Yeah, that’s where this meme fails. BASH is the default and has been for decades. Most people are not Gigachad.

I’ll accept FISH as being for babies, Zsh as being for Emo types or extra nerdy people. SH being for white beards makes sense.

BASH is:

oof

Even before Trump border control officers already had way too much power.

I worked for a company that considered the US border only second to the Chinese border in terms of a risk to confidential information. If you went to China, you had to sign out a special laptop that was wiped clean of anything confidential. Going to the US, you were allowed to take your own work laptop, but they had special briefings detailing what to do in various situations to try to keep the company’s data confidential while complying with the warrantless searches at the border.

What it comes down to is who cares. In this case, the general public doesn’t care. The TSA / Homeland Security wants to be seen to be doing everything possible. At first it was about terrorism, then it became about child sex abuse imagery that apparently people were going to take across the border, unencrypted on their work laptops. So, the boundaries of what was reasonable to search for just kept getting expanded. A few civil rights orgs. and people who cared about privacy tried to push back, but even though they cared a lot about this issue, the general public didn’t care, so Homeland Security got even more rights to search.

IMO it’s the same reason why the US is essentially the only country that does citizenship-based taxation rather than residency-based taxation. The vast majority of citizens don’t care because they never work outside the US. The government cares because it’s free money, and sometimes they get to take money from mildly rich people who try to evade US taxes by moving to a tax haven. But, the vast majority of people who have to deal with these taxes are low and middle-income people who have dual citizenship and live in Canada, or are Americans who took a job overseas. They all hate having to file these taxes, and think they’re completely unfair, but it’s just too small a group for the government to care about.

That’s not what that phrase means.

It makes me wonder if politicians, celebrities, etc. have their plate numbers already entered into Flock as a whitelist of people not to pull over.

The story makes it pretty clear that the cops are, as usual, not doing any independent thinking. The system says to pull that car over, so they do what the system wants. They don’t double-check to see if what the system is telling them to do is reasonable. If someone fat-fingers some data entry and the plate for the governor of California gets added to the system, the cops might charge up and box him in and jump out with their guns drawn. That might result in someone with actual power getting mad about Flock. So, maybe they prevent that by pre-loading the system with a whitelist of plates that are assumed to be in the clear.

four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in. The officers jumped out and started shouting.

So, 4 cars, who knows how many cops.

Really, this is a story about how absurd cops are in the USA.

At no point in this tale was there ever a car reported stolen. It was only a set of license plates that went missing. So, at no point was there a car thief, you can’t have a car thief if there’s no stolen car. Obviously, if there’s no car thief, there can’t be any reason to assume that the person in the “stolen car” will be violent. Yet, somehow the police charged up aggressively, boxing him in using 4 cars, jumping out and shouting, hands on their guns.

The cops even claimed that their reaction was “lucky” for the guy:

“You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”

And the guy considers himself lucky too:

And the more I’ve sat with the aftermath, the more I’m thinking about how, with a different set of officers in a different city, or a different unsuspecting driver with 34 ## DTM New Jersey plates who was a little less collected, this could’ve ended so, so much worse. Thank God our kids weren’t with us. I’m not sure if I would’ve been able to react as calmly.

If he hadn’t been as calm, he might have been killed by the cops because he might not have reacted as calmly.

The fact that this is being framed as a “Flock” issue is absurd. It’s like a story about a sensor in front of the orphan crushing machine which sometimes misidentifies normal people as orphans and throws them onto the conveyor belt. Sure, that’s an issue, but let’s focus on this orphan crushing machine first.

AFAIK the reflecting pool has none of the things you need with a home pool, like a permanently on filter system, heavy chlorination, etc.

I admit that I know nothing about the huge reflecting pool. But, I know enough to know that I don’t know. I know that the people who take care of it probably know what they’re doing, and probably have decades of institutional knowledge that I should respect.

Huh? The owners of the company pay bribes to… pool owners so that they can fill the pool with algae? Why would they want to do that?

Pretty telling that Canada and Mexico, the direct neighbours to the USA, have a more favourable view of China.

Importantly, it’s a dark grey.

One of the reasons they said that algae was blooming is that the blue bottom resulted in the pool heating up. A white bottom reflects the light. A blue bottom absorbs more, so it heats up more. A dark grey bottom will heat up even more than a light blue, so unless they fix the colour, they’ll have algae problems as soon as there’s water in it.

“trickery” implies he’s clever and doing things intentionally.

The dark ages exist because literacy wasn’t important to daily life. That’s why they’re dark

You should talk to a historian. That’s simply not true. The dark ages are dark because of the prejudices of an Italian who thought that the time after the fall of the Roman empire was “dark”.

What makes you think literacy wasn’t important and that it decayed?

Snapping pictures can be useful, but only if it’s something secondary.

For example, the prof with a heavy accent is talking about the Avogadro constant. You try to write down what he’s saying phonetically, and take some notes about what he’s saying – what that constant is, why it matters, etc. Later on, if you try to look it up and can’t find it, you can look back at the snapshot you took to see how it’s really spelled.

Or, sometimes a prof might write down where to find something in the textbook as a footnote. It’s nice to be able to pull up a slide and find out where to look.

Too often though, people use things like screenshots or recordings as a primary source. They don’t realize that the process of taking notes helps you understand and remember.

The dark ages are dark only because things weren’t being written down, so historians don’t know what happened. It’s not because people were dumber or something.

Just convince Ireland to enforce it… and thereby piss off the tech companies that are the basis for their economy because they pretend to be Irish. Or, convince the tech companies to move from their safe haven of Ireland to somewhere else in the EU where the GDPR is actually enforced… something they’d gain nothing from doing.

And then raised, then lowered, then raised, then lowered, then raised.

Robertson wanted to be paid for his good design. Henry Ford didn’t want to pay, even if it was a tiny amount.

Ford was willing to use an inferior screw design that could cause production issues rather than pay a license to use the superior design. And, even though the patent expired a long time ago, these decisions have momentum.

I would bet that Torx is more popular than Robertson even though it’s a much newer design. Is it a better design? To me, Robertson seems to have the edge when it comes to simplicity, but Torx could be better for industrial applications because multiple lobes that have a surface perpendicular to the direction of torque probably gives it more control. Also, thanks to Ikea, I’d bet that hex-head bolts are incredibly common. They share most of the benefits of Robertson. I suspect they’re a little less efficient though because the closer you are to a circle shape, the less the faces of the screwdriver tip align with the direction of torque. I wonder if there are advantages of hex over square, since you see hex so much more often.

It wasn’t an intentional feature. But, when they realized it happened it became a feature that they thought was useful.

There are a lot of things like that, where something has a design quirk that people come to rely on. The quirk is so useful that people assume it was designed to work that way intentionally, but sometimes it was just coincidence.

In a proper society with socialist benefits, you wouldn’t need to join the military to receive those benefits.

Basically, those are employer benefits. Your employer happens to be the US government, and you get healthcare, college tuition and housing as benefits from your employer.