I'm not very well traveled, but I think I've used a pay toilet in every country I've been to other than the US (and the little bit of Canada I've seen) They're illegal in many US cities (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets...), and American taxpayers don't like footing the bill. So we end up with Starbucks and Dunkin as de facto pay toilets, where you have to buy a pastry or drink to take a pee.

I don't really understand why it should be illegal to pay someone for a vital human need

Classic first order thinking. Forcing someone to pay directly to access a toilet is yucky. Voting against pay toilets makes you a good person.

Second order effects? Please. Those aren’t on the ballot, and are hard to stuff into a sound bite.

> Voting against pay toilets makes you a good person.

Voting against pay toilets makes you a foolish and counterproductive person that thinks you're a good person.

It's an anonymous source. Someone who knows something and isn't supposed to say it, so figure someone at the FBI or Cellebrite most likely. Anonymous sourcing is a fraught practice, but often a necessary one if a journalist doesn't want to be restricted by what an organization will officially allow. You have to evaluate the publication, the journalist, and whatever details are available to decide if you want to trust them.

The better publications will have policies on when anonymous sources can be used and may have those policies or an explainer of same available to readers. Eg here's Wapo's write-up on it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/policies-and-standards/#sourc...

Wow, I never knew that could happen! Are there other examples or a name for this phenomenon?

There are contagious cancers that you can catch via blood transfer. This has wiped out most of Australia's Tasmanian Devil population.

By most, parent means 80% species die-off rates. :(

Disclaimer: sad pictures of extreme facial tumors

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease

The article says that there is a gene for resistance to that cancer already present in the Tasmanian Devil genome. It's a fascinating mechanism. Wonder if it evolved related to overpopulation?

The likely reason the cancer is transmittable at all is due to underpopulation/genetic bottleneck. Animal immune systems usually have no problem recognizing and destroying cells from other individuals, even cancerous ones, but you need sufficiently distinct immune markers on your cells for them to recognize as "foreign."

That's surprising. Why doesn't the HLA system work in this case ?

Genetic bottleneck, they don't have enough genetic diversity to recognize the cancer cells as foreign.

Immortal sexually transmitted canine cancer.

Good scifi. We need Egan or Hughes to do it up. It's like Battlestar Galactica, except with cellular stuff.

Maybe a cheery tale from Peter Watts?

A bit before Bitcoin was NESARA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NESARA

I learned of NESARA through Will Sommer's TRUST THE PLAN, which is about qanon. The MOASS, NESARA, and qanon conspiracy theories all share some interesting characteristics, like there's something necessary for a conspiracy theory to start resembling the distributed cataclysm-utopia cults we're discussing

I see people using "linktree" to crosslink all their different social media accounts together and it really bums me out in a way I can't describe.

Linktree became the go to because social media networks only give you a single link to display on your bio.

And they also don't like it when that single link points to onlyfans.

Who'd guess why, Onlyfans (and related) spammers are the scourge of the Internet these days.

Google is the scourge.

I don't see OF spammers blasting Google with spam, but I see tons of OF (and other porn) spam on Twitter and Reddit.

Sure, but depending on another single point of failure - as opposed to linking to a url you actually own - is what distresses me

Seeing the proliferation of Linktree makes me feel bad for the folks like about.me who had this idea years and years ago and never caught fire.

Linktree seems like the natural evolution of About.me.

> if it's an actual, viable business

Maybe one in ten vc backed startups will find a viable business model eventually.

If you don't take vc money maybe it's easier to find a smaller viable business, but then it's harder to pay yourself.

There is a huge range of profitability that would be incredible for a founder who owns all our the best majority of the company, but a failure for most VCs. I don't know VC finance enough to say where the upper limit is, but I'm pretty sure several million $ profit per year still is in that range.

You can start pretty much any business and be successful with a small group of founders and no VC money (from experience, this can be anything from a wholesale flower business to a WordPress plugin to a hosting provider). The problem is that VCs push you to grow too fast and too hard, then pull funding when it "fails" and you've got an entire staff to feed, pay, and manage. Thus, you go bankrupt.

If you choose to play a long game, you can have a nice stable-ish income for 2-3 people after 5-ish years.

Or have a giant scale, show people loading all this stuff into one side of the scale, and then placing the iPad on the other side, and the iPad side sinks. There's a million ways to do this idea

Health insurers, who buy quite a lot of diabetes treatment, would much rather buy a cure. And they really don't want to pay for untreated diabetes. I've heard from an insurance CEO who wishes their plan could pay the electric bill for diabetes patients to ensure they don't lose power and refrigeration, which would make their insulin get too warm

An occasional pop, sugar or no, isn't going to cause diabetes.