Which sports team am I supposed to root for with this map? Do you expect me to make a careful analysis of team history and current lineup? Or do I pick the one in the state I was born in like a normal person?

Discovery Zone, man. I actually feel bad for the kids that never got to experience Discovery Zone. Lasted for like 2 years. It apparently failed because they had a mountain of debt (all those plastic tubes are capital intensive buildouts) and adults had to sit around while their kids played.

I feel like if you made it work like a gym membership for your kids, and had something for adults to do off to the side, you might be able to make the numbers work.

Some of that is from white balance making the top picture look warmer, but even accounting for that, it’s a tragedy.

Le right generation

Funny that they’re all in entertainment.

You’ve been experiencing a cult of an idea. The Republican party has transformed into a cult of personality with no clear successor.

There are cults of personality that have successfully transformed into a cult of ideas. Mormons and Scientology are examples. However, in each case, the person at the center fostered a clear successor, and that successor was able to make it last in the long run by centering around ideas. Scientology still has that successor around (David Miscavige), but there isn’t really a specific person in charge of the LDS. Not in the same way. Their leadership is now interchangeable, but replacing their ideas is a harder sell.

Trump has no successor, and isn’t interested in fostering one. It’s not JD Vance; nobody respects him, including Trump. It’s not Musk; he made the mistake of trying to be more popular than the boss, and he’s not a natural-born citizen, anyway. It’s not Peter Thiel; he prefers to be the power behind the throne. It’s not any of Trump’s adult children; they’re nothing but spoiled rich kids. It’s not any of the people in his cabinet; they’re all plebes using booze and cocaine to get through the day. It’s not Tucker or Matt Walsh or any of the other right-wing commentators; they’d just eat each other trying to get on top.

Oh, no, they’ll devolve into infighting. There won’t be enough shared ideals and actions to sustain Republicans as a political force. There will be fringe groups that linger on for a while. After almost three centuries, there are still two people left claiming the Shaker tradition; that’s a group that forbids sexual relations even for procreation, so you can see how they’d have trouble gaining new members. But they’re not a religious group that anyone really cares about, either. That’s how MAGA will go eventually.

See also, Knitting Cat Lady, who is a former member of the Children of God cult, then the US Army, and then got a masters in organizational psychology around cults.

Fracture to irreverence where the component pieces eat each other. There is no future for the party after Trump except as various fringe groups claiming to be the “true” party.

Channels aren’t doing that because they want to. YouTube has a lot of rules, some of which are written down. They do it because YouTube has flagged them in the past for demonetization on the issue, and they can’t afford to do that too many times. It can also impact your ability to do livestreams.

It’s on top of a pile of issues that’s making YouTube content creation non-viable for everyone.

That would probably happen as part of a narcissistic collapse. In the most extreme cases, it may trigger suicidal reactions.

That would have some significant medical ethics issues. She nearly died. Do no harm, and that’s regardless of the patient’s political ideology.

Clarence Thomas apparently said that white liberals were just as racist to him, they just did it in a more sly way. So he joined the side that made him the most money.

I can’t totally say he’s wrong.

Probably cheats with duplicate cards in Commander. On the upside, she keeps duplicating One With Nothing, so nobody calls her out.

A scripture so inconvenient that they had to spend a good chunk of the last 2,000 years contorting an explanation for why the obvious reading must be wrong.

Not necessarily a nepo hire, but they are scraping the barrel.

Project 2025’s playbook was to fire all the existing people in the federal government and replace them with Trump loyalists. To that end, they created a list of pre-vetted replacements.

Problem is, those people are vetted for loyalty first, and competence a distant second. Also, a lot of them likely have jobs already that are more lucrative than a federal position. In other cases, their circumstances change in the months in between vetting and the offer becoming concrete. So even though they may have a few thousand people on the list, a big chunk of them aren’t going to accept when the time comes. Those that do aren’t necessarily going to be qualified in any way.

What may be surprising here is that they’re scraping the bottom so quickly. You’d think out of several thousand possibilities, they could find someone more qualified than this guy.

This tends to be destructive in the short term, because incompetent people are making important decisions. In the long term, it’s one of the self-defeating factors of fascism. A system just can’t work this way, but it can destroy the rest of society before it implodes on itself.

The best examples of raytracing are in applying it to old games, like Quake II or Portal or Minecraft.

Newer games were already hitting diminishing returns on photo realism. Adding ray tracing takes them from 95% photo realistic to 96%.

Historically, this is what the NRA was for. They had basic designs setup that were very safe, and they’d offer grants to build them. There’s a local range by me (a private club, not state owned) that was developed that way. It’d be hard to shoot a bullet and have it get out of the range area.

They still kinda do it, but it looks like the industry is sending the funds on their own rather than funneling it through the NRA. Makes sense given the current state of the NRA.

Besides all the points everyone else has mentioned:

“Even if just one rapist changes his mind about raping a child, I will take that.”

Always be skeptical anytime anyone uses an argument of this form. There are tradeoffs for everything, but this phrasing only serves to stop people from weighing them fairly.

Oh, and the above quote comes from the co-sponser of the bill, who is a Democrat. Just in case you thought this was a Republican problem.

US water softeners are usually only on the hot pipe. They tend to add sodium to the water, and it’s not recommended to make it your primary drinking water source.

Southern US is the best place for developing new methods to kill yourself in delightful ways.