It’s also going to cost more, because you almost certainly are only going to be using your hardware a tiny fraction of the time.

I don’t think that people need to go to a job interview if they don’t intend to take a job — that’s wasting their time and that of the interviewers.

But that’s not what the parent comment is talking about. He’s talking about no-shows. Someone schedules an interview and then just never shows up.

I think that it’s pretty unreasonable to just no-show a job interview if you don’t want the job. Call and cancel.

People who are interviewing are going to organize their day around interviewing you. It dicks with them to leave that block allocated.

When he’s taking about ghosting the job, he’s not saying that people should be obligated to not take another, preferable offer. He’s saying that they never tell him that they’re doing so after telling him that they’re accepting his offer. Call and at least tell them that you’re pulling out.

It’s rained every evening and we don’t usually get much rain save the beginning of Spring, which we didn’t get this year. Very odd.

https://denverite.com/2025/07/22/denver-monsoon-season/

Colorado’s monsoon season is right on schedule (and, as always, we could use the moisture)

The weather around Denver looks pretty familiar this week: highs in the 80s and thunderstorms in the afternoon, including the possibility of localized flash flooding along the Front Range on Wednesday.

It’s a sign that the summer monsoon is delivering rain to the Rockies on schedule.

“We’re still very much on the front end of it,” said Bruno Rodriguez, a forecaster at the local National Weather Service office. “But we’ve already seen almost daily showers or some thunderstorms for much of the mountains most afternoons, which is really typical.”

The North American monsoon is a seasonal shift in wind patterns. Instead of blowing from the west, some winds can come from the south or southeast, drawing moisture up from the Gulf of Mexico and sometimes the Pacific. It is most prevalent in late July and August.

In Colorado, this means showers and thunderstorms during the summer months and an increased risk of flash floods. The effect is most pronounced in southwestern Colorado but can reach the Front Range. Denver saw mostly dry weather through the first half of July, followed by a spurt of rain last week and more in the forecast this week, according to WeatherSpark data.

This year’s summer rains have been strictly average in the metro, with Denver International Airport seeing about 8.9 inches of precipitation year-to-date. That’s right in line with the norm, according to data collated by Global Warming Cities.

I don’t know where Jyrdano is, but easy to search for places that are:

https://www.iamexpat.de/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/when-will-summer-weather-finally-make-reappearance-germany

When will summer weather finally make a reappearance in Germany?

Summer 2025 is turning out to be a bit of a damp squib. If, like everyone else in Germany, you’re suffering from Wetterfrust (weather frustration), you might be wondering when summer might make a reappearance. The answer is: not as soon as you’d hope.

After what feels like weeks of changeable, wet and windy weather in Germany, it’s beginning to feel like summer will never make a proper appearance in 2025. While the forecast for the next few days is much the same, there is a small bright spot on the horizon.

According to Wetter.com, the reason behind this unseasonably wet weather is numerous low-pressure systems over Central Europe, which bring cool temperatures, frequent rain showers and generally unpredictable weather. They are essentially “stuck” over Germany and other parts of Europe at the moment because they are trapped between two high-pressure systems over the Atlantic and Russia and northeastern Scandinavia.

With the situation not expected to change for the next week or so, unfortunately rainy weather will dominate well into August. For Friday, August 1, the German Weather Service (DWD) is forecasting heavy rain, moderate winds and isolated thunderstorms for the entire country. The conditions look very similar over the weekend with what the DWD is describing cheerfully as “permanent rain”.

https://www.thelocal.at/20250730/why-is-this-summer-in-austria-so-rainy-and-how-long-will-it-last

Why is this summer in Austria so rainy and how long will it last?

First ad that comes out that bitches mouth, I’m taking a 12-gauge to every motherfucking one of them, patch the roof later.

“Further work from our user experience team has resulted in several recommendations, including revising the Google Mini for the North American market to add a Kevlar layer to the case and using data from the accelerometer to treat an abrupt, rapid acceleration with a threshold above a certain level as “undesirable behavior/behavior needs improvement” user feedback to Alexa+'s prior prompt response.”

I feel like a piggyback ride should be a person riding on the back of a piggy, and a piggy back ride should be a piggy riding on the back of a person.

I do like the image, though.

It looks like the etymology is a corruption of “picka”:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/piggyback

piggyback (adj.)

also piggy-back, “on the shoulders or back like a pack or bundle,” 1823, probably a folk etymology alteration of colloquial pickapack, pick pack (1560s) “on the back or shoulders like a pack,” which perhaps is from pick, a dialectal variant of pitch (v.1). As a verb, “to ride piggyback,” by 1952.

I’d note that “federal land” is federal-government-owned land, like national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, and so forth. It’s not “all land in the US” or something like that. I’m not sure how many projects exist today on federal land, which I don’t think are generally open to development, whether it’s to sticking solar farms or whatever up.

thinks

Hmm. Maybe offshore wind. If I remember correctly, in the US, territorial waters are under state control up to something like a nautical mile or three out, and then the remainder of the territorial sea, which runs up to 12 nautical miles out, is under federal control.

kagis

It looks like it was the Submerged Lands Act of 1953 that set the line, and to three nautical miles. And there are exceptions for Texas and part of Florida, which managed to get ahold of slightly larger control.

https://www.bsee.gov/guidance-and-regulations/regulations/bsee-governing-statutes

The Submerged Lands Act (SLA) of 1953 grants individual States rights to the natural resources of submerged lands from the coastline to no more than 3 nautical miles (5.6 km) into the Atlantic, Pacific, the Arctic Oceans, and the Gulf of America. The only exceptions are Texas and the west coast of Florida, where State jurisdiction extends from the coastline to no more than 3 marine leagues (16.2 km) into the Gulf of America.

The SLA also reaffirmed the Federal claim to the lands of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), which consists of those submerged lands seaward of State jurisdiction. The SLA led to the passage of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act later in 1953 (OCSLA). The OCSLA and subsequent amendments, in later years, outlines the Federal responsibility over the submerged lands of the OCS.

EDIT: BLM land – which is mostly fairly dry land in the West that isn’t considered to be especially valuable – is the one that the federal government permits the most free use of by individuals. Like, you can go do dispersed camping on BLM land wherever you want as long as you move every couple weeks, livestock can graze on it, stuff like that.

BLM land:

This page says that they do permit solar projects on some of their land, so I guess that could be significant:

https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/renewable-energy/solar-energy

Across the 245 million acres of public land it manages, the BLM maintains more than 19 million acres as open for potential solar development, subject to a variance process. Solar energy development projects on BLM-managed public lands are authorized as rights-of-way under Title V of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, as amended consistent with appropriate BLM land-use plans. Regulations at 43 CFR 2800 identify requirements for solar development application and permitting. Applications for solar energy uses on public land are subject to paying cost-recovery fees and all proposals are subject to review under the National Environmental Policy Act and other applicable laws and regulations.

EDIT2: The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility — which you may have seen an in-game rendition of if you’ve played Fallout: New Vegas, where it played a significant plot role, is apparently on public land administered by the BLM.

Could be. They don’t say so on the page, though.

That’s nice, but I’m not going to do so, because I’d rather support the developers of pornographic games financially. They already deal with enough flak without needing to give up sales revenue over this.

It also sounds like at least some of the stores are aiming to make the games available later with different payment processors, so I expect that they’re likely to come back.

Note that they put the ruling at the bottom of the article; I didn’t initially see it and was having a hard time finding the text online.

Also note that the government appears to be appealing the ruling, so probably going to be more to the story.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11311369/ontario-bike-lane-removal-plan-court-defeat/

Isn’t Night City supposed to be future Los Angeles, in California?

kagis

Ah, no. Up the coast. Future Morro Bay.

EDIT: I was gonna say that the landmasses don’t fit all that well with Morro Bay, but it looks like there was supposed to have been a lot of building out over water in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. Here’s a map of present-day Morro Bay:

They sort of show the progression here:

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/San_Morro_Bay

Also this week:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/leavitt-time-trump-won-nobel-225301881.html

Leavitt: It’s time Trump won a Nobel Peace Prize

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said it’s “well past time” that President Donald Trump received the Nobel Peace Prize.

As a show of force, moving nuclear submarines around doesn’t seem like a great play.

• A nuclear submarine’s strongest asset relative to a surface ship is that one can’t know where it is. It goes down, it doesn’t come back up again for half a year, that makes it hard to identify. Why give clues that narrow things down at all?

• Because it needs to stay hidden, you can’t show it to the party you’re doing the show of force to to prove that you’ve done the movement, which makes your words just functionally words — the only weight here is the credibility your words hold. (Which in Trump’s case may be one of, if not the, lowest credibility I’d personally assign to any historical US president.)

I mean, I think that moving literally any military asset other than submarines doesn’t have this issue. Surface vessels, aircraft, land forces, whatever.

The article does not make it clear what type of submarine — attack (SSN) or ballistic missile (SSBN) — is being referred to. A “nuclear submarine” refers to both, as the term refers to the submarine’s powerplant, not the armament. I am guessing, based on this response where the author says that he is not sure, that Trump never specified.

If the submarine in question is a ballistic missile submarine, it really doesn’t need to be anywhere particularly near a target to hit that target. US ballistic missile submarines fire Trident II SLBMs. WP has the Trident II range as “More than 7,500 mi (12,000 km)[8][9] (exact is classified)[10]”.

There are certain situations where you might want to fire an SLBM from less than that; you can fire it at a depressed trajectory to reduce the time until impact, which might be useful in a first-strike scenario where you want to destroy an opponent’s nuclear weapons before they can get off the ground.

https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs03gronlund.pdf

SLBMs flown on depressed trajectories would have short flight times, comparable to escape times of bombers and launch times of ICBMs, thus raising the possibility of short time-of-flight (STOF) nuclear attacks. We assess the depressed trajectory (DT) capability of existing SLBMs by calculating the flight times, atmospheric loading on the booster, reentry heating on the reentry vehicle (RV), and degradation of accuracy for a DT SLBM. We find that current US and CIS SLBMs flown on depressed trajectories would have the capability to attack bomber bases at ranges of up to about 2,000 kilometers, and possibly at ranges up to 3,000 kilometers. To target bombers based furthest inland, a new high-velocity booster might be required, and attacking hardened targets would require a maneuvering RV (MaRY).

However, in that case, you probably aren’t going to want to hint that you are planning on doing so if you actually intend a first strike. Sure, you could try to so merely as a bargaining chip, but doing something that you probably wouldn’t do in an actual attack undermines the credibility of the threat and thus devalues the bargaining chip.

The US doesn’t really need to issue nuclear threats against Russia. It has strong conventional military superiority.

And there are some good reasons not to want to lower the bar for nuclear threats, as a convention. We don’t want to nudge the world closer to a situation where a nuclear war actually starts accidentally — not just in this scenario, but in later ones.

Fuckwit thinks paying more for goods means good trade practices.

Consumers forced to pay 15% more for dumbasses self imposed taxes.

It lets him impose a regressive tax, one that disproportionately affects the poor, without encountering a lot of political resistance.

If he’d said “we’re going to impose a national sales tax”, it would have been extremely unpopular.

Even households earning $150,000 a year

Nicholas Cage made a lot more than that and still got himself into trouble:

https://www.businessinsider.com/rich-famous-celebrities-who-lost-all-their-money-2018-5#nicolas-cage-was-one-of-hollywoods-biggest-stars-earning-40-million-in-2009-alone-but-also-one-of-itsbiggest-spenders-2

Cage purchased many homes, automobiles, and rare artifacts. However, in 2015, reports started to emerge about how he blew his $150 million fortune from 1996 to 2011.

The IRS placed tax liens on multiple properties he owned and then had Cage hand over more than $6 million for failing to pay his 2007 tax bill. Cage’s precarious financial situation led him to sell many of his personal belongings, including a treasured comic book.

As of May 2017, Cage is worth a reported $25 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Cage#Real_estate_and_tax_problems

Cage was once considered one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, earning $40 million in 2009 according to Forbes, although he failed to make Forbes’ Top 10 List in 2014.[195][196] In 2004 he bought a property on Paradise Island, Bahamas. In May 2006, he bought a 40-acre (16 ha) island in the Exuma archipelago, some 85 miles (137 km) southeast of Nassau and close to a similar island owned by Faith Hill and Tim McGraw.[197] He bought the medieval castle Schloss Neidstein in the Oberpfalz region in Germany in 2006 and sold it in 2009 for $2.5 million. His grandmother was German, living in Cochem an der Mosel.[198]

In August 2007, Cage purchased “Grey Craig”, a 24,000-square-foot (2,200 m2) brick-and-stone country manor in Middletown, Rhode Island. With an estate occupying 26 acres (11 ha), the home has 12 bedrooms and 10 full bathrooms and overlooks the Atlantic Ocean. It borders the Norman Bird Sanctuary to the west. The sale ranked among the state of Rhode Island’s most expensive residential purchases.[199][200] Also in 2007, Cage purchased Midford Castle in Somerset, England.[201][202] Shortly after selling his German castle, Cage also put his homes in Rhode Island, Louisiana, Nevada, and California, as well as a $7-million island in the Bahamas, on the market.[203]

On July 14, 2009, the Internal Revenue Service filed documents in New Orleans in connection with a federal tax lien against property owned by Cage in Louisiana, concerning unpaid federal taxes. The IRS alleged that Cage failed to pay over $6.2 million in federal income tax for the year 2007.[204] In addition, the Internal Revenue Service had another lien for more than $350,000 in unpaid taxes dating from 2002 to 2004.[205] Cage filed a $20-million lawsuit on October 16, 2009, against his business manager, Samuel J. Levin, alleging negligence and fraud.[206] The lawsuit stated that Levin “had failed to pay taxes when they were due and had placed [Cage] in speculative and risky real estate investments ‘resulting in (the actor) suffering catastrophic losses.’”[206] Cage also faced separate lawsuits from East West Bank[207] and Red Curb Investments for unpaid, multi-million dollar loans.

Samuel Levin filed a counter-complaint and responded to the lawsuit in a filing stating that he warned Cage that he was living beyond his means and urged him to spend less. Levin’s filing states that “instead of listening to Levin, cross-defendant Cage (Coppola) spent most of his free time shopping for high ticket purchases, and wound up with 15 personal residences.” Levin’s complaint continued: “Likewise, Levin advised Coppola against buying a Gulfstream jet, against buying and owning a flotilla of yachts, against buying and owning a squadron of Rolls Royces, against buying millions of dollars in jewelry and art.”[208]

In his filing, Levin said that in 2007, Cage’s “shopping spree entailed the purchase of three additional residences at a total cost of more than $33 million; the purchase of 22 automobiles (including 9 Rolls Royces), 12 purchases of expensive jewelry, and 47 purchases of artwork and exotic items.”[208] One of those items was a dinosaur skull of a Tarbosaurus. After discovering that it was stolen, he returned it to the Mongolian authorities.[209]

According to Cage, he owned the “Most Haunted House in America”, a home located in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana.[210] Known as “The LaLaurie House” after its former owner Delphine LaLaurie, the house was foreclosed and sold at auction on November 12, 2009, along with another New Orleans property for a total of $5.5 million, in the wake of Cage’s financial problems.[211] His Bel Air home, which had six loans totaling $18 million on it, failed to sell at an April 2010 foreclosure auction despite an opening offer of $10.4 million, substantially less than the $35 million that Cage had originally tried to sell it for. The home, built in 1940 for $110,000 (equivalent to about $1.9 million in 2023), had been owned at different times by Dean Martin and singer Tom Jones.[195]

The home eventually sold in November 2010 for $10.5 million.[212] Another home in Nevada also faced foreclosure auction.[211] In November 2011, Cage sold his Action Comics #1 in an online auction managed by Heritage Auctions for a record-breaking $2.16 million (the previous record being $1.5 million), to assist paying his tax liens and other debts. Cage purchased the comic in 1997 for $110,000.[213] The comic had been stolen from him in 2000, and Cage had received an insurance payment on the item. In March 2011, it was found in a storage locker in the San Fernando Valley and was verified by ComicConnect.com to be the copy sold to Cage previously.[214] Worth around $25 million by May 2017, Cage was reportedly “taking [film] roles left and right” in order to pay off his remaining debts.[215] By 2022, Cage confirmed that he had finally paid off his debts and intended to be more selective with his film roles.[216]

I mean…you can’t really be a Starbucks barista remotely.

Texas has pulled this shit just about every decade since its founding

Gerrymandering was happening before Texas was a state; they’re following the example set by other states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

Printed in March 1812, this political cartoon was made in reaction to the newly drawn state senate election district of South Essex created by the Massachusetts legislature to favor the Democratic-Republican Party. The caricature satirizes the bizarre shape of the district as a dragon-like “monster”, and Federalist newspaper editors and others at the time likened it to a salamander.

The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander; a portmanteau of the name Gerry and the animal salamander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette[b] on 26 March 1812 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. This word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts Senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry, later Vice President of the United States. Gerry, who personally disapproved of the practice, signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts for the benefit of the Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble a mythological salamander.[8]

Texas became a state December 29, 1845, over 30 years later.

I also doubt that the above incident was the first case where people tried redrawing congressional district boundaries to benefit. Just the one where the commentary on it stuck well enough to leave the name.

https://www.tsunami.gov/ says that they expect it to be 1-3 meters at Hawaii:

PHEB/1-3 meters/ - 1-3 meters Hawaii Issued at: 7/29/2025, 6:50:40 PM

The first tsunami wave is forecast to reach Hawaii just after 7:15 p.m. local time. Destructive tsunami waves are expected, according to Oahu Emergency Management.

Hawaii local time is UTC-10; Hawaii apparently does not use Daylight Savings Time.

So for people elsewhere interested in watching the live coverage that will, I expect, show up:

https://everytimezone.com/?t=68896080%2C13b

That’s 10:15 PM, Pacific Daylight Savings time here in California.

Will be early morning in Europe.

Probably possible to have something like a Selenium or whatever the kids use to automate Web browsers these days Python script that automatically builds a credible viewing history that looks like an adult’s.