What do you do with noxious weeds like giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum)?

Convenience is an umbrella term. There are a thousand different reasons people choose convenience and not all of them are synonymous with laziness. Single parents, working multiple jobs, with disabilities that limit mobility, lack of a car, not enough time to make a trip on public transit, lack of public transit options in their area, and countless more.

The ability to just choose to take a bunch of extra time, or take a car to go pick up an item, is a luxury and a privilege. And all that just to spite bezos and make you happy? Not reasonable.

Yeah, especially if you don’t have a car. Going across town to buy one little knick knack can be an all day affair, with 2 public transit fares included.

This may explain why Amazon is much more popular in North America than Europe: public transit. So if you want to stick it to Jeff, work for better public transit and more walkable cities!

Older people tend to be richer because they’ve had more time to earn and save money. Compare a 20-year-old to a 40-year-old. Both spent about 20 years being a kid, growing up and going to school, but the 40-year-old had an extra 20 years after that to earn and save money. You can do the same comparison between a 40-year-old and a 60-year-old, but take all the money the 60-year-old earned in the first 20 years of working and invest it in the stock market for the next 20 years, while also continuing to work.

Wealth can build like crazy. If you invest at 7% average annual return, you’ll double your money in just over 10 years. At 10% the doubling period is just over 7 years. Now consider that the S&P 500 had an average annualized return over 10% between 1957 and 2023, and that 60-year-old’s 20 year investment would multiply by 6.7x.

Representation by population vs representation by area. The same kind of arguments made in favour of switching the U.S. to a fully proportional system (getting rid of all forms of representation by area) could equally be made in favour of having one world government with proportional representation.

When we think about it that way (world elections would be dominated by Asia), it’s easy to see why we might not want such a system. Then, returning to the U.S. system alone it’s easier to see why many people want representation by area preserved. Although the cultural differences between states are much smaller than the differences between continents, they’re still very much present and the issues often dominate American politics.

It was a casual remark, not a hill to die on. That’s entirely your read!

Floor to ceiling stalls are much harder to clean. The gaps underneath allow for water to drain out when washing everything.

Absolutely! Taboos are one of the biggest aphrodisiacs! If it were out in the open and fully accepted then it would lose all the appeal!

Honestly it’s a form of depoliticization because it’s not a serious proposal with any realistic chance of success. It distracts people from getting engaged with real politics and actually making a difference. And at the end of the day, isn’t that exactly what the billionaires want?

Religion is a product of oral tradition, taboo, and superstition. These features of human behaviour played a valuable role in protecting humans from dangers we did not individually understand. Fires, lightning, floods, drought, poisons, diseases (especially sexually transmitted diseases) underlie much of the religious beliefs and other cultural superstitions you can see even today.

A favourite of mine is the processing of cassava aka manioc by indigenous Amazonian tribes. Their cultural practice involves a long, multi-stage cooking and washing process which removes the cyanide that is naturally present in the root. The amazing thing is that the cyanide levels are high enough to cause chronic poisoning but low enough to not present any short term symptoms besides a bitter taste. However, taking shortcuts with the process leads to a reduction in the bitterness without actually removing enough of the cyanide to prevent chronic poisoning.

This means that this cultural practice maintains a complicated process that can’t be immediately supported by the available evidence (bitterness) but nevertheless provides a strong protective effect against chronic poisoning. In the absence of modern chemistry, this complex practice could only have developed through a long process of cultural evolution selecting against tribes who suffer from the chronic cyanide poisoning.

Does anyone know what the timeline is for these cases? Seems to me like there won’t be enough time to finish these before the election.

Wow! I need to check that out myself!

The update prevents CrowdStrike from working. That’s a good thing!

CrowdStrike blew it. 3rd party vendors should never have the power to freeze or crash people’s computers through incompetent, untested updates!

• Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
• Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

You can see it all play out in a microcosm on reality shows like Survivor. People cooperate and compete. They cooperate TO compete. They cooperate when it benefits them the most, and betray each other when they think they’re most likely to get away with it. Some people are more trustworthy than others. Some are extremely likely to betray, but then they struggle to benefit from cooperation.

Groups of people engaged in a kind of eusocial super cooperation are very rare and tend to be fairly small. They also tend to act the most like a clique; being highly discriminatory against the outgroup.

It’s woke not because of what’s in it, but why. It’s performative politics. Token ensemble casts. Empty signaling. It’s not meant to make the world a better place, it’s meant to make money. It’s like cheap pride merch at Walmart.

As a Canadian and former campaign volunteer (and poll observer) this is really weird to me. Federal elections in Canada are always hand-counted. Results at each polling station are counted in front of volunteer observers from each party (as well as neutral observers) and then delivered to Elections Canada where they’re tallied (in front of lawyers from each party) and results are reported to the media.

It’s not a big deal and there’s no chaos.

You can’t pull up the ladder until after you get to the top.

Perform terribly on modern AAA titles, sure, but that’s a tiny % of the total Steam library. A lot of people these days don’t even bother with new AAA titles, instead playing older games or indie games. I bet Valve knows this and is working on the ARM transition specifically because of this fact.

Ahhh, good ol’ Harry!