Where are the mainstream media stories about this? The article mentioned the story blowing up but a Google search showed only one media outlet covering the story.
> I'm on page 750 of Anathem. Please give me a recap.
> You are currently reading the section of the book where the main characters have been launched into orbit aboard a repurposed military rocket and are preparing to board the alien starship, the Daban Urnud.
Given different printings and formats for books, I’d be very surprised if asking about a specific page number works reliably at all across books. I don’t even know if epub has page numbers embedded to keep track because the number of words on a page of an ereader is entirely arbitrary. My wife has her kindle in grandma mode or something. Only about 50 words fit on a page.
I would expect much more reliable results from chapter numbers though.
Or were away from the book for a while and are coming back to it. I've read 1000 page books that I just got tired of reading, so put 'em down for a bit to read something else. Anathem by Neal Stephenson comes to mind.
No way anyone wants to hang out at McDonald's. If they're trying to make McDonald's a third space they need to do some remodeling first. Restaurants aren't warm and appealing; they're hard and easy to clean.
The one near me is always full of old people just hanging out. They use it in a similar way to many kids with starbucks, but they speak to each other instead of using laptops.
Every McDonald's in North America I have been in had homeless people sleeping in it. I also actually worked at McDonald's and we would have to call ambulance every now and then because someone got high and passed out or something in the washroom.
Then you've probably only been to/worked at McDonald's in the built-up parts of major cities.
McDonald's in the suburbs and more rural areas and smaller cities are quite pleasant. Spacious, clean, just local folks.
If your local McDonald's has a homeless person problem, then all your local fast food franchises do. It's a social services problem, not a McDonald's problem.
Exactly my experience. I've been to a lot of McDonald's everywhere from rural to old inner city, and the difference is Stark. The more rural locations tend to be clean and relatively comfortable and enjoyable to be in. The inner city locations tend to be dirty, crowded, and generally not very pleasant to be in.
And it's not just McDonald's, as you mentioned. I've observed the exact same thing with Wendy's and many other restaurants as well.
There are of course plenty of exceptions. It's perfectly possible to find a dirty uncomfortable restaurant in a rural area, and it's also not difficult to find a nice comfortable place in the inner city. But generally speaking the above is what I have observed most
Thirding this observation. Inner city fast food has been - nearly universally - a horror show since at least 25 years ago when I first experienced it. I expect it will continue to be like that forever. I also suspect with them being allowed to take EBT (since maybe 10-15 years ago?), that provides enough revenue that they won’t pull out of those places completely.
I live in the suburbs, and it's not like this. The entire place smells like feet (???), all the tables are sticky, and there's a constant stream of "beep boop beep boop... bebebebeb"
I suspect you are full of it. I've been to lots of McDonald's locations, and I've rarely seen homeless people inside. Keep in mind I've been everywhere from California to Maine, From Kentucky to Florida to Texas. Nearly every state except the PNW, and I've never seen homeless people sleeping in a McDonald's (McD's used to be my goto with the $1 value menu when traveling). Ordering food? sure. As someone who once worked in fast food, I also know for a fact that management would kick them out, and so would the few dozen police officers in a lot of areas that walk in to get breakfast/coffee.
...Unless you mean Canada of course, however, I bet a well traveled Canadian would say the same thing.
Nobody’s vilifying the homeless. Tons of homeless people are perfectly fine human beings who don’t bother anybody. Unhinged and dirty drug addicts on the other hand, are pretty categorically unpleasant. If you enjoy being around them, you can let them move in with you and then they won’t be homeless anymore.
As others have suggested, you have a narrowly scoped view of the world and the use of McDonalds in it. While my city slicking McDonalds trips are usually not great, for many it’s actually very good.
Photographer and author Chris Arnade has written fairly extensively of his travels around the “forgotten” parts of America, which frequently lands him in McDonald’s stores that do serve as a community third-space, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/08/mcdonalds-c...
I can't believe you'd bring up one article written nine years ago! "Narrowly scoped!" Give me a break, you know nothing about the scope of my travels. Please don't make assumptions and condescensions about people you don't know.
Working on in-house software can be satisfying: no marketing BS, work closely with users in developing software that helps them perform their job, rarely have unrealistic schedules or demands.
Huh. 35 year ago I was the sole maintainer of an in-house SQL-like database query language. The application was transforming relational data into a more concise and efficient format for use in an embedded application (AT&T 5ESS digital switch). All the mapping was done in this SQL-like language. One of my power users mentioned the difficulty they had in actually changing logic based on the values in the database. For example, to perform different logic based on whether a column was a 1 or a 2, they'd have to write two querys: one for 1 and another for 2. Possible, sure, but not very clean or efficient. To address this, I implemented an if() function.
I have two. I agree it's quiet on the lowest speed but it's loud on the medium and high speeds so mine are setup to run 24/7 on the lowest speed regardless of the air quality. The air quality in my house is good and they run nearly always at the low speed anyways. Buy them while they are on sale.
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