That was Feb 9 -- 7 weeks ago .. Before things started to look nasty for the public. At that time, members of a pandemic response group (like what Trump disbanded in 2018) would have been quietly setting up contingency plans in case the virus got away in the US. Instead, the Trump administration spent the next 6 weeks suppressing alternate test kits, and telling people things would be just fine. Just last week, Trump was looking to put things back to normal by Easter (duh!).

From the authorization letter

yep.. Sounds like Trump. You can make a lot more tests if you don't have to worry about the quality

Is this Trump and his crew putting their fingers in stupid places??? "Just find ways to do more tests -- They don't have to be accurate I just want NUMBERS! ". It kinda sounds like Trump, doesn't it?

Like somebody else said: I'm fine with false positives, but false negatives could have misdiagnosed carriers wandering the city infecting people. It'll look good for Trump until,, 3 weeks down the road, you've got a thousand more victims cascaded from the one false negative.

We really do need to see some stats on this test. I can't blindly trust anything under Trump's direction.

I'm not a scholar on this, but the church didn't officially consider natives of the Americas to have souls, and so to be 'human'. In that context, you could argue that looking at (or drawing) a naked native woman to be technically the same as looking at an undressed monkey. It was certainly the logic that they used to excuse acts of genocide.

That would also make raping a (unconverted) native the equivalent of bestiality (which may or may not have been illegal). Things start to get very strange when you stop calling other people human.

They've also just come out with a beyond-meat type sausage patty for their breakfast menu.

A&W in Canada has been selling a "beyond meet" burger since last year. It's not exactly like beef, but I think that it's a welcome difference from it's veggie patty. I'm fine with eating either one.

That's when Trump declared his 'national emergency" and funneled money away from the project.

Now the 'Space force' is limited to building radar systems to detect Mexican drug runners using catapults to fling their drugs over the new border wall.

Alas! it was an idea with such high aspirations ...

Cash is legal tender. Plastic is not. If I offer you cash (in reasonable denominations) to pay a debt and you refuse it, then the debt is cancelled. That's the law in Canada. Canada inherits that from British common law -- just like the US but with a later fork. This is an ancient principle, so it's likely to be the same in the US unless there was an explicit change. In this case (hair done), the debt is incurred so you don't even have the excuse of forward negotiation. For completeness: The debt can be incurred before the product is taken. If you run the items through the cash register and say "Total: $19.56", I now have a functional debt. If I hand you a $20 and walk away, the debt is paid. Of course: IANAL .. YMMV.

One specific incident. i had a programing problem that I couldn't solve. I was about to post to Usenet (80s) asking for advice. Just before I posted my problem I stopped and asked: "If someone else posted this problem, what would I tell them?"

I then followed my own advice, and it solved the problem that I couldn't solve on my own.

Yeah, not much use for it right now, but the Wright brothers' initial technology wasn't that useful, either. A century later, some people consider propeller driven aircraft reasonably functional..

or $60K for each New York job. Not sure if it's worth it.

The US government using Russian-made software to secure their machines is like the time that they let Russian workers build the Moscow embassy. It ended up being so bug-ridden that they had to rebuild parts of the new building in order to have a secure zone.

Yeah!.. Same thing with Columbine, The Oklahoma bombing and Sandy Hook.

Hold on.. Those were all right wing white Christians. Nobody would have been afraid of being called racist for ratting out right wing white Christians! ... So how did those people not get stopped? Because police were afraid to be seen taking down white kids? Should police be more nasty to white folk too?

Uhm, no. It's not about porn. It's about control over, and access to, what people say to each other in private.

The death toll in this attack is roughly equal to the number of people who have died in the UK because of DUI. The only difference is that DUI deaths are so common and so continuous that they're rarely front page news, much less international news.

In the US, you have on average, 650 gun deaths per week. 500 can be attributed to 'Christians'. Less than one per week can be attributed to 'Muslim Extremists'..