tal

Trump's strongest support in 2024 wasn't actually in the South.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/95f42ca4-771c-4a27-b039-969f7ae8160a.jpeg

West Virginia and Wyoming, the two biggest coal producers, were the strongest supporters. There were states in the South that went for Trump, but there's also the Great Plains.

Contrast with, say, the 1920 presidential election, which was clearly a South-vs-rest-of-US result:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_United_States_presidential_election

goes to Google Maps

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/0ef32a5c-c9ef-4efb-b171-a35f4ba75c7b.png

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

The Blackstone River in the United States is a river that flows through Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It is 48 mi (77 km) long with a drainage area of 475 mi² (1229 km²).[1] It drains into the Seekonk River at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Its long history of industrial use in the watershed has caused significant pollution, with a 1990 report from the United States Environmental Protection Agency describing it as “the most polluted river in the country because of high concentrations of toxic sediments.”[2]

The Blackstone River has been significantly impacted by industrial activities and resulting pollution since the 18th century. Early industries discharged a variety of pollutants into the river, including dyes from textile mills,heavy metals and solvents from metal and woodworking industries.[10] Metals are still being measured in sediments near and adjacent to the river.[11][12]

https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/4178/7/WP-94-031.pdf

Despite these improvements in wastewater treatment, the condition of the Blackstone River remained deplorable. In 1937, the Massachusetts State Planning Board described the Blackstone as an "industrial river," whose industrial uses were more important than cleaning up its pollution. In 1940, Worcester reached its peak population, 195,000, the only U.S. city of its size not on the ocean or a major waterway. Total wastewater flow from the city was about 125,000 cubic meters per day (33 million gallons per day [mgd]) and comprised virtually all of the upper Blackstone River's low flow. The wastewater included a large volume of industrial wastes, virtually entirely untreated, in addition to the city's sanitary wastes. These industrial operations provided the most enduring legacy of pollution in the river-heavy metals including chromium and mercury from textile dyes and other metals from the wire manufacturing, metal plating, and machining operations.

Oh, great.

It's a steganographic technique used to slowly send messages, a bit or two at a time, from intelligence agencies to their spies. It's typically desirable to send messages in broadcast form to permit the recipient to not be identifiable. As shortwave radio has fallen out of use and thus possessing a receiver for a numbers station has become less innocuous, that channel for broadcast messages has become less desirable. But today, everyone has a smartphone and uses social media. Change a regular message from its normal form just a little, introduce "errors" that actually bear data, and you can send a small amount of data. A bit here, a bit there, triggering assassinations, exfiltrations, activating sleeper agents. Those comma ellipses are your view into the hidden real workings of the world, your glimpse of the levers that shake the world being pulled.

No, his sole audience, the sole group of people who consider his counsel valuable, is the...media classes.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

This kind of reminds me of when I see CNN or Fox News with a piece talking acerbically about "the mainstream media".

If you live in a big, brightly lit city and you feel like allergy season just never ends, you might be right: New research shows that light pollution prompts plants to shed pollen longer, increases the growth of notoriously allergenic ragweed and makes our bodies more prone to allergic reactions, from runny noses to asthma.

But on the flip side, there are also going to be fewer trees and other plants in a city. That is, one might have more pollen in a city with a lot of nighttime lighting than one would relative to a less-lit city, but I doubt that one has more pollen in a city than outside cities.

They don’t have the means to produce at scale...steamdeck OLED

They aren't going to be manufacturing it themselves. They'll pay someone else to make it.

And I'd bet that that party isn't limited by their own capacity, but by how many units Valve's ordered, which is going to be limited by how many units that Valve thinks the public will buy at current elevated-by-memory-prices rates.

EDIT: Sounds like their manufacturer is Quanta Computer, in Taiwan.

EDIT2: And they probably aren't constrained by their own capacity:

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

Quanta designs and manufactures for clients such as Apple Inc., Compaq, Dell, Gateway, BlackBerry Ltd., Hewlett-Packard,[13] Alienware, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Gericom, Lenovo, LG, Maxdata, MPC, Sharp Corporation, Siemens, Sony, Sun Microsystems, and Toshiba.[citation needed] It is the largest manufacturer of PC notebooks worldwide[14] and has diversified into servers, storage, and liquid-crystal display terminals.[15]

Keep in mind there are at least two fruits called “huckleberry.” I’m referring to the one that grows wild in Cascadia.

There are various purple things in Vaccinium, and there's something red down in the southeastern US in, IIRC, the Solanum family.

My experience has been that Vaccinium membranaceum is better than Vaccinium ovatum. Unfortunately, Vaccinium membranaceum likes to grow in places that are obnoxious to get to, and hasn't been successfully domesticated.

goes hunting

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

Wikipedia lists four, not two:

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

Huckleberry is a name used in North America for several plants in the family Ericaceae, in two closely related genera: Vaccinium and Gaylussacia.

• Cyrilla racemiflora (known as "he-huckleberry" in the family of Cyrillaceae)
• Solanum scabrum, (known as "garden huckleberry" in the family Solanaceae)

EDIT: Apparently the Solanum huckleberry isn't red. Oh, well.

https://wellnd.com/which-berry-is-acidic-a-guide-to-berry-acidity-levels

Some berries are known for their particularly high acidity, which gives them a sharp, tart flavor. Cranberries are a prime example, possessing one of the lowest pH levels among common berries. This high acidity is the reason they are often sweetened extensively when processed into juice or sauce. Redcurrants and gooseberries also fall into the highly acidic category. For individuals with acid sensitivity, these berries, and especially their concentrated juices, should be consumed with caution.

“It is, of course, possible that these multiple cases are not connected to one another,” they said, “but out of abundance of caution, we are looking into any environmental factors at the school that may be a factor in their diagnoses.”

Although the high school was constructed in 2012, the evaluation will include research into any previous uses of the site.

That sort of thing does seem to be a good checkbox to tick off when one is building schools.

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

By the end of the 1940s, Hooker Chemical Company was searching for a place to dispose its large quantity of chemical waste. The Niagara Power and Development Company granted Hooker permission during 1942 to dump wastes into the canal. The canal was drained and lined with thick clay. Into this site, Hooker began placing 55-US-gallon (210 L) drums. In 1947, Hooker bought the canal and the 70-foot-wide (21 m) banks on either side of the canal.[16] It subsequently converted it into a 16-acre (6.5 ha) landfill.[17]

During March 1951, the school board prepared a plan showing a school being built over the canal and listing condemnation values for each property that would need to be acquired.[22] During March 1952, the superintendent of Niagara Falls School Board inquired of Hooker with regard to purchasing the Love Canal property for the purpose of constructing a new school.

Despite the disclaimer, the School Board began construction of the 99th Street School in its originally intended location.

Not long after having taken control of the land, the Niagara Falls School Board proceeded to develop the land, including construction activity that substantially breached containment structures in a number of ways, allowing previously trapped chemicals to seep out.

Over the next three decades, Love Canal attracted national attention for the public health problems originating from the former dumping of toxic waste on the grounds. This event displaced numerous families, leaving them with longstanding health issues and symptoms of high white blood cell counts and leukemia. Subsequently, the federal government passed the Superfund law in 1980. The resulting Superfund cleanup operation demolished the neighborhood, ending in 2004.

When the state of New York stepped in to Love Canal in April 1978, 230 adults and 134 children lived in the homes with backyards directly on the canal, 410 student went to the elementary school, and 2,618 people lived in homes spread not more than four blocks from the landfill.

Love Canal was not an isolated case. Eckardt C. Beck suggested that there are probably hundreds of similar dumpsites.[75] President Carter declared that discovering these dumpsites was "one of the grimmest discoveries of the modern era".

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

In philosophy of mind, a philosophical zombie (or "p-zombie") is a being in a thought experiment that is physically identical to a normal human being but does not have conscious experience.[1] For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would. In other words, the being has full access consciousness but no phenomenal consciousness.

shrugs

It's got those faux slit windows and things made up to look like crenelations, but I'd say that it was never a fortification, as it has large, indefensible downstairs windows.

That'll probably place some constraints on construction timeframe, since the "manor houses styled to look like fortifications" thing only happened after wealthy people owning fortifications were a thing.

I'm not the best person to ask about this; I read about this mostly because of the recent rule changes. I have seen a number of financial publications writing articles about it, though.

MSCI

I did read one article commenting that MSCI has not changed their rules and has less-permissive inclusion rules. If you have a lot of money on the line, though, I would not take my own understanding as being authoritative (I mean, even aside from the general principle of taking statements from random unknown names on the Internet with a grain of salt; I'm explicitly not claiming to have a lot of domain expertise here).

I think that the question is why some of the indices decided to change their rules, and whether the same logic might apply to other index operators, and I don't know the answer to that. I've certainly seen many outraged people on Reddit saying that the driving factor is clearly some form of corrupt influence from company that might list on the index operator. An index operator might simply be concerned about keeping their index a useful metric that reflects market behavior

huge IPOs are market behavior. shrugs I don't have the knowledge to say what's a reasonable conclusion there, though I think that concern about misincentives is fair.

I do think that it might be worth looking into if it's something that affects you, though. There are financial publications that have people writing about this, if you want to go digging up articles on it.