Problem 1: They make the same DTMF tones that severe weather alerts do. That particular tone should mean “Immediate risk to YOUR life” such as a flash flood, severe thunderstorm or tornado. Using the same tone for amber alerts (or silver alerts, for missing old people) is just crying wolf. How many people are going to go “FOR FUCK’S SAKE I’M IN BED I’M NOT JOINING A MANHUNT” and mute such an alert without reading it, and then it’s gonna be about a tornado?

Side problem: I learned something from Technology Connections a month or two ago that I’ve known since I was four. Almost all fire alarms sound a cadence of three short bursts. When I was in kindergarten, our school used the normal bells for the emergency alarm system, we were taught that groups of 3 short bursts on the bell was the fire alarm, but they taught it as if that’s how it works at this school and not universally. I bet the alert noises your phone makes, you know the government screeches? I bet those carry meaning they haven’t even tried to teach the public, in either the exact tone or beep sequence.

Problem 2: It seems to assume that every adult in half a state is going to drop what they’re doing and fod walk the world looking for this kid (or geezer). Almost no one is, in large part because no one has been trained as to how. I guess the idea is you’re supposed to be out driving, get that alert, remember the details including the license plate number of the vehicle, and then call 911. Has that ever even once happened? Especially since:

Problem 3: The message isn’t persistent or retrievable. It’s a push notification. If you dismiss it, possibly to get it to stop making noise so you can concentrate on reading it, it vanishes. There’s no message history to find it in, no real way to go “Hey wait a second, is that the car the amber alert was talking about?” 22 minutes later.

It does kind of come off as a very political “I am assembling a task force to create a solution to these dastardly crimes” solution.

Agriculture (especially in the american southwest) uses THE VAST MAJORITY of freshwater. Its not even close.

Oh well the solution’s obvious. We’ll just stop growing food.

The Panama Canal’s locks, at least the newer ones, have these separate basins they can drain water into that gets more ship lifts out of each lock volume’s worth of water. No water is pumped uphill. I kinda wonder if it would be viable to 1. cover those ponds in solar panels and 2. use the power generated to pump water from lower locks into higher ones. On the theory that you could save evaporation from the sun by shading the pools, and pumping water uphill means spilling less into the ocean. It’s likely expensive but so was the canal itself.

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Such a whimsical jape.

I was in carpentry class in high school. I walked around campus with a box cutter, a 16 ounce claw hammer, a nail gun and a skilsaw. I could have Freddy Krugered the entire glee club. I didn’t because I’m an asshole, not a psychopath.

Several of the administrators of a school system do bear job titles containing the word “officer” such as the finance officer, head of the finance department over purchasing, bookkeeping and payroll.

It’s how rednecks proclaim trans positivity. The truck wasn’t built with testicles, and then they added them, which alters the truck’s gender. How progressive.

Sportsmen?

The last EA product I purchased new, that the company would have gotten paid for, was Desert Strike for SNES. In 1993.

Yeah, the bread is sideways in the bag. It’s hilarious.

Bread doesn’t go in the bag that way. So silly.

Pilot here: It’s interesting that you specify “airplanes” because that is specifically who those minimum altitude requirements apply to. The law (FAR 91.119) makes specific exceptions for helicopters.

I remember when I thought this bullshit was merely reckless.

I remember on Reddit once some guy was talking about how he installed Ubuntu and it only had a terminal no GUI and it didn’t have APT only Snap. Took me a minute but I figured out he had installed Ubuntu Core or whatever they call their embedded system.

And given Canonical’s corporate garbage fire website I can see how. I kinda hate the brand names they all independently come up with. Fedora isn’t much better, the way you learn Fedora Silverblue is the immutable version that comes with the Gnome desktop is you ask on Reddit, because their website is 94% marketing drivel.

I’m honestly not convinced that’s true.

In my experience, a woman’s living space is either more cluttered than a man’s because she’s got 5.37*10^9 bottles in the shower, piles of laundry made of a larger number of smaller garments, and 900 pillows, OR she lives in a film set where nothing can be moved, touched or used. You don’t dry your hands on the towels on the towel rack, those are for decoration, if you need to dry your hands go down to the laundry room, open the towel bin, take out a towel, dry your hands, wash-rinse-sanitize-dry-iron-fold and put away the towel, then go about your day.

Man tidy is “blanket’s on the bed, laundry’s either put away or in the hamper, the carpet has been vacuumed at some point in the last month, and none of the cologne/deodorant bottles on the dresser are empty.”

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Yeah, do it 3 years ago.

Underglow will always have a 2 Fast 2 Furious vibe for me, like that bed has a big amp and subwoofer in the back with no capacitor so it’ll stall the engine if the volume is turned up too high, a muffler delete and a spoiler even though it’s front wheel drive.