The shop has set up a GoFundMe campaign, ostensibly to help the teenage employee in question and other employees who were stressed by the situation.

Perhaps it's largely a way to try to capitalize on all this publicity to help keep the business afloat during COVID-19 etc too; I don't think there's anything wrong with that in the circumstances. The more successful they are, the more that sends a message to AB police.

Re "and that's why it has been" and much of the rest of your silly tirade: yes, some people are taking it seriously. Good for the medical researchers etc who haven't gone with the hype in either direction. I'm not suggesting they change their attitude. Rather, my 'should' applies both to the millions who act like it's a miracle cure because the Orange in Chief said so and to the millions of others who have dismissed it for the same reason, letting personal politics and animosities rather than science decide.

There isn't "no evidence." There's lots of evidence. But there's no _clear_ evidence. There are a lot of doctors prescribing it already because they think there's a larger chance it will help than harm.

Re "not during times of desperation" - you act as though the entire global medical community is only capable of testing one thing at a time. There have been a lot of preliminary hints that it may benefit people and I think of all the doctors and researchers etc trying to find answers here at least a couple of them will continue to look into this. I think it quite possible that there will be ways to decide, based on what we can figure about a patient's immune response, whether hydroxychloroquine or other antimalarial drugs are likely to benefit them.

Re "tell that to a president that..." look, I'm not Donald Trump's mommy, I'm not the one to tell him what's what. I personally wish he'd never been born, but your dragging politics into this to attack me would be objectionable whatever my politics were.

I've been prescribed hydroxychloroquine in the past for an inflammatory problem.

People who take realistic doses of hydroxychloroquine for short periods are unlikely to have serious side effects and complications. The major concerns are all with long-term use. Prominent among these is damage to your retinas; when it was prescribed for me they took detailed scans of my retinas to compare against later in case.

I find it entirely likely that it could have a benefit for some COVID-19 sufferers. It alleviates some inflammatory symptoms and may have mild antiviral effects. Many are killed not by the virus but by an immune response cytokine storm overwhelming the lungs. It's hard to mitigate that without seriously hampering the immune system, and researchers were speculating seven years ago that hydroxychloroquine might potentially be beneficial in dealing with cytokine storms. At this stage, when we're desperate for any way to help these people, it should be taken seriously rather than dismissed.

Because of the way it tinkers with the immune response, if studies aren't showing benefits, it may well still merit further investigation. We should take seriously the possibility that it is a real help in some cases and harms others, depending on what your body's immune response is already doing, and look for indications that help discriminate between the two.

I also am not at all surprised to see studies tell us that it's not the miracle cure many people have come to expect. Given what I knew about the drug, that never seemed realistic to me.

Drivers don't come anywhere close to paying for the roads. In most US jurisdictions, gas tax, registration fees, etc pay for less than half of road construction and maintenance costs. The rest is borne by everyone via other taxes. And since road wear scales as the fourth power of axle weight, cyclists' use of the road causes essentially zero road maintenance costs. So the cyclists are paying far more than their share of road costs and are heavily subsidizing drivers.

In many other countries, cyclists and cars share the roads just fine, with auto-bike accident rates per cyclist mile which are orders of magnitude lower than the tragic accident rates in the US. Very little of this is due to cyclist behaviors; almost all of it is because in those nations drivers know cycling is a normal mode of transport and they need to treat cyclists as fellow human beings.

The speed mismatch between a 20mph cyclist and a sidewalk 3mph pedestrian is unworkable, because sidewalks have not been designed with directional lanes, buffer zones, and passing in mind. In many jurisdictions it is illegal to ride on the sidewalk. Sidewalks, not having been designed for tires, are also inconvenient riding surfaces unless you're going quite slowly. (Did you know the reason we started paving roads was at the behest of cyclists, decades before cars became popular?)

Passing a cyclist may slow a driver's trip by a few seconds. The same is true for any slower-moving vehicle (tractors on rural roads, even horse-drawn vehicles in Amish country &c), all of which, like cyclists, have the same right to any non-freeway road as auto drivers do. People can cope with that just fine, if they don't have ignorant and arrogant attitudes.

It can't be both 72 million cu.ft and 13.3 million cu.m. A foot is 0.3048 meters so a cubic meter is over 31.3 cubic feet. No idea how someone would come up with a cubic meter being 5.4 cubic feet.

13.3 million cubic meters is correct; that's 470 million cubic feet.

Even if the waste heat is a benefit, that's still turning a pure usable form of energy, one that's ready to do useful work, into waste heat. That electricity was probably generated by burning fossil fuels, spending roughly 3.3W of heat per 1W of generated electricity. Then you have transmission losses etc too. Any kind of resistive electric heating is extremely inefficient.

The only kind of electric heating that makes sense at household or larger scales is using the electricity to do the work of running a heat pump. A geothermal heat pump can have a high enough coefficient of performance to compensate for other inefficiencies.

Been a while since I read this last. On this reading, this struck me as relevant in the slacktivist era:

"61. Do not wish to be called holy before one is holy; but first to be holy, that you may be truly so called."

As with some other provisions of this Rule, and as with that other defining work at the other end of the Middle Ages, The Imitation of Christ, great emphasis was placed on avoiding self-righteousness and on discovering your own faults rather than expecting to be praised for discovering the faults of others.

Perhaps in today's world it's seen as offensive to adopt a code of conduct that tells you to respect all people (a clearer translation of #8 from the Latin) and hate no one (#64) rather than defining special protected classes. Perhaps it's seen as offensive to have a code that says to make peace with one's adversary before the sun sets in the era when we're being encouraged to protect certain viewpoints while harassing those perceived to be on the "wrong side" and ensuring "they're not welcome anymore, anywhere."

More ethical thought went into the composition of this code 1500 years ago than into the codes of today, that's for certain.

I'm sick and tired of phone review sites that seem to maintain an outsized influence on what people think is "trendy" and what people think is "boring" yet don't actually have a connection to whether the phone is a better tool or not.

Aesthetics and screen size trump all else. Design elements for the sake of novelty (OMG A CURVED SCREEN!) are valued over basic functionality. (It's easy to find reviews that complain at length about 'dull design' because omg simple and functional is so last year.) Getting rid of the 3.5" jack really was courage, because [cool-aid reason here]. Higher numbers are always better whether they have any impact on the user experience or not. Must have 4K! (even though phone users would be hard-pressed to tell the difference from e.g. 1440p in double-blind testing.) Must have 8GB RAM because it's what the trendy flagships are doing! (even though no benchmark has ever shown any real performance advantage in realistic contemporary use.) and so on and so on. And they seem to manage to dictate to users what to buy and dictate to manufacturers what to make.

For people who actually want to use their phone as a tool rather than as an all-consuming 24/7 Netflix and Instagram stream, it's a travesty that Android has had so little in the way of decent small phones. This is especially true for people who spend considerable time doing physical activity outdoors rather than sitting at a desk writing fawning reviews of $1200 toys.

The Xperia Compact has been the only line with good performance and cameras, but it's gotten steadily more expensive and less compact. Plenty of people were interested in the Unihertz Jelly and Atom because they offered a smaller form factor, even despite the phones' clear limitations. I would be likely to buy the Atom myself if it had a quarter-HD (960x540) screen; that's 450 dpi, which is not unreasonable, while the 432x240 screen is just too low-res for many kinds of uses.

"Palm" has ticked a lot of the right boxes with this- genuinely small, high screen area to total area ratio, HD res (1280x720), IP68 and decent impact protection. But the price point is a real problem, and it's too bad it's tied to Verizon.

You are on point.

RSS is one of the few innovations in the web since the IE5 days that really empowered users and not ad providers / trackers.

Firefox claims to be all about enhancing users' power and privacy. They've claimed that Pocket and other things they're doing are there to try to do more to help people discover content they want without going through search engines and social media sites that track them. But RSS is one of the best ways for making that connection and they're killing it.

All five of the warmest five years on record in my area have been since 2012. The fact that we're experiencing an extreme drought is not a coincidence. This area would not be catching fire, especially in September, in a year when we had a remotely normal climate.

Facts are stubborn things. You can stand outside at noon in the noon and deny the sun exists - "no, there is no radiation, or at very least not solar radiation, you know nothing about radiation, get over it" - but you will still get burned.

There can be plenty of legitimate disagreements about what responses to global warming are appropriate. But claiming it's not happening, in the face of a decade of record temperatures and melting ice, or claiming it has nothing to do with us, in the face of obvious science about what CO2, methane, etc do and the fact that we've doubled their atmospheric concentrations in the past 70 years, is simply delusional.

How exactly do you claim to know that about the fire I'm next to?

People can argue about that for many fires, but not for the one near me. The area I'm talking about had low amounts of residual fuel. It has hit pines and aspens, but the period when it spread most rapidly was crossing areas with grasses, sagebrush, and scrub oak, none of which are thinned out by "ordinary small forest fires every few years."

All 5 of our hottest 5 years on record have happened since 2012. The fact that we're experiencing a drought is not a coincidence. This area was not like the forests you have in mind and would not have been burning like this, especially in September, in a year when we had a remotely normal climate.

A lot of the trees just a few miles from me are presently on fire after yet another severe drought year due to climate change.

I imagine that probably doesn't make them happy. I'm disinclined to closely approach a burning tree to ask.

No. I voted for Kasich in the primary. In the general election I voted third party, and in my state enough of us were disgusted by Trump that the third party candidate was actually leading the polls for a time until last minute desperate disinformation campaigns from the two major parties.

As to why many others around the country nevertheless turned around and voted for Trump in the general election, of course some thought Trump would do less harm than Hillary as chief executive, but that's not all of it. Many people figured that they would be willing to take an executive they disliked if it meant their party would have a better chance at choosing more of the nine unelected unaccountable robed lifetime dictators. That's one of the unfortunate consequences of the activist decisions the Supreme Court has made during the last couple decades.

Note that less than half of the GOP voted for Trump in the primaries - even though by the time of the later primaries most of the other candidates had bowed out.

There are plenty of Republicans who didn't want this President, and painting all of us with that brush is just as foolish as the prejudiced tweets from the Blowhard-In-Chief.

We have got to fix the broken election systems in the US. People keep blaming the Electoral College, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is first-past-the-post plurality voting. In any of the early primaries, Trump would have lost every single head-to-head matchup, so any decent electoral system (i.e. any kind of Condorcet preference balloting) would have avoided this disaster. (Easy explanation from a Nobel winner here.) As long as we keep first-past-the-post primaries, both parties will frequently nominate miserable candidates.