The one about cows is no joke. Hitting a cow in a sedan at highway speeds is more or less the same as hitting a brick wall.

Edit: actually, given the choice, take the brick wall, because at least a simple masonry wall will crush and crumble and absorb some of the impact. The cow will just gain a sudden increase in its net velocity at your expense.

Thanks for this. I wasn’t aware of that. All of my experience around Roe was seeing republicans wanting it dealt with in the legislature/executive.

Gotta love Pelosi, just when the Democrats are in danger of not spilling the spaghetti, she reliably shows up to make a disaster of it. She’s got, like, the anti-McConnel*.

*McConnel is, imo, one of the most talented statesmen of my lifetime. It’s a goddamn shame he’s used his talents for evil. It’s a little bewildering to imagine how different a place the US could be if he’d been on the side of the people. It’s also a powerful statement of what a wreck the GOP has become that Mitch couldn’t control the MAGA/freedom caucus members anymore. I hope the whole thing just implodes on itself and we get something new and less horrible.

This is it. Trump didn’t give a flying shit at all if anything he did was legal, he just went for it, and it worked.

So, I don’t think there’s a good single answer to this question.

Obama isn’t and wasn’t as progressive as he was (and sometimes is, mostly by Republicans) framed. The democrats only had a filibuster-proof majority for a few months, and even then, Joe Lieberman gummed up the works big time on getting the ACA through. Somebody mentioned that they wasted a lot of time trying to get bipartisan support for the ACA, and it’s true. They spent months negotiating against themselves with the republicans, whose answer was always “no”, and by the time they were done, the ACA was a shell of what it could have been. After the ACA, which I must add is basically comprised of all the non-insane (read: mostly pointless) reforms the Republicans were proposing as well as some more rational reforms, the right-wing hype machine started red-lining (as in tachometers, not the racist housing policy, though I guess that could also work since they really didn’t want that black man living in that house) and you’d have thought we had an actual communist overthrow of the government on our hands. The democrats absolutely bungled the PR (the more things change, the more they stay the same, huh) and pissed off everyone outside the party and made everyone inside the party facepalm. After the supermajority disappeared, the republicans started cynically abusing the filibuster and turned the rest of Obama’s presidency into anything from a lame duck to just one (republican caused) crisis after another.

Tl;Dr a lot of the democrats aren’t progressives, and we had a lot more of the old cold war blue dog crowd that Biden is from than we do now, mixed with absolutely bunglefucking both the political strategy and PR around the ACA and not being able to get past the filibuster once the supermajority disappeared.

P.S. it’s worth noting that, at the time, Roe was considered settled law. From what I recall, nobody was too anxious about the SCOTUS citing 400 year old witch hunters and overturning pretty well settled and accepted case law. The republicans were generally seeking to overturn Roe via the federal legislature/executive at the time.

AFAICT, the charger network is a huge part of Tesla’s value proposition. Laying off the entire 500 person team like this is going to be a massive, massive disruption no matter what anyone says, you can’t just patch it with [checks notes] an entirely different team. It’s going to take that new team months to get up to date, put out fires, find their bearings, etc. and by that point, issues are already snowballing. The rapport and contacts problem is also going to be enormous; basically shit canning all of the company’s industry/logistics ambassadors is what, in any other light, would be called a disaster. This is going to be a clusterfuck, and that’s before any competitors interested in starting their own charger network start scooping these newly available specialists up.

It’s incredible to see this man still idolized, even by bosses and other execs, as he tanks not just one but two household name businesses AT THE SAME TIME.

I’m not trying to be the grammar police, just thought you might like to know that it’s “onus”.

That’s hella cool. I remember talk as far back as the 90s that dolphins might actually have a meaningful language, but I thought those hypotheses just ran into dead ends.

IMO, this is one of the better arguments for parrots having some of the most human-like intelligence in the animal world outside of primates. Having had both toddlers and parrots, they do exhibit a lot of similarities in behavior patterns, and I could swear my kids have done exactly what this person describes their bird doing.

Are expenses exceeding revenues? I feel like a lot of the big companies that have laid people off are nowhere even remotely close to going into the red in absolute terms, and if they were, there would have been a five alarm panic. I mean, I can’t even imagine the kind of epic shit storm that would sweep wall St if Microsoft or Google only made, say, a million dollars in profit (not revenue, mind) in the last quarter.

Dude, you don’t deserve to be criticized for being a Jew, but you absolutely deserve a tomato for supporting a genocidal ethnostate.

You really only need enough independent energy to get up to rendezvous, not enough independent energy to get back to earth. That saves on the amount of fuel you need to lift to have enough fuel to lift the fuel that you need to have to lift the fuel that you etc. etc. I’m assuming that getting an independent vehicle to Mars’ surface for sample return with enough energy to make the trip home is the issue. An Aldrin Cycler (thank you) means you don’t need to independently pack that fuel anymore.

Build a transitor. Big, big, big ask up front, but it seems like it’d make all other mars missions trivial by comparison. Start with a lunar transitor to facilitate the lunar base missions.

A really good point I heard is: this was likely a state actor attack, so how many others just like this are out there, undiscovered?

All answers to the FP boil down to one of three Fs.

We’re first, we’re few, or we’re fucked.

I think the thing that people are dancing around but not quite getting to is that it’s the attention economy. The goal is to monopolize your attention as completely as possible in order to sell as many ads as possible. You may recognize that this is more or less the model of gambling or any other industry that relies on keeping its customers addicted. This is one of those things that doesn’t seem very malicious, but could well represent a malicious business choice.

I’ve met this bird. It only prioritizes issues as urgent; when interacted with, it’ll say “yes, this is part of MVP”

But it’s different for me, I’m a good person who actually needs it!

There’s one study I’m aware of that has tires as being responsible for up to 40% of oceanic microplastics

I’ve actually had good luck at a local Indian market. Also, places that are specifically tea retailers or online markets will be more likely to have it.

Plastic tea bags are really disappointing. It’s not enough that plastic is everywhere thanks to tire dust, I have to drink it, too? Cool.

At home, I use loose leaf and a metal strainer. Makes less waste, and there’s no plastic.