If I were rich enough, my kids wouldn’t care. Money brings all the boys to the yard.

That’s Mr. Porksnort to you, peasant.

Since I am not rich enough to leave an inheritance, my kids will just hate me the usual amount.

Yeah, the federation can sometimes act like shitlibs. I’m certain that colonization in the trek universe is driven by people who get annoyed with the smugness and need a fresh start.

Awesome! Any thoughts for ‘intercrural’?

Maybe you can help me find better words that rhyme with ‘frottage’? I’m writing an epic song cycle that details as many ways to get off that don’t involve intromission.

Oh and it’s the 10th already, you can just slip the rent under the door…

‘They’ do want it to happen. Ordinary USians are gettng uppity and need to be taken down a peg.

The global elite don’t really need anything specific from the US anymore. For a brief moment, the world needed our higher education system, which is why anyone under 60 who went to grad school had lots of non-US folks in their cohorts. Those folks have gone back home in large part so there are plenty of skilled experts in critical fields internationally.

The US has no remaining unique resources, be they skilled people or natural resources. So we need to be dealt with since many of us still hold on to quaint notions like ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘living wage’.

It means you only do weed and shrooms

I think we need to give kids more credit for being able to handle nuance, too. I clearly remember being amused as a tyke at the efforts of adults to ‘protect’ me from things I already knew quite a lot about.

I never needed anyone to explain to me just how risible Mickey Rooney’s character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was. I had only met a few folks of asian background by that point in real life and it was hard to even tell what he was parodying. It had no relation to even my limited exposure to non-white cultures and people.

“Ancient Chinese secret, huh?” IYKYK

Frenemy != Friend

At best a frenemy is a useful distraction to keep them tied down.

The bots sound like you, not the other way around. They can get their own style, buncha clanker wannabes

At worst they will get a talking to

Stop them? Or drop subtle hints as to how to do it correctly and teach some basic physics at the same time?

Finally, someone who gets it!

The more you spend, the more you save!

The math has been done to death. CO2 capture requires energy input and doesn’t yield any. This is basic stuff.

These advertisement-delivery systems at the pumps piss me off. They blare loudly.

Here’s a question for the techie crowd.

I used to be able to press the physical buttons on either side of these screens and get the ads to mute. It was a two-button combo I discovered using a systematic method as a way to control my irritation at the excessive volume. It was either that or stick a pencil in the speaker.

This worked at gas stations in several states for months. The mute feature was surely written in as a sanity saver for the developers and technicians. It stopped working a few weeks ago, so I guess the pushed out a patch.

Not much of a question I guess, except what gives? Does anyone have insight into these systems for realsies?

Drop the “the”! It’s cleaner!

(a memorable line dropped by Justin Timberlakes character in the Social Network. It sums up this phenomenon pretty well.)

Exactly.

Until fossil fuels are not a part of the energy equation, DAC is a band-aid where a tourniquet is required. Sure do research, but DAC will never work while we are burning fossil fuels for energy. It doesn’t even make economic sense.

It can, but it isn’t and it won’t. DAC is a scam and a distraction until fossil fuels are out of the equation. It is a false hope, a glamour, to keep us from addressing the root causes.

Direct air capture is a scam. It requires energy that comes from somewhere else. Capturing CO2 requires energy, it’s basic physics/chemistry.

Nothing about it makes sense excpet as an expensive boondoggle and a distraction for correcting the root causes of climate change.

MIT tech review article

Right. It seems analogous to regenerative braking in a gas/electric hybrid car. The momentum is turned back into electricity to reclaim potential energy. Some of the energy was already spent in RO stage and this process gets some of it back.