Why did I mentally read that as “almonds” with an s at the front?

Mysterious ways, I tells ya!

Y’know… I’d have found all this “coconuts floated from Asia to the Caribbean” stuff pretty far fetched…

But not two years ago I was fishing, and a goddamn coconut floated right down and bumped me in the leg.

In the Monongahela River.

In Pittsburgh.

For a few years, it seemed like everyone I knew who has having a little girl was naming them after old presidents.

So many Kennedys and Reagans and Madisons…

My girlfriend at the time did really like “Madison”, but I told her if we were ever to have a little girl and we’re gonna name her after a former president, we’re gonna have a little Eisenhower running around.

She laughed (as was the intention) but agreed the trend was a little ridiculous.

The only thing I know about vesicles is that microvesicles are gross… thanks to paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler.

What little blue house?

I get the concern, and it’s a good concern to have when you’re talking about what would be such a huge shift in so many ecosystems…

…buuuuuut…

I have to believe this change would happen slowly… mosquitoes wouldn’t just go extinct over a holiday weekend. It’d take years, if not decades, of dedication to the eradication strategy and even then, certain populations may prove immune to the best efforts of science.

That being said, even if it did execute as planned, I feel like the gradual decline of the mosquito would coincide with a gradual increase in other invertebrate species that would fill that niche. So as mosquito populations slowly declined in a local pond or creek, you’d see things like say chironomids (midges) thriving with the reduced competition for habitat, and the fish that ate mosquito larvae replacing that part of their diet with more midges.

Not saying there couldn’t be other complications, but I don’t think we’d see results fast enough that we’d end up with a broken link of the food chain leading to ecosystem collapse.

Share your art, not your fart!

Which is why there should be legal mechanisms to place legal responsibility for decisions like this personally on those in leadership positions when they’re being made, even if those people no longer hold those positions.

You bet your ass the chucklefucks who came up with this little stunt would’ve thought twice about it if they knew that there was a decent chance they’d go to prison for it.

Also gotta make this shit sting the shareholders too: make the company pay the victims not only the estimated value of their data but also a portion of all profits made while a policy like this is in effect. Since there’s no easy way to tell how much money was made off their data, unless the company has the numbers, let’s say half.

Suddenly the quarterly report’s got a nice repayment shaped dent in its side and all the sudden the shareholders care about following the law and respecting the rights of customers.

Maybe not the best parallel but a good point nonetheless.

A more apt comparison might be:

“What’s the best all-beef hot dog I can buy at my local supermarket?”

“Ugh! OMG! Don’t do that to yourself! Why would you even want to bother with eating beef if that’s the shit you’re going to put in your body?! Just get some Japanese A5 Wagyu ribeye and thank me later!”

Also wild seeing this…I had never heard of them till I started dating my gf. She and most of her friends are big fans and I just saw them live a few weeks ago.

The amount of times I’ve struggled when setting up monitors over the past 5 years with HDMI and DP…only to have them eventually work in a way I had it previously when it wouldn’t…is too damn high.

I feel like AIM was the de facto god-emperor of IM platforms and the rest were just also-rans.

Maybe that was just my experience tho, but I feel like ICQ and IRC were older but more clunky, MSN and Yahoo were newer or contemporary but less dependable and had less buy in from the community.

I think you’d be cutting out a significant portion of the workforce by excluding those in early adulthood.

I’m guessing their position is very much “oh they still need to work and pay taxes…and they shouldn’t expect any more support than they currently have in order to do so…but they need to figure out how to manage it all without driving, and they should be disenfranchised as well”.

There’s more than one specific topic covered in sex ed.

We teach math to children, but nobody is suggesting that you need to get your toddler into differential equations.

Also, for many areas, a vehicle is a necessity of adult life.

If you’re not letting kids drive at 16, then for that *almost-*decade until they’re 25 you’d better provide free transportation as well.

Since that’s not about to happen, leave it as it is.

While I personally agree with most of what you said, I disagree with your assertion as to the reaction you’ll get from peers.

We’ve made admitting mistakes worse than the mistake itself these days, and it’s slowly unraveling accountability.

I associate this with boomers more than kids, but that’s subjective since an old former friend I know always used to do it.

They also used “seen” instead of “saw”, as in, “I seen dark clouds so I closed the windows.” which is like nails on a chalkboard to me.

More great points, I agree.

Also…it might just be me, but I find that I subconsciously have more respect for a person, both as a person and as a reliable source of information, if they present things with qualification, as you suggest. To me, it’s a sign of humility and an indication of an appreciation for the complexity of any given subject if someone is knowledgeable enough to both field questions and demonstrate proficiency while also being careful to qualify and delineate between what’s fact, what’s generally accepted, what’s their understanding, and what’s their opinion or guess.

I listened to a podcast last year about TOP GUN instructors and the grueling process they go through to become subject matter experts in their specific subject, and one of the things that stuck out to me was that they’re less worried about being right all the time and more worried about three qualities: being knowledgeable, approachable, and humble…with the understanding that with those three qualities, you’re going to eventually get to the point where you’re almost always right, with the added benefit that you’ve trained yourself to remove ego from the equation, so you’re less likely to fall prey to the trap of clinging to bad information/belief/assumption just because you want to look correct.

I’m glad you addressed the aversion to being wrong because I think that’s part of the core of what’s causing so many problems in America today (and maybe other places, but I can only speak to my own familiarity).

I feel like as a society we have created an environment where we demonstrate and reinforce to children from like kindergarten onward that the worst thing you can possibly do is be wrong. Someone who is always right is seen as smart, capable…in short, a winner.

Conversely, if you’re ever wrong, that completely and permanently undoes your entire argument/position and not only that, but you’re branded as unreliable/untrustworthy, uninformed, stupid, dishonest, or naive.

We expect perfection in correctness, and while being right is the expectation, being wrong is a permanent black mark that is treated as a more serious negative than being right is considered as a positive. Nobody just assumes that if you’re right about one thing that you’ll be right about all things, but if you get something wrong, there’s a very real shift toward double-checking or verifying anything else that comes after.

We even tease friends, family, and children for mispronouncing words or singing incorrect lyrics. Basically, being incorrect is so stigmatized that we reinforce to everyone, children and adults alike, that it’s better to not even try…not even make an attempt or join into a conversation…than to risk being wrong. When someone is wrong we use words like “admit” like it’s a crime, or admit defeat…and that just creates an environment where nobody is ever encouraged to speak up about anything for fear of (gasp!) being wrong.

And now we’re coming full circle on this at the highest levels, with our leaders being blatantly and objectively wrong…and absolutely dead set on avoiding having to admit that at all costs, setting a precedent that has oozed into even casual discourse among regular people. It seems like it used to be that being wrong was bad enough, but to dig in and refuse to admit it was even worse…lately it seems that admitting you were wrong is now even worse than doubling down on it…so now we have a situation where we can’t even agree on basic facts because one or more sides will be wrong but would rather insist on their position than just acknowledge​ they were incorrect.