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Comment Re: Your Labor Day BBQ (Score 1) 229

You Labor Day BBQ dinner will have extra sugar in the hot dog buns, sugar in the hot dogs, sugar in the ketchup & relish. Loads of sugar in the baked beans and thats all before desert. The salads will have handfuls of chemicals & fats labeled as dressings & mayo. Chances are a 'salad' will contain more sugar and fat than the hotdogs. Save yourself - eat a steak, a pork chop, a lobster, an apple, a melon, or anything else that looks about like it did when it was grown.

Comment Re:Easy solution - a garden (Score 1) 229

That big useless patch of grass around a house had a real purpose at one time. In British English its called a 'garden', not a lawn. No sugar needs to be added to what you grow and can. If you're not self-sufficient on fruits and veg. then turn off the damn TV and get after it. Or if you're lazy join a CSA.

Comment Name the hw & sw that gets ransom-wared ? (Score 1) 209

Its not really the hospital or pipeline or nuke plant that gets hacked, its their (obsolete ?) hardware and software. Naming what software & hardware got hacked would be a whole lot more informative than saying it was the Baltimore school system or CWT Global. Since that is never published one can conclude that easily hackable hw & sw is abundant and the owners choose to keep right on using it. Getting hacked & then ransomed is a choice.

Comment Re:None of it does any good-parents. (Score 4, Interesting) 9

Experience at a local high school tells me this : about a quarter of the parents are either missing, drunk, high, or angry all the time - certainly not helpful if they're involved. The high school gave out 2000 Chromebooks, thousands of families got free cable w/ internet access. Yet hundreds of the Chromebooks are not even turned on most days, often not for weeks. Its no surprise the failure rate last semester was over 50%. Dozens of times a parent has shown up angry saying "He sits in there with that computer all day - what the *%^@# is he doing ?" The kid isn't interested in school, that much is clear. At least in-person school can make a kid attend in body, if not in mind, and take away some of the distracting toys.

Comment Re: processing power is allocated differently (Score 1) 179

I doubt the person who wrote that has ever had an autistic family member. My hands-on experience has been the 'processing power' does things like decide to eat paper instead of food, put pants on backwards & inside out, and fail to learn to read. Walking in front of moving cars does not indicate "genius in a box", a 20 year old genius is not hopelessly confused by the concept of washing all areas of a window pane equally. Most people on the spectrum won't stay alive for more than a few days without assistance.

Comment Comcast is on movie theater math (Score 1) 63

Movie theaters in the USA failed by offering more & more of the same old crap for higher & higher prices and then adding ads. Comcast has followed that same path. Increasing the number of channels they carry from around 50 years ago to well over 200 did not add any quality or value. All it did was dilute the ad revenue each station got so each station had to increase time spent on ads. Years later the Comcast bill has gone from under $50 to 3x that. Verizon is not better, still have to pay $150 a month to watch 'programs' that are 40% ads.

Comment title should read 'be saved from' (Score 1) 107

Title should read 'be saved from $Billions in debt.' not 'miss out on Billion in loans'. First lesson here is that 'financial aid' is a loan by a bank to a young kid - it is debt, no different than a used car loan, not help. The best life that half of college degrees can get you is a Barista job at the Mall. If you want to make real money without great programmer or engineering skills then run a lawn cutting or HVAC company. Sweat pays !

Comment Why not 72 credits for a degree ? (Score 1) 175

The kids need reform more than a refund. As it stands now college kids get about 60 credits in a major, another 40 credits in enjoyable nonsense which costs just as much as the major classes, 20 other credits in grey areas that might sorta kinda be useful. This is a great opportunity to downsize that bloated 4 year / 120 credit plan to something more like 3 years x 24 credits. The colleges have built up a huge welfare system of excess academics pushing classes that have no value to anyone but the excess academics and subsidizes them by insisting that every college kid must pay for them to graduate. Hobby classes like archery or pottery cost the same as 3 credits in chemistry or programming. Few employers currently need to employ archers. It was fun, but cutting there is overdue.

Comment Post Office delivery schedule (Score 1) 292

Small scale post office fix - Residential delivery 1 or 2 days a week is plenty. For a while now the PO has been delivering packages on Sundays; paying someone overtime for a whole shift just to deliver a few Amazon boxes probably isn't a money maker for the PO. Large scale post office fix - All week long the Amazon/Fedex/UPS trucks are delivering daily, often all 3 rolling by .. So .. have the Post office sort my week's mail into a pouch with the word 'Fedex' or 'Amazon' written on it, have them bring it weekly, and dump the entire post office delivery fleet.

Comment Re:Grocery logistics is idiocracy right now. (Score 1) 158

Interesting to observe the heavy overlap of rural "food deserts" with avid home gardeners. from the link : "The USDA considers households more than a mile from a supermarket and without access to a car to be in food deserts.. .." Blue Apron could have made more sense by delivering quarterly to a big rented freezer, but then thats why join Costco & Sam's.

Comment Re:More stupid from the Stupid State (Score 1) 85

Note that the other local governments didn't get pwned and do the same functions. Working systems & staff exist within 30 miles. If the City of Baltimore wanted to help itself the easiest thing to do is start sending Baltimore City IT work to Baltimore County which surrounds it. Send some to Howard & Anne Arundel Counties too. No reason City sewer & water bills or payroll or pothole tracking can't run on a County's software. The City can't afford - and should not want to afford - to duplicate the software that already works out in the Counties.

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