Only tangentially related, but: I’m a school bus driver and a very popular name for kids these days is “Rhys”. I really enjoy asking them why they’re named after chocolate-covered peanut butter as it drives them crazy.

there would be nothing to prevent the 99% from rightfully rising up against the 1%

Except for the other 1% who are trained and equipped to violently suppress the 98%. And if for whatever reason they fail to do the job, the killer robots will do it instead.

I’ve been feeding my local crows roasted peanuts for a couple of years now. They’ve never given me shit as a present, ungrateful little bastards. One time I thought they left me a little cluster of seeds and berries as a present and I was happy, but then I realized one of them just puked that up so he could eat the peanuts.

and Trump

Lol read up on Bush v. Gore in 2000.

No way! I left and I still have all my teeth.

Manny!

St. Vincent was up to the challenge.

“Manny” is short for manchego.

And to top it all off, in order to preserve the only thing they have left - their freedom - they want to hand the country over to a dictator. It just doesn’t get any more oxymoronic than that.

Well, typical muzzle velocities for these shells were in the neighborhood of 2500 feet per second, and although they slowed down some out to typical combat ranges they were still going pretty damn fast when they hit. I don’t think the Mythbusters ever had the kind of budget you’d need to test this one out.

Bigger/faster the bullet the easier it was for water to stop.

For bullets that’s probably true because of their light weight, but heavy shells from the big naval guns of battleships (12" to 18" caliber) actually carried a long way through water and sometimes hit and damaged target ships below the waterline. The Japanese in particular actually designed some of their shells to maximize their underwater performance.

It doesn’t matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON’T CHASE YOU.

I used to live in Florida on the edge of a big lake where my landlord had carved out a lagoon that mama gators used to hatch their broods, so there would often be between 50 and 100 little alligators chilling out in my backyard sunning themselves. For fun I would try to sneak up on one of them and poke it on the head just to watch it and all the others scatter into the lagoon. Everybody I told about this thought I was absolutely batshit crazy, but I knew that at the time there had been something like 5 alligator attacks on humans in Florida since the 1940s, always on little children playing in water (I was obviously a little child mentally but physically I was a 200-pound adult man). So I knew I wasn’t risking life or limb doing this. For the record, my sneaking up technique was to stand stock still and only move a step or two towards the gator whenever the wind blew; it seems that the gators just took me for a swaying branch and ignored me.

What made me stop doing this was one day I happened to look down at what I thought was a big log and realized that it was actually the mama gator, about 12’ long from tip to tail and probably 2’ in diameter at her midsection. I was fairly confident that she wouldn’t attack me on land either - but not that confident.

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the barrier for getting Linux to work is too high right now for a very large part of the population

My elderly (late 80s) parents have Windows on their laptops and it would be impossible for them to use it without my regular intervention. I might as well take the plunge and set them up with Linux.

We survive because they’re tiny. If my cat were lion-sized, I’d be dead or at least missing an arm or two. It also helps that she’s opposed to firearms … and anti-nuke.

I just gave it a listen today on my bike ride. It’s pretty good - not what I expected but not surprising, either. I’d characterize it as Kate Bush meets Dead Can Dance meets early ‘70s King Crimson, and since I like all three of those acts I like Gibbons’ album as well. I was surprised to see that it’s her first solo album.

Put money in your 401k! Nothing else really matters as much.

So cynical … what makes you think “a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies” can’t be trusted implicitly?