Who, SPECIFICALLY PLEASE, at the CDC "branded the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory and quickly dismissed it"?
Not the press, not some rando on twitter, not some anonymous and probably made up "source", not "people are saying"-- which actual CDC employee or appointee did this?
I keep asking, and people keep making up bullshit.
>Western powers embraced an ideology of peace and safety that stalled technological growth
Does Thiel have a hose running from his rectum to his nose so he can get high off the smell of his own farts?
More technological growth has occurred from Woodstock to today than at any similar-length span of time in human history.
He is rich because of that technological advancement and the fortune he amassed due to that technological advancement means he has the ability to pollute the media with his moronic worldview, and bribe politicians in order to make it a reality for the rest of us.
>You're asking a lot from law enforcement if you're giving away something for free and then demand that law enforcement make sure that people use the thing exactly as you have mandated.
I don't think the Free Software Foundation is asking a lot when it uses the rule of law to control who uses their content and how.
Who are the people of the Vatican? The only persons who live there are temporary government employees and not even all of them are citizens because that is optional.
You cannot own property, vote for your government, start your own business, go to school, buy anything except what is stocked in the small canteen, or go to the hospital if you are a Vatican citizen and odds are pretty good you live in Italy anyways.
Imagine if a bank drew a boundary around its Manhattan skyscraper headquarters and declared itself a country called Bankistan whose only residents were janitors, financial analysts, and management-- and most of its citizens live in Brooklyn. Except for the C-suite and senior vice presidents who live in penthouses and the janitors who live in tiny rooms in the basement.
Also the second the bank fires you or you quit or retire, you're no longer a citizen of Bankistan.
At a minimum, a capital-see (heh) Country is something that belongs to you if but in a very, insignificantly, small part.
So my definition of "country" is ill-defined but does not include the Vatican.
I don't understand why the Vatican is considered a country, besides as a quirk of history.
It is smaller than high school campus nearest my house, is not a UN member, and seems to exist solely as a tax haven.
It also has no native citizens. No person has been born in Vatican City in a century and even if you pop out a baby in Vatican City and are you yourself a Vatican City resident and citizen, the baby is not a citizen until made so by legal decree, citizenship which ends the second your employment ends, of course, because citizenship is tied to employment.
It doesn't make sense.
It isn't a country.
It is a tax dodge.
My perspective may be skewed. I value "quirky quirks of quirktastic history" very little.
US government spending is (for now) easy to track, and you can get totals for spending by corporate entity.
In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue.
I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue.
> Why, given that the foam strike had occurred at a force massively out of test conditions had NASA proceeded with re-entry?
What was the alternative?
Columbia could not have made it to ISS.
Columbia could not have repaired the damage in orbit.
Columbia could not have lasted, after two weeks in space, long enough to launch a rescue mission.
I know the "In Flight Options Assessment" said they could launch at an accelerated pace but the assessment assumes that it's ok to launch another vehicle with the same problem, no fix, and no completed analysis of the cause.
Yeah, they suspected the external tank bipod foam, but WHY did the foam come off? Was it a fluke? Had some unknown factor not present in previous external tank bipod foam applications but now present in all external tank bipod foam applications manifested?
>Two major assumptions, apart from the already stated assumption that the damage had to be visible, have to be recognized – the first is that there were no problems during the preparation and rollout of Atlantis, and the second is the question of whether NASA and the government would have deemed it acceptable to launch Atlantis with exposure to the same events that had damaged Columbia. At this point, at least two of the last three flights (STS-112 and STS-107) had bipod ramp foam problems, and the flight in-between these two, STS-113, was a night launch without adequate imaging of the External Tank during ascent.
This is from a pre-flight safety report for STS-113
>“More than 100 External Tanks have flown with only 3 documented instances of significant foam loss on a bipod ramp”
STS-1 through STS-111, April 1981 - June 2002: three "significant" bipod foam losses
STS-112, October 2002: significant foam loss
STS-113, November 2002: night time, but they saw 112 and went "oh shit" and wrote a report
STS-107, January 2003: yet another, fatal, significant foam loss
If two of the last three flights had foam problems and the one that didn't only didn't because you couldn't see if it did, and over 100 of the preceding flights only had three, you don't risk four more lives.
> Lounges used to feel special, a perk reserved for business travelers. Now they’re overcrowded, uninspired, yet somehow more coveted than ever—thanks to social media flexes and pricey credit card perks.
I think one of the author's main issues is that they want to feel special, and that feeling can only come through external validation like the exclusion of others.
Also, they seem to take the easy and lazy way out by seething instead of acting.
Also, they lie a lot. Nobody has hassled people with clipboards to save the whales for 26 years.
> The only thing still alive is the endless, humiliating upsell and self-service. The drugstore, the bank, the dentist
Yeah.
Lazy way out.
When I had a bad experience at a chain pharmacy 10-ish years ago I spent less than an hour, googled "independent pharmacies" and found the National Community Pharmacists Association. They have a locator for locally-owned independent pharmacies and I switched to one of those. Now I know my pharmacist's name (not the tech, the actual pharmacist, though I know the techs too) and I don't even have any pressing or complicated medical issues. The only thing they've ever tried to upsell me is a self-published book on local lore and history written by a woman who lives in my neighborhood that was in a stack next to the register.
Yes I bought it. I'm a hoe for that shit.
Same with shoes. My feet are large and weird and shoe buying sucked, not to mention the clueless staff. Often a store would have one pair in my size so I would have to take what I could get. So I took a little time, did some research, and found that specialty running shoe stores exist, staffed by experts, locally owned and operated.
You can do this with many things. Banks (though I prefer credit unions, mine is so small that nearly every member can fit in a large ballroom for our annual meeting and we have an App and digital wallet and everything), doctors, dentists, clothing retailers, anything.
But instead of acting, the author chooses to seethe.
And before you say "there's no other option" you're wrong, unless you live in a deep rural area where the nearest store is 20 minutes away and is a Dollar General, you are wrong.
You just don't care enough to do anything about it, which is a goal with most businesses: plotting the pain/rejection envelope and operating as close to it as possible, to appease the shareholders. You may have to travel a little farther or spend a little more but like I said: pain/rejection envelope-- "how shitty can we be because we're in the main shopping center and the independent guy is on the edge of town?"
An easy way to avoid the race to the bottom is to exit the race.
Hypercard died because in 1997 Apple was 3-4 weeks away from bankruptcy and 1998 wasn't that great either.
Before that, Hypercard was so valuable to Apple that they kicked it out the door to Claris and only took it back when Claris turned into a disaster (due to the Apple disaster) and everyone quit to write software for BeOS (lol).
"A friend of a friend of a friend posted to macrumors that jobs killed it because he didn't like it" has as much evidentiary weight behind it as "An elite Knights Templar strike force broke into Apple HQ and stole the source code and threatened Jobs with death if he ever released another version because if you typed 'evilmagic' into the message box, a portal to hell opened up in your room and evil sexy demons were coming out and seducing all of the wholesome pure and innocent computer nerds learning hypercarding."
Nissan, Chevrolet, Fiat, and Hyundai/Kia all make small, lightweight, low range, low power EVs.
With a 0-60 of 9 seconds, the Fiat 500e may be too low power. A 1993 Honda Civic is quicker than that and if you optioned a Civic coupe up to what comes standard (AC, power doors and windows, cruise) on the 500e, it was $14,700 in 1993[1], which is ~$32k today, which almost the same exact price of a 500e.
>I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer.
My library had two forms of microfiche.
One was a cartridge containing a single spool, which upon being inserted into the reader would unspool onto an internal mechanism. You used two jog wheels, one fine and one coarse, to control the speed at which you traversed the tape, and there were numeric inputs so you could go to an arbitrary page. (it got close enough)
The second were flat rectangular sheets with pages laid out in a grid, and you placed the flat sheet onto a glass bed, pulled down a cover and slid the plate into the reader, using etch-a-sketch-like controls to move along the x and y axis.
In either case you could insert a dime and a single page of whatever was on the screen would spit out from an attached printer.
> now the likes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are GSE’s.
Uh.. they've been GSEs since their founding. (12 U.S. Code § 1717)
"Yeah but in 2008 the government bought shares in th.." Doesn't matter. Still GSEs before that. "But they were privatiz.." Doesn't matter. Still GSEs after that.
Every time someone says "both sides are the same" a billionaire flooding media with 'both sides' messaging in order to distract from what is going on's taint twitches.