That's what's getting your goat?

Honestly, "Tennessee (sic) is the music capital of the world" got me. I would never consider listening to anything which falls under this definition of "music" and have been known to leave stores playing what they would call Music in Tennessee. And that leads us to their abuse of the term "Artist". I imagine that Elvis being the "king of country western rock" probably could count as an artist in a limited set of social circles, but so far as I know, Tennessee is not exactly a cultural capitol.

I will say that back around 1997, there was a great microbrewery/steakhouse in Knoxville (I think with an irish name) that I can't find the name of anymore. They used to brew a great draft where full raspberries came out of the tap with the beer. But that probably was the highlight of the state.

So, let them make laws to protect their "music" and in fact, I highly recommend they pass laws banning the export of their music. That would be far more effective and cutting them off the internet altogether would help enforce that law.

But the last time I was on the job market I encountered quite a few job postings on other sites - including directly from the sites of employers who were posting them - that the companies already had candidates lined up for. There are some companies who have policies that dictate they must openly post a job, even when they have someone lined up for it. It appears that is as far as those policies tend to go though, as they are free to ignore every single one of those applications and leave the applicants in limbo for as long as they'd like.

I recall one company who posted well over a dozen positions over 2 years that I was very well qualified for (I was not unemployed for more than a few months of those 2 years; I was applying earlier when I was less satisfied with the position I held elsewhere at the time) that had a convenient page that allowed me to track how many positions I had applied for, and what happened with them. Unsurprisingly not one of them ever progressed to anything other than "closed".

In a fun turn of events I have been on their campus multiple times as a contractor for my current employer. Now that company is paying far more for me than they would have if they had hired me.

EVs as rentals might start to make sense after the charging infrastructure in this country has been built out further and most people are familiar with EVs. I recently made a trip from Orlando to Jacksonville in my Bolt EV and while I was charging for the trip back, I ended up helping someone with a rental figure out how to use the Electrify America charger, since they were only familiar with ICE cars.

You need to change the mentality first. I have rural family members with two vehicle households, who typically drive 30-50 miles per day to commute into town and back out to their homes. Perfect situation for them to buy one EV and charge them at home each night, while keeping the ICE vehicle for longer trips. None of them have done so.

How does the same pay for a 32 hour work week cause inflation? Everyone will have the same amount of money as before.

It's 2024, so far as I know, most urban areas of the developed world have grocery delivery available. In fact, here in Norway, it's taken off to the extent that it seems impossible to drive anywhere without some grocery delivery truck driver parking in inconvenient places and blocking traffic while they make deliveries.

In the 1970's and earlier we had people like this too. They were called milkmen. They would deliver glass jars of juice, milk, and even soft drinks into a metal box outside your house, then they would retrieve the empty containers which of course a deposit had been paid for. The jars would be transported back to the central, washed, inspected for damage, refilled, resealed and reused. The glass would generally be of a high quality promoting a high number of reuses and, though I know nothing about glass blowing, seems to be a material which, at the cost of great energy be reblasted into a new container with little waste.

Why are we still receiving milk and juice in plastic and wax coated paper, and every other beverage in plastic? Why is it that food delivered in glass jars are being thrown into glass waste bins where they are smashed and we have to melt them in order to reuse them?

Let's go further. Uber Eats and similar services around the world deliver food in single use containers. Why is this even legal? If I order food and don't want to take the time to wash the dishes, I'm certainly willing to place the containers the food is delivered in within a pickup box or hand them to the driver next time I order (at a cost of course) and I would even order more often if we could address the waste problem.

Then there's meats. Holy WTF!?!?!?! when I go to the store and buy meat
1) It's defrosted for some dumb ass reason. Why the hell is it defrosted? How dare they? Are you seriously trying to suggest that the meat was butchered and shipped thawed? I can understand if I visit the butcher and I buy meat that is thawed because, well you don't grind meat when it's frozen and the same is true about different cuts, but why is it thawed and rotting before I even buy it at a grocery store?
2) There's a plastic container. Why the hell did you put the meat in a single use plastic container or a pressed (with craploads of chemicals) paper container? Stop charging me for the plastic and pay someone to stand behind a counter and wrap it in paper. It creates a job for a nice kid who is willing to work and I can store the meat in a covered glass dish or the freezer when I get home.
3) There's a maxipad in the container. Since they're defrosting the bloody meat, they've placed a women's sanitary pad into my food to catch the blood. WTF that's precisely what I want to think about when opening up that lovely t-bone steak.
4) There's a high tech meat freshness indicator in the package. Freeze the damn meat, leave it frozen and I don't need to buy the (probably overpriced) one time use, throw away, probably made with forever chemicals indicator. I don't want it, don't need it, stop pushing that crap on me.
5) There's a transparent plastic cover over the meat. Yeh, more plastic. You've defrosted the meat to make it beautiful and wrapped it in planet killing everything so I can choose the 125g slice of individually wrapped steak that looks prettier than the other which I'm going to buy anyway because 125g doesn't make a dinner, so we're going to really try to kill earth by buying two small packages.
6) There's multiple printed labels on the packaging.

Better yet, show me a picture of a big fat juicy steak on a website, let me choose how much I want and whether I want it delivered frozen or if the steak should start thawing on the way for consumption today.

Single use plastic is a problem and ALL plastic is single use. It doesn't matter if it's something you wrap a cucumber in (yeh, Norway individually wraps EVERY cucumber and EVERY bell pepper in plastic), or if it's a Tupperware container that will make it to landfill when die at the age of 62 years old thanks to plastic jammed down your throat. It will get to landfill sooner or later and the Tupperware made to last 50 years is 100 times worse because there was absolutely no attempt to let it degrade. It's made to keep lasting for ever and ever. It's made to curse the planet forever. The only benefit of the Tupperware is that it's your great grandkids problem and we're sure some smart asshole will solve all the recycling problems by then, so you're not being evil.

We can forgive our parents for cursing us with plastic. Just like us, they were stupid, but the difference is, we have more information. So while pumping the world full of lead and mercury seemed as great as filling toothpaste with radium at one point, we now know that plastic is a problem and we have to figure out what to do about it. If we at least make some attempts to address the issues, it's better than figuring "fuck it, not my problem" and trashing the planet for a million years to come. We know it's a problem and we know that probably an insanely big portion of the world is employed by making and distributing plastic crap because honestly plastic is fucking amazing. And I know that I'll be dead long before my pretty little life is affected by the long term effects of plastic. Maybe my kids will be smart and not reproduce and bring kids into a world that my generation and my parents completely trashed. But our legacy is "we destroyed the world because the free market economy demanded that some asshole decided we need a window to look at thawed bloody meat shipped with a maxi pad in a package that was a bad idea 100 years before it was ever made". Pretty much time to say "oops, maybe we fucked up. Let's pretend to give a shit and make some symbolic efforts to stop doing it"... and make the damn grocery delivery STOP delivering plastic and make her take the empties back to reuse them.

Except that they aren't doing full genome sequencing (which is vastly more complicated and vastly more expensive). They are sequencing only specific regions of the genome. It would be similar to comparing the Bible to the Koran based on how many times they use the word "Thou". In the end you'll know they're both books and they're different but you won't know the chapter counts or the year of publication.

Not necessarily, and for more than one reason.

• One, it's a different test (genotyping vs karyotyping)
• Two, chromosomes aren't all that stable against shipping and storage (and hence could be degraded by the time they arrive)

That doesn't apply here though. Sequencing technologies are not biased towards or against particular chromosomes, and the chromosomes are not sorted out before sequencing. The whole sample goes in and primers bind to anything they have affinity to. Sequencing then proceeds regardless of whether it starts on chromosome 4, 16, 21, or some other chromosome entirely - as long as the start and end are on the same chromosome. And if you're looking at variable regions within genes, the likelihood of those starting and ending on the same chromosome is exceptionally high.

CBC Marketplace did such a test nearly a year ago... and yes, they even submitted human DNA as well. Quite a few of the tested companies did detect it as "non dog DNA".

Which may just mean that the other company had included some additional tests to look for "non dog DNA", and this company did not. That's a smart control that this company should have thought of, although depending on the scenario it might only tell you about contamination, not complete substitution.

I have quite a bit of experience in molecular biology, including DNA sequencing. In undergrad I was part of a consortium that sequenced ESTs from a couple different species of trees. After grad school I was part of a multi-discipline multi-omics team that handled DNA and protein sequencing data.

I don't work for any of these dog sequencing company, but I know more about Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) than most people. I've seen more DNA sequencing formats and done more DNA assembly than most people as well. There are only so many ways they can do this type of DNA work at a scale that makes it possible for them to turn a profit at the prices they charge. If they had some completely novel new DNA sequencing technology they'd be selling it to research labs and hospitals, not selling it on the cheap for people to identify the parentage of their pets.

It's pretty easy to tell a human from a dog by a karyotype. It's actually quite a bit more difficult by DNA sequencing, especially the kind of rapid sequencing that is used for this kind of work.

A good analogy are the old statements that "humans are 99% chimp", and similarly "humans are 90% banana". The genetic similarities between very different species are profound. To tell one breed of dog from another - where of course the chromosomes are the same - you need to look at certain highly variable regions of the genome. The problem though is that those same highly variable regions exist in our genome.

So what could they do differently? Well they could add a few more control reactions to their sequencing to try to rule out errant DNA. They were operating under the assumption that people were sending in only dog DNA, and now we see what happens when something else goes in. The real challenge though is what to do if you get a sample that has some of each - which could easily happen if a dog owner with a dirty house collects a dog sample in a cavalier manner and ends up sending in some of their DNA along with the DNA of their dog. It appears the company built their method without a terrible amount of concern for that either.

30% and people will buy your game. Or use Epic store which is practically malware and no one buys it?

Let's be honest, this is an issue with Americans. I'm not saying that this is strictly and American thing, but look at all older American companies. GM, Ford, Boeing, etc... they all make shit products and while the raw materials they use might be pretty good, anything more complicated than a hammer they just can't get right. Add computers to anything and they're completely lost. It's hilarious because even IBM can't manage to get the computer thing right. American stuff is half-assed, overpriced junk made by workers who want top dollar pay for the least effort but made from almost the best raw materials.

I wonder if this will become noticed by more people. "Buy American" is exactly the same as it always was. It actually was always crap quality, the difference is, the rest of the world keeps getting better and American's just keep getting better pay.

Judging based on the fines they're passing, they're not punitive or corrective. The EU commission is just milking the cow. I think Apple, Google and others should raise a lobby to insist on an investigation into the EU commission who seems to think that their annual should be paid for by big tech through fines.

When people are affected by anti-competitive behavior, the fines levied should not be going to the EU, the money should be given to the people affected. This is not what the EU does. What they do is entirely self-serving and Apple should sue them for this behavior. At the least, they should refuse to pay the fines until the victims are identified and the money is directed towards them instead. The EU commission will have to find a better solution than 2 billion euro fines if they're forced to give the money to the people it really should go to.

The Prius has had a couple decades of design history behind it now. It would be a bigger surprise if it lost this contest.

I'm not a fan of the Prius myself, but it has its place and its base. We could of course criticize what it actually takes to build it, or the cost of disposing it when the time comes, but it should have little trouble winning this award.

My closest big city is not San Francisco (though I visited San Francisco not long ago while traveling for work). I strongly suspect that downtown San Francisco is seeing similar issues to my own local large city downtown area.

Namely, my city is seeing a chicken-and-egg problem getting retail going. The Macy's in that city left several years ago. More recently Barnes & Noble left as well. They still have Target and Walgreens, but not a whole lot else in terms of retail. Most of their high end jewelers, haberdasheries, suit stores, and the like have left as well.

Before a lot of the retailers left though they cut back their hours as they saw that downtown workers weren't sticking around very late into the night to shop (bar patrons didn't tend to shop much either). This created an unfortunate cycle; workers were leaving right at the end of their working hours because there wasn't much shopping to do while shops were closing because people weren't shopping.

Which leads to a chicken and egg problem of sorts. If retailers stay open later again will people start to shop? Or do the shoppers need to do something drastic to indicate to the retailers that they are looking to shop later? If the latter, what should that be?

My main airport has tried a similar idea in the parking ramps. It sounds great in theory, you can turn down an aisle in the parking ramp and see if there are any green lights in the ceiling that indicate an open spot. It also is supposed to all report back to the boards at the ramp entrance to tell you which levels of the ramp have open spaces.

It all sounds great, except it rarely works. Sometimes the tally is close to accurate on a per-floor level. The markers in the aisle rarely get it right though, and you end up driving hopefully up to several green lights before you eventually find an open spot. There is no rhyme or reason to it, either; it's not like the occupied green light spots are occupied entirely by Fiat 500s or other small cars, they could be filled by any vehicle you can imagine fitting into a standard American parking space.