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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

These microchips are amazing technology.

I highly highly encourage all you pet lovers to obtain one for your little homie.

You never know when you’ll need it.


24 EU countries have mandatory dog micro-chipping.

In Belgium there is a centralized database in which the data is maintained.

When I moved to the USA I thought it was very weird that it wasn't done automatically, and that there are many databases out there.

In fact, one went bust a while ago: https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/microchip-company-cl...

Now what? Gotta pay to have 18 digits and an address inserted in a database?

I thought it was very weird in the USA


Like many things in the US, there's no centralized authority that mandates this sort of thing. Some states have laws around this some don't. For those that don't, some counties or cities might have laws around this. Belgium of course has a stronger central government, small land area, and a small population, so I'm not surprised that something like that would be done country-wide.

The shelter in my city chips every animal before anyone can adopt them. It's honestly bonkers to me why anyone who has a pet wouldn't chip them. It's cheap (especially when considering the cost of a regular vet visit), and can save you from lots of heartbreak later on.


Coloradan with all chipped pets for decades. Not sure where you're coming from. Our friend was reunited with a cat with a chip that was lost for a 6 months. Shitting on the US is great for karma these days

Did your state chip your pet or was it a private company? I think they are saying that there are no centralized authorities and you depend on private companies

https://www.petlink.net/microchip-search/

It seems the various chip companies share registry data, doesn't have to be state run.


That is upsetting for what could almost certainly be run from a SQLite database on a garbage-tier host. Presumably 99.9% of all animals are registered one time and never again queried. Could be near zero operational burden, but of course, capitalism.

Yeah, I moved to the US and I also thought it was weird. Same with vaccination stuff for dogs. You need to carry paperwork if you want to cross the Canada border. It's a throwback to the last century I guess.

I had moved into a new place, and it had a little garden, which attracted stray city cats. A kitten found my garden and adopted it, just moving in and living there. I invited her inside, fed her, took her to the vet, made sure she was okay. She had no chip, was definitely a stray.

So I adopted her, got her chipped per the law, and she grew into a fine cat who loved her place with me - she was great.

One time she got out, and I got the call. But it wasn't to get her back, it was to come get her corpse from under the car that had flattened her some distance from our home.

In many ways, I wish I'd not gotten the chip, that was a really traumatic event which I'd probably have avoided, at least not knowing what had happened.


Pretty interesting link as well. Thanks for sharing

Here is a link to the folks at Kagi talking about this

https://blog.kagi.com/small-web


Early voting exists in many states. Even in these states you’ll find that younger folks hardly vote.

The BBC operates independently of the UK government. It is an autonomous entity that is publicly funded. It is not a “propaganda arm” of the UK government in the manner of state television.


This isn’t true. The content of the BBC is independent of the UK government. Even for the royal family and for foreign policy.

I am not British so I could be wrong however. If you have evidence that the BBC lacks autonomy when it comes to foreign policy or to the royal family please share it with the rest of us.


The BBC coverage of the royal family is always crawling. They tried to bury the Andrew story several times. The entire BBC is under royal charter.

As for supposed autonomy from the government... Watch BBC News, you can always get a good idea of who the UK will go to war with next... Before it happens. Their coverage of the Troubles was also reflective of the British government.


This doesn’t make sense. Surely paying taxes would be cheaper than buying Warner Bros?


That's what a poor person would say. Fox news managed to get Donald Trump elected, whose net worth has gone up by billions.

Also, it's not real money, it's debt equity. Equity transfers are just rich people toys. They move the actual cost into the entity they purchase, and if it fails, whatever, it didn't cost them anything.


And all the other investors in the market just ignore this debt when deciding the price they are willing to pay for a share?

Shares of businesses with excessive debt relative to income do not do well for their shareholders.


Ruining society is a long term objective. Normal 6month profteers need not apply.


I don’t know what that means. You wrote something about debt equity not costing shareholders anything, but it’s trivial to see that all else being equal, a business with more debt will have a smaller market capitalization than a business with less debt.

The debt from the Time Warner and other purchases dragged ATT down from the top spot to 3rd, and boosted Tmobile to the top. The shareholders of ATT lost and the shareholders of Tmobile gained.


Pretty cool article.

Nowadays often when you see articles about computer history of this era, the articles tend to be focused on Apple and IBM.

So it’s neat this article focuses on the other computers of this era. TI, Atari, Commodore, etc.


It's interesting how things differed so much across different countries.

In the UK there was good split between Atari and Amiga, and before that the Spectrum and the C64.

Lots of rivalries and interesting characters though, for sure.


Some of the new HP laptops are pretty well designed and have reasonable prices.


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