Wood is biodegradable. But biodegradable doesn’t mean “constantly degrading.” Wood is good for centuries as long as it is kept dry. A great deal of building technique is about ensuring that, so you can use this light, strong material that literally grows on trees.

You’re not wrong, but that’s what science and research ARE. If you want engineering and commercialization, go subscribe to those communities, not “science.”

I miss the minutes when this term was just used unironically and hadn’t yet become a magat slur.

Show zero tolerance for others speaking in favor of it. You don’t have to win every argument. You have to let them know that their “political beliefs” are fighting words and they’re going to get a fight whenever they try to speak them.

Yep, convenience of plopping the phone down really is 100% of it for me. Especially with Apple’s magnets setup, it’s a one-hand, one-second operation, and then the phone is standing at attention on its cradle stand. The thought of having a dangling cable on my desk and picking it up and fiddling to plug it in then laying the phone flat seems like something from 10 years ago. I’ve even forgotten once or twice what kind of port my phone has.

“Source of all problems?” If you exaggerate it right in your question and then ask if it’s exaggerated, of course the answer will be yes.

“It’s just a tool” yes and when people say “social media” they mean the whole combination of the tools and how they are getting used. The whole “it’s just a tool” argument isn’t worth much. Yes, it is, and now that it’s been let loose in the world, we see how it is being used.

A match is “just a tool” but in a forest that’s dripping with gasoline, you can see how that tool will do exactly one job.

Elon held an all hands at the company to announce “I’m back in charge” and the financial press are reporting that “the markets rewarded it.” Meaning the stock went up. Which makes me want to puke.

That’s disgusting. I can set time delay on my 10yo Bosch at the push of a physical button.

A 14yo was the first to fire at Marshalls at Ruby Ridge.

Forgive him for what? I recall there was drama around this show but I legit couldn’t understand what actually happened.

I’d rather do that than arm people with assault rifles so they can live in remote rural areas where herds of feral pigs are an issue. Yes this is an actual argument people make in favor of keeping assault rifles legal. “What if I need to stop a stampede of 80 feral hogs? This is a weekly occurrence on my property.”

Frankly, if feral hogs have you running scared, it’s not your property, it’s theirs.

Yeah OP needs to define what “slow” means to them. You could say that a one-week delayed effect is slow. Or you could say that it’s only slow if it takes months of exposure.

I’ve never seen anyone even think twice about the Tears of Lys or The Strangler. And after Milk of the Poppy, it’s established that we may expect some similarity to reality in this world.

Because yeah, sugar just isn’t cheap enough in America.

This. This. This.

Everyone should watch this. Even people who know about rank choice voting.

Reality

That Hardiman version is the only kind I understand, where it’s basically a freestanding robot that a human gets inside.

Others if the variety that you strap on worry me. Elderly people have weaker bones and cartilage. Having something apply force to the skeleton itself to do work seems dangerous.

Forgive me but I wanted to nitpick all those examples

Cantonese is not a dialect of Madarin. It’s a distinct language, just a smaller one.

Standard Arabic is not actually spoken anywhere, and is primarily a written form. Egyptian pronunciations ARE commonly taught, not only because Egypt is big but because, with Egypt’s large entertainment sector, they have exported their pronunciations around the world in TV and movies.

British English is taught largely as a colonial legacy, not because England predates the US and Australia in history and is therefore considered “standard.”

While all of these secondary examples are flawed, IMO, I believe you’re actually right about Castilian Spanish. It’s simply more of an individual case than part of a common pattern.

I can’t argue with the notion that we’re worse at finding information through other means. I’d just say that’s the way times change, though.

I’m reading Henry Huggins to my son right now and in it, a boy needs to find out how to take care of a fish he’s bought. He waits for his dad to come home in order to ask him, and when dad doesn’t know, they go on a trip to the library. The librarian has a little trouble figuring out where the right book might be, and ultimately can only find him one that he needs adult help to read.

And that’s a success story for those times.

While we’re certainly worse at things like that these days, we’re better off in other ways that more than compensate IMO. It’s still good to know how to resort to books, but I think it’s romantic to bemoan the options for learning nowadays (not that you are doing that).

Good points.

I do think It’s been a longer road to where we are than most people realize. Conservative talk radio and Christian AM radio had been peddling disinformation, outrage, and conspiracies for decades prior to the Internet. That really paved the way for today’s bullshit, and the prevalence of podcasts in the conservative media wackosphere helps show that.

I think his point is that the more people conflate their social media algorithms with the internet, the less able they become to do some basic research.

I guess that didn’t come through very clearly for me. Does using Instagram actually harm people’s Googling skills? This is a bold claim, and while interesting, was not founded on any evidence. I could tell he’s concerned this might be the case but he didn’t have any particular knowledge of this to present. Which is odd, because he typically has extensive knowledge about what he’s presenting.

It was a bit of an odd video for him. That’s fine. He’s more than earned the right to the occasional weird editorial.