Love it!
Gotta point out that, though, that most primates don’t eat a lot of bananas. The species that really seems to love bananas is homo sapiens. I worked at a grocery store for several years, and saw the sales numbers. Bananas are the biggest seller, and it’s not even close. They outsell whole categories of other products.
The boat in the old photo (from 1928, apparently) is casting a pretty good wake, and the man aboard is holding a tiller attached to a rudder. It’s impossible to tell for certain with the low-res image, but entirely likely that one of those shapes in the boat ahead of him is an inboard engine.
Seriously, tho!
Madison, WI just launched Bus Rapid Transit only on one route so far. But that route goes right past the stadium and arenas where the UW Badgers play their games, the city and university performing arts centers, the state Capitol, many popular music venues, and the State Street pedestrian mall. It has free park-and-ride lots at each end of the route. Lots of people say that they will ride in for events at these venues, so BRT hasn’t solved all our issues, but it’s lessening congestion and helping even drivers get around more quickly.
Oh, dear child, you have already succumbed, you’re part of the machine, and you don’t even know it. 😔 “This form of the Internet” == you are a consumer, passively ingesting the content created by the few, big players who gatekeep the marketplace of ideas. This is the Internet the capitalists want; you’re just grousing about the details of paying for it.
The old promise of revolutionary change on the Internet was the idea that it would be an all-to-all media, that the users would create the content, and shape the message. So if you want to fight what the Internet is becoming, stop fighting the capitalists on their own turf. They don’t care if some people pirate their stuff, as long as the money rolls in from the masses.
The best the can possibly happen if you teach everybody to pirate is to destroy the funding for content creation. Then all that will be left is the propaganda, the political ads, the messages pushed by somebody for ulterior motives. Unless…
Unless we teach the children to break that paradigm altogether. A person can live a happy life without any Hulu shows, or YouTube algorithms, or AAA games. Really. Become the creators. Leave the corporate walled gardens for the open, peer-to-peer Internet.
Or don’t. It’s hard, I know. Just don’t pretend that your Jellyfin server means you’ve broken free of the system.
People talk about black ice in near-mystical terms, like some sort of malevolent spirit that waits to ambush its prey. But, really, while it is every bit as slippery as they say, it’s also not hard to avoid. I’ve had great results by simply treating any pavement that looks “wet” as slippery black ice. It’s not hard to see; the pavement color changes. It’s not always black ice, but it’s the same principle at treating every gun as if it is loaded.
To jump in here with a clarification: Wisconsin does indeed have a bar exam. However, the Wisconsin courts offer diploma privilege to graduates of the Marquette and University of Wisconsin law schools. You do not need to sit for the bar exam if you graduate from those schools, but everybody else must pass the exam to gain admission.
Good news, though: Milwaukee and Madison are very blue cities.
He’ll be a martyr in prison, too. He needs to have a massive, disabling stroke so his followers can see him look irredeemably weak.
The first thing that comes to mind is that bacteria are prokaryotes, while plants are eukaryotes. They have internal membranes, called thylakoids, in which they do photosynthesis, but chloroplasts in plants are fully-developed organelles with their own DNA. If I recall correctly, the current thinking is that chloroplasts developed from endosymbiotic cyanobacteria.
Agreed, nothing inherently wrong with expensive toys for adults. For instance, I have a sailboat. I just don’t insist that everybody structure their lives and build their world around it.
And yet people get so bent out of shape when I point out that most cars are nothing more than expensive toys for adults.
Break the powers of the president into multiple different offices.
As long as we’re talking esoteric political ideas, the big one here is to split head of state from head of government. It might not affect the function of government much, because the head of state is largely ceremonial in modern systems, but it’s I think it’s super-important psychologically.
A lot of (most?) people have trouble thinking about the office of the President as an abstract concept separately from the person of the President. Therefore, the President becomes an avatar of the United States, taken to be the living embodiment of our identity as a nation. That’s why so many people freak out about “the destruction of America” when a member of the other party, with values they don’t share, becomes the President, and it makes elections feel like a polarizing, existential referendum.
By contrast, King Charles is the head of state in the UK, while the head of government (the prime minister) comes and goes, and a stable avatar of the nation, largely above politics. They have their share of major problems over there, to be sure, but at least the nation has a shared identity to rally around when needed.
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:
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.”
Sometimes I write just for the fun of it, not trying to convince anybody. In this case, I was just matching the tone of the meme text.