Meanwhile in the UK pedestrian deaths are down despite the number of miles walked increasing.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-pedestrian-factsheet-2024/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-pedestrian-factsheet-2024

Instinctively I feel like doing that is a bad idea, since it makes it easier for scammers to create documents that have the feel of authority when trying to con people.

How is using the default font wasteful? Apart from anything else I’m pretty sure it uses less ink.

“laughable,” arguing that you can’t declare the majority of Americans impoverished because the suburbs they choose to live in are expensive, which is what Green did when he used the middle class suburb of Caldwell, New Jersey, as his median.

Yeah you’re right, this is verging on dishonest. The whole point of him picking Caldwell, NJ was to find an extremely median place to live and avoid accusations of cherry-picking San Francisco or Manhattan prices. Essex county is 13th out of 21 counties in NJ for income, NJ is the 11th largest state by population. I’m sure you could find something more mundane, but not that would affect the final numbers to any significant degree unless you were cherry-picking in the other direction.

Sure there’s lots of states with much lower property values, but you have to weight it based on where people actually live. Telling poor people to move to Buttfuck, ID and get a job there instead doesn’t work.

ISTG there are more commenters up in here who obviously didn’t read the article than ones who did.

The phrase “is linked to” should be a massive red flag.

If it was smuggling Iranian oil it would say, “is smuggling Iranian oil”, not “is linked to smuggling Iranian oil”.

until this administration is long gone

Based on past performance, the next Democrat administration will repeal maybe 50% of these changes at most.

I’d be down with banning everyone from social media

Ridiculous. There’s like ten thousand people who can testify that he was with them at the time of the shooting.

I’m reminded of Jon Ronson’s observation in “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”, that the religious right are surprisingly tolerant of sexual misconduct scandals in a way that progressives aren’t.

The current MAGA position seems to be that they weren’t children, they were just very very very young adults…

The kind of people they’re pissing off with this, are the same people most likely to switch to bittorrent.

My 3rd generation iPad became functionally useless after only 6-7 years even though the hardware was pristine. Almost half of the apps on it, including some major ones like YouTube, started refusing to run because they had a mandatory Update, and the App Store wouldn’t provide updates for the newest iOS version that the 3rd gen could support.

Meanwhile my Windows laptop that I bought at the same time is still in service after 12 years. Windows going out of support just means you don’t get the security updates; Apple going out of support means they’ll brick your machine.

Fuck Apple to infinity.

They spend over £50,000,000/year on care, research, and conservation.

A significant portion of what we know about the ancient world is a direct result of their research sharing and activities; for example when the Rosetta Stone was in French hands they kept it to themselves, when it was in Egypt they did nothing with it, but when it came to Britain it was shared with research departments across Europe as well as in Britain, resulting in our ability today to read hieroglyphics and demotic script.

Think about that for a second: if the Rosetta Stone had been left in Egypt, there’s every possibility that Egyptians today would still have no idea about most of their own history or how to read their own ancient texts. You might dismiss this as paternalistic or white-savioury, but it’s true nonetheless.

Even as recently as last year we had researchers finding things like https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/babylonian-map-world-0021631 that simply wouldn’t have happened without the British Museum’s work. So, I’m inclined to cut them some slack.

Some of those are astonishing.

Safety Index: 71st, lower than Belarus, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Healthcare: 39th, worse than Argentina, Sri Lanka and Mexico

People give the British Museum a lot of shit, but it’s free all year round for everyone.

It’s an issue with cost, but that also extends to the perception of the degree itself. Even a few decades ago I always found American culture to be generally more disdainful towards degrees and degree holders than most of Europe or Asia.

One of the worst things you can be in America is “elitist”; it’s a loaded word that describes a fundamentally Un-American attitude. And you can see why - there’s plenty of idiots with rich parents and a degree, and a lot of intelligent people with poor parents and no degree. So elitism and intellectual snobbery also imply classism and racism.

In countries with free/cheap tertiary education, it’s less controversial to say that people who are qualified to do a thing are likely to be better at that thing, and that getting qualifications is inherently a good thing.

Epic Boss Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself

If you can’t get your LLM to not deny the holocaust, then your LLM is not ready to get platformed on a major internet site.

I do too, but all the ones I used to visit have gone offline, and whenever I try looking for one on some relevant topic the most recent post is from 2017.