Sometimes it feels like certain parts of humanity just didn’t really learn all the lessons that they should have from the Holocaust about dehumanizing people.

Yup, a late friend of mine was a lobbyist at the state level for a mental health lobbying group. His daughter has schizophrenia and that was his way to give back in his retirement. Without lobbying, it’s hard for politicians to know when there is a problem they need to fix. They have a small staff and they don’t just magically know when there is a problem. The problem is when a politician either can’t sniff out unethical lobbyists or just doesn’t care.

Pretty much anything that substantially improves batteries will be huge. R & D money is pouring in and that likely means progress. Improvements could be felt in factors like environmental impact, weight, energy density, safety, and charge time.

Hong Kong was always going to happen because that was an agreed upon conclusion. China violated promises that it made (one country, two systems my ass), but Hong Kong was a part China. Taiwan has never been under the control of the current government of mainland China. At this point Taiwan would likely be a separate country if it didn’t have China’s dagger at its throat telling it that even a breath of declaring independence will result in immediate invasion.

If they really wanted to overthrow shit, why didn’t they come strapped?

Multiple people had firearms at the 1/6 coup attempt, this is well documented. I’m not sure why they never shot anyone, but it wasn’t for lack of firearms.

I have really fallen in love with my carbon steel skillet for general purpose cooking, including more delicate food like eggs. It took some time to get the hang of cooking with it and I still haven’t quite gotten the seasoning right, but it’s a sturdy piece. I also have a cast iron skillet, but it’s much heavier and I’ve never been able to get it to cook eggs. Since I started using the carbon steel for eggs, I have basically stopped using our non-stick pan.

I actively use a couple of appliances with a nonstick interior, an air fryer and a rice cooker. I just try to treat them very nicely but I know they won’t last forever. At least the parts are trays or liners that can be replaced separately from the appliance.

I also have a very nice 3 ply stainless steel pan, but I find that I don’t pull that out as much. Maybe because I’m usually not making the sorts of recipes that it excels with, like ones that use the fond to make a pan sauce.

My father got a toaster at a garage sale back in the 1970’s. That was the toaster I grew up with. When I was moving out, my parents happen to be replacing it, so I asked for it. I did some research and it is a GE toaster from the mid 1950’s. I have used it for the past ten years and it’s still going strong. It’s maybe a bit small for some slices, but it’s hard to argue with 70 years of near continuous service.

I have a pocket flashlight, the Acebeam Rider. The smartphone lights are handy, but they drain the battery. The flashlight has an AA-sized rechargeable battery, but it can also use regular AA batteries as a backup. That is important during an emergency, when power might be cut off but AA batteries are pretty common. It has 4 different levels. The top level is pretty bright for a pocket flashlight, while the ultra-low level has a hypothetical runtime of 58 hours. And it was fairly cheap, so if I drop it somewhere it is not as problematic as losing my expensive smartphone.

Stackable prep bowls for the kitchen. They’re about $6 a piece and I have eight of them. I got sick of constantly running out of bowls when I was doing things like chopping lots of veggies for a soup or marinating tofu. I expect to reach the end of my “usefulness” before they do.

Similarly, I have a set of 12 rounded stacking mixing bowls. I use them a lot for tossed salads, but they are also useful for dough.

I got a kite from REI’s returns sale. The people before me didn’t like the color. I have enjoyed that kite for almost 20 years.

Oh, I totally get it, I loved it too. I just don’t think it will stick in quite the same way when people don’t have lyrics to attach to the song. Like, I can’t play it at karaoke night.

The Hapsburgs, a Spanish noble house that held the Spanish throne, made a practice of the inverse of this with uncle-niece marriages to keep power in the house. This was the closest marriage the church would allow. The generations of inbreeding produced the distinct “Hapsburg jaw”. Eventually that led to the poor, ugly, absurdly inbred Charles II of Spain. And remember, those portraits are official portraits that paint him in the best possible light. He died without an heir, ending the Hapsburg monarchy.

Dragostea Din Tei

I don’t think that one outlasts the next couple decades. Yeah, it’s fun and the lyrics are weird, but Romanian isn’t all that widely spoken, so the vast majority of the world population cannot sing it.

As far as I can tell, they are 100% different. Guix uses Guile Scheme, NixOS uses the custom Nix language.

The Democratic Party is a big tent party. There is far left, center left, center, and center right. And of course the left-right spectrum is always going to be reductive. Joe Biden has been observed to track the center of the party as a whole over time, so he would be a center left politician.

I loved that one so much! The only flaw really was that the tech tree is incredibly massive. It’s feels unnecessarily difficult to learn.

Some of the Portland parking garages downtown have them as well.

Yeah, then some of the wrong people might vote. /s

It should be noted that the evidence there is that a helicopter involved in the raid took off from a beach near the pier. So slim to none. And it doesn’t even make sense, how would the pier be useful for a military operation?

Well, there are other parts to MAD. Things like keeping mil to mil communication open at all times, especially times of increased hostility, to avoid escalations. But in the end, it is insuring that the nuclear game is set such that it is never in anyone’s best interest to set off nuclear weapons.