Systematically driving down the wages of the people you expect to catch a bullet for you by gig-ifying their industry seems like a pretty terrible idea if you’re someone who depends on armed security for your continued existence.

I guess I’ll go make some popcorn.

Not off the top of my head, but the paint color is called “TV Yellow.”

Those old black and white television cameras had a lot of limitations. For instance, things that were white and glossy would cause an extra-bright flare effect that would leave trails across the screen whenever it moved, and it was even worse on video. Guitar companies had to invent a brand new shade of yellow for musicians who performed on TV that still looked white on camera, but didn’t light up like a road flare under the studio lights.

Which is a long way of saying that when it comes to those old cameras I would expect the light from a blowtorch to cause some weird artifacts.

Got suspended in 8th grade for “smoking on school grounds” because I stood outside the front door finishing my fruit snacks before I walked into the school (we weren’t supposed to have snacks outside designated food areas). Some rocket scientist of a teacher saw me standing by the door with my hand occasionally going up to my mouth (I think it may have been cold enough outside to make my breath steam) and said, “AHA! This child is smoking!”

She literally grabbed me by my collar and dragged me to the assistant principal’s office. Multiple other kids, and an adult who must have been someone’s mom, told her I wasn’t smoking, but she wasn’t having any of it. And the assistant principal just believed her out of hand. Wouldn’t even let me finish a sentence to say something in my own defense.

They had the security guard escort me off school grounds. And I just stood there for a while looking back at the school, still holding my fruit snacks, trying to figure out wtf just happened.

I pretty much checked out mentally after that. That kind of stuff ended up being pretty much par for the course. I hung out with the metal/punk/skater/stoner/goth crowd, and that was some kind of unforgivable sin at that school. My friends and I were constantly being singled out for minor or imagined infractions and never believed or given the benefit of the doubt. I went from a 3.8 gpa to something like 0.6 that year. I’d have to sit through all these meetings about how I was “so smart,” and how “I could go so far if only I would apply myself.” And I’d straight up tell them what was going on, and they’d be like, “It’s just a mystery why you won’t apply yourself.”

It’s been like 30 years and I’m still mad about that shit.

CFPB = Consumer Finance Protection Bureau

It’s not plagiarism. The songs themselves are obviously completely different. Making an engine noise was one in a pretty standard set of whammy bar tricks that was pretty ubiquitous when guitars with Floyd Rose tremolo systems became popular in the 1980s. So many people discovered this trick independent of each other that nobody can credibly claim to have invented it. It was so common at the time as to be generic and kind of hacky.

In other words, it’s a piece of guitar technique and not an element that can be copyrighted. Which is good because music would become insufferably boring very quickly if musicians weren’t allowed to learn and iterate on each other’s technique.

One element to a good sense of humor that most of the other posts failed to mention is the ability to laugh at yourself.

Lots of people with bad senses of humor think they have a good one because they have a favorite comedian who makes them laugh, or think they have a good sense of humor because they’re quick to laugh at someone else when they do something silly or stupid. But when they’re the person being laughed at for doing something dumb, they’ll become furious and storm off, and maybe hold grudges against people who laughed at them.

Someone with a good sense of humor will be able to see what’s funny about what they did and be able to laugh along with everyone else, even if they feel kind of embarrassed.

GWAR in the '90s was definitely something to behold.

Probably showing my age here, but OK Soda. That stuff was great.

Close runner up was Josta, which was briefly the official drink of GWAR (at least according to GWAR).

Great Britain is the big island of the UK which contains England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom is Great Britain plus the six counties of Northern Ireland, The Isle of Man, and (I think) some of the islands in the English Channel.

A Briton is a person from Britain.

IDK, man. Canada be weird sometimes.

Yes, it’s its own country.

Canada, along with Australia and a bunch of other former colonies, belong to what’s known as the Commonwealth, of which the British monarch is the head. It’s basically an association of countries that used to be ruled by Britain, but Britain no longer has a say in their laws or how they’re governed.

Australia didn’t have a revolution. Australian independence was a long process that lasted from 1901 to 1986. You may want to check the “The steps to full sovereignty” section of the “History of Australia” wikipedia article.

No, Britain is not all the same country. As previously stated, the island of the Britain is England, Scotland, and Wales, which are separate countries, but members of the United Kingdom, and are governed by the UK Parliament. The six Irish counties that make up Northern Ireland is still part of the UK. The rest of the Ireland, known as The Republic of Ireland, is very much not part of the UK. They did have a revolution, and won independence in 1922.

The Democrats have had an entire decade to offer some kind of meaningful opposition and didn’t bother. Why would they start now?

The frustrating thing is that Trump didn’t even get more votes this election than he did last election. There wasn’t a bunch of new Trump voters that came out of the woodwork and turned the tide. He was absolutely beatable. He only won because 15 million of the people who voted for Biden last election just didn’t bother this time.

Where I live we have a thing called BallotTrax. You sign up once and it automatically sends you notifications for that stuff so you don’t have to remember to check. I really like it.

In the Wizard of Oz, Glenda the “Good” Witch is actually a ruthless drug kingpin.

She used her magic powers to summon a tornado and then merks the Wicked Witch of the East with Dorothy’s house. She then puts WWotE’s shoes on Dorothy in order to make her a target for WWotE’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West. Glenda then uses Dorothy as a stooge to bump off WWotW, thereby putting herself in control of Oz’s vast fields of opium poppies, and cornering the entire opium trade.

It doesn’t make sense any other way. Glenda could have told Dorothy to use the ruby slippers to get home at literally any point, but instead sends her on a wild goose chase, and uses her as a blunt instrument to take out the only other bases of power remaining in Oz: the WWotW, and the Wizard, who Dorothy exposes as a fraud. Only then does she tell Dorothy to click her heels, and poof: everything is all wrapped up with a bow, and Glenda’s hands are clean. Her two main rivals are dead, and the Wizard is fleeing Oz in disgrace.

It’s some fucking Kaiser Söze level shit.

In my state (Colorado) early voting works exactly like regular voting, just, you know, earlier. Registered voters get their ballots automatically sent to them in the mail. You can return your ballot by mail, drop it off at an official drop box, drop it off at a voting location, or you can show up at one of the early voting locations in your county and vote in person the traditional way if you prefer that. Right now in my county there are six locations where you can do in-person early voting. There will be orders of magnitude more in-person voting locations open on the day of the election, but I think most people choose return their ballots by mail or drop box.

Every voting/counting location is staffed with a bipartisan team of election judges, and election observers. I believe the locations are run by paid county officials, but largely staffed by volunteers who have completed a training program. I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of volunteers

The voting drop boxes are big reinforced steel boxes which are securely anchored into concrete. You would need some seriously heavy duty cutting tools to get one open without the key. They are placed in front of city offices like City Hall, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the city library. They’re usually in open high traffic areas, and are under 24/7 video surveillance. I believe they’re also emptied multiple times per day. I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to tamper with, but it would be extremely difficult to do so and get away with it. To my knowledge, so far nobody has tried. I’m not actually sure what it would really accomplish. I guess you could destroy ballots, but stuffing one with counterfeit ballots would probably be caught almost immediately.

There’s a pretty robust system in place to track who has cast a ballot, how, when, and where. If multiple ballots show up in the name of the same voter, that gets automatically flagged and triggers a fraud investigation. Also there’s signature verification system. Every ballot that’s returned by mail or drop box must be returned in its security envelope, which has the name of the voter and several unique QR and bar codes containing information tying that envelope to that specific voter. This envelope must be signed by the voter for the ballot to be counted. If the signature on the security envelope doesn’t match the signature on file, the ballot gets flagged for investigation, and doesn’t get counted until the voter can be contacted to verify it was them casting the ballot and not someone pretending to be them. Voter fraud is really pretty rare here, but it’s taken very seriously, and gets seriously investigated. When it does happen it’s usually someone trying to cast the ballot of a deceased spouse, or family member, and even that usually gets caught.

There are a lot of safeguards and redundancies in place here that make getting away with voter fraud extremely difficult, but lot of the reason why our system works as well as it does is that people genuinely care about their votes being fairly counted and so are willing to staff and fund the offices who investigate voting irregularities. Our voting system is considered kind of the gold standard for the United States, and I’m lucky to live in a place that has that. Voting systems in other parts of the US are unfortunately not run with the same vigilance or sense of equity.

Sounds like someone is trying to immanentize the eschaton.

Given Tesla’s usual build quality I feel like it’s pretty much inevitable that there are going to be an enormous amount of skull and limb injuries from those gullwing doors.

If we’re going to be running minor celebrities for the Irish presidency, the only real choice is Blindboy Boatclub.

He’s taken many too many blows to the head. Listen to interviews with him early in his career and compare them to his interviews now. The level of brain damage he’s endured is pretty obvious.

Did the mushroom learn to control a robot, or did the scientists figure out how to connect a robot to a mushroom in such a way as to make the regular processes happening inside the mushroom trigger a set of robot legs? Because the article makes it seem like the mushroom is intelligent and has agency, and was thus far only lacking the proper robot body in order to express that; but the video makes it look like the legs were all pumping in unison, and the resulting movement was more or less coincidental.