Can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not (the sausage thing seems to imply you are), but all public schools (elementary, middle, and high school) are closed on election day so that they can act as polling locations. Many libraries also act as polling locations on election day.

If you won’t be able to vote on that day for some reason, there are small polling places open for a couple of weeks ahead of that date.

For the record, early voting is an option in many US states, too, and it’s really expanded since COVID. In my state, you could go to any poll location to cast an early vote. It used to be you could only cast an early vote if you were going to be away from home in election day for a specific reason (college or military are the ones I remember, but there were other reasons, too), but it’s expanded so pretty much anyone can do early voting now. On election day, you have to go to your assigned poll location in order to vote if you don’t do early voting.

This varies by state, though. In any case, it’s getting easier to vote, and there are more options to be able to vote, but it’s not nationwide (yet, hopefully).

I’m kind of curious to see if plugging my phone (which charges via USB-C) into my laptop’s charger (which plugs into one of my laptop’s USB-C ports would blow it up.

I obviously won’t do it, but I’m still curious.

I’m glad that there’s sort of an agreed-upon standard for phone chargers now, but you’re right that it’s also a bit of a problem.

Technically, you do still need just the seven numbers if you’re calling locally. The phone system will just assume you’re calling the local area code if you don’t dial one. In my area, it’s pretty easy because the only people who don’t have the local area code (there’s only one even though it’s far from a rural area) are people who moved here and never changed their number.

I actually saw a recording of a news story about that recently. It was about when BBC’s Ceefax shut down 12 years ago.

It was interesting because I’d never hear of something like that before. I guess the technology wasn’t too big in the US.

• The planet Pluto

What do you mean? It’s only been googles… 18 years… since… whoa…

https://youtu.be/gsNaR6FRuO0

I still have a distinct memory of trying to get on the Internet and then hearing my dad’s voice coming through the computer speakers. He’d been on the phone with someone.

I imagine each employee crunched their own numbers using their own salaries and compared notes.

I’d trust a group of employees doing this out of curiosity over, say, HR doing it.

In the US, most TV commercials are so obviously TV commercials that they don’t label them. Some TV stations do have bumpers they air when the TV show goes to break and comes back from break.

They’re in the middle of trying to get their users to create accounts with E-Trade, their Directed Share Program (DSP) administrator. They’ll start selling shares to their users as part of their DSP late next week. After that is the IPO.

Fortunately, at least in my experience, the adblockers usually win. Even if a company changes something to avoid an adblocker or force someone to turn off their adblocker (Hi, Twitch!), it’s usually fixed within just a few hours at most.

Weren’t they also caught using AI bots to drive up engagement in some subreddits, too? (I think it was supposed to be some of their subreddits in foreign languages or something.)