Anyone ever read Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow? It was in a stack of books destined for the trash, I didn't even read the synopsis fully, I just grabbed it because I enjoy gilded era aesthetics. It was really good, I ended up reading it in 2 days.
I'm curious what other people think about it.
I am so ready for local apples. Supermarket apples have been garbage lately. Even fujis, which are usually consistently mid, have been mealy trash.
It's the worst when people get up to go to the bathroom. Wear a diaper like a true cinema fan
I went to a tourist thing where you can ride a train up a mountain. They offered us the option to ride on one pulled by an old steam locomotive that they only run on special occasions.
It was really cool looking, but I wasn't prepared for the amount of smoke involved. The train cars were open and I felt like I smoked the equivalent of 500 cigarettes on that short ride.
I get why Republicans think inflation is a good thing to campaign on, but what are they saying they'll do about it? It made more sense when they were blaming it on the stimulus checks, but nobody thinks more checks are coming, and Trump did the stimulus checks.
Maybe American voters are just stupid enough that saying "shit is all fucked up" when the opposition is in power earns a vote.
This pdf has his manifesto with footnotes that explain everything and a lot of good research into the stuff that led up to it.
It's a good read, it changed my opinion of Dorner. I still fully approve of his later actions, but his motivations were basically all personal.
There wasn't much in the way of innovation in Uber/Lyft. Private Taxi companies and the regulated cab commissions were able to get competing apps going pretty quick. They just couldn't compete because they had to charge some kind of fee to the Taxi operators, while Uber was giving users a huge discount.
The venture capital firms knew from the beginning that Uber wasn't about technology or innovation, it was about being the next tech monopolist.
Get in between businesses and customers in an industry that's going through a technological change. Subsidize to the benefit of the businesses and the customers to prevent competition. Grow until you have monopoly power. Increase the costs to the users, then increase the costs to the businesses. Next step is usually offering to sell the customers to the businesses(usually by selling ads), but I could see it being some kind of Uber driver gold subscription or something that gives you priority in the app.
Yeah, I don't think the algorithms are the valuable part of social media sites. It's the active users that make up the network effects. Meta has likely already figured out the algorithms already, Instagram reels is struggling because creators go where the viewers are and viewers spend the most time on the platform that has their favorite creators.
I'm bouncing back and forth between tears and rage
There's an Xposed module for this. Make sure you have the latest version of lsposed installed before trying it.
https://modules.lsposed.org/module/com.android1500.gpssetter
In New Hampshire a new law has started allowing parents to put their kids in private schools and keep the public funding. In my tiny town we have a private Christian school newly created for the purpose of taking this money. Each kid that leaves our public school costs the community money because you can't fire 1/20th of a teacher or close 1/400th of a school.
Our schools were already poorly funded because of New Hampshires stupid fucking tax system. There is no income tax and no statewide funding of education, all of the funding is local. The poorest towns pay the most to educate each student for the obvious reason that poverty causes a lot of problems for kids. We also have the lowest property values. This means our town, the poorest in the state pays 10 times the tax rate that the richest community pays, and ends up with the worst schools.
My impression is it's less about pushing Trump and more about causing conflict within the US. There were Internet Research Agency(commonly called a troll farm) linked accounts pushing both sides of the COVID stuff, both sides during the BLM protests, etc.
Dems blaming things on Russian disinformation plays right into that goal, too. If you want to rile up the US populace, make people feel like everyone they disagree with is brainwashed by evil outside forces. Republicans did the same shit with TikTok, blaming China for young leftists, trans people, etc.