I wonder if this surgery would be illegal in Texas.

Facebook sends any messages it can to the police when they request so. Woman and her daughter were sent to prison for coordinating daughter’s abortion over Fbook Messenger, which is also supposed to be E2EE:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-turned-chat-messages-mother-daughter-now-charged-abortion-rcna42185

The most worthwhile comparison is of the surface area, excluding crust. Crust quotient must be disregarded.

Then why did they invent stuffed crust?

I wish I could award you with fake Internet points.

2 12" pizzas are 112.5% the surface area of as single 18" pizza.

Pizza place that just opened up down the street from me only offers one size:

18 inches.

The other option is to purchase by the slice.

I actually liked it better when it sucked more. I have no idea why. Maybe I identified it as college comfort food.

Well then I guess Penn & Teller’s BS series is actually the Dark Side version of Mythbusters.

Loved both of those shows. Learned how to cheat on a polygraph from the Penn & Teller show.

It’s not the next generation that sucks. We suck for having made them this way.

I’ve noticed it a lot in my younger extended family: When something goes wrong, they wait for someone to tell them what to do next, rather than doing a rudimentary amount of googling to get the answer. I can imagine a few explanations (with the caveat that we are not talking about the top 1% of the class here):

1.) Learned helplessness. They feel they aren’t expert enough in anything to be able to rely on their own industry or facilities to figure something out.

2.) Learned helplessness by coddling from authorities. Education has gone so far in the direction of teaching-to-the-test, that they are certain that anything they are confronted with should have been fully explained and taught to them ahead of time. When a .zip file appears in a workplace setting, and no one has officially told them in the workplace setting how to handle a .zip file, they “go find an adult.”

3.) Purely applied-education, foregoing theory entirely. I am suspicious that, for example, teaching algebra through real-world application actually limits the students to using algebraic principles only when those specific real-world applications arise. I would love to run an experiment wherein you never told the students why they needed to know how to figure out 2x+3=5, and see if they are better able to apply such principles outside of school since they themselves would be the ones coming up with the situations to test out whether what they learned could help. Sort of like going back to phonics, instead of whole-language. I learned how to count to 10 in Spanish from Sesame Street songs that just (to my spacey young mind) popped up out of nowhere, with no accompanying explanation about when/where I was supposed to use this knowledge.

Essentially, I guess, my contention is that American K-12 (and, I think, college) schools are turning into concentrated animal feeding operations, where kids are not allowed to turn around in their cages, and are spoon/force-fed the specific nutrients that testing quotas demand on the other end. They learn and live in an environment of hyper-surveillance, which they are repeatedly told keeps them safe. They are not confronted with novel situations where they have to teach themselves how to apply what they have learned, because they are increasingly kept in a completely controlled environment.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to emerge at age 17 a scholar enjoying a completely un-alienated life of the mind, but I do think that we are actively NOT teaching kids how to think on their own, by the very nature of trying to teach things in the most relevant way, and in the safest-possible environment. Our good intentions are inhibiting the educational development of those who come after us.

So, to reiterate my original thesis, it’s not that the next generation sucks. We suck for making them this way.

Disney has for the last few decades positioned itself as a premium product at a premium price (think the entry costs for theme parks, cruises, etc.) much the same way Apple has. They clearly think their content is worth the premium, so they’re going for it.

Also, a lot of their best films are going public domain in the coming years, so they need to maintain and grow their revenue stream somehow.

Shedding ABC, eliminating physical media, and increasing streaming prices makes total sense if you think the way they do.

CPAP.

Same. Refi’d into 3% and not going to budge. It’ll be interesting to see if our loan servicer ever changes, because who in the world would want to buy a loan with such a low interest rate?

Just like any other job, entirely dependent on your particular unit/department and manager. In the US Fed gov’t there’s a huge difference between working for CBP, civil Marines, and NASA, just to name 3 random agencies.

The difference with the feds is that you get a basically predictable paycheck (as long as Congress does its damn job), health benefits that make life habitable, the best possible version of a 401k around (TSP), and you’re extraordinarily unlikely to get downsized.

Last I checked, the plurality of civilian federal employees make GS-13, which in 2023 was between $98k and $153k depending on where you were located, and how long you’ve been at that pay-grade. It’s not an overwhelming plurality, butnit’s not unusual to promote into a GS-13, and then hang out there for most of your career.

Retirement is a three-legged stool: your TSP (aka 401k), Social Security, and a small pension. People hired before 1985 were the ones who got the sweet fat pensions, but it doesn’t work that way anymore.

Also, Feliz el año del Niño! Gonna be a great 16 months for weather. Especially in Texas!

Trump admin was a little too insane to satirize effectively, I think. They try to stay playful while biting, with only the occasional blunt headline.

Basically, Trump only deserved single-entendre, and that’s not really what they do.

We need to block ads so that ads die. Anti-angiogenesis for advertising. Get a less annoying business model.

That said, I have YouTube premium at that I don’t see ads.

We just muted the TV during the ads and did something else until the show came back on. Ad breaks for regular shows like dramas were a predictable length of time, so you could time your bathroom or fridge run pretty well.

When the original news broke about Alabama using nitrogen, my wife woke me up by hitting my arm to tell me - because I’ve been saying that is the most humane possible method for the last 16 years.

I think the death penalty is stupid to begin with, and am kinda over talking about its merits after years of debate team in high school and college. But trying all of these seat-of-pants cocktails of midazolam and pentobarbital etc, and then inventing all of these ridiculous devices that require two people to push buttons at the same time so no one ever really knows whose button actually killed the person… it’s just needlessly complicated and dumb. Not to mention the fact that the legal costs involved in defending appeals and housing someone on death row are much higher than the cost of a life sentence anyway. And that’s leaving aside the statistically significant number of wrongful convictions…

I mean, we shouldn’t have the death penalty. But if we’re going to, it should be by nitrogen hypoxia.

Next GOP president is going to expunge all of the convictions.