hanging wire space from ATT, or WiFi/Satellite from Verizon) and it's not cheap.

And before someone tries to blame the big corps here, Oregon as a State issues all these exclusive licenses, and is 95 percent Democrat and has been since 1982.

Mergers are never for the consumer.

Unless they own stock.

Comment Re:You said "cheap" and "Wifi", but... (Score 1) 139

Sorry, the only thing I ended up with all the time was that it needed to download the support package for the camera over the internet, didn't matter what I did.

And having to use an app is also a bonehead solution, all that shall be needed is a web browser on a local net to configure what's needed.

Submission + - Sperm donor with cancer-causing gene fathered nearly 200 children across Europe (cbsnews.com)

schwit1 writes: A joint investigation by 14 European public service broadcasters has exposed a major scandal in the fertility industry: an anonymous Dutch sperm donor, who carried a mutated TP53 gene linked to Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS)—a rare condition conferring a 90% lifetime cancer risk, often striking in childhood—fathered nearly 200 children through the European Sperm Bank since 2005. Unbeknownst to the donor, a former student who passed initial screenings, the mutation affected up to 20% of his sperm, which was distributed to 67 clinics across 14 countries without adequate international oversight.

The revelation, uncovered via the European Society of Human Genetics conference where doctors flagged unusual cancer clusters in donor-conceived children, highlights systemic failures. National regulations, such as Belgium's limit of 6-12 children per donor (or 25 in the UK), were routinely violated, with one donor exceeding caps by over 10-fold. Of 67 genetically traced offspring, 23 inherited the mutation; 10 have developed cancers, including multiple tumors in some, and several died young. "We have some children that have developed already two different cancers and some of them have already died at a very early age," said cancer geneticist Edwige Kasper.

Geneticists Clare Turnbull and Edwige Kasper described LFS as a "dreadful diagnosis," imposing lifelong surveillance and emotional strain on families. The European Sperm Bank acknowledged the breach but noted no shipments to the U.S., though it operates in Canada and Mexico. No global regulatory framework exists to prevent recurrence, raising urgent calls for reform. Additional cases may surface as more children are tested, underscoring the ethical perils of unregulated sperm donation.

Submission + - Traveling to the US will require you to reveal your social media for 5 years. (federalregister.gov)

Z00L00K writes: Agency Information Collection Activities; Revision; Arrival and Departure Record

3. Mandatory Social Media: In order to comply with the January 2025 Executive Order 14161 (Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats), CBP is adding social media as a mandatory data element for an ESTA application. The data element will require ESTA applicants to provide their social media from the last 5 years.

Comment Re:Out of patent? (Score 1) 42

Bayer/Monsanto is constantly being sued. Litigation is part of their budget.

Sure. But the suggestion here is that they were specifically inviting it, ostensibly because it would harm competitors.

They are not going to support the idea that "glyphosate causes cancer" for some short-term market advantage.

Comment Re:Fukushima Volume 2? (Score 1) 28

This one magnitude 7.6 ; 2011 was a 9.2, 9.1 thereabouts (I can't be bothered looking it up).

That's 2.5 or so orders of magnitude lower which, for earthquakes is a 10^(1.5*diff.magnitude) factor of difference in energy release. Which, for those who can't do mental maths (see "dollar store" rant) is 10^-(3.6 to 3.7) or between 4 and 6 THOUSAND times less energy release.

You didn't need to wake up fully. I saw the alert on my phone, did the maths, and went back to sleep.

Comment Inability to do mental arithmetic (Score 1) 108

Since "deeply discounted" does not necessarily mean a price tag of 1.00 pound-dollar-euro (or 2000 TzSh or 10000 Won) and such stores routinely post non-simple prices (integers, half integers, etc), there is a sub-story here : an appalling (or hilarious) proportion of people who cannot do simple mental arithmetic like adding up the purchases in their basket as they go round the shop.

I should be appalled, but seeing the number of morons on X or YT (and to a lesser extent here ; lesser, but not zero) who think that posting their prompt to Chat.GPClaude.Grok and the AI's response, I'm not even surprised. And they do it for what are simple matters of arithmetic, or recall of uncontentious science which is at most a Wiki search away using the keywords in their Chat.Prompt. And they seem to think that theirs is a useful contribution to the discussion.

[shakes_head.EMOJI]

People - they're skills you worked to gain (and paid, in cash, hours, or tax) ; and you need to exercise them, regularly, or you will lose them. And if you lose them, you will be fucked over - be it by a street grifter, the clerk at the grocery store, or your elected representatives.

Kids today! Gerrorf moi lawrnn!

Comment Re:Questionable standards (Score 1) 108

I realise that I'm talking from a UK perspective not the US, but here, if a store sells it to the general public, the store is primarily liable for it. If it's not fit for sale, the holding company is liable for both the value of the goods and consequential losses. So if that one pound-dollar-euro power lead burns down the house, killing one and putting a couple of other people into long therm 24-7 nursing care, the store (chain) is liable for the quarter million pound-dollar-euro house plus maybe 20 or 30 million to go into trust to pay for care for the injured for the rest of their lives.

Plus punitive "don't do it again" damages on top, to the judge's satisfaction.

I know it's not America - land of the chlorinated chicken as an alternative to farm-to-table food hygiene standards - but that's why I'm rather less concerned about buying such things here.

I still look carefully at purchases, but the situation is somewhat different here.

(I also noticed, on second reading, that the link is to the Grauniad-dot-com not -dot-co-dot-uk, which did puzzle me for a few seconds - what are the Manchester Grauniad doing writing about "dollar" stores rather than "PoundLand" and the like. Who also have plenty of products which are not GBP 1.00 either, just heavily discounted. Those claims of false implied advertising sailed back out of the doors of court decades ago, when a pint still was a pound in any pub on the high street.)

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