memfree

Alaska. Remote, expensive, so cold your car’s tires freeze with the flat spot they had while you were parked so you thump thump thump down the graveled roads until they stretch out, and to paraphrase @poccalyps, ‘ice storms, earthquakes,… and some of the dumbest, most entitled Jesus-humping maga fucks in the country.’

Very common saying with lots of links (merriam-webster, dictionary, wiktionary, grammarist)

Is your wife from somewhere very isolated or exotic? Or does she simply want you to add more variety to your discourse? Toh-may-toh/Toh-mah-toh

“Silliness leads to tears” typically said after energetic goofiness has led to an ‘owie’.

Bonus: Grandparents were fond of “Children should be seen and not heard.”

They’d be welcome on [email protected]

Per that definition:

Vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) were the first active electronic components… and by the 1920s, commercial radio broadcasting and telecommunications were becoming widespread and electronic amplifiers were being used in such diverse applications as long-distance telephony and the music recording industry.

So tubes are in! Old lamps are OUT!

Are thermionic diodes allowed or just semiconductor diodes? What about the early crystal diodes (subset of semiconductor). Did the Colossus computer count? Eniac? I guess particular items don’t matter because no individual owns either and I doubt individual built replicas.

What counts as electronics? Guitar speaker with vacuum tubes? Old rotary phone? Lamps so old the electric cords are covered in a hard fabric? If you require solid state / chips and boards rather than things that did the same function without them, you’re excluding the stuff predating that tech.

If Kristi Noem had any morals or sense of remorse, she’d just curl up and die.

On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.

That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter

The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.

I’ve played this game enough that I’m tired of it. New DLC won’t change my mind.

The game got me to figure out that I don’t want to play a game where the people are always going to be really unhappy no matter how far I advance. If I’m playing a city/world builder, I want a game where my advancment also means things are better for the NPCs. In this game, my advancement means I can start with some tiny different perks, but nost of those are wiped out by Prestige runs, so the NPCs have really brutal conditions all the time. And if things start going well? Poof! You’re on to the next town before you can enjoy the last one.

Ah, yes, I remember those days with the text-only LYNX browser from the unix terminal and the joy of Netscape Navigator on machines that could handle windows. Searching was difficult until there was Alta Vista, which was AMAZING compared to the competition, but even it failed for D&D-style gamers who tried to search for “role playing games” and got back a list of a million sex sites and zero visible pen/paper/dice games. Happily, you could add boolean operator rules to get rid of some of that (NOT sex NOT babes NOT XXX) – but you’d either be typing a lot of naughty words to skip or you’d have to remember the sites that catered to RPGs because searching could be very hit or miss.

The article is mostly about a lack dense housing in the sunbelt. Two chunks:

By rigidly defining what a community is allowed to look like, suburban zoning has done more than simply shape the physical form of our cities. It has also made it all but impossible for many communities to adapt and grow, as human societies always have, which has created severe distortions in housing markets.

and

There’s no shortage of wonky policy ideas about how to fix housing in the US — and they go far beyond just zoning codes (you don’t want to hear me get started on building codes or impact fees). We will also need a society-wide paradigm shift beyond policy: The financial and real estate industries will need to relearn models for supporting incremental densification, which, experts consistently told me, have fallen by the wayside since the entrenchment of sprawl and restrictive zoning.

Personally, I’d like to see more towns where there’s dense housing within walking distance of the mega strip mall… though some of those strips are too big for realistic pedestrian commuting.

Compared to who? Pelosi? Trump?

Oliver is not qualified.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution sets three qualifications for holding the presidency. To serve as president, one must:

• be a natural-born citizen of the United States;
• be at least 35 years old;
• be a resident in the United States for at least 14 years.

as if he’d ever sun bathe

I’ve never had that happen (U.S.). I’ve either gone to the pound or accepted someone else’s pet when they could no longer care for care for it (due to: illness/death/move requiring dubious 30 day animal quarantine).

… there are still large hurdles to overcome before tidal energy can be adopted more widely, such as dealing with regulatory issues, potential environmental effects and conflicts with other ocean users.

I was wondering about that. What happens to the weather, animal habitats, and everything if you slow tides and currents with a larger number of these things? Still gotta be better than burning fossil fuels.

It’s very hard to take what is essentially a wind turbine normally found on land and put it under water, said Fraser Johnson, operations and maintenance manager at MeyGen. The record-setting turbine should keep going for at least another year before it needs to come out of the water for maintenance, he added.

With a sample size of ONE (okay, maybe four) that projection seems optimistic, but I’m hoping he’s correct.

You are correct, but I mow kinda high and my lawn has lots of low flowering weeds and flowering shrubs. In the spring, there is patch of … probably purslane? and daffodils on the border. Then the comfrey has its first bloom, then the clover and dandelions. Right now there’s more dandelions and comfrey’s second bloom. Next comes the invasive morning glorys and rose of sharon. There are a bunch of other things that flower, like wild strawberries, wild violets, and yarrow that is stanted by getting chopped down every week or two – but there’s more and I don’t know all their names.

We also have some type of carpenter/bumble bee trying hard to destroy the edge of the porch overhang. I’m just letting them do their thing and plan on repairing it if/when it becomes a structural issue.

While I tend to agree, I want to point out that it’s a very modern view point.

American pet stores these days are pet supply stores. Way back when (1970s and before), they were stocked with all kinds of creatures; some that were probably illegally imported as well as a mix of cats, dogs, rabbits, mice, canaries, and the like that were partially from people whose pets gave birth. You fancy canaries and some of hatch chicks? A nice side hustle was to sell the excess offspring back to the store. Same for mice. Stores were offered enough rabbits, guinea pigs, and kittens that they’d be overstocked if they took them all – especially kittens.

Spaying/Neutering was not common. Cats and dogs roamed off-leash and got pregnant. When you went to the grocery store, there was a fair chance someone was out front with a box of “Free Puppies!” filled with mongrels that pet stores did not want because they weren’t pure. The same was true for “Free Kittens!” but that, again, was because no store wanted as many kittens as the supply. That’s also why there were so many kill shelters: supply far exceeded demand.

I like it better now that most pets are NOT allowed to uncontrollably breed, but I do miss the chance to find some adorable mutt that isn’t half pit bull.

My lawn isn’t totally natural because I mow it, but I don’t use any chemicals. Despite some trees and shrubs, my yard doesn’t have ticks. We have grubs, mice, shrews, squirrels, birds, and occasional poison ivy that we pull up, but no ticks. They are in the park (with forest) a couple blocks away, but not in the trimmed lawns in my chunk of suburbia.

from Wikipedia:

Ticks like shady, moist leaf litter with an overstory of trees or shrubs and, in the spring, they deposit their eggs into such places allowing larvae to emerge in the fall and crawl into low-lying vegetation. The 3 meter boundary closest to the lawn’s edge are a tick migration zone, where 82% of tick nymphs in lawns are found.

I agree wirth you, but since I’m not a hydrologist nor any other type of expert, I included that contrary piece as an opposing view on whether better planning could have helped. Since we now know that there’s been a plan to have warning sirens in the works for years, I think it obvious that the area is a known flood risk and at least that much COULD have been done.