It could be highly inconvenient, since the Isle of Mann and Isla Mujeres are so far apart.

Democrats are kind of the canonical out-group.

Proposed reform measure: Just like teachers have to buy classroom supplies out-of-pocket, have police officers buy their own ammo.

For a seriously in-depth dive, Some More News has an episode called Why Is Conservative Comedy So... Not Very Good? The video even has a whole section about The Babylon Bee. The TL;DW is that real comedy is about the comedy, while conservative "comedy" is all about attacking out-groups. (There's another section with examples of conservative comedians who don't do this, and are funny.)

Like in this example, I read the headline, wrinkled my brow, and thought, "Huh?" Then a few seconds later, I remembered that there was some rumbling in the news a while back about how Harris hadn't done a media interview at the time, and it must be referring to that? That makes sense as an attack, and I guess that's "funny" to an audience that just wants to see attacks on the out-group, but it's not humorous. (I mean, she's done a couple of interviews now, so it comes across as try-hard.)

I read it as cutting through the spin. We use contemporary words like overnight oats, instead of words like gruel that have strong connotations of poverty, for essentially the same food, to obscure the fact that we are the same working class as medieval peasants were. There's nothing wrong with gruel; and we're just not as far removed from peasantry as we've been led to believe.

As far as I can tell the incrementalist argument goes like this:

1. The two-party system is destroying the country.
2. But one of the two parties will destroy democracy imminently, so we have to vote for the lesser evil this time, and then,
3. ...

Indeed, in the boating world, the words are "stand-on" or "burdened" vessel, which makes it clear that the vessel that should continue its course has the obligation to do so under the collision regulations. The "give way" vessel should alter its course or intentions to "keep clear." Nobody — nobody! — has the "right of way."

I believe that the OP means the Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act of 1988, which effectively bans kei trucks from import into the U.S. because they're not manufactured to the Act's standards.

Or, perhaps the Chicken Tax, a 25% tariff imposed on the import of light trucks in 1964 as part of trade dispute with Europe. It's still in effect, shielding American manufacturers from competition from smaller, lighter trucks.

Nah, like 50% of it is just telling people to restart their computers.

Well, yeah, we all vote based on feelings. Some feelings based on things that verifiably happened in the real world, and some feelings based on ridiculous bullshit we dreamed up.

Guess which side has more of the second kind of feelings.

Seriously. Saying "we're fucking morons" for being surprised by the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center might be hyperbole, except the same group tried the same thing in 1993! They were just bad at it. Instead of being a KIND OF A REALLY BIG HINT, that incident just kind of disappeared down the memory hole.

Just a random thought on this topic: Putin originally claimed (and his Western partisans still do) that the offensive in Ukraine was about countering NATO aggression. It's resulted in attacks on Moscow itself, occupation of Russian territory, and now, modern NATO weapons being used inside Russia. He's still in a fairly advantageous position militarily right. He could easily, I think, ask for and win strong restraints on NATO in a peace negotiation. But it never was actually about that, now was it?

Tell me it’s 68f out and I will fight you.

Note to self: High heat levels make Canadians cranky.

Around here, 32°F is very cold in October, but an occasion to wear shorts in February. (Both are still cookout temperatures, though.)

No, that's not it, we're measuring in incredulity units, which are syllables.

"One hun-dred and se-ven?!" == 6 syllables

"For-ty one?!" == 3 syllables

Also, the first one has more vowel sounds to really draw out to indicate higher levels of I-can't-even. It sounds only golly-jeepers in Celsius, and much more I'm-so-done-with-this-shit in Fahrenheit.

Salt is a preservative, so salted butter will last quite a lot longer when unrefrigerated.

Scenario: I want to call a friend in Bulgaria. It's 11:23AM GMT. What's he likely to be doing right now? With timezones, I can quickly calculate that it's 2:23PM local time, and intuitively know. Without, I'd have to look up a timetable of daily activities in Sofia.

I guess if I called regularly, I could memorize the timetable, or maybe roughly calculate an offset in hours to add or subtract from GMT to intuitively relate his schedule to mine. For example, my dinner time is about 11PM GMT, so his dinner time is about 7AM GMT.

But, I wonder, if I went there to visit, would it be easier to memorize the local timetable, or just do the math when I check the time?

I would make the written English language 100% phonetic.

Nobody speaks written English, so how do we know it's not already phonetic?

Well, the chief of police in my city did this (accidental discharge of gun in the oven) once, so make of that what you will. He did have the integrity to discipline himself, per department policy.

Almost literally true, which is why it makes a great response to OP's question.

From that description, it sounds like you were circumcised at birth, and then had your frenulum removed later.

Oh, hell, classes just resumed at the university here, so the new batch of freshmen is here, and some days I feel like it. But I don't count the Cold War as a war, just like the Holy Roman Empire wasn't holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Yes, that's what I see, that's clearly what he's doing. The difference is that in 2016, he was able to retain in long-term memory what didn't work, and had the mental flexibility to try out new bits to find things that did. Now, he keeps going back to the same dry well over and over again, in every speech, which is evidence that he's losing it. (As further evidence, I'd point out that this is consistent with the amount of time it took him to grasp that he wasn't running against Biden anymore.)

When I was born, the United States wasn't involved in a war.

Reminds me of an old Yakov Smirnoff routine. Espresso powder makes espresso, and milk powder makes milk. So what does baby powder make?

Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it's just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:

That's not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?

I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven't tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you're going to do do all of them. (But then, they're idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)

One can define mass shooters as mentally ill. It's not exactly wrong, but not useful in the slightest, since you can only make that kind of diagnosis retrospectively. So what? The victims are already dead. To the point, mental illness is useless as a prospective indicator of potential mass shooters, since the vast majority of people with mental problems do not become one.

But what if Thompson's Penis a Sword?

That's true, but our theory of physics is far more complex than those simple patterns. It actually consists of many, many interrelated theories that mutually reinforce each other. And that so many of them describe phenomena described with c as a term strongly indicates the speed of causality of pretty fundamental.

In any case, I'd be very interested to learn how it shakes out, but I probably won't be around in 300 years to do so!

Ah, but "major technological breakthroughs" != "major technological breakthroughs concerning faster-than-light travel". Certainly, there will be more of the former in the next 300 years, but our understanding of physics precludes the latter.

The quality of our understanding of physics is proved by the technological advances that we've already made with it. Yes, we're missing some major pieces, like how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics (how to quantize gravity), but the problem that physicists face on this front is actually how stunningly well the Standard Model holds up, and has so far resisted attempts to break it. It's highly unlikely that we'll discover anything which completely upends the laws of physics as we know them.

Honestly, I feel like too many people have a cognitive bias from living in a time of unparalleled technological advancement. We've gone from, e.g. mechanical chronometers to calculate longitude on wooden vessels propelled by the wind to GPS-guided international flights in a historical blink of an eye. The pace of technological change even in living memory has been immense.

Not knowing how any of it works, it's easy to think of it akin to magic, and to extrapolate from "18th century humans -> 21st century humans" to "21st century humans -> alien technology". The catch is that this technological surge has come about because we've figured out how the physical universe works, not in spite of missing out on big chunks of potential knowledge.

All of our technology has plumbed the depths of our physical, scientific knowledge. The same physical knowledge that allows us to do wonders also shows us the limits, and provides the definitive answers as to why there's not "alien technology" out there that would seem like magic to us.

Put another way, it would be really bonkers if the scientific knowledge that has enabled us to do so many practical things, like create tiny devices like the one I'm using to tap out a message, was somehow totally wrong.

No, Ford sells the F750 as a cab-and-frame to companies that use the chassis as the platform for building utility vehicles. That image is a custom creation.

Or, maybe this person is a radical feminist who believes that all brains are the same, and gender is entirely a social construct! /s

There was a Republican chode here in Wisconsin who voted twice to prove that people could vote twice. (The clerks caught his double vote, and he got prosecuted.)

I'm having an "akshually" moment here. For what it's worth, the Tragedy of the Commons refers to over-exploitation of material resources that are held in common by a community, like public grazing land in Hardin's famous essay. That can't happen in a libertarian system, because there wouldn't be any commons; all of the land would be privately-owned.

The closely-related concept that plagues libertarian systems is the Free-Rider Problem, which refers to people not paying the cost of a public good, which is defined as one that is non-excludable (can't stop people from using it), and non-rivalrous (use or benefit by one person doesn't prevent use or benefit to anybody else). A classic example of a public good is a lighthouse. Any ship can use a lighthouse, even those that don't help pay for its maintenance. The incentive is not to pay, so public goods are the things that every successful society has to re-invent taxes to pay for.

We focus on the bears thing because that's the unexpected, humorous part, as humor is about subverting expectations. The rest of it—sexual predators, budget cuts/bankruptcy, antisocial behavior, declining quality of life—is exactly what most people expect from a libertarian town experiment. It's the bears that turn a depressing shitshow into a hilarious shitshow.

As Bill Burr said about the difficulty of raising kids vs. pets, you can compare anything. I could compare frisbees to Bundt cakes. They're both round, but one has a hole in the center. See? I compared them.

So if I compare a genocidal, xenophobic ethno-state to a genocidal, xenophobic, theocratic ethno-state, well, that doesn't mean they're the same thing.

Indeed. Notice, too, that the concerns about Biden's cognitive abilities have instantly stopped? He's still the President, and still in charge of the nukes. But no more news stories.

Meanwhile, the other guy has recently developed a habit of swearing at rallies, and there are a few articles about his wife asking him to knock it off, but nothing pointing out that a sudden increase in swearing is a symptom of dementia. At a town hall in La Crosse, WI the other day, he didn't know why he was there at first. Still radio silence from the news media.

Funny, isn't it?

”To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

Ixonia, Wisconsin solved that problem by just drawing random letters from a hat until they came up with something pronounceable: Ixonia.

But I'm always amused by the street Oxford Place near my house. It's a street named after a university, named after a city, named after a shallow spot where cattle could cross the river.