Found the physics teacher.

Refuse to do free work for a company—insist that the grocery store employees go and gather the items on your list from the shelves for you! Never set foot on the sales floor, do pickup orders online only!

Background: It used to be that the proprietor of a store brought items you requested to the counter for you. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly pioneered a new grocery store model, requiring/allowing the customers to pick items off of the shelves themselves. Not only did they not give you a discount for doing their work for them, they raked in more money from impulse purchases. The increased sales more than offset the increase in shoplifting losses. A cynical, corporate ploy to bleed customers dry, and we just think it’s normal now!

That is to say, the purpose of a grocery store is to provide food in exchange for currency. There’s no law of nature that I know of that says that having an underpaid teenager drag your food across the scanner is the only proper way to do check-out, just like there isn’t one that says only a store employee can pick items from the shelf.

This comment neatly summarizes centrist Democrats to me. “We know that we need to do this to win, but don’t do it because we might not win.” Just like the arguments that LGBTQ groups shouldn’t have been pushing for equality 20 years ago, because it would alienate voters and harm Democrats.

Y’know, sometimes voters respect a principled stand, and the courage to push for what’s right.

You’ve just described all of human culture.

Thank goodness the UN and the World Economic Forum have started talking about replacing GDP with a measure of economic activity that takes human well-being into account. That was one of the points at the Summit of the Future a could weeks ago. Better late than never.

Right, both of these things can be true: Third parties are impossible in our system. Third parties are vital to save our system.

There’s no law of nature that says that our system must or will endure. We could just be fucked. No, wait, look at the polls for the current presidential election cycle; we’re definitely fucked.

Doesn’t mean we can’t make a doomed effort to save it, though.

A group here in the Midwest tried. The duopoly collaborated to squash the effort. We need a third party to make it happen.

All I got was a cracked screen.

Pulao, I’m assuming Punjab-style: Brown half a chopped onion in oil in the pressure cooker, toss in some spices from the dabba to let them get fragrant, then add basmati rice and chopped veggies. Put the cover on, get it up to pressure for a couple of minutes, then natural release. Top with a couple spoonfuls of curd (yogurt), and it’s delicious.

May I point out that this effect is killing small towns and living-wage jobs? Before the car, there had to be stores and groceries and doctors’ practices, et cetera, in small towns. Those provided local jobs for people, and community. Now, people drive into the city, or to the regional Walmart, and the small towns are decaying, mired in crippling poverty, isolation, and the diseases of despair that we see today. So the car might offer “freedom” to load up on a large selection of cheap consumer goods, but at the cost of dignity, connection, and meaning.

(Walmart, by the way, can be seen as predatory, killing small business with prices they can’t match, but also, it is successful largely because it is so well-adapted to a car-based lifestyle. It’s not the cause, it’s an effect.)

I hear this argument often, but it perplexes me. Yeah, the US has large areas with little population density, but surprisingly, comparatively nobody lives there. The places with high population density have lots of people living there. We could have trains in places where people live, but for the most part, we don’t. Not even a single high-speed line to connect the Northeast Corridor, just the Acela. The Great Lakes region has higher population density than, and about the same size as, Spain, but Spain has a well-developed rail system.

It’s not really about population density.

Except you’re not getting along with others, but instead ascribing negative traits (i.e. disagreeableness) to people who may have different neurobiology, instead of having empathy to try to understand how they may experience sensory input differently than you do.

Misophonia, PTSD, autism, ADHD, hypervigilance, and more. There are lots of reasons that loud videos on a phone in a public space can wreck somebody else’s day that they have no control over. Please have some empathy.

I saw a melanistic eastern grey squirrel this summer, which Wikipedia tells me has a prevalence of about 1 in 10,000. It was just pokin’ around my campsite when I woke up one morning. Oh! And I just remembered seeing eyeless fish and salamanders in caves.

Giddyup! The way Israel treats Palestine is more akin to the way the League of Nations treated Germany under the Treaty of Versailles, and look how that turned out. But, okay, for the sake of argument, if Hamas surrendered unconditionally, what’s Israel’s Marshall Plan?

All of these examples across your comments have this in common: People who were feeling guilty about something, and then lashing out at you in anger for allegedly calling them out on the issue. This is a very common coping strategy that people use, and it’s really not your fault at all because they didn’t tell you up front about their feelings. They just want to make it seem that it is your fault to deflect from their own unpleasant feelings.

This is a really hard one to learn to detect if you’re not tuned into people (that is, autistic). Hell, it’s a hard one to detect for everybody. You kind of have to watch for body language which indicates discomfort: Body stiffness, blank affect, disengaging from conversation, flared nostrils, clipped syllables, curt replies. If you see those indicators, change the topic.

Remarkable Gish Gallop here, a whole string of ahistorical nonsense. To cite one example, what’s Israel’s equivalent of the Marshall Plan, then?

(E: word order)

It’s not the worst book I’ve read, but Anthem is close. I never had the urge to read Atlas Shrugged after that. The details of the evil, collectivist society are just so over-the-top, and the plot is just such obvious author-wish-fulfillment jack-off-ery. In my head canon, there’s an epilogue to the story which picks up a year later: Gaea has died in childbirth due to a breech baby, and Prometheus is crippled from a broken leg that healed badly. Hey, maybe there are benefits to society after all, y’know?

My grandmother died.

I took the Empire Builder train, then walked into Glacier National Park. But, then, the only way to get up Going-to-the-Sun Road was by shuttle bus, and we got stuck in a mile-long traffic jam on the side of a mountain. So ridiculous.

Oh boy, if you’d named just about any other cheese, this sentiment would make sense, but Colby gets its orange color from the annatto added to it. Without the annatto, it’s very similar to Monterrey Jack.