I wonder what 50M UberEats gift cards would look like physically.

More than customizing the menubar, it is the only tool I've ever found useful to manage the proliferation of menubar entries. Besides allowing for better ordering, it allows you to determine which entries go in the main/visible menubar, and which you only want to see in the second pop-down menubar. It really was (hopefully still is) an irreplaceable tool for me.

...we'd buy cheap used records and cut them into quarter-sized blanks and feed the laundry machines with those. Kids these days with their fancy technology.

Commodore PET— I'd never seen anything like it. Followed by a Timex Sinclair which I still have somewhere, and bus trips to the local community college for some time on a DEC PDP-11.

I hope you're right, but I think you're wrong. I'm thinking eg of the examples a few years ago involving Target— IIRC they started showing pregnancy related ads to women before they even knew they were pregnant, based on what they could glean from their purchase/browsing history. Don't underestimate the power of data...

I don't own a Tesla, and hate the idea of feature subscriptions. However, for auto-drive, you can apparently buy it a month at a time. My brother eg has a model Y, and doesn't need that feature most of the time when driving around town. He buys it for the month when they're taking a longer trip. That seems like the best possible model to me.

How did you feel in that regard about the other case last week, in which the SC overturned NY's concealed carry regulation? Seems to me that NY's attempt to maintain a "well-regulated militia" in their own state through democratic means was precisely the kind of thing you're hoping should happen?

Turns out most of those screens can also be put into a diagnostic mode by pushing a few of the soft-keys on the side. Usually 2 adjacent or 2 opposite ones will do the trick. Shuts them up for 2 minutes or so. Given the proliferation of gas station advertising, with the ever-annoying "Maria Menudo" or whoever she is, on "Cheddar" or whatever brain-rot inducing attention-addled "content" those things blare out, I would assume the few people avoiding these grocery stores aren't going to make much of a dent. One step closer to dystopia, brought to you by Pepsi et al.

Already my Samsung "smart" TV accounts for 6x the amount of blocked DNS requests as the next offender in my pi-hole statistics. I haven't neutered it fully because it's fascinating to watch it try to weasel it's way out anyway. I know it must have hard-coded a DNS server or fixed addresses somewhere, because I can see traffic sneaking out at the (pfSense) router level anyway. I use some pfBlocker targets to trap that. I can see additional attempts at sending traffic that I kill with firewalla (arp spoofing). If I were really bored I suppose I should capture some of that traffic so see what it thinks it's doing, but I already know the answer (see TFA). Fuck them. I think it's time to walk over and just disable all internet access at the TV itself. I'll have to deal with it nagging me with concerned sounding popup warnings about internet configuration. That said, it's entertaining for me, but I see my mom and in-laws struggle because the fucking smart-TV interfaces try to look like Apple TV and show ads while making it as confusing as possible to realize what's happening and switch back to aTV as the source, instead of their laggy POS crapware ad platforms.

While I agree with your overall premise, nicotine actually has quite a few concerning issues. Not all are well understood, but it's absolutely more dangerous than caffeine. Not all of the negative effects of smoking are from tobacco. Nicotine itself is a negative actor. There is literature that in isolation nicotine contributes to developmental neurologic defects (it is a neurotoxin after all). It has known negative properties on the vasculature, promoting atherosclerosis and impaired endothelial function. To be balanced, there is also some evidence that in some ways nicotine might be neuroprotective, eg in modifying some of the mechanisms that lead to Parkinson's disease (coffee too). Smoking overall carries much more weight than nicotine itself, and most of us in the vascular world would indeed much prefer you vaped pure nicotine rather than smoked cigarettes. If that actually worked as a bridge to quitting that would be one thing, but nicotine replacement with nicotine seems in practice to result in long term use of nicotine replacement, not actually being able to totally quit. The "bridge to quitting" then is a fig leaf as far as I'm concerned. Nicotine still has plenty of concerning biological effects.

Sigh. Not sure why I'm about to bother, but here goes.

"This changes cell function and produces a protein that your body only recognises because it damages it." No it doesn't. Linus's explanation was pretty good. It transiently allows your own cellular machinery to produce a protein fragment unique to Covid, resulting in your immune system recognizing that to generate a rapid reaction in the future in case you're exposed to the actual virus. Just like your immune system does all the time. It's not "causing damage".

"it is least effective on those most at risk from the targeted contagion, and most effective for those least at risk". Huh? No. People incapable of mounting any immune response are indeed at significant risk in general, but they're profoundly few and far between. In fact, for those few with such dysfunctional immune systems it's a great idea for the bulk of everyone else to be immunized. For the vast majority of people "at most risk" the actual science (you should read it) has clearly demonstrated they mount effective immune responses.

"it becomes more dangerous, with over reaction " You've jumped the shark here. No.

"Overall it is a pretty shitty vaccine concept" Actually it's a brilliant bit of technology, the culmination of decades worth of research. As a vaccine it might be a new application, largely because there hasn't been a need for a new vaccine using such technology until now, but the same techniques have been used for years (targeted cancer therapies, for example).

"The virus less dangerous than the flu for those under 70". Also no. Our mistake perhaps has been keeping people out of the hospitals so that it's been a very abstract and invisible experience for everyone else. I work in one, and have been in that soup routinely for over a year. I've watched many people die, plenty of them young and under 70. I've watched pregnant women with covid die on the ventilator but deliver their babies, I have a colleague ~60 who was healthy require a lung transplant, young people have large strokes, young people have long-term cognitive issues, nurses bring covid home and have family members die. It is NOT less dangerous than the flu for those under 70.

"If the vaccine failure rate is higher than the death and hospitalisation rate, logically, mathematically, [etc]". Not sure what you're getting at here, but logic and math are predicated on correct facts and assumptions. With vaccines, we've clearly seen dramatic reductions in transmission. Lots of published science there. We still have patients in the hospitals, but the ones lingering and the new ones are more or less all unvaccinated. In the past few months it has become very clear in our local data, and nationally, that vaccinated patients are no longer the ones hospitalized. That was also one of the primary findings in the published vaccine trials.

I get that just telling you that you have your facts wrong will result in you digging in your heels, but Covid was nasty. A lot of people died or were left with profound long-term problems. Not just "old people" with comorbidities, but pleny of otherwise healthy young people. I've been dealing with that first-hand the entire time, and I'm tired of this conversation. The vaccine is effective. It's not "experimental" but the result of decades of genetic research, and it's saving lives.

I'm no fan of the drug companies and their profits, but Pfizer and Moderna in this case deserve what they make off it.

Presumably because while birds have somewhat different visual systems than the mammalian one you're used to, we both see contrast better than we do a homogeneous surface. Our visual systems respond much more to edges and contrast changes, particularly off-axis. A vaguely whitish region moving in the sky isn't something birds would typically need to have bothered about—probably a cloud? That same region alternating white/black would seem to be a much more compelling visual stimulus, and I would guess nothing that their brains would be able to falsely categorize as familiar. Painting all the blades black would probably be just as much as a non-stimulus (or worse, given perhaps less reflection) than all white.

The rules for non-profit hospitals include things like providing a minimum amount of "uncompensated care". Ie, writing off medical debt etc for uninsured. In return, satisfying those thresholds avoids taxes. We consider hospitals in some respects to be a different commodity than a typical "for profit" business. When someone shows up to the ED for example unconscious and bleeding, it's federal law that they have to be taken care of and at least "stabilized" even if it is known that they're uninsured. If that facility decides they're too sick, and they need a "higher level of care" from a bigger center, those same rules make it very hard to not accept that patient in transfer, knowing that they won't get paid. When that patient is stabilized, and they can't go home because they need eg nursing care, there's nothing to force anyone to accept a transfer to a lower level of care, so besides not paying, those folks tend to linger. Communities need hospitals, so the rules are different. We have enough 3rd parties eating at the healthcare trough without also encouraging hospitals to try to become profit centers (those that are should burn). Most just aren't, and even though 6B seems like a big number, that's for a system of 17 facilities, and probably into the 5 digits of employees. I will bet most of them are lucky to see 5-10% operating margins most years.

Actually, so far such costs are indeed passed on to the providers. Charges for services isn't something providers generally get to choose themselves -- simplistically, a specific diagnosis or complexity of a patient encounter is billed at a fixed cost determined by medicare, and by discounted contracts between provider groups and insurers (eg, "in this market we agree to get reimbursed 70% of the usual rate to have access to your patients"). So far, such costs for retooling with technology have been passed on to the providers.

Providers have been very reluctant to put money and effort into large scale technologies because so far this has been essentially out of pocket, requires several years to implement, and is not subject to a standard. Our physicians group over the past few years has migrated to a fully electronic record and prescription system. It cost 10s of millions of dollars out of our practice. It slows us down compared to the old system so we can see fewer patients a day. It's limited in the sense that it forces you into certain "boxes" in terms of documentation that make the old flexibility of dictated charts go away. The upside is much more consistent access to data, simpler provision of records to other providers, etc. It still costs us several million dollars yearly to maintain, and still can't interact with other medical record or data systems, because there isn't a clear standard.

In a nutshell, we paid for it, it's made us more efficient in some areas, less so in others, and it's not clear on balance if it was worth it for us.

In another example, CMS (medicare) has implemented a "pay for performance" system, where providers identify several measure they'll get graded on and reimbursed higher if they meet those targets. Think grocery store shoppers club. So far providers are at best lukewarm -- after making substantial up-front investments (which again, we can't directly pass on to patients ourselves, but the system overall does in one way or another) we now have a byzantine system of reporting that nobody seems quite clear on how it works, and very limited reimbursement for our efforts that are making people think it would be cheaper overall just to take a loss on medicare reimbursement. So, standards and better information systems are an absolute must in many people's minds as doctors really do hate the tremendous inefficiency we currently have, but it's vastly more complicated and expensive than it seems...