Proposed reform measure: Just like teachers have to buy classroom supplies out-of-pocket, have police officers buy their own ammo.

I read it as cutting through the spin. We use contemporary words like overnight oats, instead of words like gruel that have strong connotations of poverty, for essentially the same food, to obscure the fact that we are the same working class as medieval peasants were. There’s nothing wrong with gruel; and we’re just not as far removed from peasantry as we’ve been led to believe.

I believe that the OP means the Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act of 1988, which effectively bans kei trucks from import into the U.S. because they’re not manufactured to the Act’s standards.

Or, perhaps the Chicken Tax, a 25% tariff imposed on the import of light trucks in 1964 as part of trade dispute with Europe. It’s still in effect, shielding American manufacturers from competition from smaller, lighter trucks.

Nah, like 50% of it is just telling people to restart their computers.

Salt is a preservative, so salted butter will last quite a lot longer when unrefrigerated.

Scenario: I want to call a friend in Bulgaria. It’s 11:23AM GMT. What’s he likely to be doing right now? With timezones, I can quickly calculate that it’s 2:23PM local time, and intuitively know. Without, I’d have to look up a timetable of daily activities in Sofia.

I guess if I called regularly, I could memorize the timetable, or maybe roughly calculate an offset in hours to add or subtract from GMT to intuitively relate his schedule to mine. For example, my dinner time is about 11PM GMT, so his dinner time is about 7AM GMT.

But, I wonder, if I went there to visit, would it be easier to memorize the local timetable, or just do the math when I check the time?

I would make the written English language 100% phonetic.

Nobody speaks written English, so how do we know it’s not already phonetic?

Well, the chief of police in my city did this (accidental discharge of gun in the oven) once, so make of that what you will. He did have the integrity to discipline himself, per department policy.

Almost literally true, which is why it makes a great response to OP’s question.

Oh, hell, classes just resumed at the university here, so the new batch of freshmen is here, and some days I feel like it. But I don’t count the Cold War as a war, just like the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Yes, that’s what I see, that’s clearly what he’s doing. The difference is that in 2016, he was able to retain in long-term memory what didn’t work, and had the mental flexibility to try out new bits to find things that did. Now, he keeps going back to the same dry well over and over again, in every speech, which is evidence that he’s losing it. (As further evidence, I’d point out that this is consistent with the amount of time it took him to grasp that he wasn’t running against Biden anymore.)

When I was born, the United States wasn’t involved in a war.

Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it’s just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:

That’s not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?

I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven’t tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you’re going to do do all of them. (But then, they’re idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)

That’s true, but our theory of physics is far more complex than those simple patterns. It actually consists of many, many interrelated theories that mutually reinforce each other. And that so many of them describe phenomena described with c as a term strongly indicates the speed of causality of pretty fundamental.

In any case, I’d be very interested to learn how it shakes out, but I probably won’t be around in 300 years to do so!

Ah, but “major technological breakthroughs” != “major technological breakthroughs concerning faster-than-light travel”. Certainly, there will be more of the former in the next 300 years, but our understanding of physics precludes the latter.

The quality of our understanding of physics is proved by the technological advances that we’ve already made with it. Yes, we’re missing some major pieces, like how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics (how to quantize gravity), but the problem that physicists face on this front is actually how stunningly well the Standard Model holds up, and has so far resisted attempts to break it. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll discover anything which completely upends the laws of physics as we know them.

Honestly, I feel like too many people have a cognitive bias from living in a time of unparalleled technological advancement. We’ve gone from, e.g. mechanical chronometers to calculate longitude on wooden vessels propelled by the wind to GPS-guided international flights in a historical blink of an eye. The pace of technological change even in living memory has been immense.

Not knowing how any of it works, it’s easy to think of it akin to magic, and to extrapolate from “18th century humans -> 21st century humans” to “21st century humans -> alien technology”. The catch is that this technological surge has come about because we’ve figured out how the physical universe works, not in spite of missing out on big chunks of potential knowledge.

All of our technology has plumbed the depths of our physical, scientific knowledge. The same physical knowledge that allows us to do wonders also shows us the limits, and provides the definitive answers as to why there’s not “alien technology” out there that would seem like magic to us.

Put another way, it would be really bonkers if the scientific knowledge that has enabled us to do so many practical things, like create tiny devices like the one I’m using to tap out a message, was somehow totally wrong.

No, Ford sells the F750 as a cab-and-frame to companies that use the chassis as the platform for building utility vehicles. That image is a custom creation.

Indeed. Notice, too, that the concerns about Biden’s cognitive abilities have instantly stopped? He’s still the President, and still in charge of the nukes. But no more news stories.

Meanwhile, the other guy has recently developed a habit of swearing at rallies, and there are a few articles about his wife asking him to knock it off, but nothing pointing out that a sudden increase in swearing is a symptom of dementia. At a town hall in La Crosse, WI the other day, he didn’t know why he was there at first. Still radio silence from the news media.

Funny, isn’t it?

This to me comes across as reaching: It’s easy to design streets that are for people, but accommodate the occasional delivery vehicle, or ambulance. (A standard ambulance is only about 8 feet wide.) How often are people buying new couches or having heart attacks, anyway? We also don’t need most of the road infrastructure for transport of goods, and service vehicles. Every city street, county road, state highway, or Interstate highway that I’ve ever driven on, anywhere, has a vast majority of consisting of personal vehicles, with the exception of I-80/94 through Gary, Indiana. Freight-carrying trucks aren’t even allowed in the 3rd, left-most lane most of the time. Suburban streets are crazy wide; much wider than needed for freight delivery, or even the large units that fire officials insist upon. Smaller fire trucks exist, too, and are very effective where they are used. And, even if subgrade detention is the best solution in a particular situation, something like, say, a park can go on top, and offer much better infiltration than a parking lot. I know of stormwater vaults in large buildings, so they don’t necessarily preclude buildings on a site. In any case, how many parking lots have a detention basin underneath?

Lastly, you’re severely misrepresenting my point of view by comparing to wailing, “cars bad,” and thinking that’s a solution. No, I look to solutions that cities around the world (including my own, in some limited cases) have actually, successfully implemented. Adding lanes is the only politically viable solution sometimes, but it mostly just makes the problems worse in the long-run.

Hahaha, that is an amazing bifurcation fallacy! Cars or feudalism. Amazing then that Americans settled a whole continent without cars.

That aside, the truism in real estate is that the three most important characteristics of a property are: location, location, and location. Land in cities is always more expensive because its value is very closely tied up with the things it’s close to. In that sense, auto-oriented development is a massive theft of value, because everything in cities has to be further apart than it otherwise would be, in order to accommodate wide streets, and parking spaces.

Less philosophically, “more expensive” is a scale, not an absolute condition. If all of that space currently devoted to speedy car travel in cities were instead available for people to live in, yes, the central city would be the highest demand, and the most expensive. But the spatial scale of cost would be very different. My grocery store co-workers would still live on the edges, but the edges could be only a mile or two away, not 15 miles away. That, and lots of cities wouldn’t be structurally insolvent due to all the infrastructure they need to pay for.

(That last bit is a sore point for me, as city is facing a $22 million budget deficit, and they’re considering cutting things like emergency services, or even the municipal pool. While the water utility shores up century-old pipes, we’re still subsidizing the parking utility.)