Love it!

Gotta point out that, though, that most primates don’t eat a lot of bananas. The species that really seems to love bananas is homo sapiens. I worked at a grocery store for several years, and saw the sales numbers. Bananas are the biggest seller, and it’s not even close. They outsell whole categories of other products.

“Corinth is famous for its leather!”

The boat in the old photo (from 1928, apparently) is casting a pretty good wake, and the man aboard is holding a tiller attached to a rudder. It’s impossible to tell for certain with the low-res image, but entirely likely that one of those shapes in the boat ahead of him is an inboard engine.

Seriously, tho!

Madison, WI just launched Bus Rapid Transit only on one route so far. But that route goes right past the stadium and arenas where the UW Badgers play their games, the city and university performing arts centers, the state Capitol, many popular music venues, and the State Street pedestrian mall. It has free park-and-ride lots at each end of the route. Lots of people say that they will ride in for events at these venues, so BRT hasn’t solved all our issues, but it’s lessening congestion and helping even drivers get around more quickly.

People talk about black ice in near-mystical terms, like some sort of malevolent spirit that waits to ambush its prey. But, really, while it is every bit as slippery as they say, it’s also not hard to avoid. I’ve had great results by simply treating any pavement that looks “wet” as slippery black ice. It’s not hard to see; the pavement color changes. It’s not always black ice, but it’s the same principle at treating every gun as if it is loaded.

To jump in here with a clarification: Wisconsin does indeed have a bar exam. However, the Wisconsin courts offer diploma privilege to graduates of the Marquette and University of Wisconsin law schools. You do not need to sit for the bar exam if you graduate from those schools, but everybody else must pass the exam to gain admission.

Good news, though: Milwaukee and Madison are very blue cities.

He’ll be a martyr in prison, too. He needs to have a massive, disabling stroke so his followers can see him look irredeemably weak.

The first thing that comes to mind is that bacteria are prokaryotes, while plants are eukaryotes. They have internal membranes, called thylakoids, in which they do photosynthesis, but chloroplasts in plants are fully-developed organelles with their own DNA. If I recall correctly, the current thinking is that chloroplasts developed from endosymbiotic cyanobacteria.

Agreed, nothing inherently wrong with expensive toys for adults. For instance, I have a sailboat. I just don’t insist that everybody structure their lives and build their world around it.

And yet people get so bent out of shape when I point out that most cars are nothing more than expensive toys for adults.

Break the powers of the president into multiple different offices.

As long as we’re talking esoteric political ideas, the big one here is to split head of state from head of government. It might not affect the function of government much, because the head of state is largely ceremonial in modern systems, but it’s I think it’s super-important psychologically.

A lot of (most?) people have trouble thinking about the office of the President as an abstract concept separately from the person of the President. Therefore, the President becomes an avatar of the United States, taken to be the living embodiment of our identity as a nation. That’s why so many people freak out about “the destruction of America” when a member of the other party, with values they don’t share, becomes the President, and it makes elections feel like a polarizing, existential referendum.

By contrast, King Charles is the head of state in the UK, while the head of government (the prime minister) comes and goes, and a stable avatar of the nation, largely above politics. They have their share of major problems over there, to be sure, but at least the nation has a shared identity to rally around when needed.

It could be highly inconvenient, since the Isle of Mann and Isla Mujeres are so far apart.

Democrats are kind of the canonical out-group.

Proposed reform measure: Just like teachers have to buy classroom supplies out-of-pocket, have police officers buy their own ammo.

For a seriously in-depth dive, Some More News has an episode called Why Is Conservative Comedy So… Not Very Good? The video even has a whole section about The Babylon Bee. The TL;DW is that real comedy is about the comedy, while conservative “comedy” is all about attacking out-groups. (There’s another section with examples of conservative comedians who don’t do this, and are funny.)

Like in this example, I read the headline, wrinkled my brow, and thought, “Huh?” Then a few seconds later, I remembered that there was some rumbling in the news a while back about how Harris hadn’t done a media interview at the time, and it must be referring to that? That makes sense as an attack, and I guess that’s “funny” to an audience that just wants to see attacks on the out-group, but it’s not humorous. (I mean, she’s done a couple of interviews now, so it comes across as try-hard.)

I read it as cutting through the spin. We use contemporary words like overnight oats, instead of words like gruel that have strong connotations of poverty, for essentially the same food, to obscure the fact that we are the same working class as medieval peasants were. There’s nothing wrong with gruel; and we’re just not as far removed from peasantry as we’ve been led to believe.

I believe that the OP means the Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act of 1988, which effectively bans kei trucks from import into the U.S. because they’re not manufactured to the Act’s standards.

Or, perhaps the Chicken Tax, a 25% tariff imposed on the import of light trucks in 1964 as part of trade dispute with Europe. It’s still in effect, shielding American manufacturers from competition from smaller, lighter trucks.

Nah, like 50% of it is just telling people to restart their computers.

Seriously. Saying “we’re fucking morons” for being surprised by the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center might be hyperbole, except the same group tried the same thing in 1993! They were just bad at it. Instead of being a KIND OF A REALLY BIG HINT, that incident just kind of disappeared down the memory hole.

Just a random thought on this topic: Putin originally claimed (and his Western partisans still do) that the offensive in Ukraine was about countering NATO aggression. It’s resulted in attacks on Moscow itself, occupation of Russian territory, and now, modern NATO weapons being used inside Russia. He’s still in a fairly advantageous position militarily right. He could easily, I think, ask for and win strong restraints on NATO in a peace negotiation. But it never was actually about that, now was it?