Vice President of Population Health

Can't lose aiming high. Fingers crossed and all that jazz.

As to weddings, It's hardly my place, but I've been to ones ranging from "350 people in a literal palace rented for three days" to "12 friends and family served a nice three-course dinner after a ceremony at the registry office" and the cheaper end of the scale seems to be universally more enjoyed by everyone involved.

Are US trains notably cheaper or more convenient than airlines or buses? Are they seen as this rustic freighter of the past that ended the era of cattle drives you may indulge in Dollywood? I'm asking because for us EU folk, the answers are unsurprising "yes, and I use them daily" and "no, they feel more modern and 'civilised' than most of the planes I flew."

The truth is that I needed teachers and professors to get me to understand electrodynamics, but for the most part, I grokked Bleak House because I read a ton of books before it that weren't part of my educational curriculum.

It'd be easy to grokk CED if the Poynting vector was as easily experienced as classism or poverty or long-winded descriptions of weather.

And indeed, to their credit, they don’t pretend that they know how to bring the “problematic” readers up to proficiency.

Don't stigmatise the reading of not-so-great books? I'll admit to smirking when told I don't read that much by comparison, only to hear a litany of YA novels that'd make Eragon read like Zamyatin... but don't put folks down for choosing to read for pleasure. Reading utter crap won't boost your vocab, but it's leagues (or would 'miles' be more appropriate for the modern reader?) better for you than vegetating in front of a screen.

As the students read, they must translate what they read into modern English, explaining what each passage means.

This isn't easy; going from academic to vernacular register is on par with translating from a foreign language, effort-wise. Doubly so for Dickens, who takes a page to say a sentence.

veen's mention of a vocabulary percentage is on point, as reading (in a foreign language) with comprehension is painful below 90-98%, especially if the goal is for the reader to acquire new vocabulary. It's why comprehensible input is so huge in classical languages these days (and historically, before German school reforms grammaticised it): Latin isn't difficult to read if you start with an introductory text (Orberg: Roma in Italia est. Italia in Europa est. Graecia in Europa est. Italia et Graecia in Europa sunt.) rather than introductory author (Caesar: Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur).

My sabbatical was accepted, I'm taking a year to push hard towards habilitation. Success or not, I'm leaving.

Also, gonna use that year to learn some data science tools beyond "Python and some R, I guess?" and... euch, actually learn and understand, <vomits mid-sleep>, some finance <dry heaves>. God, I still think this is too mature of me.

kb (and others too!), what do you recommend? Is there something that's conceptually For Dummies but isn't afraid of maths? 'cause in my experience it's either "here's de Vries equation describing <white noise in fluent garbage>" or "money can be exchanged for goods and services, here's a five-page description of a fucking supply-demand graph."

Should I pay a subscription to read that thrilling piece of journalism

Nah.

Boy Accidentally Orders 70,000 Lollipops on Amazon. Panic Ensues.

Holly LaFavers said she was eventually refunded $4,200 for her 8-year-old son’s order of Dum-Dums candy.

Piles of red boxes labeled Dum-Dums sit outside a front door with two white columns on either side.

The delivery of Dum-Dums lollipops was left outside of the LaFaverses’ home on Monday in Lexington, Ky.Credit...Holly LaFavers, via Associated Press

Christine Hauser

By Christine Hauser

May 8, 2025

On Sunday morning, as Holly LaFavers was preparing to go to church, a delivery worker dropped off a 25-pound box of lollipops in front of her apartment building in Lexington, Ky.

And another. And then another. Soon, 22 boxes of 50,600 lollipops were stacked five boxes high in two walls of Dum-Dums. That was when Ms. LaFavers heard what no parent wants to hear: Her child had unwittingly placed a massive online order.

“Mom, my suckers are here!” said her son, Liam, who had gone outside to ride his scooter.

“I panicked,” Ms. LaFavers, 46, said. “I was hysterical.”

Ms. LaFavers said in an interview that Liam, 8, became familiar with Amazon and other shopping sites during the pandemic, when she regularly ordered supplies. Since then, she has occasionally let him browse the site if he keeps the items in the cart.

But over the weekend, Liam had a lollipop lapse. He told his mother he wanted to organize a carnival for his friends, and mistakenly, he said, he placed an order for almost 70,000 pieces of the candy instead of reserving it.

And so the double ramparts of suckers rose on their doorstep, where the excesses of e-commerce crossed paths with their tight-knit community.

Ms. LaFavers said that she discovered something was amiss after a shopping trip early on Sunday, when she checked her bank balance online. “It was in the red,” she said.

The offending item was a $4,200 charge from Amazon for 30 boxes of Dum-Dums. Frantic and upset, she called Amazon, which advised her to reject the shipments. Ms. LaFavers was able to turn away eight of the boxes, totaling 18,400 lollipops, but the 22 boxes containing 50,600 lollipops had already landed.

“My Alexa didn’t even ding to tell me they had been delivered,” she said.

Ms. LaFavers said that she was then told by Amazon that it could not take the candy back for a refund because it was food. So she tried to send back to the virtual shopping world what it had unloaded on her in the first place.

“Hi Everyone! Liam ordered 30 cases of Dum-Dums and Amazon will not let me return them. Sale: $130 box. Still sealed,” she wrote on Facebook on May 4.

Our business coverage. Times journalists are not allowed to have any direct financial stake in companies they cover.

Here’s more on our standards and practices.

The post attracted the attention of local news stations and national media outlets, highlighting the financial treachery of online activity.

Parents commiserated on her Facebook page and shared solutions, like detaching payment methods from online accounts, setting up alerts for large purchases or simply keeping children off phones. One child spent $980 on virtual Roblox game currency. A 3-year old playing on a phone during an airport delay spent $300 on movies. A woman’s granddaughter spent $1,000 on Google Play.

“As a mom that has experienced unwanted orders, I feel your pain,” a woman wrote.

Companies offer steps on how to prevent and dispute unauthorized purchases in online shopping and games.

Roblox advises parents to use password-protected purchasing, and to call its customer service center before initiating a dispute with a payment provider, which would stall the refund process. Epic, the makers of Fortnite, has safeguards that include an “intent-to-buy” step, and purchase cancellations.

On Apple devices and accounts, family-verification settings include controls called Ask to Buy for a child’s device, or “don’t allow” for in-app purchases.

Google Play’s purchase-verification process also has additional safeguards on family accounts that reverify the user is authorized to make a purchase on apps meant for children ages 12 and under.

Amazon eventually told Ms. LaFavers that it would give her a refund. In an email, the company said that it “worked directly” with her “to turn a sticky situation into something sweet.”

On Wednesday, after the refund came through, Ms. LaFavers decided to give away the Dum-Dums instead of selling them. One neighbor offered to distribute some on Halloween. A local chiropractor asked for two boxes, and a bank in Somerset, Ky., said they would take five boxes.

“I am giving them to the individuals that offered to buy them from me, or I am donating them to a charity or a school or church,” Ms. LaFavers said. “People that I have relationships with were willing to buy those to help me out.”

Spangler Candy Co., the company that has made Dum-Dums since 1924, invited Ms. LaFavers and Liam to visit its factory in Ohio. “We also love that so many people jumped in to offer to purchase the extra cases,” said Kirk Vashaw, its chief executive, in an email.

Liam’s online browsing privileges are on pause. But Ms. LaFavers said he, too, had tried to find a way to recoup her money, telling his mother: “It’s OK, mom, we can sell my Pokémon cards.”

Gf got sick after a horrible week at work, we're playing scrabble. It's 21:0. Thanks to an occasional good word she still believes I'm letting her win, since nobody could possibly suck this hard at putting letters together. Little does she know, my hand is almost always a straight consonant cluster so bad even speaking Polish isn't helping. At least she's feeling better.

I'm starting engineering school next academic year, electronics and telecommunication. Not for degree but because learning this stuff on my own is fucking arduous sieving of folklore. Kinda like learning how to weld (here, at least) when you either: a) apprentice under some old fuck whose first (and likely last) order is 'swipe the floor that hasn't been touched since the last apprentice two decades ago', b) have welding-able friends teach you, c) overpay for a year-long course that's 80% theory despite job being 95% doing, d) go for an engineering degree for a programme with compulsory freshman class that potentially opens your 'hours book' (officially recognised time spent working as a welder/trainee, important for various reasons), EDIT: e) try not to kill yourself figuring it out with a book/yt/whatever.

Gonna laugh my ass off all the way to "hell no!" if they'll make me take intro math and physics classes, though.

cat snow moose cloudy? Something Musk-loudy? I strained both of my lateral thinking neurons long enough to give up without shame.

Reading Hippocrates (find a Loeb here, it starts at L147), mostly in English because the Greek in it sharply fluctuates between I could read this whole paragraph unadapted after three months of study and dafuq even is this, epic optative?! You gotta love the fact that an author from 5th century BCE opens with an overview of 'ancient medicine' and goes all "it's difficult, meandering, and with lotsa unknowns, and those countless generations wouldn't bother with it if human suffering wasn't a constant" as justification for discipline's perseverance.

I'm working through a couple of books on circuit theory, keep finding words and phrases that I want to call gatekeeping jargon because EEs never use those in the wild. Then again, maybe it's so low-level for them it'd be a bit like chemist specifying they mean moles and not some other thing.

Normal books-wise, I'm revisiting Ghost Wars and Charlie Wilson's War because they're a) easily the most casual reads from kb's list, b) goldmine for non-fantasy RPG ideas. I also got a great translation of some of Lovecraft's collected stories, and I impulse-bought it for footnotes alone.

Kicking bad fanfics and Yudkowsky, and being euphonic about it? How stars aligned me a free evening, thanks for posting this. I almost knee-jerk badged it out of loathing, both for him and his untold legions[0] of condescending, "you don't like Him because you don't understand logic or epistemology on a high school level, so read this overlong drivel and learn how to think, mr Devac, PhD" cryptobro fanboys.

[0] - Here defined as N=17, which Youdkowsky would assume statistically significant if rationally aligned with his cognitive unbiases.

I'm not new to the game, but recently began to find deeper levels of appreciation of the character creation system in Traveller. It's not like D&D or any other RPG (that I know of/didn't steal it wholesale), where you decide "I want to be X" and then play as X with whatever class/gear/stats/skills/feats of your choice. No. Here you start wanting to become something, assign attributes and skills learned from your homeworld... and then life happens.

You start wanting to become a space frontier doctor like Julian Bashir, life happens, and you're playing an '80s vision of a netrunner - with chip sockets behind high-collared hobojacket and cyberdecks and communicating with excerpts from Gibson - that's been in and out of prison for the last 40 years.

You start without any idea what to do with yourself, enlist in the navy, life happens, you earn a field commission and continue as some larger-than-life overdecorated mix of James Bond and Horatio Hornblower, hitting Admiral before turning 40.

You are born into wealth and nobility, spend 20 years of your adult life as a blasé socialite with one of those administration 'jobs' the rich save for their spare heirs, life puts on its asskicking boots, and without other options you become a middling novelist more famous than Coca-Cola with contacts rivalling the FBI.

There's three more people with equally subverted ideas for their character's life, ones above need the least explanation ("what's a Bwap?"). It was awesome to sit and make those characters together, weaving a common story. More games should offer something like that, but I'm afraid it's too much work for most designers and too not-what-I-want-waaaah! for most players. Still, it'd be bitchin' to have it in Call of Cthulhu as a better background generator than GM's default "so you all know this professor/are related to that so-and-so to inherit X."

It's honestly embarrassing for me because I spend time organizing then they just don't show up.

It's embarassing, but you certainly aren't the one to feel embarassed by that situation.

It's horrible. You wait for them to hint it's a joke, laugh or crack a smile, but it never comes. Then it dawns on you, they're serious.

Certainly not my first encounter, just never had an actual professor say this kind of bullshit. You can kinda get how they could be right wing or antisemitic or be otherwise mundane dumb. Having someone correct your reasoning on the fly with foreshadowing words like "do you have any idea how much energy it takes to move something so massive?" only to wipe their ass with it to talk about assassinating a ship with an iceberg requires mental disjunction I hope to never understand.