From the same article:
In the United States, several states have enacted legislation to implement permanent DST, but the bills would require Congress to change federal law in order to take effect. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 permits states to opt out of DST and observe permanent standard time, but it does not permit permanent DST.
Spoon rests are just another thing that needs cleaning. If you are using a pot with a hole in the handle for hanging, a clothes pin can grip a mixing spoon while the other side of the pin gets wedged in the hole. Spoon drips back into the pot, and no additional cleaning is needed.
I have always wanted to check out the timeline where Chris Farley was Shrek.
It also doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Even if there is some specific issue that keeps you bound to Amazon, seeking out alternatives the rest of the time is still an improvement.
I know someone who has extreme difficulty taking pills and who frequently needs pain relievers to function. The only thing they have ever found that works for them is the Walmart brand Tylenol (aka tiny lol). They don’t buy anything else from Walmart on principle, but thos pills are a necessity.
That said, in my experience at least, while Amazon’s shopping experience has gotten significantly worse over time, smaller local and regional businesses have been making things much better over the last few years. It’s easier to find what I need on the website of my local hardware store than Amazon, with prices that are as good or better on most things, and without the glut of trash items clogging my search. I can even get 2 hour delivery if I need it. I can’t get a fucking pizza delivered to me but I can have a socket wrench and a change of underwear here at a moment’s notice.
I can’t say that there is a better option available to everyone for anything they need. But I would bet that there are good alternatives available the vast majority of the time.
Chicken is dinosaur meat.
Electricity is basically magic. It only seems mundane because we take it for granted. If sorcery, the force, investiture, or any other fictional magic system you could think of were real, we’d harness it, get used to it, and stop thinking of them as magic too.
Dont let familiarity diminish the sense of wonder. Understanding doesn’t make electricity less magical, it just makes you a wizard.
I am not saying that we will necessarily go down the road to fully automated luxury, or that if we do that the journey there would go smoothly. The current “AI” bubble is an unsustainable mess which is causing a lot more problems than it solves. In the long term, we are looking at the development of incredibly powerful and dangerous technologies that can potentially reshape society.
I mainly just wanted to highlight the weird, shortsighted reasoning behind this post. The argument that we need to keep cashiers so that we have a human connection feels a lot like arguments for going back to an agrarian lifestyle. It’s a losing argument that requires glossing over a lot of downsides and ignoring much better alternatives.
People should have to work shitty service sector jobs so that I have someone to talk to. Because obviously I will never encounter other humans if they aren’t being forced to trade half their waking hours for money. What am I supposed to do, talk to people who aren’t being forced to put up with me if they don’t want to lose their income?
The “AI” being pushed on us now is trash, but if we do eventually get to the point of being able to automate away the vast majority of jobs, we ought to use that to free people from the need to work. Give us UBI, make robots do the shit that you wouldn’t do for free, and let us all have free time to do the things we actually want to do.
Not to mention that the bullshit in AI videos made by the left would absolutely get called out in every propaganda outfit on the right. It would just give them more ammo (without the usual lies).
But even more important, it will grant legitimacy to everyone who responds to damning video evidence by claiming it was AI. We don’t need to make shit up, the reality is already horrifying. All AI will do is make it harder for people to believe their own eyes.
So if your character is from Alabama it could still work then.
Things that have helped me include:
Had a coworker who was riding a motorcycle on the highway by a semi when the tire next to her blew out. She ended up dropping the bike and sliding along the road. Fortunately she was covered head to toe in protective gear, but it’s still amazing that she wasn’t seriously injured.
And it’s even more complicated by the fact that Talia was already the replacement for Lyta. And that the revelation about her being a sleeper was never meant to happen unless she left. Oddly enough, that exit was actually recycling the plan for Takashima had she made it past the pilot, only she got replaced… by Susan.
Plus there’s Garibaldi. His interest in Talia mirrors Zach’s interest in Lyta. Garibaldi’s interest is never resolved because of Talia’s exit. That they tried to reestablish that idea with Zach and Lyta implies there was a plan. Given where things go with Garibaldi and telepaths (including Lyta) that might have been very interesting.
Instead, Zach’s interest gets folded into the Byron plot. But Byron is also a late addition caused by the whole cancelation and uncancelation around season 5. If they hadn’t lost multiple cast members and rushed key plotlines to fit them into season 4, things would have probably been very different.
Babylon 5 has two women start a relationship… sort of.
They set up a frienship that was supposed to turn into a romantic relationship, but one of them left the show, cutting that subplot short. They still try to work it in, as the last couple episodes before the character exit heavily imply they are romantically/sexually involved, but nothing is explicitly confirmed until the next season when the remaining character briefly opens up about having loved the now absent character.
It’s not much, but it’s still pretty big for the early to mid 90s.
If God is talking to bronze age goat herders, what kind of knowledge is going to be useful to them? What will they manage to pass down to future generations without mangling it horribly? If they were to be given information about scientific concepts so advanced that only God (or aliens or time travelers) could have given it to them, they wouldn’t have the foundation of knowledge to grasp it, the vocabulary to explain it, or the technical means to exploit it. Anything they can actually understand and act on is necessarily going to be something that is not beyond their means, and therefore we are right back where we started with stuff they could have figured out on their own.
Suppose God did explain something far beyond human understanding, and they wrote it down as best they could. Even if it wasn’t completely incomprehensible to the guy writing it down, it’s still going to be totally lost on future generations if it isn’t anchored in a more comprehensive understanding of how things work. Without context, it will lose all meaning and will be reinterpreted by later scholars who will try and find a meaning that they can understand. It would become a part of mythology and folklore, and would be unrecognizable by the time science catches up to the original ideas. You might have people point out similarities, but they’d probably be taken as seriously as the ancient aliens guys.
Shot in the dark, they’re doing keto in the saddest way possible.
Also being able to get anything in diet instead of just one or two things.
Or diet everything.
Plus the plans only got to the rebellion after Vader personally failed to stop a piece of physical media from escaping the airlock where he was slaughtering rebels. This happened despite him having telekinetic powers, because he chose to use them on rebel soldiers and not the obviously valuable item they were clearly trying to smuggle out at the cost of their own lives.
And it just so happens that the ship those plans got onto was his daughter’s ship. And when he “captured” her, she just happened to choose his old astromech droid and the protocol droid that he built as a kid to carry the plans off. And those droids got out in an escape pod that just slipped past a fully armed star destroyer because obviously there couldn’t be anything valuable slipping past that might warrant firing up one of their many lasers or tractor beams.
And the planet they were over? Tatooine, the ass end of nowhere, a wasteland ruled by the Hutts which has no rebel presence whatsoever, but which just happens to be Vader’s home planet. And those droids, who could have landed anywhere on that entire planet, by sheer coincidence, land right by the farm where Vader’s step brother is looking after his son. And those droids take the son and the plans to Vader’s best friend and teacher, who has not been part of the rebel alliance, and couldn’t possibly know of a secure place to pass them along.
From there, a disgraced former imperial officer with a lot of debts to pay agrees to take the group to the planet that happens to be where the death star is waiting. This happens only after the former imperial carries out the murder of a childhood associate of Vader. And they only manage to escape because the troopers who have them outnumbered and outgunned yell a warning and fire wildly, completely negating the element of surprise.
And don’t even get me started on the death star escape or the battle of Yavin. There’s just too much. How does a moon-sized planet-killing space station not have enough fighters to overwhelm a dozen x-wings and y-wings? How does a transport get the drop on an ace fighter pilot with functioning sensors, wing men, an entire goddamn space station backing him up, and oh yeah, FREAKING PSYCHIC POWERS?!
By the way, that transport? Previously registered to the man who handed control of Bespin to Vader. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. I mean, it’s not like he blew up a death star or anything… oh wait!
Wasn’t expecting to plug the Children of Time series again this week, but here we are.