You unambitious fools. I’m going to en passant onto the board of the people playing next to me!

That’s how you expand your territory.

This is recreating the Civ weapon progression. Start with swords, then rifles, then cannons, then ICBMs.

We’re gonna need a bigger board.

This is something that the CIA actively engages in. It’s not quite at the covfefe level of “we meant to get caught,” but they do occasionally put out the word that they like it when they’re perceived as ham-fisted bunglers as it makes it easier to get away with stuff.

The Kids Who Lived.

If you get a circular rash around a tick bite, you might want to get it looked at.

It is true. It came out a while ago. It was just entered into testimony. I didn’t actually read her statements and answers, so I don’t know what level of detail she went into, but it was in her book and she talked about it at the time.

Probabilistic curves are pretty much the opposite of what we normally mean when we say “free will.” If the assumptions were correct, we’d tend to use the term “non-deterministic.”

I tend to lean in the direction of Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky who believes that it is deterministic but not predictable due to the complexity of the parts and their interactions.

This is known as the Whorfian Hypothesis, aka Sapir-Whorf theory. In generalized-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy terms, the idea is that language constrains thought. It’s one of those ideas that we can perceive as intuitively correct but that does not stand up to experiment.

There are, for example, languages that don’t have words differentiating green and blue, and others whose counting numbers don’t include specific words for numbers larger than two. Some languages have no words for cardinal directions but use terms like “mountain-way” and “ocean-way.”

Experiments do seem to support a weak version of Whorf - people from cultures with “missing” words can differentiate between green and blue for instance, but it seems to take a bit longer. There’s also a paper indicating that people who don’t use cardinal coordinates have a better innate sense of orientation when, eg, walking corridors in an enclosed building.

I’d personally fall between the weak and strong position because I do not believe in free will and do believe that semantics are a significant driver of behavior, but that’s a step beyond where most of the current research is. There’s research into free will, but none that I’m aware of that pulls in cognitive semantics as a driver.

That makes perfect sense.

At one point, many years ago, I read that earth’s water cycle is such that, at some point, you’ve drunk Napoleon’s urine. The author didn’t show their math, but let’s assume it’s true. We can take the same approach to holy water.

We might make the assumption that all water on earth has holy water mixed in with it, like cosmic background radiation. Now, obviously it doesn’t have sufficient holiness to be considered fully holy water - it doesn’t damage such creatures as vampires, possessed children, or Jews - but it’s necessarily present in at least trace amounts. And it would increase as a function of time.

So if the water is holy, does that mean in addition that the evaporated water is also holy, or does the holy get left behind, making future batches even holier?

If the former, does that make the air containing the water vapor holy? Is holiness a percentage thing - the more holy water humid it is, the more holy? Could you take out a nest of vampires simply by boiling a pot of holy water and letting the place steam up?

This is a hot take.

Here’s the problem with your hypothesis:

You’re mixing together people who don’t vote with people publicly advocating not voting. That’s completely unsupported. Let’s see some stats on why people don’t vote. Is it because they don’t have time because they’re working, because they’re uncomfortable with the process, because they’re being lazy? On the other hand, what are the predictors of voting? We know age is a factor, so that would encourage us to think about the time availability question.

The second part is that the disengagement approach you’re advocating has driven the Democratic Party to the right. The Third Way movement came entirely from seeing Reagan’s engagement numbers. Not voting casts a zero information signal. First, the numbers only move mildly from year to year, and even when they do it tends to come down to the charisma of the candidate, not the policy positions.

A surprising number of Americans want universal healthcare, support LGBT rights and are against racism, yet vote for Donald Trump or DeSantis because they can get the crowds riled up in the way that policy wonks just don’t.

I mean, when the republicans did that huge study that found that economic and demographic changes in the US meant they needed to adopt more progressive policies (eg not being openly racist) if they wanted to have a future, the gop said “screw that, we will just depress the vote.”

So, no, your policy is not evidence-based, and it’s unreasonable. It forces the country to the right. If that’s what you want, go for it.

I have an Army background (from a long fucking time ago). I was always amused by “Front Towards Enemy,” and we were trained to click three times.

I still think the joke works though.

1. Chainmail provides little to no protection against impact damage. As we saw in Fellowship, evil beings who attack heroes in bed use slashing attacks with broadswords or similar weapons. While it might prevent cuts, it’s basically like being beaten with an iron rod that will break bones and rupture organs. It is unsuitable as armor. That’s leaving aside weapons like maces, hammers, and clubs, or a Seal Team Six scenario.
2. It’s aluminum. Or aluminium, if you’re that kind of person. This is basically a blanket designed by Jony Ive. It doesn’t warm. It doesn’t protect. But it’s thin and lightweight. Which is the opposite of what you want in a weighted blanket.
3. You can buy weighted blankets that come in a variety of weights and warmth characteristics for a fraction of the time investment used to make this. The money you save could be used to buy a home security system that includes a minefield or electric fence. If you’re impressed by what a claymore sword can do to an orc, wait until you see what a claymore mine can do.

What an absolutely believable conclusion announced by an absolutely credible organization that has no motivation except to publish the unvarnished truth.

No, I am very well aware of that. But they’re not saying “You can’t wear a BLM button because we do not think black lives matter, but you can wear a proud boys one if you want.”

They may or may not have that right - that’s going to depend on both the currently existing corporate rules and any state/local legislation.

I was thinking in particular about a case in the past 5 or so years where a company was sued for forbidding one employee from wearing a hijab while allowing others to wear crosses. It was a case of religious discrimination.

My point is that for this to be non-discriminatory it has to be a policy that’s handled in an even handed fashion. Of course it has nothing to do with the constitution - I’m not even sure why you’d introduce that unless you’re staying to strawman. But I know that I can’t fire someone for saying in the workplace that they agree with Trump unless I have a wholesale policy banning talking about politics. I’d be in trouble if I said people could talk about politics, but they could only say nice things about Biden and bad things about Trump. You might be able to get away with that at a locally owned auto body shop, but not at a major corporation.

My further point is that saying that black lives matter isn’t political, unless there’s a major political party that thinks black lives don’t matter. Rainbows aren’t political, unless there’s a major political party that thinks the LGBT community shouldn’t be visible. Books on gay parents aren’t political unless there’s a political party that thinks gay people shouldn’t be allowed to be parents. But that same party would allow a flag pin, or a yellow ribbon, or a book about a hetero couple with a kid. It’s only political when they disagree with it. Otherwise it’s just “normal.”

So if they’re banning BLM as political, do they have to be even handed and ban all political iconography?

Is a rainbow political? Obviously anything with an American flag is political, so those need to be banned. Anything like a cross obviously would be forbidden - necklaces would have to be tucked in and invisible. Christianity is far more of a political thing in the US than BLM, as it’s being used to specifically and actively drive legislation. Would they then have to ban employees from other religious dress, like wearing a hijab or yarmulke? I don’t recall Muslims or Jews passing legislation in the name of their religion at the national level, but do activities in Dearborn or Williamsburg count?

Are wedding rings heteronormative? They’re certainly both a cultural and a social thing. Makeup is also both cultural and social, and additionally potentially has gendered implications. If we ban rainbows, do we ban anyone wearing makeup or require everyone to do so, since they’re potentially signaling gender identity?

This exercise recurs regularly and there have been a few formulations.

One of the big ones is atomic theory. It took a long time to figure out - and I’m intentionally discounting the Greek version and monads here because I’m talking about actual atomic theory and not a philosophy of essences.

Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics are a second option, especially if you could squeeze in things like the germ theory of disease.

I’m not familiar enough with pure math to say that there’s one concept that would have let the Greeks or Mesopotamians develop the calculus millennia earlier than we did, but that would also massively accelerate scientific progress.

NotLD is not a great example.

George Romero literally invented the modern zombie. NotLD was massively successful on its own, and spawned a genre of horror literature that to this day is a dominant trend. It was a brilliant piece in a college-level production. It was a lot like Clerks, but even more so.

NotLD became public domain when they changed the name of the film from Night of the Flesh Eaters to Night of the Living Dead. While the change was obviously brilliant, the distributor didn’t include the copyright notice in the updated prints that were sent to the theater. That one mistake by someone else cost Romero untold tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think we are all in favor of work being published in the public domain. As a scientist, I paid thousands of dollars per paper for everything I published to make sure they weren’t locked behind a $30 paywall. I’ve been a vocal supporter of FOSS since my first slackware install in the mid-1990s, and even before that with the cypherpunk community on usenet.

But NotLD is a counterexample of the goodness of non-copyrighted and non-patented works. It was not only done without the permission of the creator - which is key to the ethos - it is taken advantage of by every third rate company who sells a copy of it for $1.99.

What’s lower in terms of quality?

The e-ink display is different than something like an iPad. I find it easier to read, to be honest. I can read the kindle for longer in comfort and it’s easier to read while falling asleep.

It’s crap at displaying anything that’s not intended for the platform. PDF files or graphics heavy books are a poor fit for the kindle, but novels or regular books are far better in my opinion.

I have an iPhone, an iPad Mini, an iPad, and multiple laptops. I prefer the kindle for reading in any formats that support it.