If you have to stoop to attacking someone’s grammar in an argument, you’ve already lost. I likely won’t be replying to this comment chain again.
Edit: Lol they edited their comment. The original was only as follows:
Only nine states have outlawed red light cameras. Your “many” statement you made earlier is, in fact, just “some.” So, fixed that for you.
That’s not how it works where I live. I had to fight a ticket from one of these once, because I live in an area where courts haven’t ruled the cameras unconstitutional.
FTFY. The rest of your comment needs to have that context in mind, because the cameras’ legality entirely depends on where the camera in question is located.
Here’s a reminder that the 40 hour work week was intended to have a partner at home, to take care of the housework, errands, bills, etc while the employee was at work. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and like you don’t have enough time in the weekend, it’s because the weekend was supposed to be free. But since wages haven’t kept up with inflation, everyone in the house needs to work, meaning nobody is available to be a homemaker.
Gerrymandering doesn’t factor into presidential elections, because presidential elections don’t use districts. Gerrymandering only affects local and state elections. It’s how all of the crazy house reps have rock solid seats, for instance. But on the presidential scale, it’s voter suppression and swing voters, combined with presidential candidates focusing their time in expected swing states to reach that magic 270 electoral college votes.
Our local and state elections are 100% gerrymandered, but the presidential doesn’t use districts. Instead, republicans have focused on suppressing blue votes. Things like shutting down voting locations in blue areas, so people in blue areas need to travel farther, and wait times at the remaining locations are 6-8 hours, instead of minutes. Making it illegal to hand out water to people waiting in line. Voter ID laws, to bar people who can’t afford the fees+time off work to get an ID. Plenty of others too, but those are the big ones. Usually they use the “ensuring the integrity of the election” messaging to justify it, but it’s really about eliminating blue votes.
Texas had more votes for Kamala than New York; Texas had 4.8M democrat voters, while New York only had 4.6M. Believe it or not, most states are fairly purple, and the elections largely depend on a small amount (less than 10%) of swing voters. Republican states have also largely relied on voter suppression to disenfranchise blue voters, rather than trying to grab the swing votes.
Isn’t the accuser in that case the police or whoever is in charge of those cameras?
If it were a cop pulling you over and writing a ticket, sure. It would be that cop. They can show up in court and stand as a witness for you to cross-examine. But if the entire system is automated, which specific cop is the accuser?
When you do frequent midnight alerts for missing elderly, people disable the alerts on their phone entirely.
I’m reminded of the time cops woke up the entire state of Texas at 5AM, to say a dude named Sam Altman shot at a cop near Amarillo. They issued a Blue Alert for the entire state. For reference, many Texans were more than an 8 hour drive away from where it happened. Yeah, shit like that gets emergency notifications muted.
If you truly want to be petty, sit until it’s a late yellow before you go. They’ll be stuck at the red. I wouldn’t do it if there’s anyone stuck behind the honker, but if it’s just the two of you then it’s an easy way to be very petty. It’ll piss some people off so badly that they’ll be liable to run the red.
Red light and/or speed cameras are banned in many parts of the US, because courts have repeatedly ruled that they’re unconstitutional. The constitution’s sixth amendment guarantees the right to argue against your accuser in court. This was originally intended to prevent secret surprise court rulings, which the British used against Americans leading up to and during the revolution; The crown would accuse people of crimes and try them without any notice. When they obviously failed to show up to court, they were found guilty in absentia and arrested.
Regional courts have repeatedly banned the cameras, by ruling that because people can’t argue against an inanimate object, the object can’t accuse people of crimes. Basically, the constitution says you have the right to get your day in court, and some courts have interpreted that to mean the automated cameras violate that right.
For real, I remember when Solitaire was added to Windows to teach people how to use a mouse. It wasn’t just some fun little thing they added on a whim. The goal was to provide an entertaining way for users to naturally learn mouse controls like clicking and dragging.
Before then, you had to use the keyboard to navigate text, because you literally didn’t have a mouse.
There’s a setting in windows that opens snipping tool when print screen is pressed. This allows to select a screen, window or a rectangle. More than that, it also has screen recording functionality. Very good for quick screen grabs with no additional software required.
Win+Shift+S is the keyboard shortcut. You can even do screen recordings. I use that shit all the time at work, to send bug reports when the useless fucking software we’re forced to use has a repeatable crash that the dev team can’t replicate with text reports alone.
Even in medicine, there are big blind spots between specialties. My radiologist who did my wife’s sonogram was like “yeah I got into this because I fucking hate needles. If I wanted to go into nursing I’d need to use them a lot. So here I am, doing all of the non-invasive stuff instead.”
AI detectors don’t work reliably, and often just end up flagging autistic people as AI. And even if it is, the points can still be valid. The em dash is a big giveaway, but those are also common with people who read a lot of fanfic (cough autistics cough). Because the em dash is commonly used in fanfic dialogue, so fanfic readers and writers get used to seeing and using it.
Yeah, dB is a measure of difference, not an absolute value. Every increase of 10dB represents twice as much volume, but that means 0dB is essentially just a reference point. Going from 0 to 10dB means you have doubled the volume. 20 is twice of 10, 30 is twice of 20, etc… But what is twice of 0? If 0 were an absolute value, the entire scale would break down because 0x2 is still 0.
People have a really hard time wrapping their minds around the logarithmic growth of the dB scale… For reference, a rock concert can easily hit 120dB, but the loudest sound that earth’s atmosphere can support is ~194dB. Because sound is a pressure wave with a compression and expansion. After 194dB, the atmospheric pressure isn’t enough to fully expand into the void after the compression. Once you get above that ~194dB threshold, it stops being a sound wave with a distinct push-pull, and becomes a solid shockwave that is all push. Above 194dB, it’s essentially an explosive wave.
And to briefly touch on what you mentioned about perception, there’s also the fact that different frequencies require different amounts of power to produce the same volume. Lower bass frequencies require more power to produce the same volume, because the bass waves are physically larger and require more motion from the speakers to produce. If you want a demonstration, go look up the difference between white noise and pink noise.
White noise has the same amount of power throughout the entire audio spectrum, but it tends to sound relatively high pitched and tinny. This is because those lower frequencies are quieter. In comparison, pink noise has a curved power distribution, mapped to how much power it takes to produce the same volume. This means it sounds much more “full”, as the low end is actually balanced with the highs. But listening to pink noise will be wildly different on a phone speaker vs a car stereo, because the phone speaker physically isn’t large enough to truly produce those low notes.
My dad once rm -rf’ed his company’s payroll server by accident. He was a database admin at the time. He was asked to make a quick update to something. Instead of running it as a transaction (which would have been reversible) he went “eh it’s a simple update.” He hit Enter after typing out the change for the one entry, and saw “26478 entries updated”. At that point, his stomach fell out of his asshole.
The company was too cheap to commit to regular 3-2-1 backups, so the most recent backup he had was a manual quarterly backup from three months ago. Luckily, Payroll still had paper timesheets for the past month, so they were able to stick an intern on data entry and get people paid. So they just had a void for those two months in between the backup and the paper timesheets.
It wasn’t a huge issue, except for the fact that one of their employees was on parole. The parole officer asked the company to prove that the employee was working when he said he was. The officer wanted records for, you guessed it, the past three months. At that point, the company had to publicly admit to the fuckup. My dad was asked to resign… But at least the company started funding regular 3-2-1 backups (right before his two week notice was up.)
I know you posted this as a joke, but the CIA’s Simple Sabotage handbook recommends doing something exactly like this. If you can’t risk your cover with active sabotage, you can still contribute by getting a position in middle management and doing everything in your power to grind the gears of bureaucracy to a halt.
Let’s say there’s a company that is manufacturing war supplies. You can apply for middle management positions, and then do the typical “middle management is so inept” thing to slow down production.
I used to work in a theater where the main director had recently died. It was cancer, and was a relatively long battle. The entire cast and crew watched the slow attrition, and her loss hit everyone pretty hard. She always sat in a specific seat during rehearsals. When she died, the theater even had an embroidered ribbon with “Reserved for [Director]” made, to hang on the seat.
About a week after she died, one of the audience lights started acting up. It was the one directly over her favorite seat. It would just randomly come on during rehearsals when the rest of the audience was dark. We all very quickly started calling it “the [director’s name] light.”
Those of you familiar with theatrical lighting may know that this “randomly decides to turn on” phenomenon is colloquially called ghosting. It happens often enough with older lighting systems, so it’s not unheard of. But the fact that it was directly over her seat, (and only ever during rehearsals, never during shows when an audience would have been bothered by it) fueled a lot of superstition. Needless to say, there were a lot of other “this theater is fucking haunted” things that started popping up.
The most memorable one for me happened after a rehearsal. The rehearsal had already ended, and most people had already left for the night. The lighting tech and I were in the booth, going over some of our notes and updating lighting cues. The director’s light was ghosting, but we didn’t think too much of it. Then the wall phone in the booth rang.
The phone ringing was notable for a few reasons… First, it was like 11:30 at night; Who the hell calls that late? Second, to the best of our knowledge, the phone didn’t fucking work. As far as anyone knew, it was just left over from when the theater had a landline patched into the booth. But normally it didn’t have a dial tone or anything, so you couldn’t dial out with it. And nobody knew the phone number for it, so it never got any calls.
The lighting tech and I swap confused/concerned looks, and I reach over to answer it. On the other end is just pure static. Like straight white noise. And no, I know what a fax sounds like. This wasn’t a fax. After answering and a few seconds of trying to hear a response through the static, the line goes dead. Okay, whatever. I hang up.
The very moment the phone returns to the wall hook, the director’s light in the audience flickers out. The lighting tech and I swap another confused/concerned look. She starts to worriedly say “so I think we’re done for now“, and I’m already shutting down my gear and grabbing my bag to leave by the third word in.
Yeah, Samsung TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app either. You can sideload it, but good luck walking your “you touched my computer six months ago and now it’s broken. This is your fault” grandmother through that over the phone.
I suggest you read the article you actually posted, because it supports what I said. Whoever wins the state gets all 38 electoral votes. It’s not like a 51/49 split has the votes split. Whoever gets 51% wins all of the electoral college votes. The congressional districts are gerrymandered to hell, but that’s because they determine house reps. Just like I said.