Worthwhile intertubez finds

[Ellie]

Well, the policeman should be more sympathetic. The crook has probably fallen on hard times since his husband passed away, as evidenced by that black half-veil he's wearing.

[thoreau]

I thought the unfairness of the match was that the cop brought a club to a gunfight.

[Highway]

Maybe he's using the prybar to break into the window behind them, and he took off his shoes because he doesn't want his metal heels to make noise.

This is what I figured as well. Shows intent to enter the building he just broke into. If he was just walking by, he would be wearing his shoes.

[D.A. Ridgely]

Maybe he's breaking into a mosque or some Japanese's house.

[Jasper]

Spreading his colonialism, no doubt.

[JD]

An article by a former NYC restaurateur on how the letter grading system for restaurants is an arbitrary, meaningless process that exists mostly to extract fines from restaurants and keep them compliant: https://www.grubstreet.com/2020/03/why- ... tment.html

It’s been ten years since New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene began assigning letter grades to restaurants. Today, diners focus on the grades posted in each restaurant’s window, assuming they’re objective assessments of establishments’ cleanliness. Cooks are obsessed with the points system that the Health Department used to determine violations. And restaurant owners loathe the system because the whole thing feels like a slow-motion bureaucratic shakedown whose real purpose is to be a steady, easily manipulated revenue stream for the city.
...
Often, other violations made no sense at all, or the inspectors didn’t listen if you told them they were wrong. There was the time an inspector walked into our wood-storage room, looked at the row of wood we stacked for our pizza oven, and told me I was only allowed to store one day’s worth of wood, and that we had more than that.

“The building code says that you can store one day’s worth of wood within six indirect feet of the wood oven,” I explained, “and one week’s worth of wood in a one hour fire-rated, sprinklered room, which this is. I read the building code myself and the permit drawings were approved by the Department of Buildings.”

She didn’t want to hear it. Another fine. Another court date.

[Pham Nuwen]

Holy shit! You can do entire virtual surgical procedures with this STEM site thingie. https://edheads.org/



It's got some for free as well that don't require a membership if you don't want to do a total knee or aortic anyeurism .... you pussy ....

[dead_elvis]

I've dreamed all my life of resurfacing a hip. I've also dreamed all my life of never again having flash installed.

[Warren]

I've dreamed all my life of resurfacing a hip. I've also dreamed all my life of never again having flash installed.

Suck it up d_e, don't you know there's a plague going on?

[JD]

An online test for how good your relative pitch is: https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td

I scored 29 out of 32 correct, with an average response time of 0.7 seconds ("better than 85% of people"). I feel like it's definitely something you could improve at with practice, though.

[Highway]

An online test for how good your relative pitch is: https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td

I scored 29 out of 32 correct, with an average response time of 0.7 seconds ("better than 85% of people"). I feel like it's definitely something you could improve at with practice, though.

Interesting. I got 30 out of 32 correct with an average time of 0.6 seconds, which apparently pushes it up to 94%. I was surprised by the 1/64th intervals being in there, so those were what I missed at first. And even though they felt like half-guesses later, I didn't miss any others.

[Painboy]

A list of when a science fiction idea or concept first appeared and in what story.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/ctnlistPu ... ate2=1899

[Kolohe]

A list of when a science fiction idea or concept first appeared and in what story.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/ctnlistPu ... ate2=1899

I used their link and the bigger internet, and I still can’t figure out what a ‘Gansas’ is vis a vis a scientific fi trope.

[D.A. Ridgely]

A list of when a science fiction idea or concept first appeared and in what story.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/ctnlistPu ... ate2=1899

I used their link and the bigger internet, and I still can’t figure out what a ‘Gansas’ is vis a vis a scientific fi trope.

Nor I. In the book, gansas are wild swans the protagonist harnesses to fly him about. I'd put that more in the category of fantasy than sci-fi.

[Kolohe]

I wonder if that’s what the birds in that video game Joust were supposed to be called?

[JD]

An article from the Atlantic in 1966 about race relations in the North, mainly from the perspective of poor White folks. It's interesting to see what's changed (I think even poor White folk might be slightly more circumspect in their views when talking to a reporter now) and what hasn't (poor Whites feel like the plight of Black Americans gets all the attention, even though theirs is hardly better), and in some ways the article foretells the rise of Trumpist reaction.

There is uneasy talk about a so-called "white backlash vote," waiting in the wings to single out and dismiss summarily anyone trying to give special favor to Negroes...
...
In many ways the poor and lower-middle-class white people in our Northern cities are going through a kind of experience precisely opposite to that of Negroes. At this time in history Negroes are being affirmed, while these white people feel increasingly deserted and alone. The Negro's excuse for his present condition is everywhere made known: it was not his fault, but ours. We carried him here by force and kept him in bondage for three centuries. He was not simply poor, but singled out for a very particular form of exploitation. The brutality and exclusion that he experienced have now become our national problem, because the price once exacted for the Negro's compliance lives on in the illiteracy and fearfulness we encouraged in him for so long.

In the Northern cities a white man who is poor has no such past history to justify his condition.

[JD]

New analysis of the 1979 Vela incident says that it was certainly a nuclear explosion, and almost certainly an Israeli one, and that this was intentionally obscured by US authorities to avoid political embarrassment and difficult conversations:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/blast-from-the-past

[JD]

"The day a Native American tribe drove the KKK out of town"

In Robeson County, North Carolina, in 1958 the KKK thought they could terrorize the Lumbee tribe, but they ran into stiff opposition from the people they'd hoped to terrorize and no support from the authorities.

[Dangerman]

The video is only 6/10 unless you *really* love police procedurals, but the channel is really great in general and this description is *chefs kiss*.

By law, every United States municipality with a population greater than 10,000 is required to have at least one dude who looks (and acts) erratically, however in many areas Ordinance 12(b) allows the guy to - occasionally - be more stable than his appearance might suggest. This so-called ‘ten-thousandth man’ must have sufficient knowledge of the law to be a nuisance, but he must never be permitted to have enough knowledge to be dangerous.

Recent changes to the Uniform Commercial Code suggest that if any such individual's knowledge of the law was to surpass that of your median Moorish National (no joinder intended), pursuant to the current construction of 970 UCC § 1974 (B)(6)(b), the individual must act swiftly to identify a replacement nuisance-citizen within fourteen days.

The ten-thousandth man must possess at-most-rudimentary sign-making abilities. They must own or otherwise be able to somehow obtain multiple livestream-capable cameras, and - critically - they must have the testicular fortitude to stand outside doing essentially nothing other than occasionally shouting for long periods of time.

The position in Pasco is not available.

Note: The foregoing is not true.
Surnote: But some people are going to be convinced that it is.

(Many of those people have jobs waiting for them...)

~~~

Follow us on Twitter @realworldpolice

[JD]

On why the Second Avenue subway was so expensive and why NYC will probably never build another subway line: https://nypost.com/2020/07/04/why-new-y ... y-station/

[Warren]

Each regulation serves a good purpose, but when you pile on top of one another, it makes it impossible to build anything.

Testify

[nicole]

outgroup.jpg (96.55 KiB) Viewed 4741 times

[Mo]

Each regulation serves a good purpose, but when you pile on top of one another, it makes it impossible to build anything.

Testify

I suspect it's the QOL stuff and the multiple layers of graft (government and union*) that ended up costing more than the regs. It's not like the EU doesn't have high levels of environmental and safety regulations or have a higher willingness to let construction workers die and their costs are more than an order of magnitude less. Madrid built 35 miles of new Metro, 2/3 of which required new tunneling for $65M a mile. Barcelona built 30 miles for the same cost as 2 miles in NYC. It is ludicrous how bad the US is at this compared to our peers abroad.

* Which is different than unionized labor, which applies to all European countries.

[JasonL]

I'm more and more interested at looking real hard at the Cantonic model of local government in Switzerland. The normal answer people give to local corruption is to nationally regulate something something, but it isn't at all clear to me that works here. Local governments it seems to me are deeply, deeply captured in many cases. Everything from liquor distributors to developers to car dealers to public (police, teacher) and private unions.

[Mo]

The problem is that NYC has at least 5 government entities to deal with, NYC, NYS, NJ, MTA and the Feds. So, aside from the Feds (which are relatively not corrupt) you have 4 layers of graft to deal with. That’s a lot of people and friends to bribe.