That’s not entirely true. Gerrymandering can affect statewide elections in two ways.

The first is turnout suppression. If voters feel that their votes do not matter (for instance, if they constantly end up voting for local/district positions that they “lose”), they’re less likely to vote. That’s why people interested in vote suppression make such frequent use of the “both sides” memes. This is part of a larger effort that includes ID laws, registration restrictions, and disallowing vote by mail.

Second is resource restrictions based on districts. I know that in both TX and AZ there have been around-the-block lines with multi-hour waits to vote in some districts, while others were basically walk in and walk out. Yes, high density populations will require more resources than low density ones, but you generally don’t see state legislatures passing bills to remove polling places from low density areas so that rural voters are required to drive for hours to get to the closest urban polling place.

Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.

I kno.

This is the correct answer. It doesn’t address the multiple mistakes in English and spelling that the OP ended up writing, though. Nor does it address the spelling variant, although that does not seem to be the particular focus of the original enquiry.

Iirc the GoT intros gave you a hint about the episode by highlighting the map areas that the episode was going to cover. But S8 ended up being so bad that it went back in time and ruined the entire series for me, so I never rewatched it and might be misremembering.

Right now I never skip the intro for What We Do in the Shadows. It’s the same every time, but the song is just too much fun to skip. I am probably on my fourth watching of that series.

I think I also sit through most of the Star Trek intros just because I enjoy the visuals.

TiVo has entered the chat.

The NYT has a market cap of about $8B. MSFT has a market cap of about $3T. MSFT could take a controlling interest in the Times for the change it finds in the couch cushions. I’m betting a good chunk of the c-suites of the interested parties have higher personal net worths than the NYT has in market cap.

I have mixed feelings about how generative models are built and used. I have mixed feelings about IP laws. I think there needs to be a distinction between academic research and for-profit applications. I don’t know how to bring the laws into alignment on all of those things.

But I do know that the interested parties who are developing generative models for commercial use, in addition to making their models available for academics and non-commercial applications, could well afford to properly compensate companies for their training data.

Wings evolve from legs though, generally speaking. This means that a four legged dragon with wings would have conceivably evolved from a six legged creature. You can get hand-wings or arm-wings, and we’re not entirely sure but think insect wings may have also evolved from legs or some other kind of similar structure.

But pretty much you can either have wings or legs/arms. You have to trade them in. That’s why the whole angel/demon thing doesn’t work either. The traditional harpies work but they’d be furry and not feathered. I haven’t worked out the wingspan for them but you could probably come up with a reasonable guess. They’d be more bat-people than bird-people, and I suspect that their chest areas would be less generously proportioned than is typically seen in the artwork. I’m not going more into the physics of that one though.

Not from my office window per se, but on my way into work I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. That was weird and messed me up for a bit.

The weirdest one was probably back in March/April of 2020 when we were in a total covid lockdown, and an ice cream truck - completely alone on the street and the only vehicle seen for days - slowly drove by while playing Christmas music. That was some Twilight Zone shit.

What an odd chart. Do the authors do any kind of correlation analysis on something like interest rates or median housing prices to explain the seasonality?

Most of the people I know who moved to Austin are looking to come back to the west coast due to concerns about their civil rights being removed and their overall safety. Blue city in a red state used to be a viable strategy, but several Republican governors are centered that the big centralized state government can tell the cities what to do, while simultaneously saying that the federal government can’t tell them what to do.

I’m going to have to go with Team Mouse on this one. If your only reaction is to stomp a mouse running past your foot, that’s a bit of a red flag there. The mouse is not presenting a clear and present danger, it is not threatening harm to itself or others, and is actively engaged in de-escalating the situation triggered, through no fault of its own, by its mere presence.

Anon could make Police Captain some day.

Oops - it just moved. Here’s the ad you just clicked on though.

The bit that really irked me was that it was purely performative. It seemed like literally the exact same community that populated the_donald with memes and Trump train bots and the photoshopping of Trump’s pic onto Rambo. Their posts have fuck all to do with communism just like the trump posts had nothing to do with conservative politics. It was just edge faux-outrage and basically taking an opposite position for its own sake. They could simultaneously criticize Gov Newsom for not signing a trans rights bill while praising Putin who is doing his level best to make being gay illegal. It’s a mistake to see it as political discourse when it’s really just trolling. Like on the_donald, they egg each other on and have their in jokes and memes (in both the picture sense and in the actual meme sense) about walls the same way the trumpers did with helicopters.

Defederation is the best response imo.

This is revisionist heresy. Gary Gygax, who is expected to be cannonized via a trebuchet in the next couple of years, explicitly said that the official books are more like guidelines than actual rules.

And I mean that I actually had beverages with Gary at a science fiction convention back in the early 90s, and he said stuff like “If you want to pack a healing kit that heals +5 damage, do it.” Being serious now, it’s about the story, not the rules. I know that’s the point of the joke, but it’s been almost 50 years now and people we are still arguing about rules lawyers.

I always thought the White Wolf games that called the DM the Storyteller and explicitly made dice rolls optional were the apex of the interactive story idea.

DARVO (deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender).