culturestate

Not every deaf person is born that way, mate.

I understand where you’re coming from, but it’s perfectly sane if your legal system recognizes and accepts that speed detection methodologies have a defined margin of error; every ticket issued for speeding within that MoE would likely be (correctly) rejected by a court if challenged.

The buffer means, among other things, that you don’t have to bog down your traffic courts with thousands of cases that will be immediately thrown out.

When someone goes three miles per hour over the speed limit they are literally breaking the law, but that doesn’t mean they should get a serious fine for it. Sometimes shit happens.

It’s the foundational decision to make this an optional subscription instead of just pricing it into the sticker from the jump that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around.

This doesn’t clarify it at all for me because this model already works without the bother of subscriptions. They’re generating the data either way, regardless of whether the customer is paying $140 per year or $1,400 up front.

I think the real reason is probably closer to “we want to be able to add recurring subscription revenue to our 10-K” than it is to “we want a better pretext under which to mine consumer data.”

This subscription costs $140 per year; even accounting for price increases over time, if someone has calculated that its 10-year LTV exceeds $14,000 then I think they need to go back and review the spreadsheet.

It feels like such an obvious win that I know I must be missing something, I just don’t know what it could be.

Maybe the long-term goal is to push more people toward direct leasing?

There is absolutely no scenario in which you could convince me to train as e.g. an underwater welder, no matter how much cash you’re offering.

For example, there’s a street in my neighborhood that’s normally open for two-way traffic, but one of the buildings that fronts it is being renovated so the street was changed to one-way for about a month, and as of a couple of days ago it’s still one-way but in the other direction. Imagine trying to get a car to work that out on its own.

> “The User may not sell this Work directly, unless they/she/he/it/ey/fae/ze/bun/puppy/foxxo … use it only as a small part of a work of a much greater scale.”

That said, TIL that there are two things that can be considered “Belgium denialism” and surprisingly neither of them involves refusing to acknowledge that Belgium exists.

- What decision-making process led to the idea of injecting human urine into a frog in the first place?

- How did the frogs escape? What kind of living and handling conditions are we talking about here?

- Did the bacteria that the government was concerned about make the frogs more susceptible to cold, thus the coincidental die-off at the same time as eradication was to begin?

- Will Welsh clawed frogs be the next species that we thought were gone but had just become better hidden?

I crave a one-hour documentary about this.

A multinational framework explicitly for the protection and restoration of eels would never have occurred to me (or most of the rest of humanity, I’d imagine) but nevertheless it occurred to someone and now there are civil servants who are paid real money to design and implement it.

To put it another way, I’m less interested in the policy than I am in the mechanics of governance that enable it to exist. One of my favorites is the National Cemetary Administration Operational Standards and Measures[1] program, which basically defines OKRs for U.S. veterans cemeteries.

1. https://imlive.s3.amazonaws.com/Federal%20Government/ID25151...

If you, like me, are masochistically fascinated by this kind of “I can’t believe this is a real thing that the government actually does” documentation I recommend giving it a once-over.

1. https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/ocean/marine-biodi...

“If your family isn’t well-off or you didn’t work hard enough in high school to get any scholarships, college isn’t for you” is certainly an interesting take.

I'm not sure where I would find the data to back this up, but since it seems like an across-the-board change I imagine the labor savings have proven to outweigh (heh) the inventory shrinkage.

To me, the Uniqlo system where everything has an RFID tag and the machine just automatically scans the contents of your basket is the platonic ideal but I know that comes with issues of its own in different retail contexts.

Somewhat more worryingly, Little Snitch doesn't report them at all, though that might just be because they were already blocked at the browser.

Took me longer than I care to admit reading the Wikipedia page for Carter Clarke Sr. (also a brigadier general) who led a pretty interesting life of his own (e.g. leading the War Department investigation of Pearl Harbor intelligence failures) before I realized I had the wrong generation of Clarkes.

It takes considerable investment and effort before you’re 25, too, you just don’t notice it because it happens slowly over a long period in school and via immersion.

I move around a lot so I’ve had to learn a few new languages as an adult - at least to basic proficiency, if not approaching fluency - and I don’t think it’s really any more difficult than it was when I was a kid, except that I now recognize how difficult it is.

Do you mean results in English, or results that are specifically US-centric?

I don’t really understand this distinction. How is eg a Pixel 9 Pro running Android with GMS on a Tensor any less entirely Google-designed than an iPhone 16 is entirely Apple-designed?

1. e.g. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Park-Micro-Digital-Parking-Approv...

MPEG the standards group is organized by ISO and IEC, along with JPEG.

The one you’re thinking of - MPEG LA, the licensing company - is a patent pool (which has since been subsumed by a different one[1]) that’s unaffiliated with MPEG the standards group.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via-LA