In part it might be trying to head off trouble during and after the election with Republican state officials interfering with the election process—they might be more hesitant if they see other Republican leaders supporting Harris.
In part it might be trying to head off trouble during and after the election with Republican state officials interfering with the election process—they might be more hesitant if they see other Republican leaders supporting Harris.
For the Greek gods, the greatest sin was attempting to be like them.
If there’s ever a Giraffe Interchange Format, I’ll pronounce it the same as giraffe. And unlike some people, I’ll be able to tell the two apart.
Stuck a wire in a power outlet.
Direct democracy—except instead of directly voting on legislation, voters vote on the desired effects of legislation and a metric for measuring if those effects are being achieved. The actual legislation is then written by specialists trained on effective policy implementation, who can adjust the legislation on the fly if it isn’t having the desired effect. Their mandate is limited by the associated metric—if they can’t meet the goals, they lose their mandate and the case goes back to voters for review.
Homer’s Odyssey.
Most modern adaptations present the stories Odysseus tells while visiting the Phaeacians as if they were the actual plot—but Homer’s audience would have known Odysseus as a notorious liar and trickster and wouldn’t necessarily have regarded his stories as true even within the context of the frame narrative. Homer’s epic focuses as much on the parallel stories of Telemachus and Penelope—I read the underlying story as their struggle to untangle Odysseus from his own web of deceptions and fantasies and bring him back to reality.
I think there’s a part of our brains that treats these stories as fiction—in particular, the kind of folk fiction used to reinforce community mores. The strength of our reaction to such stories signals how strongly we support the standards, not necessarily what we think should be done in real life to those who violate them.
They’ve been overstepping enough on a regular basis for the last fifty years—the real problem is that they’ve subverted the “reform” process so that reforms that seem adequate to the general public get neutralized or twisted to work in their favor.
That’s why you have more-experienced reform advocates eventually pushing things like “defund the police”—they may be shooting themselves in the foot in terms of popular perception, but it comes from a long history of frustration with lesser reform efforts.
A pretty-much arbitrary system based on a standard letter size of 8.5 in x 11 in, with multiples and fractions thereof. It lacks the critical √2 aspect ratio, so pages designed for one size have the wrong proportions when scaled up or down.
Which… might be ok, if the object is to reduce plastic consumption and pollution.
International standard paper sizes (A4 etc.) in the U.S.
My mom watched the Watergate hearings while she was pregnant with me.
An ad-blocking DNS server on your local network should work for apps too, right? (As long as the ads are hosted on known ad servers.)
Coffee isn’t a true bean—it’s more closely related to gardenias.
Pulp Fiction.
Yeah, “generating your own Marvel movie” was considered high art for most human cultures before copyright: from traditional epics to Greek dramas and even Shakespeare’s “serious” plays, audiences were already familiar with the characters and stories and valued the art of the re-telling. Novels (so-called because the characters and stories were “new”) were considered low-brow trash for people unfamiliar with the myths and stories that “real” literature was based on.
Now, that primal human urge to build on and re-tell familiar stories is relegated to unlicensed fan-fiction and to franchises like Marvel who only permit certain sanctioned creators to build on their “property”.
Trademarks should be good as long as the company is in business.
Patents should be determined by weighing two factors: 1) how much sooner will the invention be produced than it would have been without the incentive of a patent, and how much will the public benefit from that earlier introduction; and 2) how much will the public be harmed by the monopoly resulting from the patent? The patent should then expire before the second factor outweighs the first.
Copyrights have been a scam since they were first introduced: the original intention (when printing was first introduced) was to police the printing of politically or morally objectionable works, but the authority appointed to do so abused the power to sell monopolies on printing specific works. Authors were originally opposed to this practice, and actually got it overturned for a time—the idea that copyrights are needed so publishers can compensate authors was a post-hoc justification publishers came up with to get authors to withdraw their objections. But it’s never been a good deal for the actual creators.
So copyright needs to be re-thought from the ground up—the amount of time that works remain under copyright is a secondary issue.
I have two theories, applying not just to rhyme but to traditional verse forms in general (i.e., formal constraints like rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc.):
In prehistory—when all knowledge was transmitted orally—verse constraints acted as a sort of verbal checksum to prevent transmitted knowledge from getting corrupted accidentally. And the presence of verse patterns became a subliminal flag indicating that whatever was being sung or recited was important knowledge worth the extra effort of casting into verse.
It’s been found in many different contexts that humans are most drawn to information with a novelty-to-predictability ratio of about 20–25%: if it’s much less than that we get bored, and if it’s much more than that we get lost and/or dismiss it as gibberish. So adding a predictable element like a regular rhyme pattern gives the creator freedom to add more novel elements without losing the audience.
Only if the headache is caused by a hematoma (which would need a brain scan to diagnose).
Front left: phone, small bills, crow-calling whistle
Front right: keys, multitool, tin of peanuts
Back right: wallet
Back left: spare change, spare mask, small magnet