That… actually makes a lot of sense. Time could just be an emergent property of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics (the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases) could then be applied to explain why time appears to only move in one direction.

While the original text neglected to specifically outline the right to vote (other than saying the states were responsible for running elections), there are six amendments to the constitution expanding and clarifying the right to vote. One of these amendments is that senators must be elected by popular vote – not out of a hat.

As far as your point about electors, that’s just for the presidential election. Most elections you vote directly for the people running for office. Sometimes you even get to directly vote on policy matters (propositions or referendums).

Is an appealing an innocent verdict not double jeopardy?

But the developers put a story/easy mode in the game. That seems intentional to me. Maybe those games just aren’t for you if the mere option of difficulty settings bothers you so much.

yeah, mycotoxins (ie: toxic byproducts from fungi/mold decomposing your food stuffs) don’t always get broken down during cooking. So, while cooking according to standard food safety specs may have killed the mold, their shit is still everywhere ready to fuck your shit up.

Not to mention that you have to survive an infection before it matters that you immune system learned to detect the infectious agent. Yes, the first inoculation techniques were literally just minor exposure to the infectious agent (eg: grinding smallpox scabs and blowing the resulting powder up the nose – wtf). While it technically worked, the mortality rate was still pretty damn high, just not quite as high as ya know getting smallpox the normal way, and thus really only used when a serious outbreak was occuring. We’ve gotten so much better at making vaccination safer and more effective, because we now know so much more about what is actually occuring biologically and know to use attenuated virus or just the benign protein coat alone to achieve results. Why would you ever want to go back to scab-snorting (or toilet licking, apparently, lol)?

I have always used an ad blocker in the browser, but i recently jumped on the DNS blocking train and it’s like a whole new kind of awesome on my phone in particular.

I use FiraCode Nerd Font Mono instead, but it also does not have a specific italic font. In my config, only the “normal” section is defined, but all my bold and/or italic text looks like it should. Apparently, alacritty will apply a heavier weight or slant to the “normal” type face if you simply omit the “bold” or “italic” sections. So, what you have right now should Just Work.

Allegedly, you can omit the “style” specification in the “italic” section (ie: just add "italic": {"family": "FiraMono Nerd Font"}, to your config snippit above), but i haven’t actually tried doing it that way.

Due to some poorly placed quotes, I managed to create a subdirectory named ~ in my home folder. You can imagine what happened next. Luckily, I had just gotten my backup system up and running the day before, so nothing was lost.

While i do think life exists elsewhere in the universe, I think the chances of extraterrestrial biological entities coming to our planet is exceedingly unlikely. Space is just too big, and there isn’t any hard evidence that faster-than-light travel is even possible.

Although, the universe isn’t just big – it’s old. There could be some ancient civilization from an ancient planet that became uninhabitable long ago. If they were technologically advanced enough to escape their solar system before things went tits-up AND were able to live multiple generations fully in space AND they just so happened to set out in our direction, I guess it’s possible that they found us. Even then, i would expect any UFOs or whatever would merely be probes, not the actual biological entities themselves.

with another deposition scheduled for Saturday… don’t forget that part. he wasn’t even done giving evidence.

Do you think that rich people should have to serve shorter prison sentences because their time is more valuable? Do you at least SEE the parallel I’m trying to draw here?

And I already admitted that I don’t know what the optimal metric is. I just know that a flat fine that is the same for everyone, without taking into account their financial situation at all, is unfair.

I agree that everyone should be equal under the law, but that doesn’t mean that fixed fines are fair. The same amount of money has a different value to different people, and that perceived value changes depending on one’s income and wealth.

IDK if you saw my edit in my previous response with the community service example, but I think that might help clear up where we’re diverging. If it takes me 10 hours of work to make enough money to pay the fine, but it takes you 100 hours of work to pay the fine for the exact same offense because our salaries are different, were we really punished equally?

1. stealing != traffic violation. while stealing may have a fine associated with it, it’s generally based on restitution for the goods stolen + legal fees etc. So, you’re moving the goal posts on me, and my feelings about how to handle theft of necessities is tangential to the discussion (for the record, my feelings are: if you see someone stealing necessities, no you didn’t).

2. You seem to not be getting that the goal should be equal deterrence regardless of income or wealth or whatever the most fair metric happens to be. IDK what the baseline fine should be, nor what the most fair way to scale the fines should be b/c i’m a chemist, not a sociologist or legal scholar. But at the end of the day, if the only punishment is a fine, the wealthy don’t have to give a shit.

Edit: for #2, let’s use time instead of money. If instead of paying a $1000 fine, you could do community service. But the “value” of your community service is tied to your wage/salary. So, someone making $10/hr has to do 100 hrs of community service, while someone else making $100/hr only has to do 10 hrs of community service. Is that still fair in your view?

if the goal of the fine is to deter people from committing a traffic violation, the person making $150k will not be equally deterred compared to the person making $75k. If the fine has too little impact, it no longer works as a deterrent. This is especially true for things like parking tickets, where you aren’t necessarily putting yourself or others in danger like you might be for speeding (though, assuming the two people only differ in their income and all other variables – like how willing they are to drive dangerously – remain equal, then the point still stands).

Is the quality not trash anymore? Maybe it’s gotten better and i didn’t notice, but music over the telephone has always sounded muddy and distorted to me.

But… you never get to hear it because when do you ever call yourself? So it’s just subjecting everyone else to a song that they may not even like… And besides, the quality was like listening to an underwater phonograph cylinder.

(obviously don’t know your music taste; you may actually have had a great song of decent quality. but i wouldn’t trust everyone with that power lol)

y’all remember the “ring back” tones? i don’t think they ever really took off since they are a ring tone that people hear when they call you instead, which is… just… totally idiotic… but i did encounter it a few times in the wild.

How much could one habanero weigh, Michael? One pound?

I was, but I’m making ANUSTART

Then you’re gonna hate my use of “lololol” instead of “hahahah”, both of which i use essentially interchangeably in texts.