nabbed

I just read this on CNBC:

  “US business continues to boom,” S&P Global Market Intelligence chief business
  economist Chris Williamson said in a statement. “To put the growth surge in
  context, barring the spike in demand following the opening up of the economy
  after the COVID-19 lockdowns, the latest improvement in business activity
  is the greatest recorded since early 2015. Business is clearly booming now in
  both manufacturing and services.”

From https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/treasury-yields-oil-inflatio...

Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.

Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?

In BC Canada, many, and possibly most cities use the national police force (RCMP) as their local police force. A city that contracts out with the RCMP gets a local RCMP detachment with local headquarters, etc.

Imagine, say, Framingham Massachusetts contracting the FBI for their local police services.

I imagine that could be a big problem if the national police force suddenly had a corruption problem: many cities would also suddenly have a police corruption problem. As far as I know, that's not currently the case, although somebody might correct me.

Some BC cities, like Vancouver and Surrey, have their own police forces (Surrey is actually in the middle of phasing out RCMP usage in favour of their own police force).

I loved, loved, loved this show when I was a kid (I saw it as a syndicated show in the US around 1971, I am guessing). Yes, the soundtrack was the hook: I came for the (at the time) great theme song, but I stayed for the mystery of the UFOs, the spaceships and moon base, and Michael Billington (who, for some reason, I liked better than the star, maybe because he was younger and actually went out into the field).

Edit: Interestingly, Ed Bishop and Michael Billington both died within five days of each other in 2005, despite Billington being quite a bit younger.

It left a temporary spot in my vision after I scrolled it away.

Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.

Ha! Me too. I have [email protected], which means [email protected] (without the dot) also maps to my email account. (first and last are placeholders for my actual name, of course).

I get lots of stuff intended for other people (including a mildly famous person with my name whose actual email address is [email protected]).

A few years ago, someone set up a shopify account with my email address. Overnight while I slept, the shopify account was created, did some bad stuff, and got suspended for fraudulent activity. The whole story was told through the series of emails coming in over a couple of hours. Shopify did not required the fraudster to confirm the email address to activate the account.

When I asked shopify to unlink my email address from this fraudster account, they instructed me to click on the "forgot my password" link on their login page, click on the "change password" link in the resulting email, and then login and remove my email from the account. This was my only option, they claimed. Obviously, I was never going to connect my IP address with some fraudster's Shopify account, so I just left it as-is.

I guess services feel it adds too much "friction" to force a user to verify the specified email account before allowing them to use the service.

Might be a temporary rescission, though:

'the Pentagon said that the document, titled “Clinical Guidance for Health and Human Performance Optimization,” had been temporarily rescinded on September 3 to allow for updates.'

The article also hints at throwing Taiwan under the bus to get China to withdraw support from Iran:

"The counter-trade is Taiwan. Beijing has wanted a public American recalibration on Taiwan for two decades. "

At this point the American people have no additional say, except indirectly through congress. Barring an impeachment with a successful conviction (extremely unlikely without a blowout loss for the republicans in November), the man will "serve" the rest of his term whether we like it or not.

>He’s in for a surprise.

I guess this went over my head.

I responded to an ad in the newspaper for a C programming job way back in mid-1980s. The team that posted the ad was not impressed with my resume, but they sent it on to a different team within the same company. That team hired me and I stayed at that company for 14 years.

Unlike the author, I kept the ad in a box for 35 years, at which point I scanned it and threw out the hard copy.

Edit: Also, the resume I mailed to them was printed by a print shop.

>And then it all went bad. The Daily Telegraph, following up on biographical discrepancy in a BBC documentary, uncovered proof that Patrick O’Brian…was not Patrick O’Brian.

About 15 years ago, I decided to know as little as possible about the musicians/artists/writers whose work I was consuming, because I didn't want my enjoyment of their work to be influenced or spoiled by what I knew about them (even superficial things, e.g., how they looked).

I remember mentioning that to a co-worker, when discussing a band I had just learned about and enjoyed, and he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person. I figured if the person was bad enough, the information would get to me somehow.

After several interviews with a big telecommunications company, I got a verbal job offer from the recruiter over the phone. I accepted. They said the formal job offer would be coming in the next week or so.

I never received the formal job offer. I called after a month and was told not to worry, it was still happening. I think I called again after 3 months, but stopped thinking about it after that.

Eventually I went to work for an internet company (which also delayed the formal job offer for several months. Deja Vu! But only because the background checking firm was having trouble completing the background check).

This was in the mid-aughts.

>it was a Finance company so people suddenly not coming in the next day was a thing.

Oh, I'd love to know why this is a thing.

I did work for a mutual fund company for 18 months, one of those companies where the title Vice President simply meant nothing more than "employee" (although it was fun showing my business card to my friends and family, who were impressed by the title even though it had no meaning), but I didn't notice anything special about employee retention, probably because I was in a tech team.

Doctors blamed my first afib episode on dehydration. I had been very sick, could not eat or drink for days, and just experienced the highest fever of my adult life, nearly 105F. A few hours after the fever finally broke, I went into afib.

At that time, I was on an opioid pain killer for an abscess. The next time I was on an opioid pain killer, years later, I also had an afib episode. So I wonder if maybe I have some sensitivity to opioids.

I have paroxysmal afib. After my third episode, the doctor told me to quit consuming caffeine. Before quitting caffeine, I had an episode every 2 years. After quitting caffeine, I had an episode every 2 years. So I believe the statement that coffee is not associated with higher incidence of afib (at least in the general case... as the article states, your mileage may vary).

One the other hand, I find that dark chocolate has more negative heart effects: I associate dark chocolate, maybe unfairly, with premature beats (several 1000s per day). For that reason, I've avoided dark chocolate, which I love, for almost 25 years.

>Interestingly there is no mention of semantics or what does actually "TV watching" mean.

Also, is one watching "The Real Housewives of <place name>" on Bravo or an author interview on CSPAN.

Not sure myself.

There's more variety of content on youtube, whereas I think TV sometimes caters to lowest common denominator (although that's less the case in the era of streaming: TV is much higher quality than it was when this study started in 1987).

On youtube, you could watch lots of silly dancing videos, car crashes, etc., possibly rotting your brain. Or you could watch history lectures, book reviews, documentaries, etc.

I didn't pick up on it. I see this often: comments on HN remarking that something is AI generated, yet it's not obvious to me. Makes me worry that I am an LLM myself[1].

I've seen lot of bizarre, hard to understand or weirdly formulaic writing pre-2023, so I guess that's why I don't assume anything is AI generated.

[1] BTW, I am not.

I watch (or listen to) a lot of youtube on my iPad (and sometimes on my TV, but not too often). I wonder if youtube watching is also correlated with the mentioned brain changes.

>The results indicate a correlation, not necessarily causation

Just to drive that home, "Study participants also did not undergo a baseline MRI", which of course could mean that they already had some of these brain changes, which may have driven more TV watching.

>Sedentary activity is correlated with slightly faster degradation of multiple brain measures.

It seems to matter what you do while you're being sedentary, at least according to this study. From the article: "Strikingly, the sedentary element of TV watching didn’t appear to be the main driver for these changes."

Kobayashi Maru :)

Article reprinted by Yahoo here: https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/clue-night-mh370...

I did the same.

Maybe the cookie banner was the CAPTCHA in question ;).