First off, Afroman is amazing.

Adams County is in an Appalachian part of Ohio, along the Ohio River between Cincinnati and West Virginia. I was there during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and it was very depressed compared to where I came from. Very, as in I had to go to Kentucky to get a hotel room. Kentucky in that area had benefited from a lot of federal economic development money, and the small Amtrak city I stayed in, while certainly not Aspen, was doing okay, with a functioning newspaper larger than some of the other small town newspapers in Eastern KY at the time. The hotel was aok and not a franchise - other people on jobs were staying there too. Kentucky had new highways and the like, probably thanks to Mitch McConnell and other political influence. Ohio, while it's a more powerful state economically than Kentucky, seemed to have forgotten about their side of the river there. And it's far enough away from Cincinnati to make it outside pleasant exurbia.

The next county upriver and inland, Pike, is famous for the so-called Portsmouth site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

While a typically poorly managed federal nuclear materials site, in a poor area, it did started with good technology. The two coal-fired electrical plants that powered it were built with innovations that set power efficiency records. At least one coal plant nearby on the river (there were may, some survive I think, too bad for the trees) was pressure-negative to reduce dust for the workers. Later cutbacks emptied out much of the staff and support, such as the plant medical office. DEI employees were excluded from the union break room, but appeared when work happened.

I met some great people who helped me for no particular reason - but corruption, severe economic pressure, and some level of prejudice is the bane of such places. As elsewhere.

Dogs were some of the most popular characters in early cinema. Rin-Tin-Tin may have been the most popular "actor" in Hollywood for a few years. Everybody (mostly) can relate to a dog, and conversely, a dog can relate to everybody. AI is the opposite of going to the dogs. Rover has no interest in AI as it has no animal nature. Nor should people. Oh sure, a dog-feeding robot would get Rover's attention, but that's about it. No licks. Those cats that ride Roombas don't nuzzle up to them. The T-1000 did not fool John Connor's dog.

The Rin-Tin-Tin era also saw a massive migration from rural areas to cities and suburbs, so there was more going on than natural affection for the beasts. A certain nostalgia, and humor, in a battle for our humanity. Today we are making a less fortunate migration, and leaving workers behind. Such as the immigrants who do roofing and slaughterhouse work and picking crops. (It was a mistake to leave the legal niceties to refuge status and unaccountable subcontractors, rather than E-Verify and reasonable increases in limits.)

If the actors are leading the way in resistance, good.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in classical physics electro-magnetism was always a bit of a problem theoretically, and with some observations here and there. The excellent formulas did work. Newtonian mechanics and gravity seemed more natural by contrast. The surprising thing was that solving the EM situation also involved changing gravity.

The resistance to change was a bit high in this case it seems. People have jobs, career, etc. As always with Thomas Kuhn arguments on change, it's a matter of degree. Medical science is highly innovative but lead researchers are notoriously hidebound and autocratic and/or overly revered. Look at what happened at Duke, with a lowly postdoc calling out the biostats of a prestigious and promising research group, the lead protected on up to the provost, until finally the NIH imposed a big sanction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... And it's hardly the only case. Much money in that field of course. And the outsiders to it, patients, journalists, alternative care providers, are highly motivated, so it's hard to separate the spurious critiques from the real problems. In anthropology you have general fans, but also descendants, as outsiders (usually). Seems overall more pleasant, far less money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Minitel was the exception, with millions of terminals. We knew about it in the U.S., and we used the word "minitel," with a French accent, as a one-word comment on the fractured online world we had in the early 1990s: IRC, Gopher, Mosaic, Sabre (the public, online version of a travel agent's terminal), and most amazingly, Nexis, if you had a home dialup connection to a university library that offered it. Nexis was (or is?) a commercial service with the full text and recent archives of every newspaper, which themselves were far beefier than now. For socials and pron, that went way back. I first saw it on a clacking teletype with a cradle modem to a university at 300 baud or less, written in Basic stored on paper tape, in the early 1970s. Generative oohs and ahhs and ascii art.

Since it was just a one-word comment to us, I looked up Minitel on Wikipedia. There it's claimed that "in 1980, Ouest-France expressed the concern that Minitel would 'separate people from each other and endanger social relationships.'"

sorry for the typos

Yes! So anyway I was wondering if would fly on Klingon Wikipedia*, or one of the more obscure language Wikipedias. Maybe Tolkein's Elvish language. Seems Elvish was never seriously considered as a Wikipedia language, but Klingon was kicked out and went to Fandom/Wikia. AARoads didn't need Fandom since AARoads started pre-Wikipedia. And than led to...

• There 336 Wikipedias by language. Esperanto (constructed) is the 37th largest.
• Another 13 are "closed and read-only." All real languages, and only one was really deleted; most are in "the incubator."
• Another 4 are "deleted but hosted elsewhere:" Klingon, Moldavian (real), Siberian (a hoax), and frickin' Toki Pona, a simple constructed language for positive vibes, with only 137 words.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik...

* Roads would be useful to Klingons for spying on Earth, or interested in its history.

The NPP seemed a bit trigger happy in my experience editing Wikipedia, but the site can't be a free-for-all, if you consider, say, spam. The contributors are called editors, not writers. It's worked out OK, but the complexity of managing Wikipedia can be tedious, as are the layers and layers of macros, not all in active development. I had no special role in managing it, but voted on a couple of things, and reverted obviously bad edits when I saw them. On NPP in particular, every added page does mean you need a community of people interested enough to maintain it. That doesn't apply to geeky things like roads, but even there you could have a morass that's hard to organize or navigate. What would be the disambiguation page for "95" if Wikipedia had every street address starting with 95? Maybe that's a straw man to what you're saying.

A good example of complexity and workload is the initiative to add structured data to Wiki Commons. You know, catalog pictures like a library would, with lots of meta fields, beyond what is shown when you go to the picture's page on Commons. It's not required when you upload a picture. It's a good idea, but also one more thing that takes time to do, and a certain critical mass to be useful.

The upshot is Wikipedia is usually reliable, but who knows about the future. Many references are dying out. New projects like the structured data on Commons might be a good way to keep people involved. Zealot-adjacent individuals and groups like NPP probably do more good than harm.

The psychology you describe is legit, and I try to avoid being around it, which not everyone can do. But I'll just say blanket statements about it are subject to lack of perspective and scale, and those two qualities are themselves things that separate mental illness from the normal. Almost all crazy people are normal with certain exaggerations, so not that different from you and I. It's a fine line! Even Carl Sagan (the popular astronomer) had a hard time explaining scale. But power trippers, yeah, not good.

s/the the/the

s/Missing from the news/Missing from the headlines/

The WSJ article is free to read if you register. No trial offer or anything.

There's not much to it though. It quotes a few experts, and leaves it at that. Two contradictory quotes:
* These types of audits are pass/fail only and provide no details at all. Only standardized, general language is allowed.
* These types of audits can point of failures, by saying they are not "unqualified," and giving details.

The reason audits have boilerplate language is so the auditor doesn't get sued. That's probably how the court looks at it. I don't know about these audits, but other audits say they rely on the company's numbers. Then you have forensic audits, like of the the Bahamas crypto scam with the Stanford prof parents and once-future-in-law MIT prof parents. So WSJ needs to tell us all the kinds of audits that exist, in some article that requires a paid sub, I guess.

Chris Christie when he was a chief US Atty pioneered a whole new business for large-sized law firms, brought in to run compliance programs, rather than the defeated companies paying their fines or suffering other penalties.

Missing from the news on the Sackler opioid case is that as part of a settlement, they wanted the bankruptcy court to bar suits not just against the family, but also against a list several pages long of other individuals and entities, who hadn't even been mentioned in the case, nor were party to it. Some of the plaintiffs wish that settlement had been accepted, because time is ticking.

Charles Dickens portrayed a court case that lasted so long generations of lawyers had lived off it, and nobody cared to or could discern the facts of the original case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why... The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world."

Interesting. I've noticed another feedback thing in pseudoephedrine, more congestion than I started with after going off it. And it has minor side effects systemically, some good, some bad. Low-key weird drug. So I use it sparingly. What I like to call psuedo-pseudoephedrine (phenylephrine) sounds like a good solution for you.

Pseudoephedrine is still fairly easy to buy. You just show your license. You don't need a prescription, but can only buy x amount every three months. Some pharmacies have stopped carrying it, though.

Crucially, Covid-19 patients at home didn't realize they were patients, and the blood ox level can crash quickly. (This was before rapid Covid-19 testing.) With a blood ox* meter, one can detect the initial drop and go to the ER before the crash. The initial drop precedes the crash by a few (?) days. When this news came out, drug stores ran out of $15 pulse oxs. Took about a month for the supply to stabilize.

(*) The TFS wrongly implies the company is "calling" the device a blood ox instead of a pulse ox. A pulse ox does both pulse and ox. Ox means blood ox.

One glitch, shutting down Windows with my old as mud MFC-based app still running causes a dismissable error.

Yes for Notepad++, it's solid.

And I guess the Microsoft Foundation Class that was basically Wordpad will keep working. Does MFC still exist? I wrote a customized wordpad-like app about 25 years ago, using Borland Delphi (Pascal) and its wrap of MFC. The exe still runs fine in fully updated Windows 11.

General de-staffing is common. Your comment on USAD shows malicious policy, but I guess I'll chip in with general woe.

1. Private: had a job in an operating power plant on the Ohio, 2008. Two floors of offices, for support functions like an infirmary, machine shop. All vacant except the engineering office and the union breakroom.

2. Public: conference in what's called the GSA Building (1800 F St NW) in the mid 1990s (nice auditorium). Typical miles of hallways, more than half the offices empty, people there told me. A big picture of Al Gore (V.P. 1993-2001) stood by the entrance inside, for leading the "Reinventing Government" initiative.

3. Semi-public: skeleton crews at USPS and Amtrak. It's become a safety problem on the latter, with local commuter trains typically better staffed.

4. Regulated/contracted: one-person crews on bucket trucks, garbage pickup, long-haul transport, all jobs that are easier with teamwork.

The only thing resembling former gangs of workers I see are on construction sites, road maintenance, business bubble offices, etc., and even then it's about half.

The question would be how much is efficiency, how much is social policy, how much is management bias. Academics and activists have spent two centuries trying to argue the market is not necessarily efficient even in micro-economic choices. Fairly obvious, and it's a mix, but plenty of well-funded groups take the other view.