I haven't followed reddit drama in years. I've deduced from threads here that they're assholes. But who are they and what does the number 196 mean?

What would you recommend for an Android-based TV streaming box? I'm looking for a few features:

• HDMI out (but I think it's a fair bet that they all do).

• Isn't locked in to some oddball proprietary app store, but is standard Android that allows for easy sideloading of APK app files.

• Can use a large-capacity external USB drive for storage, say several TB.

• Has the CPU power to decode a bunch of older video formats in addition to the hardware-decoded modern ones.

• Is a current model that's likely to get updates for a few years or so.

• Is priced somewhere near or below $100CAD.

• Has reliable wifi and bluetooth.

The Canadian Armed Forces has created a new program to gradually phase out its old housing benefit after hearing feedback from military members who were set to lose the payments.

The military announced plans in March to create a new housing allowance called the Canadian Force Housing Differential, which came into effect on July 1.

The program is based on a member’s salary, unlike the post-living differential, which was aimed at offsetting the cost of living in particularly expensive communities. Those rates had been frozen since 2009, even as the cost of housing has soared.

It was estimated the change would make around 28,000 people eligible for the new allowance, or roughly 6,300 more than the previous program covered.

But the military also estimated around 7,700 members would become ineligible and thousands of others would see their monthly payments reduced. Officials said that would result in a net savings of $30 million a year, bringing the program back within its budget at around $150 million.

In an update emailed to Armed Forces members last Thursday, the director general of compensation and benefits said feedback on the change had been heard and the Treasury Board has approved the creation of a provisional policy to phase out the payments.

Brig.-Gen. Virginia Tattersall said those who would have seen their monthly housing benefit decrease will be eligible, and will receive decreasing payments until July 2026.

“Your individual entitlement will cease prior to that time if you are posted to a new location, or if your (provisional post-living differential) calculation amounts to a negative value,” Tattersall wrote in the memo, noting that individual circumstances, including promotions, will be taken into account.

Eligible members will be enrolled automatically and should get a lump-sum payment to cover the summer months sometime in mid-October.

In an interview in March, Tattersall said the new program was about “being equitable” and would benefit more people in the junior ranks.

She said the military wanted to ensure no one was forced to spend more than 25 to 35 per cent of their monthly salary on rent. An outside company was hired to assess average prices near military bases.

A critical shortage of housing on bases means that thousands of military members are on wait lists, and in some cases base commanders have allowed people to keep living in training quarters for months because they’re struggling to find other accommodations.

This question has just come up among some friends. We're divided on the who and why. I think Brad topped, but I'm open to alternative theories.

• What is the Goa'uld-Tau'ri conflict?
• How much do you care about the conflict?
• Who started the conflict?
• What are the causes of the conflict?
• What is the role of allies in Tau'ri defense?
• What is the perspective of the Asgard and Nox on the conflict?
• What is the perspective of the System Lords on the conflict?
• What do Jaffa think about the war?
• What is the current status of the conflict?
• What is the most likely way the conflict will end?
• Which of the leaders involved in the conflict is the most evil?
• What is the best in-depth review you've seen about the conflict explaining all of this?

How would you go about alienating a potential employer?

They're currently about 1.4°C above the 30-year mean, and the trend shows no sign of slowing.

The currents of air that wrap around our planet are becoming unrecognizable to climate scientists.

Some have even compared the chaotic pattern of the jet streams to a Van Gogh painting.

The southern part of the jet stream over North America has completely broken apart and is currently trapped in a vicious revolution that has triggered an off-the-chart heatwave.

While it's normal for the air currents to stop, split apart, recombine and flow in opposite directions, on average these tropospheric air streams are typically quite continuous over long distances with an overall west to east flow.

The current fragmentation is unlike anything specialists have seen before.

"When I look at this jet stream the word insane comes to mind," tweeted the chief meteorologist of a local Florida news station, Jeff Berardelli.

"This configuration, likely enhanced by climate heating, is fueling a record heat dome so extreme that even experts are astonished!"

The climate scientist and author Michael E Mann was quick to reply to Berardelli's tweet. Mann has studied planetary wave behavior for years now, and yet online he said that he's rarely seen "such a disjointed configuration."

Jet streams are known to get 'blocked' on occasion, trapping weather systems in certain regions for days on end. But recent evidence suggests climate change could cause more blockages than usual by slowing down jet streams so they break apart, causing chaotic weather on the ground.

That seems to be what's happening right now in North America, and it's not just climate change that's contributing.

Mann explains that El Niño has likely exacerbated the situation, too.

"I'm honestly at a loss to even characterize the current large-scale planetary wave pattern," he tweeted.

Even the average layperson can clearly see the differences when comparing a normal pattern of jet streams to what's occurring today.

At the moment, Mann describes the jet streams over North America as "slow and wobbly", which is probably a result of climate change.

Last year, a study found warming temperatures in the Arctic were specifically weakening jet streams in the Northern Hemisphere.

What's more, because of El Niño, the paths of these jet streams have also changed latitude, exposing the southern regions of the US to the heat dome.

In the United States alone, 40 million people are currently under high heat alert, and in the last week, there have been widespread power outages.

The center of the heat dome sits over Mexico and has already caused a mass death of birds. The climatologist Maximiliano Herrera apparently told Berardelli that the heat wave in some parts of Mexico is like a "category 7". Category 5 is the highest actual ranking on the heat index scale, defined as "beyond extreme" heat.

Herrera is essentially arguing we're now beyond previous extremes.

"[I]t's simply something in its own league, nothing like this even can attempt to compare," Herrera is quoted as saying. "Records obliterated all over with insane margins and beaten as many as 7 days in a row."

Nor is there a sign of the heatwave ending any time soon. Some experts think the dome could stick around until July.

In the past, strange jet stream patterns in Earth's atmosphere have coincided with extreme weather events in both the northern and southern hemispheres, although usually not in both at the same time.

Right now, though, even the southern hemisphere's jet streams look out of whack, experts note.

This week in southern Australia, for example, a jet stream is bringing unusually wet weather to some regions of the nation.

And back up North, the Atlantic hurricane season is starting to brew months early, University of Miami climatologist Brian McNoldy warns.

Meanwhile, sea surface temperatures have also soared into uncharted territory, and don't seem to be returning to normal levels any time soon. This has already caused mass fish deaths and marine mammal poisonings and all before the El Niño has properly set in.

"It is now clear that Earth's climate system is way out of kilter and we should be very concerned," Central Queensland University Environmental Geographist Steve Turton explained for The Conversation.

From pole to pole, the winds of change are here. The climate crisis is no longer a future problem. It's happening now, right before our eyes.

Player refusals overshadowed teams' hosting Pride nights, commissioner says

NHL teams won't wear special jerseys for pregame warmups during themed nights next season, the result of a handful of players refusing to use rainbow-coloured Pride jerseys this past season and causing unwelcome distractions.

The league's board of governors agreed with commissioner Gary Bettman's view that the refusals overshadowed teams' efforts in hosting Pride nights that in some cases included auctioning off the warmup jerseys. All 32 teams held Pride or Hockey is for Everyone night.

Teams will still celebrate Pride and other theme nights, including military appreciation and Hockey Fights Cancer. They're also expected to still design and produce jerseys to be autographed and sold to raise money, even though players won't skate around with them on during warmups.

Pride jerseys became a hot-button issue in the league last season after multiple players refused to wear them during warmups.

Bettman, in an interview with Sportsnet, said he suggested teams stop having special warmup jerseys because themed nights were being undermined by chatter over certain players declining to participate.

"That's just become more of a distraction from really the essence of what the purpose of these nights are," Bettman said. "We're keeping the focus on the game. And on these specialty nights, we're going to be focused on the cause."

Philadelphia Flyers defenceman Ivan Provorov was the first to make that decision, citing his Russian Orthodox beliefs. Florida Panthers brothers Eric and Marc Staal also refused to wear their team's Pride jersey, claiming religious reasons.

Some Russian players did not wear the sweaters over safety concerns going back home. In December, Russia amended its anti-gay laws making it "illegal to spread 'propaganda' about 'nontraditional sexual relations' in all media, including social, advertising and movies," per The New York Times.

However, Russians such as Pittsburgh's Evgeni Malkin and Florida's Sergei Bobrovsky did wear the jerseys.

You Can Play, which has worked with sports and leagues — including the NHL — to help them grow more inclusive for members of the LGBTQ+ community, said it was "concerned and disappointed" by Thursday's decision.

"Today's decision means that the over 95 per cent of players who chose to wear a Pride jersey to support the community will now not get an opportunity to do so," the organization said in a statement.

"The work to make locker rooms, board rooms and arenas safer, more diverse, and more inclusive needs to be ongoing and purposeful, and we will continue to work with our partners at the NHL, including individual teams, players, agents and the NHLPA to ensure this critical work continues."

As of June 10, 2023, worldwide data showed the remarkable concurrence of three dramatic climate events.

A tropical depression has developed and, boosted by record-warm waters, is forecast to steadily strengthen. Puerto Rico could be affected this weekend.

The National Hurricane Center has begun issuing advisories on a newly formed tropical depression — the precursor to a tropical storm — in the Atlantic Ocean currently located about halfway between the coast of Africa and the eastern Caribbean Sea. The system is likely to intensify into Tropical Storm Bret over the next day, and could approach or impact the Lesser Antilles as a hurricane by the weekend.

“The depression is forecast to strengthen and move across the Lesser Antilles as a hurricane on Thursday and Friday, bringing a risk of flooding from heavy rainfall, hurricane-force winds, and dangerous storm surge and waves,” wrote the National Hurricane Center.

It added, “[E]veryone in the Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands should closely monitor updates.” The Lesser Antilles includes the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Saint Lucia and Grenada, among others.

Hurricane season in the Atlantic officially began June 1, but most early-season storms form near the U.S. Eastern Seaboard or in the Gulf of Mexico. So-called “homegrown” systems are typically the result of spin left at the tail end of cold fronts, and don’t really amount to much.

What’s happening in the central Atlantic is, at the very least, highly unusual, and may be historic. If the system, dubbed Tropical Depression 3, manages to intensify into a named storm by June 22, it would among the earliest on record to do so in the Atlantic’s MDR, or Main Development Region. The MDR is the region between the Caribbean and Cabo Verde where long-lived, intense storms can grow out of disturbances rolling off the coast of Africa.

While atmospheric chaos plants the seeds of storm growth, record-warm ocean temperatures over the Atlantic have created an environment ripe for this system’s intensification. Ocean temperatures around the world are at record high levels, with human-caused climate change the driver of a long-term warming trend. The waters in the Atlantic are as warm as they would typically be at the peak of hurricane season two to three months from now.

The Hurricane Center is also monitoring a second disturbance in the wake of this depression that has a strong chance to develop into a storm as well.

As of midday Monday, the center of Tropical Depression 3 was located more than 1,000 miles west-southeast of Cabo Verde, or 1,425 miles east of the southern Windward Islands, moving west at 21 mph.

Infrared satellite revealed an overnight flare-up in convection, or downpour and thunderstorm activity, associated with the system. On Sunday, it had been a mere skeletal swirl largely devoid of thunderstorms, so the fact that it’s filling in is a harbinger of intensification.

Maximum sustained winds were listed at 35 mph, which is just shy of the 39 mph threshold to be designated as a tropical storm. It is assumed that a cohesive center of circulation exists within the roiling cloud mass, but it’s unclear where exactly that center is located. That makes modeling its future track a bit uncertain.

The nascent storm exhibited healthy outflow, visible in the tendril-like wispy clouds fanning outward to the north. Outflow, or high-altitude exhaust, is integral to strengthening. The more “spent” air a storm can evacuate up and out of its fledgling center, the more warm, humid air from below it can inhale. That fosters further organization and strengthening.

Tropical Depression 3 will be driven west, prevented from turning north in the short term by a blocking zone of high pressure over the central Atlantic. Low amounts of disruptive wind shear, or a change of wind speed/direction with strength, will allow it to intensity, perhaps into a Category 1 hurricane, by Thursday.

If soon-to-be Bret strengthens more quickly than currently predicted, it would grow taller, and would be more prone to a northward curve before the end of the workweek. A taller storm would mimic a sailboat hoisting its sails, catching the wind and being blown in a given direction. However, weather models are more consistent in depicting Tropical Depression 3 as continuing its trek due west, eventually affecting the Leeward Islands.

Heavy rain, strong winds and coastal flooding are likely there Friday into the weekend. Historically, early-season storms are more likely to weaken in the Caribbean, but the unusual circumstances of the present may mean conventional norms don’t apply. The National Hurricane Center projects the system to maintain hurricane intensity into the Caribbean and that its center will be near Puerto Rico on Saturday. However, it cautions that both the track and intensity forecast are more uncertain than normal.

On average, the first Atlantic hurricane doesn’t form until Aug. 11.

Simply stated, this is very unusual. There’s a growing likelihood that Tropical Depression 3 will become the tropical storm formed in the farthest-east location on record for the month of June.

Only four other named storms on record have formed in the Main Development Region of the Atlantic during the month of June; the earliest, coincidentally also named Bret, was named on June 18, 2017, but it’s likely this forthcoming rendition of Bret will earn its name farther east.

Exceptionally warm sea surface temperatures, up to 5 degrees above normal, are feeding the storm, and will probably contribute to a number of overachieving systems this hurricane season.

Another tropical wave several hundred miles southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands has a 40 percent chance of eventual development. Weather models also forecast this system will strengthen. If it earns a name, it will be called Cindy.