Studies have shown that more expensive placebos are genuinely more effective than cheaper placebos. Not in the sense of, “har har, it’s a placebo, 2x effectiveness of zero is still zero” but actual reported higher rates of improved health and diminished symptoms.
It works in a similar way with audiophiles. The sticker shock is part of the effectiveness for them.
I mean, reading the article, it’s specifically for victims of people who have court ordered ankle monitors. This isn’t like tracking non-convicted citizens… these individuals have been sentenced in a court of justice to having their privacy reduced by being tracked at all times, instead of being locked up in a prison cell. This is just notifying someone who has reason to need to know about data that’s available. I don’t have much problem with this…
The later is possible, and I’d bet many try to get into policing because of that ideal, but I hear they tend to get bullied out of the profession by the former, or else converted by them.
As the saying goes, one bad apple spoils the bunch.
Add in that there’s no cheating involved, and the niche gets even smaller.
What can I say? It’s a catchy tune!
I signed onto a sailing ship
My very first day at sea
I seen the Mermaid in the waves
Reaching out to me
“Come live with me in the sea,” said she
"Down on the ocean floor
And I’ll show you a million wondrous things
You’ve never seen before"
So over I jumped and she pulled me down
Down to her seaweed bed
On a pillow made of a tortoise-shell
She placed beneath my head
She fed me shrimp and caviar
Upon a silver dish
From her head to her waist it was just my taste
But the rest of her was a fish
'Cause her hair was green as seaweed
Her skin was blue and pale
Her face it was a work of art
I loved that girl with all my heart
I only liked the upper part
I did not like the tail
But then one day, she swam away
So I sang to the clams and the whales
"Oh, how I miss her seaweed hair
And the silver shine of her scales"
But then her sister, she swam by
And set my heart a-whirl
Cause her upper part was an ugly fish
But her bottom part was a girl
Yes her hair was green as seaweed
Her skin was blue and pale
Her legs they are a work of art
I loved that girl with all my heart
And I don’t give a damn about the upper part
'cause that’s how I get my tail
I’m pro piracy, and anti-copyright (or at least, anti copyright as it exists today). That said, steam is a legitimate competitor to piracy AND can coexist with it.
Steam— Cons: it costs money. DRM exists. Pros: the majority of the money goes to devs, great ui, fantastic networking tools (they literally have invested in additional physical networking wires (OSI layer 1) to expand bandwidth for use in gaming on their platform), consumer oriented discovery of new titles, consumer oriented review tools, useful socialization functionality, automatic updates, easy and simple access to developer communication, easy mod support, customer support/service, and there’s probably more I haven’t thought of off the top of my head.
Piracy— Pros: free, no drm Cons: less convenient than steam, have to be scam/virus aware, needs privacy protection to be safe and to keep up with what the minimum requirements for being safe are, requires technical skill and know-how, lacks all steam’s pros.
And the nice thing is, piracy still exists, so if you need a drm free version for any reason at all, it’s still there!
Only on my TV, where my family watches youtube through our PS4. Old kids shows and taskmaster and the like. It’s incredibly obnoxious— ads play when you open the video, and if you want to simply restart it move to the correct place it’ll play the ads again, and the ads can be 60 seconds long each time. They also pop these unskippable ads up at the most obnoxious moments in the videos.
The “next ad” button often does bring the time-to-skip down by ten seconds or so, at least. Still obnoxious. But I’m not sure about a better way to access YouTube and Disney+ and Prime Video etc etc on the tv from one device, and, well, I have a 4 year old, so doing without is not much of an option.
I think it’s kinda refreshing when Hollywood actors get married and then show evidence that they genuinely like who they married, you know? It’s sweet. There’s too many times we’ve seen it go otherwise.
I seem to recall that people found that the like and dislike buttons equally improved the video’s visibility in the algorithm, causing many youtubers to genuinely suggest disliking the video as their call to action.
I’m for smartwatches in general.
About a year ago, I was measuring my blood oxygen on a regular basis for a medical condition, and the oxygen meter thingy wasn’t very convenient to carry around all the time. So I got an Apple Watch (non us models had blood oxygen monitoring even back then) for the convenience and logging. This was genuinely my only concern.
The fact that the watch was displaying my exercise time and calories burned was startling to me… and extremely motivating in a way that quite literally blew my mind. I started exercising regularly, working out. My health started improving in general. I started counting calories and losing weight. I lost weight. I gained muscle that I’ve never had in my life.
I had a friend try to tell me that I could have done all these things without a smartwatch to tell me things. Empirical evidence for decades indicates otherwise. I’ve been told that it’s a crutch and that I’m a lesser man for using it. But you know, you use crutches when you can’t do what other people do. I absolutely love my smartwatch and will hear nothing against it.
I have no opinions on brands or specific models in general. They’re pretty much all the same to me. Get whatever has the features you want and like. As far as I know my apple health data stays local to my phone and my data exports, so I feel pretty safe there.
I’m not sure exactly which region, but I know for a fact that there is a region in Canada that speaks like this. I thought it was just a joke until I met someone from there. My memory suggests maybe from near Winnipeg? I could be entirely wrong there, it was twentyish years ago. (We were both volunteering for Hurricane Katrina cleanup in Mississippi)
Anyway, he legitimately had the most stereotypical thick THICK Canadian accent I’ve ever heard before, and at first I was convinced it was affected or a joke he was making. Nope, that’s just how he talked.
There is no such thing as a weapon that is only capable of being used for defense. It’s a logical contradiction on the order of a true paradox such as “this statement is false”. It is theoretically possible to have some sort of defensive shield with no way to move it, but even such a thing could be deployed offensively as an area denial tactic, ask any rts player. If you can stop force, it can be used as force.
Another way to think about it is the old question of which would win, the proverbial unstoppable force, or the immovable object? Einstein’s theory of relativity gave us a framework to say that both terms refer to exactly the same thing. An immovable object, by definition, is actually an unstoppable force. And an unstoppable force, by definition, is an unmovable object.
So it goes with weapons. A weapon is a weapon by its nature. It is only the wielder who decides if it is defensive or not. If you can’t trust the wielder, then you can’t trust the wielder, and that’s basically it, and the root of all problems.
My understanding is that light directly above is their method of determining how to stay upright, so artificial lights cause them to think up is towards the light, so attempting to go in a straight line puts them in orbit around it.
They aren’t trying to go towards the light at all. They’re attempting to go perpendicular to the light.
Multiple.
You may also be interested in knowing that a four letter acronym is not an FLA, but rather an ETLA, or Extended Three Letter Acronym. The rarer five letter acronym is either an EETLA or an XETLA as you prefer, for Expanded Extended Three Letter Acronym.
With you 100% of the way, except I’m not sure I would have gotten it without the comment nudge.
In some contexts this is true. Other contexts reverse this. Ukraine is showing a context in which it is easier to defend than attack, for instance.
I mean, it is. Always has been. Pretty sure the scholarly record supports it pretty darn well.