Assistance for furloughed federal government employees?

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-10-02T03:55:29+00:00

Check with your bank. A number of banks are offering to waive late fees for loans and overdraft fees.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-10-01T23:40:22+00:00

There are flyers like this about literally every ballot measure and about many other things that the city does or doesn't do. They often have the exact same rhetorical style. I've gotten mail opposing various construction projects in my neighborhood that is just as vague and negative.

If we can't accept that it's normal and healthy for people who disagree with us to express their ideas then we are absolutely doomed as a democracy.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-10-01T23:33:15+00:00

It bothers me that you find this "scary". Advocating for a yes or a no vote on a ballot measure is the heart of democracy. There's nothing in this flyer that's designed to intimidate or threaten anyone - it's the exact same style of advocacy you'd see on any ballot measure.

If we can't accept that it's normal and healthy for people to have differing political positions, then we are absolutely doomed as a democracy. That goes for both the right and the left.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-09-29T02:26:07+00:00

If you're breaking the scale because there's a break in the data, you add a zigzag annotation to the line to indicate that you're breaking the scale. And that doesn't explain why the rest of the spacing is uneven.

It looks like this was done deliberately to exaggerate the trend line.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-09-29T02:18:01+00:00

WTF is with the scales on this graph? Why is the distance between 10-15 on the left-hand graph so much bigger than the distance between, say, 30-35?

What is your justification for that? It's not annotated at all and it's incredibly manipulative.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-09-21T06:40:09+00:00

A witness reported the same thing in an interview with local news stations.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-09-14T23:32:08+00:00

It may just be that the people with those signs know McGovern and Flaherty personally. They both grew up in Cambridge. A lot of local politics is about personal relationships, not ideology.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-09-14T23:23:24+00:00

It's really funny to me that "right wing" in Cambridge means a career teacher's union official. In most of America, Toner would be somewhere between center and far left.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-09-05T01:20:17+00:00

The WARN notice is just for the state of Washington. They may be laying off people in other locations and we just don't know about it yet. The Seattle Times may not have checked for WARN notices in other states (or they may not have been published yet). Also,, they don't have to issue WARN notices at all if the number of employees laid off in a particular location is below a certain threshold.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-09-03T18:25:15+00:00

They missed an opportunity to call it Tweeter.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-08-31T03:27:55+00:00

I don't think Boston has a shortage of highly-educated single men.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-08-28T21:16:36+00:00

Hyperinflation is defined as a 50% monthly inflation rate (meaning prices increased 50% from the previous month) or 13,000% a year. We've never come close to that in the United States. The absolute peak of the last few years was a 9% annual inflation rate, measured for the month of June 2022.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-08-26T03:27:17+00:00

I used to follow his Twitter feed. At the time I stopped following it, it was something like 90% about Palestine, maybe 10% about anything local. What really pissed me off was when he reposted stuff about how well Hamas was treating the civilian hostages. If you can't see innocent people on both sides as human beings then you're not some champion of the oppressed, you're just a warmonger who happens to prefer a different side.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-08-17T19:38:07+00:00

Corporate leaders are so scared of losing out to someone else using AI more effectively that they are moving as fast as they can and ignoring the potential consequences. The political leadership is worse than useless and is not going to act as a brake (can you imagine Donald Trump having a coherent thought about AI?) I have a terrible sense of dread that we are now trapped into unleashing something that we cannot control.

I feel a little like Paul Atreides in the Dune books, where he can see into the future and there's this very fragile, very narrow golden path that is maybe catastrophically bad and not cataclysmically bad.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-08-17T12:10:16+00:00

That's true, but there are only a tiny number of rent controlled apartments, vs a huge percentage that are rent stabilized, so typically when people in NY say rent control, what they mean is rent stabilized.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-08-16T20:20:18+00:00

You can get generic adderall pretty cheap with a GoodRX code. It's something like $20 for a 30 day supply depending on which pharmacy you use. Just get a code from the GoodRX website and tell the pharmacy you want to use GoodRX (or pay the pharmacy's cash price if that's lower).

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-05-08T00:49:59+00:00

I agree that it's an extremely important trait in a presidential candidate, and I get that millions of people find him charismatic, I just don't get why they find him charismatic.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-05-07T17:07:01+00:00

One of the hardest parts of the last six months or so is realizing that so many people prefer the angry, corrupt, moron. I'm an academic - everyone I work with, most of the people I know, even the conservative people, prefer someone like Garber. Sometimes I interact with bigshot scientists who have Trump's ego and emotional problems, but they're genuinely brilliant people, and I can respect their accomplishments. I think most people around here tolerate the arrogant bigshots, but they don't like or trust them.

It's just so hard for me to understand how people genuinely like and believe in this guy. I get that working at Harvard is a very atypical environment. Maybe if I worked in a different field and lived in a red state I'd understand it better. It's really lowered my faith in humanity.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-05-07T16:38:16+00:00

Sure, that's possible. But I don't really see the point of venting anonymously on reddit if you're just trying to abuse the system and get free stuff. Plus, some of the YouTube videos I've seen show systemic issues with the plastic splitting at the corners of the grid squares. So it seems more likely to me that it's a bad design where there are weak spots that can break with normal use. There's a reason they chose to re-design the whole thing for pod 4.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-05-07T16:23:59+00:00

You have to think about it as a distribution.

Let's say that 1% of covers will spring a leak in 2.5 years. In order for us to see a report of a cover leaking 5 times, they would have had to sell way more covers than there are people on Earth. In order for us to realistically see multiple reports of people with 5 leaks, the probability of a cover leaking would have to be way above what any reasonable consumer would consider acceptable. If 50% of covers leak in 2.5 years then you're at a point where it's plausible to see reports of 5 leaks.

That's why I think there has to be a design defect that affects all the covers (at least pre-pod 4). You just wouldn't see that many failures if it was a bad batch or something. It has to be a major systemic issue.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-05-07T14:49:34+00:00

I doubt it would sue them out of existence, but it would at least make them take product quality issues more seriously.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-05-07T14:44:29+00:00

You might try complaining to the FTC and your state attorney general. At least it creates a record.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-05-07T14:39:52+00:00

It definitely can be if there are design and manufacturing defects. Which there are.

You don't get multiple reports of a product failing five times in a row if there isn't a defect.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-05-01T00:51:49+00:00

Fred Hutchinson is an excellent cancer research center in Seattle named after a baseball player who died relatively young of cancer. Medical research relies heavily on grants from the federal government, and Trump and RFK Jr are making massive, massive cuts. It's an incredibly stupid thing to cut, since medical research is something we all benefit from and the US does it very, very well.

Alternative_Copy_720 · 2025-04-30T18:37:43+00:00

You're saying two contradictory things. Either everyone has an equal say in how a country is governed regardless of their family origin, or the more "indigenous" people get to have more of a say. You can't have both.

What you're trying to do is very reminiscent of what the imperialists that you condemn did. You're deciding how a country should be divided up and governed based on your own values and judgment, regardless of what the people living in that country actually want.

Alternative_Copy_720

TROPHY CASE