RickRussell_CA

For real, go to a library and ask a librarian for help.

They’ll have various books aimed at different levels of maturity and reading levels. Get a book, read it yourself, then ask him to read it and talk about what you learned.

Absolutely.

I hate to say it, but the only solution to bullying (and it’s not much of a solution) is to escalate the issue to administrators and parents. Over and over and over again, until the administration realizes that allowing these kids to be near each other is exposing the school to risk.

Sounds like the friend is absolutely “negging” your sister, trying to convince her that she’s defective and can’t expect better treatment.

Of course, you can explain this dynamic to your sister – that her friend is trying to build herself up by convincing your sister that she’s terrible. But sadly many people subjected to such behavior internalize it and are unable to fight it.

I think the real answer is that we end up kind of like the UK – going from the worlds ultra-dominant superpower to a sort of slow regression to the mean, as China, India and others take the spotlight.

When you look at what China is doing with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their move to dominate the transportation infrastructure of developing nations – the US isn’t anywhere near equipped to counter that. We’re still in a cold war mentality thinking that we will dominate as the world’s police force.

Meanwhile, all the actual economies will be run by Chinese companies operating with state support.

Supporting data from The Economist:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/09/05/what-to-do-about-americas-killer-cars

Yeah I’m not excusing the driver parking it like a jackass.

It depends on the use case, though. If that driver’s main concern is getting in and out of muddy work sites safely, maybe carrying cargo is less important than 4WD cred.

FYI, Fortnine is based in Canada.

Increases or decreases in the frequency of pedestrian-driver fatalities is affected by lots of things, although I suggest that poor road design and traffic laws might have a positive feedback effect when combined with limited forward visibility (e.g. a truck with poor forward visibility isn’t a huge liability in Canadian road designs might be a larger liability in typical US road designs).

Unfortunately I don’t know if we collect the right accident statistics. Perhaps the more relevant question is: are pickup trucks over-represented in pedestrian fatalities as a result of vehicle collision compared to other vehicles, and has that representation grown as truck grill heights have grown? I found a doc on Canadian pedestrian fatalities, but it classified all passenger vehicles as a single class – and unfortunately that doesn’t tell us much since most 4-wheel pickups are classified as passenger vehicles.

Fortnine has an excellent video about this issue.

I don’t pretend to know what professional landscape contractors need for their job.

I’m all for f*ck cars but people who have actual jobs that involve moving stuff like gravel and sod probably have different needs than I do, I assume?

Perhaps worth noting, there was a SCOTUS decision in the early 2000s (New York Times Co. v. Tasini) that held that freelance journalists whose contracts did not specifically include an electronic distribution clause were entitled to damages when those articles were subsequently released on the web and to electronic news services like Lexis/Nexis.

Big publications like the NYT came to settlements that allowed them to pay to redistribute the older articles (by paying the original authors), but smaller publications may not have such a settlement structure in place and may not be allowed to redistribute the original articles without additional permissions.

FYI, I have a copy of the Dragon Magazine Archive CD-ROM version that came out in 2001… only to immediately disappear off the market for this very reason!

You stop explaining and apologizing.

“We need better training data for our AIs. Let’s introduce some random scramble into search results, and when users have to hunt through the list and pick what they actually wanted instead of the top result, we can use those data to train the AI how to respond to those words when they come up in AI prompts.”

– a Google exec, probably?

Of course anybody can break the rules if they choose.

Anything that complements your career as a Cheese Greeter

Do what you enjoy. Half-ass all the things.

It’s not inadvertent. Businesses can collect aggregate statistics on race, disability, and veteran status as part of the application process. The responses are anonymized and not visible to hiring managers (except for veteran status, which may be used to provide a positive bias towards veterans for certain roles).

FYI, the new official Office default is Aptos. I’ve been making work docs with it for a few weeks and I have to admit, it looks really clean and technical.

https://medium.com/microsoft-design/a-change-of-typeface-microsofts-new-default-font-has-arrived-f200eb16718d

True, that tailgate probably precludes a 5th wheel.

I mean… f*ck cars for sure, but exotic specialty work vehicles like this are not really the problem. This is a $150000 truck; nobody is buying this to impress the neighbors. They’re buying it to haul trailers and stuff.