MetaFilter

I live and rent in East Vancouver. The only reason I can afford where I live is that I have been here so long. It's a larger, crapped out 1 bedroom that doesn't get the attention it needs from the landlord.
I have been here in my apartment for twenty years. In that period the average rent in Vancouver has gone up roughly 400%. My income has not.
I'm not sure I'm reading it right but it says my neighbourhood has roughly 18% affordable(1000 a month) places but as soon as... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Phlegmco(tm) at 1:08 AM on March 16, 2024

Shout out to Christopher Nolan for creating an innovative new spin on time travel that is simultaneously too smart for average people to understand and too dumb for science-minded people to understand, thereby confusing everyone in the audience while also deafening them.
posted to MetaFilter by dephlogisticated at 7:02 PM on March 15, 2024

Someone didn’t understand Primer.

Someone did?
posted to MetaFilter by The Bellman at 12:22 PM on March 15, 2024

OK, on the Superman thing, I think we're meant to understand that we're watching this from Superman's perspective. He's not actually reversing the rotation of the Earth, he's flying so fast that time is moving backwards and from his perspective that makes the Earth look look it's slowing and then rotating backwards.

Don't ask me how flying fast moves you back in time, but I think visually this makes sense.
posted to MetaFilter by Eddie Mars at 10:48 AM on March 15, 2024

Primer, less scientific AND less entertaining??
posted to MetaFilter by UltraMorgnus at 10:08 AM on March 15, 2024

Santos as an as-yet-unconvicted former member of Congress has the privilege of being present on the House Floor and attending the State of the Union Address.

No shame in his game.

None whatsoever. In 2020 when he first ran (and lost) it took a while for his race to be officially called because of the number of mail-in ballots that needed to be counted. During the time that he was "leading" in the vote count, he... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by RonButNotStupid at 2:33 PM on March 8, 2024

The streaming choices so limited that according to @thathagengirl we would be better off going to the video store:

At this moment, Netflix is streaming about 3800 films - less than half of what the average Blockbuster used to carry. As for films made before 1990? Only 79 titles are currently streaming. If we go to 1980 or earlier, that drops to 36 (!)

posted to MetaFilter by autopilot at 11:53 PM on April 18, 2023

And ricochet biscuit, one of the best was of The King...
posted to MetaFilter by Windopaene at 10:38 AM on March 6, 2024

Newspaper publishers: Please stop calling us irrelevant and dated!

Also newspaper publishers: Please enjoy these comic strips drawn by white men, largely in the 1980's and earlier.
posted to MetaFilter by DirtyOldTown at 2:31 PM on March 6, 2024

It is exceedingly clear that we lack the legal infrastructure to do anything meaningful about actual attempts at insurrection.
posted to MetaFilter by grumpybear69 at 11:46 AM on March 4, 2024

I love Dragonflight dearly but for somewhat less dated character dynamics and focusing on people with more human-scale goals, I actually prefer the Harper Hall series.

Also, man I miss that old style of book cover. I'm sure they've run the numbers about what gets people to buy things but those covers for Night's Master, Nifft the Lean, and Nine Princes in Amber just make me want to know what's going on in there.
posted to MetaFilter by Phobos the Space Potato at 10:22 AM on March 4, 2024

Sometimes, The Onion plays Cassandra.

The inarticulate grievance has been escalating for decades: people who used to enjoy unquestioned privilege in this country because of their color, their gender, their religion, their political beliefs, their numbers, their population concentration in specific areas, their guns, their preachers thundering from the pulpit, their influence over the media and the entertainment industry and their children are losing that privileged state,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by delfin at 8:36 AM on February 27, 2024

I'm quite impressed with how quickly the Coast Guard was able to not only locate and retrieve Julia's naked corpse adrift in the icy black waters of the night-covered sea, but also positively ID the body and then immediately track down her next-of-kin to deliver the sad news. (And all of this on Christmas Eve!) That's some 5-star detective work. Too bad they couldn't be put in charge of the multiple murder investigations in Ennis.
posted to FanFare by Atom Eyes at 10:26 AM on February 7, 2024

An APGAR assessment is carried out on all babies who are born in the presence of a competent midwife, usually one minute and 5 minutes after delivery. The mnemonic works in (at least) English - Portuguese - German

Appearance - Aparência (skin color) - Aussehen
Pulse (heart rate) - Pulso - Puls
Grimace (reflex irritability) - Gesticulação - Reflexe
Activity (muscle tone) - Atividade - Grundtonus
Respiration - Respiração -... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by BobTheScientist at 11:06 PM on March 2, 2024

I didn't know this, and sarcastically implying "everyone knows this" is not good social lubrication. Also there's a difference between "everyone knows this" and "a rigorous scientific study has been done."
posted to MetaFilter by seanmpuckett at 8:30 AM on March 2, 2024

Barnes and Noble should have named their store “Noble Barnes” so you’d think it was named after fancy farm buildings.
posted to MetaFilter by madcaptenor at 1:20 PM on March 2, 2024

All Americans should watch Al Jazeera English at least some of the time. And I don't say that because they're amazingly better than US news stations (although sometimes they are) or because they have their own equally destructive biases that it is instructive to observe (although sometimes they do).

I think Americans should watch Al Jazeera English because they should take in what a corporate-owned, profit-seeking media operation looks like when it targets... [more]
posted to FanFare by DirtyOldTown at 6:54 AM on March 1, 2024

I'd thought of doing something like this. I just never had the time or resources. Maybe when I retire.

In the meantime, you’ll re-tire…
posted to MetaFilter by mochapickle at 7:11 AM on March 1, 2024

"at taxpayer expense"

Irony meter: Beep! Beep! Beep!
posted to MetaFilter by Reasonably Everything Happens at 11:49 AM on February 28, 2024

So it turns out my cat loves Star Trek? My partner and I watch it projected on the ceiling and it's the only thing we've actually noticed him go out of his way to sit and watch with us. Sometimes we catch him scanning the ceiling during the day, just in case there's a Star Trek going on up there.
posted to MetaFilter by Phobos the Space Potato at 10:04 PM on February 26, 2024

To be fair, in the past, there have been times that air was in very short supply for the very rich.
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 3:05 PM on February 23, 2024

Sticks and String

Cathedrals are OK as far as they go, but to my way of thinking that's a completely inadequate amount of far.

It's easy to stand inside a cathedral and get a little teary from contemplating the astonishing amount of multi-generational human labour and cooperation and skill and commitment that was required to build such a thing. As the general tone of comments in this thread so clearly attests, the same... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 10:41 AM on February 22, 2024

Was that a sly sideways burn on Car Wash in the article? That song is fantastic.

Also, reading about this thing we built for mostly non-capitalist reasons, that has lasted for so long, makes me even madder that I have to get a new phone every 3 years and put a new roof on a 12 year old house. We CAN build things well but we don’t. Where’s today’s Roman Coliseum? Nowhere, that’s where.
posted to MetaFilter by caviar2d2 at 9:35 AM on February 22, 2024

Voyager’s death is merely the end of the very beginning.

New Horizons is still headed deeper into the Kuiper Belt, 19 years after launch. And some people at JPL are planning gravitational lensing telescopes out at 150 AU that could take actual photos of exoplanets.
posted to MetaFilter by Headfullofair at 7:18 AM on February 22, 2024

There's something about deep space and deep time and the journey that Voyager 1 is on that resonates on a profound level.

Voyager 1 isn't just a thing that humanity did, it might end up being the thing that we did that will end up outlasting everything else we achieve as a species. Everything on terra firma is temporary in a way that Voyager isn't: the pyramids will turn dust and Voyager will still be traveling.

And we will never catch up with... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by slimepuppy at 6:16 AM on February 22, 2024

I was in grade school in Ithaca with Nick Sagan. Carl Sagan, his father (also known for some other things) was in charge of the golden record, so it's Nick's voice saying "“Hello from the children of planet Earth.”
I remember when he told me about this, I probably said something like "cool," and then we kept talking about D&D, comic books or other more important topics.
posted to MetaFilter by signal at 4:52 AM on February 22, 2024

A friend who is aware of the group supporting it say that they are supporting assembly code written by people who are now dead and didn't leave good notes - they have no local copy of the hardware to test on - but don't think all is lost
posted to MetaFilter by mbo at 1:11 AM on February 22, 2024

On a now-defunct tumblr blog, swanjolas posted:
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by autopilot at 11:51 PM on February 21, 2024

Year by year, the energy declines, the power levels relentlessly fall. Year by year, NASA has been switching off Voyager’s instruments to conserve that dwindling flicker. They turned off its internal heater a few years ago, and they thought that might be the end. But those 1970s engineers built to last, and the circuitry and the valves kept working even as the temperature dropped down, down, colder than dry ice, colder than liquid nitrogen, falling towards absolute zero.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by armoir from antproof case at 6:59 PM on February 21, 2024

Voyager’s greatest performance may be yet to come, an adventure beyond our capacity to imagine.

50,000 years floating through the endless void?
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 7:14 PM on February 21, 2024

Even if we carbon units have peaked and these are the last objects we intentionally fling into the void, at least we can say we got a Blind Willie Johnson song to exit the heliosphere. That's not bad.
posted to MetaFilter by credulous at 6:22 PM on February 21, 2024

.

That was lovely. Clear skies, Voyager I, and thank you for your service.
posted to MetaFilter by gauche at 5:15 PM on February 21, 2024

If you're a hammer every problem is a nail, and if you're a billionaire holding the hammer the nails are people.
posted to MetaFilter by The Card Cheat at 7:47 AM on February 20, 2024

The thought that a young pushy pedant could be treated with respect, while balm for my youthful heart, puts Encyclopedia Brown firmly n the camp of “utterly unrealistic fantasy.”
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 10:18 AM on February 17, 2024

To answer the question in your last sentence: yes, this is an absolutely normal thing for busy people.

I have had this happen to me (most recently today) and I have done this to others (most recently today.) It’s not because I wasn’t focused on the person; it’s not because I rudely double book calls. In my case it was a tech issue I could fix in under a minute. In my caller’s case, someone was pounding at his front door and he was concerned.

I... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by kapers at 11:59 AM on February 16, 2024

corb's comment expresses my feelings exactly. This particular scam relies on the notion that if it were actually a cop on the phone line (rather than an impersonator), then it would be OK to follow these instructions.

But that's not true! Cops lie all the fricking time. They lie to lure juveniles into false confessions. They lie under oath in a court of law. They even enter long-term sexual relationships and father children with... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by splitpeasoup at 2:45 PM on February 15, 2024

I watched that! (The doc and the reality.)

No one not alive back then will ever know the dull horror of watching the beginning of yet another argument between the “the millennium turns in 2000! Woo, party like it’s 1999!” and the “the millennium actually turns in 2001, you do not understand calendars, I will explain them to you” people. It was like watching any other slow-moving disaster, and just as predictable. I’m still recovering from it all.
posted to MetaFilter by cupcakeninja at 4:02 AM on February 17, 2024

Donald Trump will say “This was a bad and mean judge, very unfair.” and many people will believe him. The media doesn’t exactly seem part of the transaction.

How else do those many people find out about what Trump said?
posted to MetaFilter by slappy_pinchbottom at 1:02 PM on February 16, 2024

One interesting bit I wasn't aware of until reading the NYT article: "There might be little Mr. Trump can do to thwart one of the judge's most consequential punishments: extending for three years the appointment of an independent monitor who will be the court's eyes and ears at the Trump Organization, watching for fraud and second-guessing transactions that look suspicious."
posted to MetaFilter by mittens at 12:46 PM on February 16, 2024

One thing that's never in any "Go back and stop Hitler" fantasies is a part where, with the whole world having seen all of his fuckery laid bare, and with the gun finally leveled at his head, millions of people cry out, "No! Don't! WE LOVE THAT GUY." And the newspapers are all "Should we stop Hitler, though? I mean... he's bad and all, but he is leading in the polls."
posted to MetaFilter by DirtyOldTown at 12:41 PM on February 16, 2024

It's a very tight, clever little screenplay, at least on the teen movie level, of the conflict between the "everything is gonna be awesome!" life you daydream for yourself (Ferris's) and, respectively, the nagging hurts and disappointments that may already be in your way (Cameron), the frustration that your carefree life of popularity and endless fun is not coming (Jeanie), and the sad realization that even for a person with some version of that popular kid life,... [more]
posted to FanFare by DirtyOldTown at 8:50 AM on February 16, 2024

But this sounds so much like the plot to a middling airport paperback that you'd leave half-read in the seat-back pocket that I can't believe she'd show her whole ass by writing this article. None of it makes any sense. There are well-crafted scams, and then there's whatever this is.

You have the comfort of reading about it after the fact, at your leisure, having already read the headline "The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jacquilynne at 9:52 AM on February 16, 2024

Part of the problem is that for the past several hundred years, banks have been expected to be able to immediately fulfill their depositors' requests. Banks that didn't immediately hand over whatever cash a depositor asked for were presumed to be failing, thus leading to a bank run. The idea that a bank should protect you from yourself is fairly new.
posted to MetaFilter by Hatashran at 12:23 PM on February 15, 2024

Younger adults — Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X

Don't mean to be too pedantic here, but this line caught me. As a member of Gen X, let me tell you: we're not "younger adults"; we're in our fifties, for cryin' out loud.
posted to MetaFilter by grubi at 6:43 AM on February 16, 2024

Air Canada once advertised, on their customer contact page, "several weeks" for responses to email inquiries. I did take that at face value when I emailed a question about whether they would restart direct service from Maine to Toronto. Sure enough, something like 5 months later, an email response from a human trickled in, with a single word: "No."
posted to MetaFilter by Jubal Kessler at 6:52 PM on February 15, 2024

Man you gotta give it to Air Canada for their aspiration to be shittier than Rogers.
posted to MetaFilter by seanmpuckett at 3:48 PM on February 15, 2024

How many people now absolutely loathe Air Canada?

Only now?? Their business model, for as far back as I can remember, is to be actively despised by all Canadians. I wasn't sure they could inspire me to hate them more than I already do, but I suppose you have to applaud the effort.
posted to MetaFilter by selenized at 3:45 PM on February 15, 2024

I wonder how many customer service agents were "replaced' by this fucking AI chatbot? How many people now absolutely loathe Air Canada? Driving customers away aren't fucking "durable savings," you MBA shit bags.
posted to MetaFilter by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:49 PM on February 15, 2024

I would take, "If you talk to a lawyer, there will be severe penalties," as a sign that I should definitely talk to a lawyer.

If there's anything that American copaganda shows have highlighted, it's that asking for a lawyer is always taken as a sign of guilt and things get Much Worse for you.
posted to MetaFilter by hanov3r at 3:42 PM on February 15, 2024

in the moment, while you are scared and amped up, I don't know if I would spot the same things

I rolled my eyes a lot reading the article, because
1) Cops don't call first
2) I am not running all over town doing legwork for you
3) I couldn't get my hands on $50k cash in 24 months, let alone hours

BUUUUT after rolling my eyes, I remembered a time when I got scammed: I was a restaurant... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Alvy Ampersand at 1:54 PM on February 15, 2024