And they don’t seem to wear sunscreen

You aren’t wrong, but you are being a little unfair to Amtrak. You always see people saying the same thing about amtrak and other forms of public transit as well as services like the post office. Yes, amtrak receives subsidies, but prior to covid, they had a 99% farebox recovery ratio, i.e., 99% of the cost of a ride is covered by the fare, and the remaining 1% by subsidy. Covid dropped travel numbers across the board, but they are still forecasting 86% for this year

Compared to the interstate highway system, which is covered 0% by fares, Amtrak is performing incredibly efficiently. By mentioning that amtrak is subsidized, you are insinuating that driving is not.

Amtrak actually legally has right of way over freight, it’s just that the freight companies break the law, and no one does anything about it. https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/HostRailroadReports/mythbusters-enforcing-amtraks-legal-right-to-preference.pdf

In case people think you are joking, I want to clarify that you are not joking. Amish, and similar groups like some Mennonites, absolutely vacation by train

They want to merge with Albertsons, who owns the other half of grocery stores: Acme, Safeway, jewel osco, and a bunch more.

In this case, though, it probably wasn’t $3.80. That’s what the cost would have been to the owner of the gas station, but to the cashier, letting a customer walk with goods could cost them their job. Definitely a different risk/reward

Recyclability, too

Cigna doctors spend an average of 1.2 seconds per case. Their whole system is to deny everything right off the bat, and then they only have to potentially pay out for patients who have the resources to appeal.

That’s exactly how you do it. It’s not same-day, but if you really need a passport same day, you probably messed something up, lol.

If it is expired, I don’t think you can do it. Just if you are in the last year of validity.

That’s how it has been in the US. Now, though, if you already have a passport, you can renew online and take the picture yourself, and get it mailed directly to you.

The thing that makes getting a passport slightly tricky to begin with in some circumstances is needing proper ID. In the US, there’s no generalized law saying that you have to have certain forms of ID. Most people use drivers licenses as ID, but obviously not everyone has one (by choice or as a consequence of drunk driving). There are a lot of people without ID, and there are ways to get ID, but they can be difficult for people without resources. A birth certificate is hard to get if you don’t have one already, especially if you don’t know where you were born.

I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.

I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.

Oculus was founded by a shitty person who sold to Facebook and then went on to help make a company to bring Big Tech into surveillance and autonomous weapon systems. Basically, he’s trying to bring on an orwellian nightmare.

Oculus would have gone bad weather or not Facebook bought them.

A huge problem with the wine industry in America is that they’ve always tried to position themselves as a premium product with respect to other forms of alcohol. With respect to the information available to the consumer, the pricing seems to be random. Products that are aged understandably are going to cost more, and huge brands should be cheaper than small brands. Other than that, prices just seem to be set to correspond to whatever market segment they are targeting. A $20 bottle of wine may taste way better than a $15 bottle, but it could also be worse. There’s no indication of what could make the $20 bottle better than the $15 bottle other than the fact that it’s more expensive. Some brands put a little bit more info in, like the percentage of grapes, and sometimes they tell you where the grapes came from, but most consumers are just going to grab the cheaper bottle.

Contrast this with beer, where you know higher abv=more ingredients=more expensive, aged beers are more expensive, and beers from smaller or foreign breweries are more expensive. Breweries often tell you the exact ingredients that went in, so you can get a decent idea of what a beer will taste like before ordering, and you can make an informed decision to buy slightly more expensive products.

Wine is a little more tricky because there are fewer ingredients, and less processing, but they could absolutely give way more info. The wines that are good just try to market it as the magic of terroir in a bottle, rather than actually pointing out how and why they are better or taste different.

Coffee beans aren’t beans. There are some beans that are roasted as a substitute for coffee, like the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree. In times of shortage, people have tried many things to replace coffee, like dandelion and chicory root. For the most part, the substitutes arent as good as the original, so people don’t stick with them. There’s a chance someone has tried to roast and brew pinto beans or whatever, but they probably taste bad.

This whole post is a good illustration to how math is much more creative and flexible than we are lead to believe in school.

The whole concept of “manifolds” is basically that you can take something like a globe, and make atlases out of it. You could look at each map of your town and say that it’s wrong since it shouldn’t be flat. Maps are really useful, though, so why not use math on maps, even if they are “wrong”? Traveling 3 km east and 4 km north will put you 5 km from where you started, even if those aren’t straight lines in a 3d sense.

One way to think about a line being “straight” is if it never has a “turn”. If you are walking in a field, and you don’t ever turn, you’d say you walked in a straight line. A ship following this path would never turn, and if you traced it’s path on an atlas, you would be drawing a straight line on map after map.

Lots of cars > lots of traffic > stopped cars > radiators don’t cool > cars break down > roads blocked

The problem I have with that is the same problem I have with the way people talk about most colonizer-colonizee(?) relationships. In many cases, you don’t have the big bad powerful people going in and doing violence against natives. The powerful sit at home, and force their local poor into a position where they have to do violence in order to survive. Yeah, you had your Christopher Columbus types, but they weren’t/aren’t the majority.

Odds are, those loggers are members of another local tribe, who have been economically forced into illegal logging. Logging is super dangerous, and there’s no way that the people actually responsible, who are the ones making real money off of it, are out there with chainsaws.

Tl;dr, they need glocks and bus tickets

Basically, from my understanding, the idea was that it wasn’t a defense in the sense of the person saying they were innocent. The defense was in claiming that an assult/murder was not premeditated, hence the “panic”.

I was thinking about potential for inaccuracy due to refraction from thermal inversion layers or other temperature anomalies, but then I realized that the refraction would equally affect the optics, provided that the optics remain on target throughout the firing.