You include car safety features in your list of reasons that you think the EU is going to collapse?

I hate to tell you, but you might be onto a losing battle. It’s been a mandatory safety feature on all new cars in the EU for a few years now.

Black Books (s1e4). It’s a daft Father Ted / IT Crowd style comedy.

The main character’s posh friends are angry at him for being extremely drunk at a dinner party and traumatising their son, who has been walking around with a shocked open-mouthed expression ever since walking in on him going to the toilet in their kitchen. He tries to downplay it by saying that’s how children normally look.

“What? What? He looks surprised. All children look surprised. Everything’s new to them.”

FWIW, the UK currently has a bill in place that will lower the voting age to 16 before the next General Election (so, before Aug 2029).

I think it’ll be a good thing. Young people are a good deal more aware of what’s happening in the country than old people are. I mean, the current arrangement has stripped away the housing and career prospects of young people and brought us to the verge of fascism again.

For information based things, absolutely.

Something that people don’t seem to understand is that there’s a difference between AI and GenAI.

And that within GenAI, there’s low cost stuff like text and graphics, and high cost like video and audio.

And that with tools developed with GenAI often do not use GenAI when it is run.

AI is super useful and you use it in a bunch of applications already without even realising it. The camera that interprets speed signs and displays them on your dashboard = AI. Spam filters = AI. Google translate = AI.

I don’t know what you think my greater point was, maybe you’ve accidentally conflated me with another poster.

My point actually is that these are not unprecedented rates. These are entirely precedented rates. This is gross capitalism destroying the world as gross capitalism always does. What you’ve lost sight of, though, is the respective scale of things.

As I said, the US alone needlessly wastes vastly more energy and water than the entire world’s usage of AI consumes. For energy, it’s several times more, for water it’s orders of magnitude more.

You make out that solving these massive problems is impossible, so instead you’re railing against AI. Which of course is your prerogative, but just remember that there are much bigger wins out there.

There is a point there, though.

American cars are much less efficient than European ones.

The amount of water required for AI data centres worldwide is more than an order of magnitude lower than the water required for just corn in the US alone. Only a small fraction of which actually gets used for food.

The average energy usage per person in the US is nearly three times higher than someone in the UK.

The environmental cost of data centres is absolutely a concern, but we shouldn’t forget the US alone wastes more energy and resources than are used by data centres worldwide.

Perfect choice of title

This was my immediate thought too.

OP - it’s not that uncommon, and is totally treatable.

It’s just some muscles involuntary tensing up as a result of something going inside (or sometimes even the idea). Unfortunately, because it’s an involuntary reflex, you can’t “just relax” it away. It’s just something your body needs to unlearn.

Talk to your doctor, follow their advice.

For what it’s worth, both of the people I knew who had it when they were younger, once it was sorted, it stayed sorted.

Survivor bias is definitely a major factor here - I can vaguely remember at least a dozen sitcoms from my childhood and early adulthood that didn’t survive (or got soft-rebooted into something better).

We do capitalise community names though - like deaf vs Deaf.

This is the same, it’s not being used as a description of how someone looks, but to what community they belong.

Mitchell and Webb did a terrific sketch on this concept.

Mitchell and Webb - Advertising

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There are two different things coming into play here.

First of all, hair length evolved before long hair did.

Modern humans originally evolved tightly curled hair. Basically like we still see in many African populations. It’s thought that this was an adaptation to protect against the heat of the sun. Basically like an insulated sun hat. The longer this curly hair grew, the more protection our natural hat provided.

As homo-sapiens populations moved further North, this protection was no longer needed - in fact there was the opposite problem, it was cold and rainy.

Greasy straight hair offers an advantage over curly hair in this kind of environment. It acts like a waterproof blanket, preventing the skin beneath getting wet, and it dries more quickly. Heat is lost through wet skin significantly faster than dry skin, and in situations where energy sources might be hard to come by in winter months, this can be a disadvantage.

We already had hair length sorted, so it was simply a matter of reacquiring the straight hair shape.

Europeans got a leg-up in this regard - Neanderthals appear to have had straight hair, and interbreeding definitely occurred. At this point it’s worth remembering that by the time anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa, earlier hominids were already living all over Africa, Europe and Asia. Neanderthals were very similar to modern humans and shared an extremely close common ancestor.

And this is how, and why, some homo sapiens populations have long straight hair.

I won’t touch on the points covered by the other replies because they’ve explained it perfectly. I think you’re confused about the divorce thing, though.

It was King Henry VIII who founded the church of England to allow him to get a divorce. But his version of the church was essentially identical to Catholicism but with the king instead of the pope.

His great great grandson, King James VI / I actually cared about religion and reforming the church. He supported the idea that everyone should be able to actually understand the scripture, instead of just the elites and clergy. That’s why he sponsored the King James Bible. He was also very anti-Catholic and, as a direct result, was targeted in the Gunpowder Plot.

I did not know I needed this in my life until you posted it. Thanks so much - I’m going through all the old posts now!

I sometimes wonder what became of them. I like to think they finally bought a second cup so they didn’t have to share anymore.

Putting all patriotism aside, I don’t think there’s any reality in which the US uses its potential to make the world a better place.

The big difference nowadays is that it’s become patently clear that the US government isn’t even trying to make the US a better place.

I make my bed purely because my wife likes it that way. I’m not bothered either way, but I do it because it’s important to her.

She wakes up before I do and goes to bed before I do. I make the bed nice and tidy when I eventually wake up so she has a nice neat bed to climb into at night.