USPS purchased the usps.com domain a long time ago specifically so they could control it and prevent phishing. The decision to replace usps.gov with the .com domain came later, with the tenure of Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.
Right wingers believe that USPS should operate as a business, not a public service, so "rebranding" their website to be .com is definitely a part of that narrative.
This does not jibe with my recollection, which is that usps.com has always been the main site. And now, after a quick interent search, I find many references[0] that show your claim is wrong -- the use of the .com domain pre-dates DeJoy by many years, going back in fact to the days when WWW was starting to get widespread use (because .com was far better known than .gov).
No, as I and others have commented, this wasn't changed by the current Postmaster DeJoy (not ignoring all the other wonderful stuff he's changed). They've been using the dot com domain for decades at least?
I'm honestly not a fan of what Louis DeJoy has done to USPS, but I'm pretty sure they've used the dot com domain for as long as I can remember, way before DeJoy became Postmaster General....
fake news ... i love how people always blame dejoy even tho he is one of the better PMG's we've had... and then right wingers somehow enter the picture? I've been working at usps in tech for 15 years...this has nothing to do with dejoy or right wingeres and .com has existed for a very long time as the main external facing website for customers
> Right wingers believe that USPS should operate as a business, not a public service, so "rebranding" their website to be .com is definitely a part of that narrative.
Seems failing businesses is also on brand for those guys.
I think we're getting ahead of ourselves as an industry if we think the ability to generate a convincing B- history essay from a prompt presages the enslavement of the human race
Oberlin native here. I've been going to Gibson's since I was a kid. You're getting an incomplete picture of this sad drama and the Gibson family does not deserve your sympathy.
I'll preface by saying that no one in this story comes out looking good – certainly not the shoplifters, who expected get out of jail free cards despite being thieves; nor the college, whose greatest fear is offending its fragile student body, with predictable results like this.
What you're not going to read in this article or others like it is that the Gibsons aren't heroes either. There are two important details I'd bring to your attention:
1. Allyn Gibson, the man who tackled the shoplifters, really is a confirmed racist. I know this both first hand (we are peers), and from his many social media posts in which he casually rags on immigrants and black people (expect he identifies them using the n-word). The judge in this case declared that evidence inadmissible, for some reason.
2. The Gibsons are not a put-down, working class family who were nearly bankrupted by this protest. They're one of the wealthiest families in town, and were millionaires before this all happened. Gibson's Bakery is a hobby business; they turn a modest profit selling some baked goods and beer. Their actual livelihood comes from rent – they're the second largest landowners after the college, and own most of the commercial and residential rental property in town. The idea that they were impacted by this protest in any consequential way is frankly laughable to anyone who knows anything about them and their business. Once again, the judge declared evidence of their wealth to be inadmissible in court.
This doesn't absolve the college of blame. But this isn't the black-and-white, "David vs Goliath" story the media is making it out to be. Unfortunately this story just fits too neatly into a national narrative about "woke" politics going too far, so you're not going to see any nuance from the media.
That evidence was likely inadmissable because the case wasn't about whether Gibson's was racist. It's difficult to defame someone by calling them "racist", which is to a large extent a subjective statement of opinion. Defamation must comprise false statements of fact. Oberlin can probably arrange a boycott of Gibson's owing to their racism. What they can't do is circulate flyers saying that Gibson's employees assaulted Oberlin students when that didn't happen.
Regardless, this is new information for me; thanks for posting it.
Unless Allyn Gibson did not in fact post things to Facebook criticizing immigrants and Black folks, or the Gibson family does not in fact own a huge amount of real estate in town, there's no possibility of any of that comment being libelous. Anybody can call anybody racist any time: that's a statement of opinion, and opinions cannot be defamatory.
So Elon Musk calling that guy a pedophile was an opinion and therefore shouldn't have been considered defamatory?
Realistically any opinion based comment could be taken offence to and then whether it is defamatory or not depends on the evidence that individual has for having said opinion.
I'm a bit confused here. How was it refuted? I'm not sure up to date on the whole thing and only really remember the substack article where she kinda admits that the store is run for sentimental reasons.
It's an article about how Oberlin was refusing to pay a defamation award --- which it was not, it was simply exhausting its appeals --- which was followed almost immediately by Oberlin paying the defamation award.
I see that STEM chauvinism is still alive and well on Hacker News.
Believe it or not, there are some skills you can pick up studying the humanities that will set you apart from your CS major peers. Being able to write and communicate clearly, for example, is pretty much a super power in most tech jobs.
The way I look at it now after working for large and small tech companies, the Stem degree will help you land your first job because you can be extremely green as long as you have that stem BS.
However a self taught programmer with a humanities degree can also get to the same position with some sweat equity.
Once at the position of software developer the person with the humanities degree takes off.
They've learned to write, they learned to talk and be communicative amongst friends and colleagues. Your job will let you learn as you go wrt to tech, but not as much with soft skills. where the stem grad is still that weird awkward guy who gets into arguments about pedantics, the humanities person is writing proposals and building a network.
The stem person needs to put in a lot more work on the soft skills they never learned, especially if they want to rise in the rankings, this is where the humanities person has that leg up
does getting a humanities degree improve one's soft skills, or do people that already have good soft skills choose and succeed in humanities degrees?
I took several upper-level humanities courses in college (almost enough to get a classics minor), but I don't really feel like they improved my ability to communicate/network in the office. in my experience, these courses teach the material and the skill of writing a very specific kind of formal research paper that doesn't have much to do with business or technical writing. while you don't directly use a lot of the concepts you learn in a CS degree, I find the technical background much more useful in my day-to-day work.
Sometimes I wonder why we have to choose. Why can't we take STEM degree and learn humanities from Coursera/Khan Academy. Or we take humanities degree and learn programming from Coursera/EdX/Youtube.
You don't have to choose; there is plenty of time during a four-year college education to do both. Plenty of people double major across STEM and humanities. Or if you don't want that level of commitment, you can create breadth with your electives.
You were a bit vague, but STEM has the highest concentration of job options that can pay you $60-70k straight out of college.
Well other than finance, but you could argue that STEM is heavily mixed into that field of study (and its derivatives) as well (mathematics, technology, data science)
Even in pure STEM jobs, like physics academia (where I work), writing/skill is probably the most important skill you need to develop to be a working, publishing scientist.
No one is arguing that Airbnb is solely responsibly for rent increases. It's one of many contributing factors, including limited supply as you point out.
According to the paper, this is what the researchers found -
"In a baseline OLS regression
with no controls, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings is associated with a 0.1% increase in rental rates and a 0.18% increase in house prices. Of course, these estimates should not be interpreted as causal and may instead be picking up spurious correlations"
I wouldn't be quick to call that "almost certain".
> Insane that this is happening without federal coordination
Not surprising, because the feds are providing zero leadership right now. Just today, Trump told the governors on a conference call that they should "get their own ventilators". We should not expect competent and engaged leadership from this administration any time soon.
That's quite the fake news you got there. Trump said governors should feel free to provision their own if they have a faster pipeline, rather than waiting for the fed's orders to arrive and then have to apply, etc.
But to claim the federal government has not bought equipment it plans to distribute is a lie .
To clarify, this is what the president stated about 30 minutes ago during the ongoing press conference, when asked about his previous statement. Before that we only had the unqualified phrase.
More reasonable stuff is coming out of Trump now. This is encouraging.
Amusingly, this morning, there was zero Trump content on the Fox News home page. All epidemic info was from more reliable sources. The story behind that must be interesting.
“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,” Mr. Trump told the governors during the conference call, a recording of which was shared with The New York Times. “We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself.”
Imagine if you had to go to your VP or CEO to get approval to buy a new laptop. How long would you have to wait? How much of their time would be sucked up with organizationally-irrelevant bs?
The US military has the principle of solving things at the lowest level possible. Not only does it prevent extra time and hops but it means the people closest to the problem are the ones solving it.
That's a good point, but I think it would be a shame if wireless charging completely replaced wired, because it's much less efficient.
Something like 20-40% of input energy is wasted when using wireless charging versus a wire. If every existing phone switched to wireless charging, that would cause a non-trivial increase in total power usage.
Not saying it's entirely unrelevant, but when looking at energy consumption by production and by usage of smartphones, the usage basically consumes no energy at all (https://imgur.com/VHpJ5et).
That is probably because batteries can hold a very limited amount of energy and therefore mobile software is developed to use very little electricity.
But on the other hand, less energy efficient chargers wont help this. I just mean it's not the big problem about our smartphones energy consumption.
> therefore mobile software is developed to
> use very little electricity.
I see that you're _not_ in the mobile dev industry!
Power consumption is the type of thing that is talked about in prerelease mobile software, and removed from the bullet points during release. Nobody optimizes for power consumption at the expense of features, bugs, or developer time.
David Graeber also pointed this out and came up with a rule of thumb: how much a job contributes to society is inversely proportional how much someone is paid to do it.
