Good point. It’s really just a cheap key you have to have with you.

That’s one of the things Aldi brought with them when they came over to the US. I’ve always thought it was a pretty cool idea, though as inflation keeps going the 25-cent lock-in becomes less and less of a motivator. Maybe a good reminder, though.

The bottle filler is activated by proximity. I think that’s totally doable for the other part, too.

“The GOP” can be used synonymously with both “The Republican Party” and “Republican lawmakers.” One of those is singular, the other is plural.

No kidding. They experienced 24 hours every 1.03 seconds–a differential of 88,992, meaning that 88,992 years pass on the planet for every one year in the galaxy at large. That’s a staggering speed.

If you were to just map Earth’s development directly onto that timescale, then that species would have evolved into its modern form only about three (galactic) years prior, around the time that the Voyager crew was getting stranded on that deserted planet by Seska and the Kazon. They were discovering fire around the time of the Enterprise-D’s launch. Right now, today, if that planet existed, dogs would only just be evolving. Their geological time is almost perceptible to us.

So 20 galactic years would be the equivalent of about 1.8 million years on that planet. That’s about how long ago we developed the idea of language. Obviously, we’ve never seen a species that advanced. Assuming they survived, they likely wouldn’t even be the same anatomically as the peoples that the crew of Voyager met. We’d expect them to have developed concepts as transformative for their culture as language, fire, art, and clothing have been for ours.

It’s possible that they’d see humans in a similar way that we see Australopithecus. They would have advanced so far beyond humans that humanity’s scientific advancements over those 20 years would seem about as notable to them as our scientific advancements over the course of this morning seem to us. Voyager would almost certainly have receded beyond history, legend, or even myth. Some predictions of human advancement suggest that this species would have already surpassed the advancement needed to be a Type III on the Kardashev scale, but the fact that they are essentially trapped on that planet might direct their research inwards, in a similar way to how John Barrow modified the Kardashev scale. If they are a Type III-minus civilization after those twenty years, genetic modification is essentially child’s play. They’re probably hand-crafting exotic new materials and elements from scratch, and flirting with the idea of manipulating atoms directly.

If the species did not survive those twenty years, then the planet may be moving toward the rise of another sentient species altogether; assuming the biosphere remained intact.

That’s super fun to think about.

Well, gerrymandering is still a thing, but anyway it would be like adding another California to the US, electorally. The populations are pretty close. And actually, the less-populous provinces are a little more conservative (the truckers protesting covid restrictions were canadians, remember), so actually maybe each individual province being added as a state would work in Trump’s favor.

Not that he’s thought any of that through, of course.

After the last ten years in America, I’m thinking maybe we give Chuck a shot.

The “I want to buy your house” things are a little bit different, because they’re usually not technically scams (though they are definitely predatory). If you work with them, you will probably receive money in exchange for your house. It’s just that your sale price is likely to be far, far below what you could’ve received by listing it yourself on the open market.

They’re exclusively targeting people who don’t know how much their property is worth. Usually people in transitioning neighborhoods who bought their home 40 years ago for $10k, who don’t know that their property alone is worth $200k today and will happily take $80k cash from some rando on the phone because they think the 800% return is a great deal.

I’ve lived in neighborhoods like that for a while. The phone calls we receive are insane; in our old house, which we knew was worth $300k because we had just had it appraised to put it on the market, the guy on the phone offered us $65k sight unseen. I was like, “if you even took the twelve seconds to look at this property on Street View you’d know why that is a laughable idea.”

Definitely true, though Elon paid enough money to Trump that he’s probably going to make sure there’s a cutout in any tariffs for Tesla’s batteries (which are largely made by CATL in China). Besides, cheap power means that even with tariffs raising the prices of batteries, BEVs are still going to be worth driving.

There’s too much money in renewables for rich people. The tariffs may or may not happen, but the renewable switch is a runaway train, and almost entirely in the country.

On the electricity futures market, wind producers regularly sell their power for negative prices (paying transmission companies to take their power) because it’s so cheap for them to make, with such negligible overhead; since the government subsidies are based on the mWh they produce, they can sell it at a loss and still make money. But even if those subsidies go away, renewables can still easily undercut every other producer on the grid.

That’s just one example. The same tipping point is approaching fast all over just about every industry. Obama and Biden got the renewable energy industry over the hump of research and infrastructure outlay, so now Tr*mp gets to take the credit for their work while it all falls into place; and because the rich people are benefiting from it financially, they’re going to protect the industry.

Strange New Worlds s1e6 “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach.” Heavily adapted from Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

We are all the ones who walk away from Omelas on this blessed day.

Yeah, well, losing two console generations in a row will do that.

I’m a parent, and I don’t want special treatment. Some consideration would be nice, but honestly I just want every employee to be treated like adults.

In French, it is!

Actually, I say “rat,” but the article immediately above this one in my feed is a scientific study about how rats are in fact quite altruistic.

I don’t begrudge anyone trying to get out of poverty. This is another failure of the system. Mangione struck against that system, and a different arm of the system struck back.

If the worker had been paid reasonably, if wages had not stagnated for the last three decades, if the ruling class didn’t demand infinite profit out of a finite system, neither event would’ve happened.

The real rat here is McDonald’s, making the reward money enticing by paying too poorly.

The problem as presented is that the player they want to use pays them less money. Every other platform would pay them no money, or negative money.

So.

Yeah, I get twitchy when I have more than about ten tabs open. My senior regularly has thousands, across multiple browser windows. There are two types of people.