Just checked. I've got five comic book stores between me and my local mall (a half hour drive away). I've been to four of them.

I don't go often, but when I do I make sure I buy some stuff. Gotta support the local economy.

(Yes, yes. Survival of the fittest. But if I was being dispassionate and only buying stuff from the cheapest place available, my community would only have Dollar Stores and Amazon warehouses. It takes a community to keep a community together.)

I anyone buying newspapers in news stands? Who cares if comic books are sold there?

I buy comics at the local book store. Every Barnes and Nobles I've been to has at least a couple shelves of comics: Trade Paper Backs (TPBs), which are collections of multiple issues that cover a single story line.

I haven't bought single issues in decades, but buy a lot more TPBs than I did back in the 80s. If I want single issues or special orders, I'll go to the local comic store. Every town I've been to has one. My kids are teenagers and mostly read comics in TPBs, as well. They're generally not interested in buying single issues.

A better article would be the metamorphosis of the local Comic Book store. What have they evolved to when there are less casual readers?

Comic Book stores I've been to also do a lot of table top gaming (ie: D&D, Magic The Gathering, etc.), comic-related merch (ie: posters, T-Shirts, etc.), and whatever their communities want. They also will special-order and hold non-comic items (ie: SF/Fantasy novels) for regular customers.

Sorry for screwing up by bold. Forgot a close tag. :-/

When recommendations for medical treatment are put into guidelines, every single recommendation is associated with two things. One is a level of evidence and the second is a strength of the evidence.

Here is the old guidelines for preventing heart disease, from 2019: https://www.jacc.org/doi/abs/1...

It's a free PDF.

The explanation of level of evidence and strength of the evidence is on page e182.

According to page e204 (28 of the PDF, I think), the level of evidence is A (very good) but the strength of evidence is IIb, which is quite weak, suggesting that it may be overturned in the future.

Obviously the level of evidence has changed since this guideline came out.

That's why physicians "practice" medicine. There's always new information coming out and we change what we do.

BTW, I'm a cardiologist.

Proportional fines seem to be the way to go there.

Five dollar speeding tickets for people on welfare. Ramp up to a million dollars for Jeff Bezos (as if he would drive his own car).

And get rid of the added court fees if you don't contest the ticket. Paying a ticket should have as much added paperwork as buying groceries (ie: none).

And make sure the speeding ticket fines go to the general state coffers, not ear marked for the local municipalities, local police department, or state troopers funding.

...or at least the heat death of your hardware.

I remember when I lost my virtual copy of Windows XP with all appropriate updates installed for VirtualBox. I lost one piece of software which wouldn't work under Wine or have a native Linux version. It sucked for a couple months and then I got over it.

Now it's essentially a Microsoft-free household. Probably. I may have a Microsoft mouse somewhere that I've misplaced.

They were following a "China First" doctrine. Around the same time as the U.S. was following an ""America First" doctrine.

China didn't trust the leader of the free world and therefore hid reports. Can't say I blame them.

Trust is a two way street, and the U.S. administration was saying that we shouldn't trust the Chinese.

I didn't watch it when it came out and picked up a pirated version.

The audio mix on it was horrible, with the special effects/space having very high volume and the dialogue low volume, making it hard to pay attention without getting my ears blown out when the special effects scenes started up.

The science fiction in it was quite good. The rest of it was utter garbage. I find it hard to believe that Chinese people are as written in the books.

He writes good science fiction but horrible dialogue and characters.

Google Chrome has an amazing amount of lock-in with the rest of Google Apps.

You enter your credentials into Chrome and you're automatically logged into your gmail and sheets. You also have seemless synchronization of your bookmarks and passwords. Your Google Drive is there, waiting for you, already populated with every document you created with Google apps, including customized Google Maps.

It's just so seemless that it's difficult to avoid.

And don't forget that Chrome is used in more business and school environments.

I'm not currently interested in this, but I appreciate their (monumental) effort.

I've got an M1 MacAir and fairly happy using MacOS on it. But I know that at some point in the future Apple will drop support for the hardware and I'll be looking for a Linux fallback.

The sooner the heavy lifting gets done, the sooner full support for my Macbook Air will be in place. If it takes a few years, so be it. Apple generally supports the hardware for 5+ years.

I'm thinking once every 500 seconds. Seems like a step backwards, but writing an OS is hard.

Do you really think the wheels on this weren't turning before the pandemic started? It was just given a push by the difficulty to get people in low-pay positions.

Humans are expensive to employ. Health care insurance keeps going up. Humans are unreliable and require sick days and a couple days off a week.

It is in every company's best interest to employ as few humans as possible.

Here's a thought: The economy has already bounced back and is bigger now than it was pre-covid. (source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/2... ). But unemployment is higher. Which means the economy is more efficient and those unemployed people are... "excess"?

I am a cardiologist that works in a 450 bed hospital in PA. I've personally seen over a hundred of patients come through the ICU with Covid-19 infection. And they don't call me for most of them.

I have yet to see a single patient in the ICU for Covid-19 vaccine-related issues.

Question: What are these 13k people dying of? Anaphylaxis from the vaccine (presumably within 24 hours of vaccination)? Covid-19 infection after vaccination (unusual, but possible)? Something else?

As a cardiologist, I can tell you that I've seen several patients with Covid-19 infection that had myocarditis from it (mostly diagnosed by elevated troponin levels). None of mine died from it. I've also seen several who've had low heart rates (sinus bradycardia) attributed to covid-19 infection. None have needed pacemakers.

So what are the covid-19 vaccination-related deaths actually due to?

So what if I get a breakthrough Covid-19 infection after being vaccinated? I'm not worried about infection. I'm worried about life-threatening infection. Is that more likely in people vaccinated or those that aren't vaccinated?

Also, a single shot for those that were previously infected seems to work there. Why not highlight that?