Ok, so in the TV show Stargate SG-1, the Stargate program is an Air Force initiative to use an ancient alien device to send teams through a wormhole to planets in distant reaches of the galaxy where they interact with aliens and humans from other worlds.

One of those humans, having become a refugee on Earth after losing a war to aliens, creates a television show which essentially “files off the serial numbers” of the actual Stargate program.

When the Air Force learns about this, they allow the show to remain on the air, because that way if the story of the Stargate program ever leaks, anyone who hears it will dismiss it as the ravings of a fanboy who got too into the show, or of a conspiracy theory who can’t tell fiction from reality.

So the first part is, I think that the US Government could totally be using this to hide something really wild. Maybe there actually is an Upside Down (“oh really? Like in Stranger Things? Suuuure.”) or maybe aliens really do exist (“bro, you’ve been watching too much X-Files.”) and maybe not only do they exist but they’ve formed this whole secret subculture on Earth (“dude, that’s literally just the premise of Men In Black.”).

But see, now we run into a truly Heller-esque bit of circular logic, because with me even saying that, now the government can just say, “come on buddy, that’s just the plot of season 5 episode 12 of a TV show you’re on the record as a fan of.”

This also helps to explain why Trump and his cadre hasn’t blabbed about aliens in the past decade. They were told about the secret government program, but then they were also told exactly which TV shows and movies have been made to discredit the truth, and exactly how the conspiracy would make them look like laughable idiots if they revealed the truth.

tl;dr: superheroes are real, they’re way more like The Avengers than you’d think, they have an airtight plan to discredit anyone who leaks it, and “Wormhole X-treme!” is part of the conspiracy

That might well be the best thing that any government could possibly do to drive open source adoption.

The way we estimate on my team is to break tasks down into related subtasks that will take one day or less, then add up all the subtasks. It’s worked pretty well.

Not to mention, 14 days is three weeks, not two. Unless they’re hiring someone to work your weekends for you.

Easier onboarding should be a priority once they feel like they can handle a solid influx, especially for the ones that are backed by a company dev team with money.

This may be the first time since the 80s where the OS you’re first exposed to will be anything other than Windows or Mac.

We’re already well past that point, honestly. Kids graduating high school this year grew up on iPadOS and ChromeOS. Last year I taught someone who is going to college this fall how a directory structure works.

As for me, our household is a Windows-free environment (except for a VM on my personal laptop that I use for DRM’d ebooks). We’re Mac-free except for my work computer. My kids are learning Linux as their first real desktop OS (previously they had only used school Chromebooks), and it’s been pretty smooth sailing.

I know why Discord isn’t offering that, but there are at least three FOSS options (Element, Stoat, and Spacebar) that could really use a good way to get content off of Discord and into an open format (sure, Matrix is a solid option). Any data that can be accessed publicly can be scraped, even if it’d take a while. I think one of those teams should be considering this.

I just want one of these Discord alternatives to code up a “migrate-from-Discord” script that admins can use to scrape all of their messages and media, save out their channel structure and access rules, and pull their user list for later mapping, and box it all up into some sort of standards-compliant package.

Ruby Bridges–the little girl featured in maybe the most famous photo of desegregation, being walked home from school by US marshals, the photo that inspired Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With”–she’s still alive. And not super old, either; she’ll turn 72 this September.

That’s the fact that blows me away about segregation.

“The past is never dead; it isn’t even past.”

Could be where your VPN is hosted. If your traffic appears to be coming from (for instance) an AWS data center, it might appear to be coming from a known spam source (since there are some spammers which have used AWS). The instance you’re on might just be using an overzealous spam block IP list.

You’re right, this graph isn’t specifically about cities; it’s just that cities are currently the biggest transit problems in the US.

I would like to see a graph that just shows major metropolitan areas.

The org that did this research also has a visualizer tool where you can compare different cities around the world, and you can see that even new York City has something like 65% of its population using personal cars. And it’s by far the most multimodal city in North America; Ithaca gets close, because they have a robust cycling culture, and there are more Canadian cities in the hunt than US cities, but it’s still unbelievably skewed in favor of personal cars. Which means that, even if you excluded all rural areas from this graph, North America would still be dramatically anomalous.

you can’t include households that are many miles from any store at all and use that to skew the numbers.

I think that the reason that the graph doesn’t exclude rural areas from its data is that the density of North America isn’t dramatically different from the density of Europe or Asia. Yes, the US is slightly less dense than the world average, but not excessively so; and there are plenty of countries in those other continents with lower density than the US or Canada. In fact, Canada is quite a bit less dense than the US, but it’s pulling North America’s multimodality up. So no, you can’t use it to skew the numbers–but I mean that in the sense that you’re unable to do it, it’s impossible, because it’s affecting the numbers worldwide in more or less the same way.

Also, why exclude Mexico and then call it North america. Why not call it Canada and the US? Why not label Canada and the US separately?

Better readability, is my guess. The only divisions in this infographic that really matter are the political ones, because those are the divisions that affect the data in a meaningful way. So cutting out Mexico is no more arbitrary than cutting out Canada would’ve been.

These numbers are pushing an agenda.

All numbers are pushing an agenda.

Ok, not all numbers, but there’s no real reason to gather demographic research data otherwise. We do censuses and polls and studies to figure out what to do as a society. That’s why we do that. The numbers are telling a story, and it’s not a false story: multimodality in the United States and Canada is dramatically lower than in other countries around the world. Cities in North America don’t serve their citizens as well because their citizens don’t have as many options for how they get around.

Sure, they could use this data to highlight how multimodal transportation in Eastern Europe is, but that’s just another way of pointing out how one-sided it is in North America. Or you could use it to show how dominant public transit is in East Asia, or biking in South Asia, but again, they would just be another way of showing how anemic it is in the US.

And when you’re an organization called “Environment International,” that’s the story you’re trying to tell. They’re just slicing it up in a way that makes the story clearest.

I’m not saying the agenda is wrong but this graph seems a bit dishonest.

It’s not dishonest. It’s being pretty up-front about showing a huge disparity, and it’s not trying to hide the fact that they’re cutting out Mexico to show that there’s a serious problem in the US and Canada. It’s like if you took a photo of a purse-snatching in progress, and you cropped in to show the crime occurring. No one would accuse you of lying because you cropped out the kid getting a treat from the ice cream truck on the right-hand side of the frame; you just made it more clear what you were trying to show with that photograph.

I think they’re trying to tell a story about the way cities in the US and Canada are brutally malformed for moving people around in them. Mexico is much more like Central America in its modality, and so adding their stats in obscures the abnormalities that are the US and Canada.

If there’s enough pushback, they’ll eventually either do it or they’ll die.

Have you actually been a parent paying for a psychiatrist? Because I have. This would be laughable if it weren’t so infuriating. You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I pity any children you might have.

My brother in Amerigo Vespucci, there are maps from 500 years ago that show sea serpents on them. Are those real, too?

That’s true. Honestly I remember being a kid, learning about the Soyuz recovery system and being shocked. A 20mph collision with the ground (without the braking SRs, 5mph with them) doesn’t sound like much, but it can still ring your bell pretty good.

Also

We did land on land

For like forty years we did that exclusively

It’s called the Space Shuttle and it’s pretty cool

I’m a Christian and even I have no idea what you’re trying to say.

Nah, that’s just a strip of raw bacon.

It’s an airstrip in a warzone. Every departure is newsworthy.