SwingingTheLamp

Never tried anal, but all the rest feels about the same— something's going on down there, not clear what.

Does that really matter? He can just say that the protests are violent, Fox News will report on the violence, and his cultists will believe it. Hell, they already believe that protest itself is a punishable offense, as do most American institutions.

They're called "snout houses," because the garage makes them look like they have a big, ugly pig snout.

Usually, the answer is racism. In the case of HOAs, though, I'm going to guess that it's probably racism.

ETA: I looked it up on Wikipedia. The answer is: racism.

I hear a lot of talk about guillotines, but I feel that wood chippers are the sleepers here.

It's not my window, but a bald eagle has taken to observing the lake from a dead tree near where I moor my boat in the summer. It showed up two years ago, IIRC, as a juvenile, and I got to see it become white-headed. I usually see it in the morning when rowing to shore from the boat.

It's absolutely amazing to me to see one in the city, since they were so rare when I was a kid. It used to be that you'd have to go to the Prairie du Sac dam on the Wisconsin River in the winter to try to see a bald eagle, as they'd fish in the open, flowing water there when the rest of the river was iced over. Even then, it wasn't guaranteed you'd see one. Now, I see them as a part of my daily routine!

Can confirm, too, they use the hawk scream for bald eagle calls in movies and on TV, because their real call isn't intimidating. It sounds kind of like strangling a seagull.

What the hell is it with the Sterling Archer window borders? Y'know, where the active window is black, and the inactive windows are slightly darker black?

Sort of meta, but: Alienation.

Buildings plopped down in a rectangle with a standard layout—boxy building with door facing parking lot—with no ornamentation, no contextual clues about what's inside, and worst, no consideration or design dialogue whatsoever with the surroundings. It's like a city as Lego set, each building on its own bar plate, and they can be shuffled around in any order. Designers talk about design language, and this style says, "fuck you."

Food that just shows up at your door after ordering from an app, made by a "ghost kitchen." Possibly located in one of those boxes-with-a-parking-lot. No connection to other humans. (Or is that a tire distributor's headquarters? No way to tell.)

Company web sites with no information about who runs the company, or where it is, or much about its connection to the community. The product is probably made on spec by an anonymous Chinese factory, so even if you can talk to somebody, they're either in a contract call center serving hundreds of companies, or somebody not paid enough to care.

Speaking of low-paid lackeys, the fast food-ification of the landscape. They're getting rid of dining rooms, so your only human interaction is briefly through a window. If you're lucky. They're working on getting rid of that, too. Then, you're sealed behind a windshield, in cars that get more fortress-like every year, never seeing another human face.

A lot of people say that they're introverts and hate people and like it this way, but we also have a pandemic of loneliness and poor mental health , so...

EVs don't put out tailpipe emissions while in operation, sure, but that's an highly reductive view of the system. The latest numbers I've found show that an EV car has about 30% of the total lifecycle CO~2~ emissions as an ICE vehicle. That's production, operation, maintenance, and disposal. A lot better, so if we drastically cut back on the number of vehicle miles traveled, that'd be a win. But that's not what's happening. Instead, the profusion of cheap EVs in China means that more people can afford them, there will be more vehicles on the road, we double down on automobile infrastructure and lifestyles, and the environment, human health, and long-term sustainability will take a hit. It's the Jevons Paradox, which says that if we find a way to use a resource more efficiently, we use more of it.

What's more, the transition to EVs won't even stop the CO~2~ emissions. The emissions will just come from a new source. World-wide, we have a fully-functioning fossil fuel extraction industry. Petrochemicals are the energy and raw material input for so many industrial processes (including the production of EVs), it's not going to shut down. If we stop using it for fuel in our vehicles, the law of supply and demand means it'll get cheaper for other uses, which will ramp up. Indeed, our total global CO~2~ emissions keep rising.

What's necessary is to re-design our societal systems to solve a bunch of problems, like the ecological catastrophe of habitat destruction and collapsing insect and bird populations, or the looming fresh water shortages, which don't get much press because of the climate change issue. Drastically reducing the number of vehicle miles traveled to 10% of the current level would have a much greater impact, even if all of those miles were all done in ICE vehicles, compared to maintaining the current VMT but doing them in EVs. That's why I don't agree that EVs are necessary to lower CO~2~ emissions from ICE vehicles. It would be really great if we drastically reduced VMT, and did those miles in EVs, but that's not at all what's happening.

(I've ignored the last-mile logistics issue because it's small potatoes by comparison.)

It's a multi-generational problem, so we should start fixing it now. Why is it going to be easier to solve 30-50 years from now? Why should we wait until we've transitioned to EVs to start the process? What is it about EVs is going to make that easier?

It's... still around, in a way. Apple bought NeXT Computer, and it provided the BSD Unix base for MacOS X, as well as all of those classes with the 'NS' prefix. Of course, Apple pasted on a totally new UI. 🙁

Yeah, all those losers born in Soweto in 1971 who haven't used their enormous wealth to fund a bunch of different business ventures. What are they even doing?