“I need you to prove that you’re bi.”

[produces ticket stub]

“Fuck, that’s good proof.”

Edit:

Different kinds of hits, but… goddamn. I saw a guy in a rugby game take a full-on elbow to the face while running full tilt and go pinwheeling to the ground… and the game continued without so much as a comment from the announcer.

I object on the basis that he gets to sit in this cool car and I don’t.

Well, the only way we can know for sure is through experiment. We should clone a bunch of Hitler babies and see if any of them come out with micro-penises. Of course, we couldn’t do it in Germany for obvious reasons, and the chance of them recognized in America is still a little too high. Maybe somewhere in South America… like Peru… or Chile… or somewhere in that neighborhood…

Weaponization or dangerous rays are not among the challenges facing space-based solar.

Contrary to appearances in fiction, most designs propose beam energy densities that are not harmful if human beings were to be inadvertently exposed, such as if a transmitting satellite’s beam were to wander off-course. But the necessarily vast size of the receiving antennas would still require large blocks of land near the end users. The service life of space-based collectors in the face of long-term exposure to the space environment, including degradation from radiation and micrometeoroid damage, could also become a concern for SBSP.

Gallo Pinto

But then I start to feel like

this guy, with the “real” camera and the phone camera, but the phone camera is the one I’ve most consistently got on me, because I can’t lug a whole additional piece of hardware around in a camera bag, meanwhile the phone camera pictures are grainy and shitty, and I’d just as soon have a Pixel in my pocket at all times that can take fairly good pictures at all times.

Camera is probably the first obstacle. I’ve got a kid, and I really want to have good documentation of her growing up. If there were a dumbphone with a legit camera, that’d be a big deal for me.

After that, probably maps is the next most important thing that I want an actual smart phone for. I remember getting my first smart phone, and probably the main thing I was excited about was always being able to navigate directly to where I wanted to go.

Almost everything else is tertiary to my needs.

Take one of the most violently-contested parts of the Earth, a center of blood feuds that have been raging for, depending on how you count it, between eighty and six thousand years, a place that has become synonymous for “a location of endless conflict,” take that piece of real estate, enhance the violence, and then tell yourself you’re going to build a bunch of high-end condos and invite rich assholes to move in.

What could possibly go wrong?

I thought the article was telling an unmarried woman that AI can find the cancer pathologists she’s been looking for. Not sure why they would be hiding.

Okay, well, the last time I made this joke it came true, so I’m going to throw some salt over my shoulder after I say it, but how about instead of that, we just give Russia about 20,000 square miles of Alaska. We can start with the entirety of the Aleutian Island chain (about 6,800 sq. miles), and then work out some chunk of the mainland for the rest. That seems reasonable.

And if that does come true, then by God I’m going to go out and buy a lottery ticket.

Brock Samson has entered the chat.

Proverbs 26:18-19

Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death, Is the man who deceives his neighbor, And says, “I was only joking!”

Could they do the thing that airports do with geese, where they get a Labrador to run around and bark at the birds and the birds say, “Ehh… fuck this area” and leave of their own accord?

via SMBC:

Surveys indicate that 100% of people respond to surveys.

There are people who, disturbed by “big government” today and its tendency to curb the advantages they might gain if their competitiveness were allowed free flow, demand “less govern- ment.” Alas, there is no such thing as less government, merely changes in government. If the libertarians had their way, the distant bureaucracy would vanish and the local bully would be in charge. Personally, I prefer the distant bureaucracy, which may not find me, over the local bully, who certainly will. And all historical precedent shows a change to localism to be for the worse.

—Isaac Asimov, Nice Guys Finish First, collected in The Sun Shines Bright, 1981