Another NPR listener here. While I think your criticism is fair, it really needs a pile of salt. What needs to be remembered is that NPR is but one small piece of a journalistic puzzle in America. So while it may be nice if NPR was critical of local power utility prices or local business corruption, they do not bear the sole blame for its lack of reporting. IFF NPR was alone in not reporting on these issues while (say) the local news paper ran a series of excellent articles on it then maybe you would have a major problem to reveal. From where I sit I see a whole spectrum of Editorializing going on. There is a tremendous amount of right wing media (more than Trump and his dolts care to admit) that also chooses what they cover and how they present it. The same is true for CNN, NPR and so forth. They all write their headlines a certain way and choose what stories they want to cover. They choose who they interview, what gets through, and where in an article it goes. To this day, I'll still take NPR over "Fair and Balanced" all the time, but I'll still occasionally check breitbart or AM (right as it gets) radio. I do not believe its easy to have a good grasp on the issues today with just one news source which is indeed a shame on them all.

It is practically a kids book so it's very fast and an enjoyable read. There are used copies on ebay. I found it on a spare bookshelf under the basement steps at my moms house and thought it looked interesting enough to borrow.

Your Post and the GP, while a little off topic were great fun to read. To continue our fun sub thread: two books "Guns Germs and Steel" and "A Tale of Soap and Water" cover this and were the two books I have read that cover these two topics. The latter is very old and should be in the public domain but I can't find it on google books.

While I appreciate your attempt at a fun little troll, why in the hell would a "new movie theater" be renovating? Maybe next time slow down your mental roller coaster a little and make more sense. Also, shouting fire in a crowded movie theatre would NOT be patently false if it were actually on fire. So they are not entirely alike. Also, consider the context, I am sure for some people Socialism is indeed great. Its easy to see how (for example) Scandinavians are actually just fine with their high taxes and myriad of social services. I could go into more detail, but I told myself I wasn't going to talk politics as much with others - they just don't care to listen as shown by their already obvious lack of reasoning skills and ability to read a variety of material on the subjects.

I can guarantee you that these Amazon written algorithms do not have any employee best interests in "mind." It sounds like weaponized game theory to me.

Don't worry, Republicans are really good at governing and we have a plan for this! We're going to lower taxes on both the automakers and the insurance companies, and then we'll completely remove any coorporate liability. Then we're going to lower the wheel tax on all the autonomous semi trucks on the road, but leave higher the wheel tax on all the vehicles with less than 6 wheels. We'll probably complain about the cost of fuel once this becomes a niche commodity so we will be lowering the gas tax too. There'll be subsidies for the purchase of diesel fuel for farmers too.

Where is the class action over their new phones and the horrible cell reception and drops? The other hilarious thing, if you buy one of these new phones and have a horrible experience like this with it, you still are facing a restocking fee if you want to take it back.

Without Trump this never would've happened. Make America Great Again!

As from our household, we had covid about the same time as Trump. I went in to get tested, but I almost chose not to. Positive test result. We knew what it was based on progression of symptoms and loss of smell. We are fairly certain 3 others in our immediate family also came down with it, with only one family member having no symptoms. I work from home, we homeschool, so covid didn't really affect our need to quarantine. Now, that's an anecdotal 4x applied to our one positive test result. I know from others in our rural state, that as long as symptoms were not serious there were a lot of people that choose not to go in and get a test done. Our state of South Dakota has ~100k positives, and about 8x that in population. So if this situation is extrapolated out you'd potentially have about half of the state w/ antibodies by now. And indeed our state has our "7 day average", or whatnot, on a downward trajectory - despite a VERY hands off approach by our governor and department of health. (They basically contacted me about my test result and need to quarantine when i was DONE with my home isolation. No contact tracing. Nothing. They're worthless.) Luckily I did not get very sick at all, my last day of quarantine I drove out of town and went on a two mile run. I missed running so much but I also wanted to test my lungs out and see where I was gonna be at. My wife lost her smell longer, covid can send people into mild/severe depression due to this, not fun. It'll be interesting to see how our states numbers progress if indeed it keeps dropping - hint: Christmas and New Years didn't really spike us badly.

Well, then I hope they're all running around right now without a mask so they can get their immunity the old fashioned way. I say this in only slight sarcasm, since they're the types to also believe masks don't work, there's nothing to do, and we should just reopen and move on anyways. Basically they are already the current covid threat.

I see this as a "minor" scandal, which is close to your view. There is a lot of nuance here that people just ignore. Consider that iPhones at least last long enough to have battery issues! The iPhone 5S you mention just recieved an OS point release, that's 7 years of support. Which is just incredible and incomparable to the Android wasteland. Pun fully intended. How is the Nexus 5 doing these days? This so called scandal was first an issue, if I recall, on the 6S which after 5 years is still fully up to date. This compares very well to, say, the Nexus 5X. This like so many things, needs a strong dose of facts and perspective. Yes - Apple should've been more transparent on battery life and performance, they at least did the right thing eventually. Which is more than we can say about Androids and device lifetime and support.

You could always just leave. All the people on /. from about 15 or so years ago probably remember all the rumors, conspiracies, and chat on here about how these funny things were going on. Special rooms in ISPs with no doors. Snowden blew it all wide open, and it was all true. In what other way would the light have been shed on all these matters? Don't the people deserve to know the truth now, as opposed to 50 years into the future or never. Sure, nothing came of any of it, but at a minimum it should be enough to inspire us all to be concerned with issues of internet privacy and strong encryption. I think what he did was absolutely acceptable, and I'm glad he pissed off all the government security hawks that think it was fine to slurp up almost all the data it could from us.

Here is my two cents. After years of cheap android phones that quickly fell out of support and updates, I "reused" a family members older iPhone 5S and had a great experience. I eventually broke its screen and later decided to buy a reasonably priced iPhone SE on ebay. This was about $150 in "excellent" condition and in every way was a better choice than anything the Android world could offer. I later broke its screen too, but had it repaired and the battery replaced. The whole experience was awesome. My take away: used older iPhones are great. They are cheaper, and they keep getting OS updates and upgrades, and they're repairable. I would really prefer new phones were as easily repaired as the original SE, but I'll cross that bridge eventually. I'll probably buy a cheap/lower end apple watch soon to run with, and hope I stop breaking my phone screens.

This whole thing is so absurd. The IRS should directly collect the data if it so chooses. For millions of Americans, I'd say the vast majority, they should know all of our data all ready? That is how they audit us after all. Our employers are sending in our payroll info already. Social Security, Medicare, W2, etc. I don't see why the IRS doesn't just mail us a pre-filled out form, and then we can choose to send in a modification/alteration if desired and so forth. Our "no new taxes" republicans hold this back, they think it'll make paying our taxes too easy and make us complacent. Get bent.

Reporting in from here in eastern South Dakota - we grew corn for the first time in our garden this year. It was great, probably the best I can remember and we get plenty of good corn here. This year was below average moisture for us, and our tomatoes also had a good year, after about a decade of above average moisture being a struggle. I've had field corn (horrible, though this was over twenty years ago, typical gmo field corn now is probably worse) and below average sweet corn and the rank stuff sometimes in a can. We started using an organic/natural turkey manure based fertilizer which probably helps things along. Next year I also hope to plant some indian corn for fun, I'll have to figure out how to grind it.