Yeah, that’s a decent way to put it. Or a lack of a reasonable amount of empathy.

Edit: libertarians are Prosperity Gospel paladins with wisdom as their dump stat.

I’ll disagree, slightly. They can also be:

• starting from flawed premises (aka “The world is a just place” or “a just god exists”)
• Inexperienced edgelords
• Arguing in bad faith (or just “I’ve got mine, so fuck you”)

I say this as someone who flirted with libertarianism in my early 20’s due mostly to a conservative religious upbringing. I’m not super smart, but I flatter myself to say that I’m above average intelligence and education, and there was still a brief time in my life when libertarianism served like a valid ideology. It took actually reading some objectivist philosophy and simultaneously reexamining and then rejecting my religious background before the flaws became evident.

Maybe it’s because I’ve become a pretty outspoken anti-theist, but after growing up and being exposed to better theological and philosophical arguments, I’ve come to the conclusion that Lewis is an overrated hack.

And yes, the Silent Planet books were absolute torture to get through.

It’s not that they “no longer have the ability.” Most people have never been able to comprehend things on that time scale when it’s happening in real-time. It’s only after the fact that people are able to look back and see clear signs and the early groundwork being laid.

As someone who lives in this same town, black bears are more like overweight raccoons.

Fun fact, our “city hall” is at the tiny community airport, which also had a restaurant with the best chicken wings in town (salt and vinegar wings FTW). The restaurant was still going when this happened in 2019, so my guess is the bear smelled the food and went looking for the kitchen, only to get sidetracked by the city council meeting.

You’ll be hard pressed to find someone deny basic science in today’s world.

They didn’t outright deny it (out loud), but they cast doubt and equivocate about the parts that don’t agree with their preexisting worldview.

Jesuits have done some decent work for humanity, but they are not scientists, mostly because they start from a premise they want to be true and find evidence for it instead of the other way around.

Edit: in fact, why did knowledge need to be “curated” through the Dark Ages? I’ll give you a hint: it starts a “C” and ends with an “atholicism”

Not OP, but mine was really pretty manageable. 2 days of sitting in an easy chair and icing my balls, 2 days of “walking is fine, but avoid any sudden movements,” and a week of “it’s a little sore, but it doesn’t really hurt.” After that, it was about 2-3 weeks where I didn’t really notice it unless I moved the wrong way too suddenly (whereupon I’d get a quick twinge, but nothing too bad).

Really a pretty small cost for the benefits. I don’t really like painkillers, but I do recommend some THC gummies for the first week and a fresh series to binge

I have tons of playlists and saved music on spotify; how is Tidal at importing data from other services? It’s not really a deal breaker, but I’m really picky about my music (so I don’t really care about “radio” features or curated playlists), so it’d be a real pain in the ass to start from scratch.

“No Skyrim until you finish your homework and finish your chores” is a fantastic motivator for my 10yo. When I can model that I can’t play Rocket League with him until after I finish the dishes, it drives the point home that IRL responsibilities need to come before video games.

Depends. The cheap houses, yeah, there’s as fair bit of noise, but you can’t hear everything. From downstairs, you can hear when someone walks across the room above you, but not when they’re walking in other upstairs rooms. And from rooms on the same level, you can hear if someone is talking loudly in the room next door, but not enough to make out what they’re saying unless they’re yelling.

Well-built houses or buildings made for occupancy by multiple families usually have better sound insulation between the rooms/floors/units, so it’s not always an issue.

Edit: the plus side to that is I know all the noises my house makes at night, so as a light sleeper, I know when something is wrong in the middle of the night, and I only need one decent sound system for the whole house, which is great for listening to records while doing housework.

You know what? Now that you mention it, I think reading that story in the Dulaires book of Greek myths was my first conscious exposure to the word “sieve.”

Not that that’s too interesting to anyone besides me, but you just unburied a long-forgotten pleasant memory, so thanks!

DAMN fine!

It’s more like a mutual friend. There’s a connection to both reactants (aka “binding affinity”), but not as strong as the bond that is formed between the two substrates (if the reaction is forming a covalent bond between the two substrates, anyway)

Edit: I’m actually saving this meme to show my coworkers that teach biochem, because it’s a pretty decent analogy. You can even extend it to other reaction classes, like a phosphorylase being like a friend who connects your buddy who is selling a guitar with your other buddy who wants to buy a guitar, or a isomerase being that friend who gives you a make-over so that another friend can set you up on a date.

You said it, man! Nobody fucks with the Jesus!

Even though weed is legal in Canada the legal stuff is the worst and most expensive.

Give it time. I’m far from a connoisseur, as these days I mostly just partake in edibles 1-2 times per week, but California has some pretty sweet weed prices, at least compared to my college/grad-school days. I saw an ad on a billboard just yesterday for 10 USD Eighths at a pretty reputable shop in my town, and I think I usually pay 35 USD for a pack of 10 2-dose THC:CBD gummies (compared to 40 USD for an eighth of mediocre bud in the early 2000’s).

As people get less paranoid about enforcement and local governments ease up on restrictions, the price should come down and the quality should go up (although this probably depends a lot on local government, so who knows, really)

I wish this was true for me, but I only have one record shop within 45-minute drive of my house (and their prices and selection are far from competitive), so I wind up buying pretty much all my records online through Discogs. Frequently, the new represses are just flat-out cheaper than the vintage vinyl, especially for a lot of the more esoteric albums I buy. For instance, even though they’re not really hard to find, for Black Sabbath’s first four albums I paid just as much for mediocre, water-damaged copies of Sabbath and Volume 4 as I did for brand-new represses of Paranoid and Master of Reality. If you actually buy your vinyl to listen to, buying used online can be a pretty big gamble as far as quality, so for the same price, I frequently wind up consciously choosing the new vinyl over the used copy.

Even though I do frequently manage to package one or two cheap used albums with each new album purchased to take advantage of that sweet “media mail” shipping, it’s not even close to a 10:1 used:new ratio.

Edit: I suppose now that I think about it, I’m starting from a pretty decent used vinyl collection from my days in the early 2000’s as a hipster music snob before used vinyl got nearly so expensive, so my collection overall has much more used vinyl than my current buying habits would indicate (I probably have 200 albums, of which 30-40 were purchased new in the past 3-4 years)

Fair enough.

You’re absolutely right, if it was actually plating. However, given the contract was for copper ingots, I’d guess the poor quality copper was copper cast into an ingot shape around something worthless rather than what we would consider plating. It could also have been much more about impurities and ores left over from an incomplete smelting/refining process such that trying to hammer or cast the copper resulted in lots of worthless slag.

What the fuck kind of snakes do you have living around you?