How often does this even get used? How does the NSA even communicate to a police officer in the field? I think you give local cops a ton of credit. At the end of the day it looks like there are more hard drugs available on the street than ever before despite all the spooky tech and warrantless searching.

I think selling drugs was a simple, if dated, example. And nobody suggested the NSA would contact an officer 'in the field' - they said contacting the agency/department

> At the end of the day it looks like there are more hard drugs available on the street than ever

Nobody said they're doing it to get drugs off the street.

The NSA (probably) communicates it to the DEA’s Special Operations Division, which creates an entry in the DEA’s DICE database and tips off a DEA field office, which then asks local law enforcement to do a “random” stop and to use some Parallel Construction to keep it hush hush.

It was probably used in the Silk Road investigation.

They aren’t going after drugs they are going after people for their political beliefs. Remember when the IRS audited every organization just for having the word “patriot” in their name?

I wonder why puerto rico is a nonstarter

Nothing like buying yourself a telescreen

Yet another xbox sized awkwardly for the tv stand it seems

Hilariously you can't even place it on its side this time. At least with the original Series X that was possible.

Or maybe they'll make a horizontal stand for it?

I was hoping that the shape had something to do with quiet efficient cooling, but wasn't mentioned at all.

Very unlikely this is the final form factor.

My parents grow large bushes of catnip. The cat walks up to the bush, chews it some, and passes out in the bush. Seems to enjoy himself.

My spectrum cuts out pretty reliably at 12:30am every night. Lets me know its time for bed.

Now that, I could get behind: “Attention Spectrum user, cease doomscrolling at once and get some sleep”

When cable came out it was ad free. That was one of the selling points actually.

After reading the title I was expecting a phone duct taped to the lid.

There’d be almost no way to tell given these ads generally don’t have precise locations for the address until after you book.

I bet Airbnb has a lot of data and does have some ability to make a good guess if a property is listed on other sites.

Do banks have anything you can use to automate getting data off their websites? My annoyances lie in generating the csv files. My checking account outputs an arbitrary range of dates, however many transactions fit on pg 1, while my credit card from the same bank outputs csvs by billing cycle. It makes it a little annoying going into the bank website and generating these files across relevant date ranges.

In my experience (USA), most banks will give you the option of downloading a CSV for the last two years of transactions. Beyond that, it’s a challenge.

Some investment brokers will only give you PDFs with tables in them. But there are some pretty amazing libraries for converting these into CSVs, that have worked well for me.

Some people use plaid, but I didn’t like the idea of introducing a middleman-dependency.

What I’ve been doing over time is downloading all of the raw transaction history I can get, and storing it in a git repo. Each month when I “top it off”, I just use git add -p to add only the latest bits. The most annoying part is when they change their CSV format on you (Chase did this recently) and you need to reformat all of your historical data to match.

Maybe your bank is better about this and offers OFX, but ultimately I gave up on this approach due to my bank adding more aggressive anti-scraping measures over time. The credit card sites were even worse about this.

Now I have a Postfix server setup which accepts the daily transaction summaries they send and makes CSVs out of those. There's still some HTML munging involved but I've found it much easier to let the data come to me than to go out and try to fetch it myself. In my experience financial institutions simply don't have a lot of reliable automation options accessible to the normal consumer.

> Do banks have anything you can use to automate getting data off their websites?

There's an Open Financial Exchange (OFX) standard that's supposed to be for this, I think. I came across it when someone mentioned the ledger-autosync [1] tool that tries to use it to get your data from your bank automatically. If I understand correctly (no guarantee on that), this automation would work for institutions listed here [2].

[1] https://github.com/egh/ledger-autosync [2] http://www.ofxhome.com/index.php/home/directory/successfulRe...

I just got started using the ofxget command in the ofxtools package. It was a simple "pip install --user ofxtools". After that, I read some of the docs for ofxget and configured these with the settings from ofxhome.com and I've got automated ability to pull in my transactions for credit cards, checking accounts, and even long-term investment accounts. It's really cool to interact at this low level because there's so much control compared to QuickBooks/Quicken.