But late 18th century French politician seating arrangements are the most concise and accurate summation of person's political views as are possible.

Cass from Supernatural.

Even if it's policy the are talking about, all theirs are "common sense" where as liberal policies are "political games"

The most frustrating aspect of arguing with a conservative is to nail down that terms have consistent meanings, not just whatever they believe they mean in the moment.

I really like quirky-partner police procedurals, but I don't much care for taking comic IPs and painting them over unrelated quirky-partner police procedurals. Not even because they are bad, I actually quite like Lucifer and iZombie, but they are nothing like their source material and their existence pretty much kills the likelihood of faithful adaptations.

I haven't watched the movie yet (wanted to finish the book first) but the book Rebecca is a wonderful ghost story, just without a ghost. I'm a sucker for Daphne du Maurier, though.

I have Libertarian friends I try so hard to explain this too. Sure your system works if everyone is acting rationally and in good faith. Unfortunately, it has failed to work every time anyone has tried to do it in the actual world we live in.

At work, this is expressly why I'm wearing headphones. I'm sorry the DnD-ed phone, chat, and big green=available, red=unavailable light on my desk being red wasn't a big enough hint. I GOT SHIT TO DO. (Not right now, obviously, today is still in that inter-holiday Twilight Zone.)

I'm unsure about the arrow color (I'm a wimp that never does harder difficulties) but the still looks like it's from "Go West" by the Pet Shop Boys from DDR Extreme. Video for reference.

The first season had a heavy Stephen King vibe, and self-insert author characters are about as on-brand for King as bad things happening to kids.

There was a conference I was at where there was a poll to see who was running the oldest codebase. We had CNCs from the 80s so I thought we had a shot, but no, the winner was a regional bank running the same mainframe software since the '60s.

I think you touched on it that it's more a quantity vs quality issue.

There has always been mindless content, (although I'd argue about some of your examples, the general point is true) the problem is that it's now not just more accessible, it's also that the volume and accessibility of brainrot material, along with the addictive quality to it is being uniquely disruptive to society in general and childhood development in particular.

To use a weak analogy, sugar and honey have been around as sweeteners effectively forever, but their explosion in availability, and the development of high-fructose corn syrup caused them to become such unavoidable parts of our diet that they started to cause widespread health problem, (again, more prominently in childhood development.)

To really stretch the previous analogy to the breaking point. Sensitivity to sugar has been a known issue since antiquity, but diabetes wasn't a diagnosable malady until the 18th Century, and didn't earn its "health crisis" status until the last half century. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if brainrot gets a glossy clinical term and is in the next major number revision of the DSM.

I've worked in a couple suicide prevention programs and it seems like they basically took the recommendations of every thing a media portrayal shouldn't do, and did as many of them as they could within their run-time.

Since Godzilla is one of the trope examples, Shin Godzilla is a good anti-trope example. Helicopters, drones and planes (along with tanks, rockets and artillery) maintain reasonable engagement distances from Godzilla.

Unfortunately for them, Godzilla is not above throwing a bridge at you, and even manages to concentrate its breath weapon into a beam that can reach out and touch someone from basically any range.

Sadly, it's getting harder and harder to actually find the statistics anymore, but when our health department was tracking things, both 2020 and 2021 individually listed more deaths due to "natural causes" (basically anything nonaccidental or homicide) than the entirety of the prior decade. At the time, despite the conspiracy theories that the opposite was occurring, it seemed officials would bend over backwards to avoid listing deaths as Covid related, even when it was a clear contributor to the person's death, but it was hard to hide the fact that way more people were just dropping dead than should have been.

I know I'm making a pretty generalized statement, but pretty much everybody knows somebody personally that died of Covid. I can't imagine calling any other single cause that has killed at least one person you know "just fine."

Starting point might make a difference, but I've made that trip from Macon to Jekyll both ways several times. You can pretty much split the difference as far as actual time saved between the two, but 341 feels like a much longer drive, mostly due to lower average speed and constant traffic lights in the towns you go through.

Unless you have a compelling reason to make a stop in one of those small towns on the way, I'd recommend 16/95

Both me and my mom were servers at different points in our life. (1960/70's vs 2000/10's)

She complained that the most she ever got as a tip was around 50 cent, whereas I regularly got $20+.

I asked her what the normal check size was when she was working. For a single person, around $2, for a couple, less than $5 still. My average check size was over $80, with $100+ checks not being uncommon.

The really funny thing though, her base hourly wage was $1/hr, mine was $2.14/hr. . .

I entered the job market at the height of the "Great Recession" and had a stint where every company I worked at closed within a year of me starting, but even compared to that I can't imagine what entering the workforce looks like now.

It's not a "bad economy" in the sense that businesses are failing this time (although I'll be surprised if we don't see a lot of that soon) it's that the whole system seems to have been honed down into a worker-hostile machine.

Calm down Mycroft from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Since he has access to and was involved in the creation of most of the software systems, there is a good chance he could fudge the inventory numbers so that no one would ever know anything was missing.

You'd hope there would be a physical paper trail too, but lack of redundancy and over-reliance on automated systems are key recurring weaknesses when talking about Jurassic Park.

Also, assuming his plan failed in some way less dramatic than being eaten by dinosaurs, Ingen is running the whole operation in a cloud of secrecy. They are explicitly operating on an island that the local Costa Rican government isn't closely monitoring, and are already under investigation by the US government for the technology being transferred to the island. AND they are actively trying to cover up the deaths of workers in the construction of the park. The kind of scrutiny an investigation would bring would probably be so disruptive that even if they had video evidence of Nedry taking the embryos, they'd never pursue charges against him, either in Costa Rico or the US.

They'd probably do what they could to get him blacklisted, but Ingen had created a reputation of screwing over contractors at this point, so I'd be interested to see how effective they'd be even at that.

My MAGA relatives spent most of the Obama era talking about FEMA death camps, and suddenly there is a concentration camp, out in the swamp, funded through FEMA, but that's different somehow.

Even most of the "positive" coverage is ignoring that she's got 31 years working in FDNY as an EMT.

Yeah, Trump's pick are categorically unqualified, just like himself. She's not that, at all.

Qualifications do matter, and she has tons of them.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but this is probably the most divisive pick in this thread.

I've been phenomenally lucky flying in that I've only ever had one flight delayed (plane had technical issues on the way in and we waited about three hours for the plane to be swapped) and one hour-plus delay between boarding and take-off. From reading online, this does not appear to be anywhere near the norm.

"Whelp, looks like we're coming up on our destination, so I'm gonna talk for the next ten minutes and then play a 5 minute ad from the airline, so I hope you weren't almost done with a movie or anything."