Definitely not. But just force people isnt going to do anything but send people to jail.

You figure out why they’re saying no.

It’s often stuff like forcing spouses to separate in order to get housing, concerns that the provided housing is unsafe, or mental illness which prevents sleeping inside.

Yes, it’s run by the national park service, and you can get a ferry ride to it and do a tour.

I’m not expecting anything like “up to standards”

I wouldn’t go where you are; I can think of several examples of the NYT and US State Department agreeing about Ukraine in ways that turned out to be very right. It’s more important to look at what evidence is brought to bear to support a conclusion, and whether the conclusion is valid based on the evidence, and to look at more than one outlet to understand an issue, so it’s not easy to use paltering to mislead.

Media literacy means having a sense of which outlets lie about which issues and why. eg: the Wall Street Journal editorials and op-eds are used as a means of introducing lies for commercial advantage, and New York Times politics writers put out puff pieces to maintain access to wealth and power.

Taxes tend to be really hard to pass thanks to Prop. 13

It looks like a planned gradual turnup

I’m pointing to an old one because the causes are well known, there isn’t any current propaganda campaign to confuse people about it, and its a wide-area unanticipated failure.

That kind of facility tends to have its own backup power, often with a week or so of fuel stockpiled on-site.

Back when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was a period where the only building with power was a datacenter. The lights prompted soldiers to break in, and the system admin wound up having to pretend that they’d discovered evidence of somebody nefarious forcing the door, so they’d clear the building and leave.

I think that one is coming from the UK Daily Mail which is generally unreliable.

During one of these events, it’s really common for all kinds of misinformation and rumors to fly, and even to come from otherwise trustworthy people.

I’ll note that the US had some very large-scale blackouts in the 1960s which were caused by fairly ordinary technical problems.

In the US, the towers that provide mobile service are required to have a few hours worth of battery backup. The EU may require more, but I’d expect them to go down not too long after the main grid goes out.

It’s a gift link. Folks with Javascript enabled just get the article without needing that.

A big chunk of the US population wants dictatorship

Top level post is already a gift link

That definitely helps a lot.

The new trains in Caltrain have much greater acceleration, which means that local trains don’t have so much of a time penalty as they used to, and they also are a LOT quieter, which makes it easier to get something else done while traveling.

Definitely not 100% external. A chunk of cases are known to be genetic.

And these people were eating a mushroom known to be mildly poisonous.

Exactly. There’s a reason I won’t eat any Amanita: the similarity of edible and deadly species in that genus makes them the main source of mushroom fatalities in North America.

By contrast, messing up a bolete ID is likely to result in a meal that is too bitter to eat. That’s a much more acceptable risk.

And these days, that means making sure it’s a book written by someone who knows what they are doing, rather than AI auto-generated bullshit.