Schadrach

Look at it this way. Pluto didn’t change, we just changed the definition of a planet to exclude it from the cool kids club because if we included it we’d also have to at the very least invite Eris too, and nobody likes Eris (hence the Trojan War).

No, the opposite; it’s a classic example showing that correlation doesn’t necessitate causation.

Right, but ice cream sales and shark attacks have a shared cause, and it’s the weather. Humans both get in the ocean where they are shark-accessible more often and also buy more ice cream when it’s hot out.

Basically causation is X->Y. But there are other relationships between X and Y, and in the case of ice cream sales and shark attacks it’s W->X and W->Y (one doesn’t cause the other, but they are caused by the same thing). It’s also possible for two things to correlate without any connection whatsoever, because sometimes things just happen to move in the same directions at the same times for a while.

People have trouble dealing with that, and much magical thinking arises from X and Y happening together being believed to necessarily mean X and Y are connected in some fashion because humans are very good at building patterns even when they don’t exist.

That’s literally where the vaccines cause autism thing started from - kids start showing clear signs of autism at about the same age they get several vaccines. The guy who originally proposed it with a deeply flawed study was only specifically claiming it was the combined MMR and not all vaccines generically and produced his study in an attempt to sell a separate MMR series that could be spaced out (rather than being one shot with all three) which would allegedly prevent the effect, because he would directly profit from his vaccine series being used instead of the combined MMR.

SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned.

Not even that. If you were born before 2014 or so and you’re from somewhere relatively populous theres a pretty good chance there’s more than one living human with your SSN right now. SSN were never meant to be unique, the pairing of SSN and name was meant to be unique but no one really checked for that for most of the history of the program so it really wasn’t either. The combination of SSN, name and age/birthdate should actually be unique though because of how they were assigned even back in the day.

Not even that complicated - SSN are not unique, by design. The combination of SSN and name is supposed to be, but for most of the history of the program no one was actually checking for that so it really isn’t either. Until something like 2014 the first 5 digits of your SSN were basically a code for where you were born and the last 4 were just assigned in order.

Sounds like an obvious spot in the market for a bullshit-free smart TV. You’d just have to get the UX right.

Kraft singles are still cheese. They’ve just been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate.

No, if it was just cheese that’s been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate it would be pasteurized process cheese. A couple other additional additives are acceptable.

When it has other additives but is at least half cheese by weight it’s pasteurized process cheese food.

When it’s pasteurized process cheese product it’s not meeting any of those standards. Often because it’s less than half cheese or an addictive outside the accepted list to meet the other definitions is being used. Milk protein concentrate is an example, but also increasing the fat content with something like vegetable oil or adding flavoring agents to make the result taste more like cheese.

The FDA caught Kraft singles not meeting the definition of pasteurized process cheese food something like 20 years ago which is why it’s labeled a pasteurized process cheese product.

For any curious, the sodium citrate is an emulsifying agents that helps the natural cheeses used melt together smoothly, and pasteurization was originally done to prolong the life of the resultant mixed cheese as the whole original point of American cheese was to reprocess ends and scraps into something homogeneous and comparatively safe for long distance overland transport before refrigerated trucks were a thing.

• “In [the United States of] America, any citizen can become president”.

So long as they are natural born, 35 years of age and can convince enough schmucks to vote for them, yeah. Of course, the demonstration of that being true is that we got Trump, a lifetime grifter with no political experience.

On the upside, he proves one of my go to sayings true: “There are two kinds of people I don’t trust, salesmen and politicians. And politicians are just salesmen selling that they should be in charge.”

The most recent season has a surprising amount of sexually assaulting Huey though. The first time they even play it for laughs.

The Constitution didn’t establish a right to vote for men in general or any men in particular. It left the question of which citizens were allowed to vote fully up to the states.

Or to go deeper: The Declaration of Independence limited voting to landowners. The Constitution set no regulations whatsoever for which citizens could vote, leaving it wholly up to the states. There are various trends in state laws over time but nothing federal regarding who can vote (other than various immigration laws about who can be naturalized). Until the 15th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Technically, men did not have a federally protected right to vote until women did, the 19th amendment. Though state laws had expanded to give essentially all free white men the vote in every state shortly before the Civil War, but that’s not from that federal point of view you’re so worried about.

While you can hunt with an AR-15, it’s not the best rifle for the task.

It’s not the best rifle for any task. But it’s a good enough rifle for most tasks, and between real AR-15s and the various clones they are cheap, in common calibers, and have accessories widely available.

Which is why it’s the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin.

It being the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin is in turn why it’s so often used in public mass shootings, as those are usually done with weapons of convenience rather than something bought for purpose. Likely also why the guy who shot Trump used one.

If a public mass shooter wanted the best gun for the job, they’d get something closer to a PS-90 (the civilian version of the P-90 which is a military rifle designed for urban combat).

In fact, women were not even considered full citizens then since they did not possess the right to vote.

Like most things, this was up to the individual states. Like anything up to the individual states, it was all over the place depending on exactly where you were. For example, at the founding women in New Jersey could vote, presuming they owned 50 British pounds worth of wealth because the wealth requirement was the only requirement New Jersey had for who could vote. Ironically, the spread of Jacksonian democracy (aka universal male suffrage) actually cost women in New Jersey the right to vote in the 19th century.

Mindjourney can make incredible images, but it can’t make art.

Mostly because you’re defining “art” in such a way that being produced by MidJourney disqualifies it automatically.

I’d actually be more surprised to learn they didn’t move to Ada when that was THE DOD programming language.

We really don’t do that here, because we skip the rehab part almost entirely because it’s bad for the profit margins of private prisons.

You misunderstand the dynamic. Most GOP voters are going to vote and are going to vote for the Republican, regardless of how awful that Republican is. Voting is a civic duty and party above all are kinda core ideas for them.

Dem voters are a lot more flighty in general. Any barrier to voting no matter how small (even having to rise from the couch) impacts Dem voters more than GOP ones.

There are more Dem voters than GOP ones except maybe in very red states. It’s about turnout - US voter turnout is God awful and it’s worse among Dems than GOP.

That’s why the debate was so bad for the Dems, because it’s not about whether or not it pulls voters to Trump but about what it does to Dem turnout.

it would be nice if the democrats fucking tried.

They think they don’t have to, they just have to keep you scared enough of the GOP that you’ll vote for them out of terror. It’s how Biden won the first time, after all.

That analogy was chosen for a reason. Ada was originally developed by DOD committee and a French programming team to be a programming language for Defense projects between 1977 and 1983 that they were still using at least into the early 2000s. It’s based on Pascal.

It was intended for applications where reliability was the highest priority (above things like performance or ease of use) and one of the consequences of that is that there are no warnings - only compiler errors, and a lot of common bad practices that will be allowed to fly or maybe at worst generate a warning in other languages will themselves generate compiler errors. Do it right or don’t bother trying. No implicit typecasting, even something like 1 + 0.5 where it’s obvious what is intended is a compiler error because you are trying to add an integer to a real without explicitly converting either - you’re in extremely strongly-typed country here.

Libraries are split across two files, one is essentially the interfaces for the library and the other is it’s implementation (not that weird, and not that different than C/C++ header files though the code looks closer to Pascal interface and implementation sections put in separate files). The intent at the time being that different teams or different subcontractors might be building each module and by establishing a fixed interface up front and spelling out in great detail in documentation what each piece of that interface is supposed to do the actual implementation could be done separately and hypothetically have a predictable result.

By that logic what we really need is a modernization of Ada, where there are no compiler warnings and anything that would generate one in another language is instead a compiler error, everything is strongly typed, etc, etc.

If you aren’t familiar with Ada, just imagine Pascal went to military school.

I thought they had on several occasions dropped games from the store because they had DRM. Which DRM titles does GOG still have?

Last game I paid good money for was on GOG. Everything added to my steam account in the last few years has either been part of a humble bundle or a freebie from somewhere.

H1B skilled worker visas. You have to prove that you tried to hire locally and couldn’t find anyone qualified. The whole point is that the qualifications are impossible, so you are either under qualified or lying. Since no qualified candidate exists, you can bring someone over from overseas and hold the risk of being deported if you fire them over their heads - and you suddenly get less thorough about checking qualifications for your immigrant candidates.