Himmler.

Removed by mod

See. This is how it’s done.

IRON YOUR DAMN FLAGS PEOPLE!

I just remove my upper layer of skin whenever it gets too hot.

All I know is that it’s insane that we call the seventh planet from the Sun “Uranus.” Not only does this lead to extremely tired and cliched jokes, but there’s literally no reason to name the planet that. Uranus is a Greek name, while all the other planets have Roman names. The seventh planet should be called Caelus. This eliminates tired jokes as well as makes the planet’s name compatible with those of the other worlds in our system.

I’m at the point where I think we should peacefully dissolve the Union entirely. Just grant all 50 states full independence. Let the states come back together in whatever new nation or combination of nations they want.

Look at the current state of our politics. Step back and really look at it. Every political system relies ultimately not on a constitution, but on the good faith of the people actually governing. Look at how the current president is wiping his ass with every check and balance built into the system. Words and laws don’t matter, there’s always a bad faith interpretation that can allow the president to seize more and more power. And the Supreme Court is openly giving broad sweeping authority to Republican presidents while severely curtailing the power of Democratic presidents. Bribery is legal, and both parties are completely captured by the wealthy. Oh, and every last scrap of freedom, privacy, and autonomy are being torn down in the path of an ever-expanding surveillance panopticon.

I’m sorry. But by the time your political culture decays so far to allow this level of dysfunction, there’s no saving it. Our constitution is a woefully out-of-date obsolete document that should have been scrapped generations ago. And it was made difficult to amend by people who had no idea how important amending it would later be. It was built for the compromises of the 1780s, not the compromises of the 2020s. We need to go through a new process of Constitution creation, potentially multiple such processes, and come back together based on new compromises that reflect the reality of the 21st century.

This nation cannot be saved. We need a peaceful national divorce. The alternative is likely something far worse, as we hurdle inexorably towards a second civil war.

Note: obviously there are practical difficulties with dissolving a nation. When this comes up, people love to hand wring about the national debt or how military assets will be dissolved in this kind of scenario. These are important but obvious concerns. But national myopia blinds us here. Nations have peacefully divided countless times through history. These matters are always handled through some negotiation process. American exceptionalism blinds us to our possible futures, simply because we are unwilling to look beyond our own borders for inspiration.

The story of Israel is a story as old as time. An abuse victim growing up to become the abuser and repeat the cycle.

Mostly this is just an issue with the nature of science. There’s fundamentally just a lot we don’t know about what these creatures looked like. Thankfully, in the last 20-30 years, we’ve learned a lot more. We’ve become a lot better at finding evidence of feathers and other surface details. We may have gotten better at estimating the musculature? I’m not really sure what the current state of knowledge is here.

But the key thing to consider is that science, as a project, is incredibly conservative. Science is all about precisely defining your claims and clearly justifying them, ideally via quantitative analysis. The reason old renderings of dinosaurs look like this is that these represent the threshold of the known. They are scientific renders, containing only the details that we can be reasonably certain actually existed on these animals. You can of course go further and fill in missing details with imagination and reasonable speculation, but this will always be more an exercise in art than science, a speculative exercise. Yes, dinosaurs likely didn’t have this “shrink wrapped” appearance. But what their real appearance was is a guessing game. Yes, it’s plausible spinosaurus had big back muscles rather than a fan, but there are likely also other speculative models people could propose. Maybe the spine isn’t a fan, but the base of some giant peacock-type tail? Maybe it wasn’t a fan, but a series of spikes. Maybe it wasn’t one vertical fan, but two horizontal sheets? Who knows?

Science is an inherently conservative exercise. We tend to forget this. Political conservatives hate science because they hate when reality disagrees with their dogma. But while political conservatives call science woke or liberal, the truth is, institutionally, science is conservative. Ideas move slowly. Major paradigm shifts only occur when overwhelming evidence forces them to. Ideas often take decades to slowly percolate through academia, sometimes only changing because the old generation retires or dies of old age.

Scientists as such are, generally, biased against making unfounded claims and speculation. A lot of scientific training focuses on precisely defining your claims, including the precise limits of those claims. And this bleeds over into scientific renderings. From a scientific perspective, it is often better to make a rendering that you know is almost certainly incorrect, rather than make a likely more correct rendering that you cannot support with evidence.

It was a flash deal on Walmart’s website. I assume it’s fine.

Meanwhile I just ordered a 1 TB usb key for 22 bucks, delivered. It will be here within the week. And flash drives are hardly the best storage/dollar, and I probably could have found a better price if I had searched harder.

When talking about where you live, you don’t “stay at”, you live at a place.

Perhaps a social critique of our post-capitalist hellscape? We no longer “live” anywhere. We just stay places.

It’s a knight light. It keeps the monsters away.

Want to really make a power move in life? Go through your grocery store clockwise, like a psychopath. Just to show you won’t let the system control you!

Simple. They should only be legal to own if they’re fixed.

I want the most anti-British option. I know! We’re going to do away with clocks entirely. We wake up when we wake up. We work when we work. We forget counting the days. Forget the calendar entirely. Live forever in an eternal now.

No. Let’s go for the craziest option. Continuous time zones! Your clock changes a bit every mile east or west you go.

You are vastly underestimating the social awkwardness that comes with telling someone they smell. Maybe you have a very different relationship than most do with their friends, but it would take quite a lot before I would bring that kind of thing up. In a professional setting, I would want to get HR involved before pointing that out to someone. I would let them figure out a polite way of asking the coworker to fix their B.O.

Everyone needs a bidet. Literally clean yo stinky ass up!

In our nightmare world where fame is money, being deprecated IS being depreciated!

We should organize libraries not by name, or even the Dewey decimal system, but simply by title length. Fiction, non fiction, jounrla articles, doesn’t matter. It’s all just in one stupid long list, shortest title to longest title.