Yup. I also liked this, but I’m trying hard not to just quote the whole thing back, because it’s all good.

Their wealth insulates them from friction so effectively there’s no incentive or pressure for them to develop an imagination, or diversify their knowledge to the point where an imagination might emerge on its own. I can’t think of a better argument for a humanities requirement than a billionaire being asked “how do we know what is real?” and responding with “cryptographic signatures.”

Agreed. I think this is more specifically it rather than the 50s.

• Unfettered domestic commerce devoid of worker protections.
• International trade viewed as zero-sum and managed using blunt instruments like tariffs.
• America as a rising manufacturing power.
• Nominally speaking there is no slavery, but Reconstruction is “done” and Southern elites have been rehabilitated and reintegrated without having to give up their power.
• Foreign policy built on late-stage colonialism where areas within a great power’s sphere of influence are silently allowed to be dominated so as not to antagonize other great powers. Relations handled by a stupid nest of ad-hoc limited-party treaties.
• No effort is given to contextualizing what the American experiment has meant, and who it has harmed, just literally a “manifest destiny” from god to fill the land.

Ignore that the era was laissez-faire with immigrants actually arriving (though of course the robber barons who were working their laborers to death were okay with this… until they began to unionize), and it’s a remarkably apt analogy. I’m pretty sure you can see Trump openly pining for The Gilded Age from time to time, though that may literally just be because he thinks gilding things is awesome.

Thanks, Richard.

I learned to shoot at Boy Scout camp when I was about 13. We shot .22 long rifle and 20 gauge shotguns. Many of my friends hunted (never appealed to me) and learned even earlier.

I haven’t looked it up, but having spent a lot of time in Northeast Georgia, I’m guessing the odds are pretty high that the stress on that town name is on the first syllable.

The short version is simply that the Romans exported their state religion to areas they conquered, but they didn’t try to completely obliterate place names and existing culture in most places. This temple fell into disrepair and was covered by other rubble before it would have been taken over as a church or mosque, and the sheer size of the complex it was part of meant it wasn’t fully harvested for building material. It was excavated around 1900.

Also, lucky you! Today, you get to learn about Roman public religion and quasi-official syncretism!

Nah man, it’s Deer Lady.

Yeah, but look at the switch! If God made you that way, you’d all be pissing in your faces!

Chip

And for every single one of them, the ‘gh’ at one point described a phlegmy hissing sound. Spelling was sort of locked in on London English around the time that printed books became ubiquitous. Modern English spelling is frozen in a certain time and place with all speakers obliged to just sort of recognize words by sight, and in that sense it can sometimes be closer to Chinese than we might think.

Jizz. It’s called jizz.

SMH.

And people wonder why Star Wars fans hate Star Wars so much.

I don’t math so good, so I roughly counted layers and used the formula for area of a circle, reduced slightly for gaps. First guess was a good 10%-15% off but got within 12 on the second. Then I seriously overcorrected on my third.

A = pi(r^2) is a hell of a drug.

And much cheaper, but the infrastructure is already there for normie golf if even walking the course would be a challenge. That reminds me that I need to see if my bag of 15 year old pastic still has anything usable in it and go to my local DG course.

If you haven’t spent as much time refining the prompt as you would have to take an art class and do the medical research, have you really used the AI properly at all?

Law school can be eye-opening. Con law in particular was an interesting one. If you can make it through Marbury v Madison in your first semester of your first year and not realize that the entire American system is held together with chewing gum and baling wire and it’s a miracle it ever enabled a functional government at all, or get through Dred Scott v Sandford or Plessy v. Ferguson later on and not realize that the law should always seek justice in as far as said chewing gum and baling wire even halfway plausibly permit, then you’re either an idiot or an asshole, and probably both.

Slavish devotion to your generation’s “plain reading” of increasingly distant legalese written by – to put it euphemistically – deeply conflicted men who were indeed clever and motivated, but were also the half-educated elites of a cultural backwater, is how you end up with our current mess.

Oooh, intarsia. Looks great!

But only play if the solenoid is working. A person has got to have standards.

Yup. Really nice bearings. I also have a few HDD magnets that work well as hold-downs for laser cutting.

LOL, I did not know about that, and it’s stupid and cool.

I just use THIS with the flame set higher than it strictly needs to be.