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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You’re not going to split hairs out of this one. Trying to say that these are not Evangelicals because no true Evangelical would do this is pretty much the "No True Scotsman " evasion. When people say, “Evangelicals”, this is exactly the group to which they are referring.

    The one or two “True Evangelicals” in the US can consider themselves exempt from this thread.




  • Back in the 70’s and 80’s there were “Travesty Generators”. You pushed some text into them and they developed linguistic rules based on probabilities determined by the text. Then you could have them generate brand new text randomly created by applying the linguistic rules developed from the source text.

    Surprisingly, they would generate “brand new” words that weren’t in the original text, but were real words. And the output matched stylistically to the input text. So you put in Shakespeare and you got out something that sounded like Shakespeare. You get the idea.

    I built one and tried running some TS Eliot through it, because stuff is, IMHO, close to gibberish to begin with. The results were disappointing. Basically because it couldn’t get any more gibberishy that the source.

    I strongly suspect that the same would happen with Trump’s gibberish. There used to be a bunch of Travesty Generators online, and you could probably try one out to see.




  • Agreed, but I don’t know the mindset of those people and how to think of them. Do we just take them out of the voter pool? Are they potentially swing?

    My take on 2016 was that the Dems were deeply unenthusiastic about Hillary - and who can blame them - so they didn’t show up to vote. On the other hand the Reps were stoked about Trump so they turned up at the polls.

    Swing voters? I don’t get it. I cannot see any rational person sitting in the middle comparing Trump and Harris and picking Trump as a better presidential option. Irrational people? My gut tells me they they are probably sitting and the far ends of either camp.

    My guess is that the people closer to the middle aren’t actually swing voters, but they are far more likely to have their enthusiasm to vote influenced than the true believers.

    The big question, in my opinion, is how much - or how little - the polls reflect the enthusiasm to go out and vote. My impression is that Dem enthusiasm in high right now, while not so much for the Reps. It’s possible that a 50/50 poll may hide the fact that a big chunk of one of the 50% is much less likely to actually vote.

    I’m Canadian, so I see the news but I don’t have day to day experience with US voters. Of course, neither do the 90% of Americans that don’t live in those swing states.





  • I would have a couple years ago. In a flash. We replaced our phones a while back specifically to have eSIMs. It truth, considering the cost of Canadian roaming plans the phones have already paid for themselves.

    Both of our old phones were single SIM, so using a local SIM would mean disconnecting our Canadian numbers which would put us out of touch with people back home. Which means that this card wouldn’t have work for us either.

    I was at the point of looking at buying a portable WiFi hot-spot, when I found out about eSIMs. So we went that route.


  • I have an Orange eSIM with a France number that I have kept alive by reactivating it at least once every 6 months. It’s good for all Europe, without roaming charges, so that’s easy to do. Having the same number all the time is convenient, but more importantly I have gone through the hassle of providing passport info to Orange, which is a government requirement if you want a number for more than a couple of weeks. I think that’s an EU thing.

    The local number is good for calling hotels and for making restaurant reservations. Just having that is a game changer.

    For my wife’s we don’t need a number, so I just use Nomad for her data only eSIM, and get a new one each time. The cost is about $12-15, and you get whatever carrier you get, but the service has been good so far no I keep using Nomad.

    We can text each other using WhatsApp, and you can even use WhatsApp for voice calls. The sound quality is acceptable.




  • Historically, the name came from Dave Nichol, who was president of the company for decades. He actually had a very strong hand in the selection of products that were included in the product line.

    Apparently all kinds of people would pitch product ideas at him, and would taste test them and pick only ones he liked. The idea of “President’s Choice” wasn’t to be cheapo no name products, but unique and distinctive stuff personally picked by the company’s president.

    And Dave wasn’t just some guy in the corner office. In his prime he was a Canadian personality, and you saw him in TV commercials. Once he left Loblaws in the '90s the President’s Choice stuff lost its panache and meaning.



  • Many, many years ago I used to have two Wyse50 terminals, running split screens each with two parts. I did a lot of support on remote systems (via modem!) and I would have a session on a customer system, source code and running on our test system and internal stuff. I didn’t have space for a third terminal.

    At another job I had an office with a “U” shaped desk. I would spread printouts across half the “U” and swivel around between the computer and the printouts.