A Welshman about to traverse a steep-sided hollow at the head of a valley: “Oh baby I’m gonna cwm!”

The most charismatic man I know is my uncle, he worked right near the WTC on 9/11 and even though they closed his bridge home because it was 9/11 he sweet talked his way across.

Sean Spicer needing to defend Trump’s absurd claim about attendance to keep his job was delightful TV.

Speaking of Vaporeon…

For a while they were like Maroon 5 level over exposed. I don’t think I’ve heard a song from them in a while though.

Real answer, Elon made it more friendly to the far right (the racists and Nazis) and unbanned a bunch of them who had previously been banned for being too racist and Nazi. Then he introduced a subscription service where you pay to have Twitter spread your content.

So that started a doom loop: The far right bought the additional views, people who didn’t appreciate the extra racism and Nazi views on their timeline left Twitter, but the view boost was paid for so it kept pushing those views to the fewer people who remained, then THAT volume of hate pushed more people away, etc.

It probably got to the point that they couldn’t keep paid views high enough with just people who care about politics and they had to just push at all costs, eventually to you.

This happened at my work with internal docs as we switched from an ancient intranet to a new service that had a ton more features but no backwards compatibility so all the pages got updated to PDFs with helpful links that went nowhere and it caused chaos for like 3 months.

It’s all a hypothetical, feel free to just decide you are that type of person. No harm in it.

In real life though, if money is no object, the difference between a 2017 normal car and a 2025 luxury car is literally just “do you want extra features and a bigger screen on a car that will last longer?” It just doesn’t make sense to get the cheaper version, unless you are giving up something else because you only have a limited amount of money.

It was always short sighted tax policy. We’re just living with the blowback.

But in 1954, apparently intending to stimulate capital investment in manufacturing in order to counter a mild recession, Congress replaced the straight-line approach with “accelerated depreciation,” which enabled owners to take huge deductions in the early years of a project’s life. This, Hanchett says, “transformed real-estate development into a lucrative ‘tax shelter.’ An investor making a profit from rental of a new building usually avoided all taxes on that income, since the ‘loss’ from depreciation canceled it out. And when the depreciation exceeded profits from the building itself—as it virtually always did in early years—the investor could use the excess ‘loss’ to cut other income taxes.” With realestate values going up during the 1950s and ’60s, savvy investors “could build a structure, claim ‘losses’ for several years while enjoying tax-free income, then sell the project for more than they had originally invested.”

Since the “accelerated depreciation” rule did not apply to renovation of existing buildings, investors “now looked away from established downtowns, where vacant land was scarce and new construction difficult,” Hanchett says. "Instead, they rushed to put their money into projects at the suburban fringe—especially into shopping centers.

http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/why-america-got-malled

So, obviously, people don’t generally change their legal gender for an advantage somewhere. But if they do, that’s a pretty good sign, not that it’s too easy to change your gender, but that there’s a gender bias in the law.

So arguably, the easier it is to change your legal gender, the less of a problem gender-based affirmative action is. Conservatives must love this! End liberal overreach in one easy step!

He somehow monetized being a Trump reply guy back in 2016, every Trump tweet you’d see this guy with a snarky little “well actually I prefer an X that WASN’T Y” or whatever. Within seconds.

How often do you wear a suit? Dry clean as necessary, hang it up between uses. I’ve never ironed a suit.

The one example I’m familiar with is a name brand ice cream company that produces the store brand ice cream too…in that case the recipe is different, cheaper ingredients to cut costs to the bare minimum. But using the machines for a higher volume saves money.

I’m sure ‘same exact item’ does happen too but just ‘same manufacturer’ doesn’t mean exactly the same item.

Can’t believe Harriet Tubman got all that infrastructure up.

Metric has been legally “preferred” in the US since 1975. We just don’t use it.

Also while I was looking up that year I came across this wild factoid:

In 1793, Thomas Jefferson requested artifacts from France that could be used to adopt the metric system in the United States, and Joseph Dombey was sent from France with a standard kilogram. Before reaching the United States, Dombey’s ship was blown off course by a storm and captured by pirates, and he died in captivity on Montserrat.

This would be a life goal of mine if they could guarantee I wasn’t going to get a damn DVD.

I need examples or I don’t understand.

Not for House or Senate. Age just isn’t a close enough metric for what you’re trying to fix.

If you’re concerned with age-related decline, vote them out if you see signs of it, or if they would reach whatever age your limit is during the term.

If you’re concerned about longevity in office, use term limits or reform campaign finance such that longevity in office doesn’t grant too high of an incumbent advantage.

SCOTUS, sure. I think Canada has appointments until 75. Does not seem meaningfully different from appointments for life except less randomness on open slots.

It’s an older meme sir, but it checks out.

And Trump just copied the slogan from Reagan anyway.