This is largely to taste. An apostrophe doesn't always mean it's possessive, as just demonstrated, but it is also used for plural abbreviations or for numbers (like 1960's).

Casual English is fairly fluid. People rarely talk exactly according to the rules of English class.

This is a lot of words to communicate a fairly shallow fantasy.

This comment section is also a bunch of speculation without any evidence. Seems to be the same with every other story or conversation about this topic.

If one wishes to price like that, they do it from the start. We have more than enough history to show that you don't offer customers something for one price scheme and then change it in the middle to get even more money out of them. It doesn't work and only causes problems.

This applies to new licenses purchased starting in October. It's not "in the middle."

Did you read the article? It literally says people at a private citation outfit put NULL in the license plate field when there is no number available.

And I still expect my story is more accurate, with theirs being a reasonable expectation of what you'd get when some techie tells their manager what happened, who tells their manager, who tells the reporter.

To be clear, I'm not denying that what you say is literally true, just that by the time I'm done filtering that particular fact through my personal belief network and personal experiences, I still end up saying that my story is more likely. It's true enough that they put a "NULL" in, it's just that the way the private firm does that is most likely that the field agents leave it blank, some software somewhere puts a NULL in some database, and the report that comes out for the enforcing authority has NULL in it. For a reporter, it's not a false statement, it's just not all the technical details.

With this story, the responsibility ends up distributed in a very plausible manner I've seen many times over; HN readers could fill in a dozens of similar stories no problem. It's a problem characteristic of these sorts of systems and the way they tend to communicate with each other.

People use the word NULL and in all caps as well, in particular in bureaucratic processes like those you would encounter at the DMV.

NULL & VOID, etc.

It is entirely reasonable that the system would not accept an empty string for the plate so the process folks worked around that by instructing all employees to write NULL if they couldn't read the plate.

Many people who are not programmers per se come into contact with databases that use SQL enough that they might absorb a few random concepts or names for things.

So, some bureaucrat might in fact know "NULL" because they type a command into a database every Tuesday to run a report.

As per HN guidelines, please don't ask or insinuate that someone's not read the article, instead just quote the relevant part.

What would you classify as "real" science? Be cautious of dismissing research because it doesn't fit into your personal definition of reality.

Quantifiable, repeatable, falsifiable theory that is peer reviewed and forms a foundation for other theory. Physics is at the peak of hard science. Social science is a worthy endeavor, but it belongs in a different category.

Like the article touched on, there are regenerative practices that do not require pesticides. Frankly, pesticides are a human convenience. Utterly unnecessary for survival. If we weren't focusing on mass producing food, largely unused to directly feed people, we wouldn't need to spray everything with poison to keep things easy and profitable.

Trying to find a "smarter" way to poison things is exactly the status quo and it will lead nowhere good.

Are you saying Americans can live without seeing the president rant on Twitter? I wonder if I can do my own research that's greater than 140 characters...

Americans can, the American media can't (which is WHY he does it lol).

Accepting the fact that we're just like any other animal on this planet, merely along for the ride until the day we're done, will help curb the rage and grief felt towards the planet's reformation.

This is just what happens here. Species rise and fall, lands rise and sink, yet the Earth spins on until some other shit starts to happen on the surface. We just happened to fuck it up for ourselves faster. Humans have been good at that since day one.

Everyone, even healthy people, should attend therapy if able. There's a lot of tricky ground to navigate as a person and you don't have to be experiencing trauma to get help.

It is a technology to get more satisfactory outcomes from life. Not sure why you wouldn't use it.

Marketing what? Mental health? Everything isn't some shill post or /r9k/ nonsense. People do speak authentically.

Therapy. Therapy is a service, and one that in my experience is of dubious value. It is difficult to look at a statement that is essentially "pay for something you don't need" and not think of it as marketing.