Nah, Kermit has to play Wesley to Miss Piggy’s Princess Buttercup. I’d keep Andre the Giant. Or maybe Fred Savage. Statler and Waldorf would of course be the grandfather(s), and the Swedish Chef as Miracle Max. Oh, this could be good…

What a giant, extra-crispy bucket of stupid. Here’s what makes a woman: Intent.

Remember intent? It’s kind of a big thing in criminal law. It’s the difference between manslaughter and murder. We treat killing people very differently depending on the killer’s intent. Murdering for a life insurance payout? Very bad. Manslaughter with a car? No biggie. Killing an enemy in war? Laudable.

Point is, intent matters, in this and lots of other ways. So if a person intends to be a woman, she is a woman.

(And, yes, if a hen could conceptualize and express intent to be a human woman, I say that we should consider her as such. Shit, The Android Who Wants to be Human is a well-worn sci-fi trope, so why not a biological organism, too?)

Well, I mean we currently give them a badge and a gun and pay repeat offenders to repeatedly offend.

Yes, try the Sonoff ZBMINIL2 device, which does exactly what you want. Wire it in the box with your existing switch, then you can control the light with either the switch, or via HA. If you have a neutral wire in the electrical box, there’s also the ZBMINIR2, which has a relay-disconnect feature. In that mode, it provides continuous power to the the bulb, and sends switch-toggle events to HA to trigger an automation to turn the smart bulb on and off.

I’ll take your word for it, because it would be awfully hard to compare it to other billiard balls after we’d asphyxiated from the atmosphere dissipating into space.

Connections Puzzle #920
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟪🟪🟪🟪

Funny how the difficulty of this puzzle varies so much between people. I had green and yellow on the first read-through, which made blue a snap, but I’m still not clear on WTF purple was.

Here is osmium, a framework and tool to work with OpenStreetMap data.

Here ya go.

I’m not a gamer, so I had to look up the definition of a third-person shooter. It seems like very poor terminology; it’s actually a second-person shooter. There’s the player (1st) giving commands to an on-screen avatar (2nd). Where’s the 3rd person?

I’m thinking a true third-person shooter would consist of an NPC shooting at your unarmed avatar?

By the time I left r/fuckcars, people were asking this question several times per day, or every 15-20 minutes at peak times. I recall that the moderators had an auto-mod bot that would respond, and my paraphrase of it is something like this:

We don’t hate the cars, per se, but rather the physical, environmental, and social destruction wrought by designing all aspects of daily life around their use (to the near-exclusion of anything else). Small, cheap, utilitarian motorcycles are better than cars in a lot of ways (space, cost, fuel economy), and worse in others (noise, pollution). They’re fine, as long as the riders aren’t demanding that the entire landscape and society be structured and built to cater to their machines.

That’s brilliant! Now, when users replace their phone, they also have to replace a second device. Hooray for planned obsolescence!

Quite a few of them actually do have public transit in the form of shuttle buses.

Seems like Germany could save a lot.of.money by not building lanes that you’re not allowed to drive in!

That’s utterly ridiculous. If the highway has three lanes, it’s because on average there’s too much traffic for two lanes. That’s why they added a third lane. What—the left lane is for passing, the right lane is for cruising, and the middle lane is for decoration?

I don’t see how it could be made better without having to do billions or trillions of taxpayer-funded upgrades to every road

This seems like a good-faith comment, so I’ll try to keep the snark to a minimum. Honestly, when I hear this sentiment, I think that somebody believes that roads are naturally-occurring phenomena. They just sort of… grow? appear? form from the bedrock?

Good lord, no! Roads are highly resource-intensive structures, and roads for cars have a finite lifetime, typically figured in the range of about 30 years before they have to be re-constructed. And that’s not counting perhaps several rounds of re-surfacing and maintenance in that span. In fact, Strong Towns often points out that when businesses acquire a capital asset, they have to book the cost of future maintenance as a liability. Municipal governments, by contrast, book roads as an asset, and ignore the future maintenance liability. If they followed GAAP, most cities and towns would be bankrupt. Hence, the reason the American Society of Civil Engineers grades our roads as D+. As a country, we keep building roads that we can’t afford to fix.

That is a long way of saying, “We have a backlog of trillions of dollars of maintenance to roads already!” They have to be re-built regularly, anyway, and lots are overdue. One of the major reasons that we can’t afford to do it, and the reason that there are so many lane-miles of road to maintain, is cars. The simple geometry of the space needed for cars means that everything has to be far apart in order to fit the roads, and the parking lots, and the drive-thrus in between.

So, we’re on the hook for a backlog of trillions of dollars of taxpayer-funded basic maintenance to roads, and we can’t afford it. Wouldn’t it be better to re-construct our cities and towns—which again, have to be re-constructed no matter what—around more opportunities for walking, biking, or transit? It would be way cheaper. And without all that pavement for cars, we could put things closer together. Walking to the local grocery would be convenient, because the nearest grocery wouldn’t have to be 5 miles away, on the edge of town, where land for a parking lot is cheap enough. We could be healthier, stopping by the grocery for a few minutes on the way home a couple of times a week to pick up fresh, healthy ingredients, instead of loading up the car with a pallet of highly-processed food from CostCo every two weeks. We could have better weak ties with neighbors by seeing them from time to time at nearby places, which science shows is critical to addressing our mental health crisis. We could let our children, elderly, and disabled people have independence again. And the buses could be fast and convenient, if they didn’t have to go so far and get stuck in private car traffic all the way.

Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough, but I hope that this is a peek at just how bad our car-based system is, and how it could be made better, and for cheaper.

In environmental conservation, there’s an old saw about how we’re really good at preserving rocks and ice, i.e. places we can’t make productive use of anyway. I’ve noticed exactly the same effect in urban planning: We’re pretty good about prioritizing bike and pedestrian access where it doesn’t affect drivers, i.e. places hardly anybody wants to go.

Feh. Goldfish have a better memory than the corporate media. Sleepy Don’s brain is so far gone that he agrees with the last person who talked to him. Witness his whiplashes back and forth on Ukraine depending on whether he talked to Putin or Zelensky last. I guess it makes good headlines when he likes Mamdani briefly. At least, I hope to hear the reaction from the MAGA crowd before his handlers can get to him.

No, that explanation fails on the face of it. If that were the case, then why the furious opposition whenever such infrastructure is proposed?

And that forces you to treat people without cars as sub-human? No sympathy, or even empathy, for people who have to navigate such a landscape without one?

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