Posts by skeptical i

proven results

"What's a perceptive stress question?"

You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lies on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help, but you're not helping. Why is that Leon?

Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.

Ctrl-Z?

Ain't it Command-Z on a Mac? That four-leaf-clover thingie?

the Pot-emkin Village ...

... all smoke and mirrors.

One presumes they will be soliciting investment, and the talk is always bigger better faster than the reality.

Gen-X'er here ...

Dark blue cargo van was Babe the Big Blue Ox, two-door sedan was Minnie (sorry, no idea why since she wasn't THAT small), early 1970's V8 four-door beastie was Hildegarde which the dictionary said derived from the old Teutonic for Battle Maiden. A former co-worker had a small two-door named Buck on account of the bad clutch.

Not a precise analogy, but ...

re: "Social media websites have become our modern-day public square."

I am quite sure that someone once made the same argument about why one should be allowed to collect petition signatures (or hand out flyers, or ...) at shopping malls, and was shot down by arguments that because malls are private property the owner could disallow these activities. For a state that seems to be all about letting business do its business without the heavy hand of gubmint interfering, arguments that gubmint should interfere sound remarkably self-serving.

can't websites already do this?

There are some sites I use that, when I get distracted and do something in another browser, pop up a notice to the effect of "are you still there? click [here] to keep the page open" (some have a "you will be booted in 20 seconds" countdown). So, unless the real reason is employee "time on task" tracking (as mentioned above), I don't know that this is doing what can not already be done.

I would expect Chromium-based browsers whose developers claim top concern for users' privacy will have "turn this nonsense OFF" toggles easy to find and adjust, if this hell can not be disabled "at the source" by the browser coders.

Also, I "attend" many tele-meetings wherein I don't really DO anything besides listen, watch the presentations, and maybe toss a question into the chat window at the end. Will my lack of participation be considered "away"?

I agree that this would seem to cause more problems than it notionally purports to solve.

so much for helping the poor

If, as I understand it, the Capuchin order is dedicated to helping the poor, it is not clear how it is helpful to destroy the cellphone service upon which more poor people rely for everything interwebby (e.g., tele-school using a cellphone, and not on a computer using cable, broadband, or the other options of which less-poor people can more easily avail themselves). Burning down Facebook and things that actually do harm, fine, but cell service?

go get it your own self?

One would hope that if delivery charges rise too much, people wanting food plunked down at their door would do what we've always done: call it in, pick it up, then either take it home or eat it nearby. (Yes, there are mobility impaired people who NEED home delivery, I'm not talking about them.) Some of the best meals I've had were picked up, schlepped to a nearby park, and enjoyed under shade trees watching kids and dogs running around.

and what about the ~1.3 billion replaced phones?

Sure, some phones will go to the second-hand market, and the phones displaced by the "new used" will go to a tertiary market, and so on. But there will still be a bunch of phones that are absolutely obsolete, broken, or otherwise have no place to go but ... where? Landfill? Oceans? Technological improvements and new whiz-bangery are great, but it would be really helpful if the creators were to have practical and easily achievable end-of-life plans for when their latest shiny-shiny gets retired. Happy to be corrected if there are such plans in place, but in my corner of the world there are only a few "urban recycler" efforts (repairing and reselling what can be repaired, breaking the remaining units down to salvageable parts/ materials) that do the best they can with the funding they get until the funding runs out.

Have an honest above-board election.

If Amazon is the great place to work they say it is, the voters will say so.

If Amazon is the hellhole it is alleged by many employees to be, the voters will say so.

In the second case, Amazon has shedloads of money and can easily afford to meet any union demands (wages, work conditions, benefits, humane rest room breaks) so I don't know what the problem is. If Amazon were a small company barely keeping its lights on I could understand the stinginess in employee treatment (in which case they might consider just shutting down completely), but this is very much not the case. Seems they want to give more reasons to people who refuse to buy anything from Amazon.

But what about the cat?

Did Embassy Cat get his (or her) own Ecuadorian "kit-izenship"?

Enquiring minds want to know.