That's what was supposed to happen, but the school's administration was not present to review the footage and cancel the alarm, hence the police came in force.

They re-adapted to a predatory diet later. Their neornithian ancestors however were feeding on seeds and insects. In fact, eagles (as members of the Accipitriformes), owls (Strigiformes), hawks (also Accipitriformes) are more closely related to the likes of sparrows and parrots than to most other birds, and the falcons (Falconiformes) are the direct sister group to sparrows (Passeriformes) and parrots (Psittaciformes).

The hackers I mean. Stealing has consequences.

So he has something to distract his constituents from why he fled Texas when the people were freezing to death due to Abbott's and Ercot's incompetence.

Also, because the Wikiepedia article about the battle at the Alamo explicitly states, "About one hundred Texians, wanting to defy Mexican law and maintain the institution of chattel slavery in their portion of Coahuila y Tejas by seeking secession from Mexico, . . ." To him, telling the truth is "liberal" bias.

Oh fuck off. The headline is exactly correct. Something was worth X yesterday and today it's worth Y, where Y is substantially less than X.

If you had to sell right now, you would get far less than for the product than if it you sold it yesterday. Hence, erased market cap.

It's used every single day in the financial industry and is regularly quoted in headlines when a company's stock plunges.

While this caveat is correct, it is incomplete, as most avian lineages died out too. Only some toothless lineages survived, and that's the important adaptation. Toothed birds had a diet similar to their theropod ancestors. Birds with toothless beaks diverged from that diet to a seeds and insects based one, and in the aftermath of the meteor impact, that was an important treat.

I don't remember that rule about not discussing politics. Sure, at dinner, or specifically at Thanksgiving dinner, but we used to discuss politics in the office face-to-face all the time, and just kind of agree to disagree. But we both came away with a better understanding of how the other person was thinking, and in most cases there were also areas on which we agreed. Nobody every tried to get someone fired for their viewpoint. That's what changed.

This is a good step, if it's really a thing. But what I wonder about is if we can somehow get people from the political non-extremes talking to each other again (face to face). I was in Kentucky on a business trip a few years ago, and we were going out to lunch with the client there. We asked if this other guy wanted to come with us, and they said, "No, he won't come... he's a democrat." So? I used to work in Michigan from 2000 to 2006 and we'd go out to lunch all the time, and there was a mix of people who were democrats and republicans. Sure, there were lightly heated discussions, but everybody went back to the office and worked on stuff together. People understood each other's point of view a lot better back then. And they were polite. I wonder how to encourage more of that these days.

Yes, because all the communist countries over the past 100 years were utopias devoid of greed and suffering. *Editor's note: they were not.* Communist regimes are just as eager to exploit natural resources and conquer territory as any other nation. Do you think communism stopped China from emitting so much CO2?

> I wonder if someone with my "punish disobedience" attitude
> just wouldn't succeed as a teacher, these days.

Yeah, the problem is the school administration doesn't believe in it, so they undermine you. For example, if you send a misbehaving kid to the office for discipline, they'll generally be given candy or other treats. Yes, really. Every time. Which means every kid who has ever been sent to the office for bad behavior, is going to misbehave again and again, hoping to achieve similar results.

And you *absolutely* cannot punish them yourself; that would end your teaching career.

No, I'm not making any of this up. My sister is an elementary school teacher.

So long as Trump and his minions have the same done to them, deal. Fauci has given decades of his life to help people so if he has to be sacrificed to get rid of a larger evil, so be it.

Honestly, at this point I think their population is closer to three times ours; though it's impossible to be precise at all, because death statistics are as illegal to report in mainland China, as any other politically sensitive thing.

We know for certain that their birth rate has been lower than one-child-per-woman and falling for the last couple of decades (and given their demographics -- most of the population being well past child bearing age for a woman -- this definitely implies that the population of domestically-born Chinese people has been shrinking), and we also know for sure that an abnormally large number of deaths went unreported or grossly under-reported in 2020, 2021, and 2022. (We've got satellite images of the backlog stacked up outside of crematoria for months at a time, and needless to say there's nothing in the official stats to correspond to that.) As for immigrants, expats have been leaving China like rats off a sinking ship for the last half decade or so. Estimates of the current population vary wildly; I've seen figures as low as half a billion, and as high as 1.5 billion; but realistically, I think on the one hand it's clear that there's been a significant decline, and on the other hand it's also clear that China is still significantly more densely populated than America. On the whole, I estimate that their population is about three times ours, give or take. And continuing to decline.

Whether this decline is altogether a bad thing (for China, I mean), is another topic for another day.

Congratulations. You have reverted to the way things were written 2,400 years ago.

What a great improvement. Certainly better than writers no longer using the Oxofrd comma in sentences.

I don't know about the count of solar panels, but I don't need to, because it's a side issue.

Fundamentally, the article is abusing purchasing power parity, when talking about the size of the entire economy, to make it sound like China's economy is actually comparable to America's. That's *incredibly* intellectually dishonest. Purchasing power parity GDP is only meaningful, at all, when you're looking at per-capita numbers, because in that context it is a proxy for average standard of living. (Even then, _median_ income, adjusted for purchasing power parity, is a much better proxy than GDP PPP, especially in countries with a stupidly extreme wealth gap, like China.) When you're talking about the total size of an economy, as a proxy for the resources and economic power that it can bring to bear, purchasing power is entirely irrelevant, and bringing it up is absolute proof that the writer either does not understand economics at all, or else is deliberately attempting to deceive the reader. Or both.

The article is absolutely propaganda, and furthermore it's _stupid_ propaganda that no educated person should fall for.

Yes, there are, but it's becoming less common now.

We were *told* back in the early 2000s, when USB was still horribly unreliable, that computers with "legacy" ports (PS/2, RS232 serial, and parallel) were going to be a thing of the past "very soon". At the time, it didn't happen. A couple of large manufacturers released a couple of models each with no legacy ports (e.g., Compaq with its iPaq line, and let me just remark on what an early-2000s product name that is), and then then due to popular demand they introduced variants that did have the legacy ports, and the whole thing blew over and everything went back to normal. A few years later, a lot of models started shipping without parallel ports (presumably because they genuinely are physically large to an annoying extent), and in some cases without serial ports as well, but the PS/2 ports mostly remained, for another next twenty years or so. And then they too started to decline (rather suddenly, since the pandemic, though I think that's probably a coincidence of timing), and at this point it's difficult to buy a new PC that has PS/2 ports, but that's a fairly recent phenomenon, and it's still *possible* to get them (new, I mean), it's just no longer the norm, it and becomes more uncommon with every passing year now. Another MS Windows version or two from now, it may not be possible any longer. Which would be unfortunate, because then it wouldn't be possible to plug an XT keyboard in using an XT-to-PS/2 adapter, either, and that would be a shame, because XT keyboards are awesome. I suppose someone might devise a USB hub that has PS/2 ports, but it would probably require drivers and so would likely not work until the OS is loaded, I expect, which for a keyboard would be an unfortunate limitation. Ah, well. On the plus side, it would be hot-pluggable, so there's that. It did always annoy me that PS/2 wasn't (reliably) hot-pluggable.

Now we're being told that USB A ports are going to be a thing of the past, and I anticipate an even more protracted phase-out period for that, because the port has been in use for so long, and is so convenient, that it has became a rather important de facto standard, to the point where even non-computer-related things often support it (as the most common and standardized source of low-voltage DC power), so you have it on things like desk fans and wall-outlet adapters. I don't see it going away in a short amount of time.