A quick tip to remember which countries are majority Shiite is that the two I’s in Shiite are Iraq and Iran and then you just have to remember Azerbaijan and Bahrain because this is a shitty quick tip.

I’ve never had to wait long in New Orleans or DC except for odd circumstances but those places essentially have predetermined elections.

• During the pandemic in New Orleans, they made the Smoothie King Center the main early voting location. That took a couple of hours but in normal years, I vote at a fire department and it just takes a few minutes.

• In 2008 in DC, I lived near the White House and my polling place was an historic AME church that was a spot on the Underground Railroad. Every global news channel with staff in DC — so all of them — was trying to interview people. So, I’m not sure that was the voting system’s fault so much as global media asking everyone for a sound bite. (I got interviewed by Japan’s NHK but I didn’t make the cut. If I want to get on Japanese TV, I guess I’ll have to go on a game show.)

But I’ve never lived in a competitive state or district. DC doesn’t have real representation in Congress and Louisiana’s 2nd district is drawn for Voting Rights Act compliance reasons so it’s also not typically competitive. (Louisiana also elects state/local officials in non-presidential years so it’s rarely got much on the ballot besides President and maybe an amendment or two. This year, we voted on whether offshore wind farms would participate in the coastal wetlands restoration program like offshore oil rigs.)

Stuff from different decades just to confuse whomever finds it. Like get a Five Stairsteps album from a used record store, a Blue Oyster Cult 8 track, a Tecmo Bowl cartridge, a Boyz II Men CD, and a newspaper from yesterday.

You think open source project maintainers should move to different countries because of temporary sanctions? What if they have a wife with a job and kids in school? Or delicate Lego collections that are impossible to pack? Or a side-piece?

Take issue with the sanctions if you want but don’t take issue with people who don’t want to move their family, LEGO collections, and side-pieces.

I love it but even in high school, I knew I didn’t want kids. People told me seeing my friends have kids would cause me to change my mind but it only reinforced my preference. Having kids is a huge amount of work and commitment (not to mention the expense). I love to travel and I’ve been able to go to places and do things you can’t (or just wouldn’t want to) do with kids. I also like that I was able to take risks with my career. It’s much easier to start a business or join an early stage company or whatever if you don’t need the stability kids need.

So, for me, it’s amazing. I feel for people who want kids but never had them, though. I know a few and they’re happy — freedom is a nice consolation prize — but it wasn’t their dream.

I usually just use an email draft for cross platform transfers. MacOS/iOS handle this pretty much automatically and Linux has a good option (KDE Connect) but it sounds like you’re on Windows.

Does Phone Link (built into Windows) work for your needs? I don’t use Windows often but I know they’re trying to make something sort of like the other OS’s syncing systems. Not sure how good it is.

Can you use pyenv for the script?

Scam attempts. This may be better elsewhere but in the U.S., every phone call I get is either a scam attempt or my mom (who is old enough that I worry about her getting elder scammed like when my grandma paid a stupid amount for silver coins).

I’ve never gotten scammed (except small stuff like carnival games or whatever) but if I were president I’d make ending scams — even false advertising ones — my top priority. You’ll be able to pick up a call from and unknown number after my first 100 days: that’s my promise to the people of America.

The open source project is fine. It’s in no way perfect but it powers a shocking percentage of the world’s web sites. It’s showing its age, is bloated, and has constant security issues but if you know how to use it, it gets the job done.

Lately, the CEO of Wordpress.com — who also heads the Wordpress.org foundation for the open source project — went after a popular hosting service claiming they were basically making billions and contributing nothing to the open source project. But from the outside, he went about it in a very aggressive and seemingly irrational way.

In my head, a red rubber ball the size of a baseball rolls off a square wooden table and falls on the floor. A guy pushed it.

Edit: I knew ahead of time. I added more detail once I saw the quiz but I can imagine pretty vivid images.

I like to watch sports and, other than soccer, the ads are relentless and so repetitive. When there’s a tournament or playoff, companies will make one annoying ad and show it seemingly every commercial break. Currently, in the U.S. we have a major election so there’s the most vile political ads shown hundreds of times. Those are definitely the worst but online sports betting also recently became legal in many states and their ads are the 2nd worst after political ones in terms of being so dishonest, they should be illegal.

In terms of other type of ads, I hate 99% of outdoor ads. Billboards are literally made to distract you while driving and now they have electronic ones that change even at busy interchanges. If they didn’t already exist and you proposed the idea of putting distracting shit next to busy highways, people would think you were a sociopath.

I relentlessly avoid ads on the web and on streaming services. If I find a service useful, I don’t mind paying to get rid of them. But you can’t really avoid the ones during live TV events or on a road to where you have to drive. (A long time ago, I had a TiVo where the remote had a skip 30 seconds button. That was amazing. Internet wasn’t ubiquitous yet so I could record something live, start watching in the middle, and skip all the ads. I was like a kung fu master with that button. I learned exactly how many times to tap for each type of commercial break.)

Big insurance companies are also big institutional investors. They can’t be thrilled that their risk level is uncertain.

As a practical matter, this is less concerning to me than data breaches like the Equifax one where my social security number and everything else were compromised. I can think of ways 23 And Me data can be misused but, aside from police (who could get the data anyway), most of them are kind of theoretical or contingent on technological developments.

Like, 23 And Me data going to the highest bidder is obviously disturbing but I’m not sure it’s an immediate danger in the same way as all our SSN’s being sold on the dark web. I’d rather nationalize credit reporting agencies than the unprofitable ancestry report company.

I definitely did at a BBQ place near my old office. If you give me a bite of good BBQ, I’m buying what you’re selling.

It might be as close to a perfect game as it gets. I love that you can turn off the HUD and it’s still completely playable. Nintendo is one of the few companies that puts so much care into their open world that you can just explore and talk to people and get all the information you need to complete the game.

For modern games, I also love Nier: Automata and Horizon Zero Dawn for the complex stories and creativity but Breath of the Wild is just so perfectly executed. It’s sort of like classic Pixar movies where it might be rated G but still manages to appeal to adults.

Jam band. Dolphins love Phish.

I’ll show myself out.

It’s kind of impossible to objectively rank strongest hurricanes. Meteorologists probably use atmospheric pressure but when communicating with the public, the focus is always on wind speed. Storm surge matters way more in some places than others. Diameter can make a Cat 2 cause more damage than a small Cat 4 that hits a less populated area. There’s so many different variables.

A lot of Helene’s danger was that it was so fast-moving that it made it inland to places that aren’t prepared. Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston so much because it was so slow moving. Pick your poison when it comes to movement speed, I guess? 🤷

Wikipedia uses atmospheric pressure and wind speed, FWIW: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlantic_hurricane_records

Which was basically a coincidence of one close election night and the TV networks trying to act objective. Parties don’t have official colors in the U.S. and every network was using red, white, and blue for their maps. To use red for Democrats would have implied a connection to communism and white was obviously for states without results yet. So, they all, independently, chose blue for Democrats, red for Republicans, and white for states whose polls hadn’t closed.

Maybe she’s just annoyed that Billy Joel wrote a song about how everyone in the bar sucks but him.

For those curious, even the Wikipedia page for “perverse incentive” has a picture of a cobra and that story. It’s something most Econ professors and textbooks will use as the classic example. It’s not the same as the Bengal famine. I just mentioned it as something we learned about India besides “Gandhi was like their MLK” or whatever.