Exactly. There is no such thing as a labor shortage, only activities that people don’t think are worth the cost.

It took a long time for nature to figure out how to process wood, but it eventually happened. My wooden furniture is still standing though.

Whatever it is, it’s not whataboutism when it involves the same exact war and what instigated it. That applies directly to the question of why the US got involved.

It could be a liability thing though. An organization that sells expired product might be in for bigger judgements if something does happen.

That’s a money saver vs. “donated” or “sold at discount”.

Food banks that I’m familiar with won’t distribute expired food because it’s a liability. Of course there is a big difference between “expired” salt and meat, but it’s safer for them to have a blanket policy than count on the workers’ judgement.

But at least it doesn’t have any chemicals. /s

I feel like a ketamine overdose is right around the corner. It’s too bad that good news isn’t allowed to happen.

That sounds too sciency for most Americans.

It’s not often that the most privacy conscious choice is also the most reliable, easy to use, and flexible option for something, but Home Assistant checks all the boxes.

On a completely different subject, have you seen those dragon drones being used in Ukraine? Just a cheap drone and a little thermite does soo much damage it’s insane.

Those aren’t mutually exclusive.

It’s the next chapter, but it’s always been where the story was going. The oligarchy has been running things since at least Reagan. Now the mask is off. Now it’s reaching the suburbs. You think being under the thumb of the rich and powerful is a new experience in America? Check your privilege.

That’s the only reason I’ve ever done much of anything in shell script. As a network administrator I’ve worked many network appliances running on some flavor of Unix and the one language I can count on to be always available is bash. It has been well worth knowing for just that reason.

That’s just it. The laws of physics, at least as far as we understand them, absolutely preclude changing our position in any way that would reveal anything outside our observable universe. Lifespans don’t come into it at all. If you lived forever traveling at the speed of light, you would never achieve that change of position.

The cosmic background is the leftover “noise” of the big bang, and we observe it roughly uniformly in every single direction. So where did the big bang occur? Everywhere. Everything that exists is precisely at the center of the universe, right where the big bang happened.

It’s all about the concept of spacetime. Spacetime isn’t space and time considered together, it’s a singular thing that operates by rules that we are ill equiped to comprehend intuitively.

As I just explained, it’s not really about observation, it’s about causation. If two objects can never possibly interact, then are they really in the same universe?

Looking out in space is also looking back in time. Anything (roughly) that is further than we can observe in the microwave background would be further back in time than the beginning of time, and therefore doesn’t exist at all in our universe. It’s a bit brain bending.

Thus the term “observable universe”. Everything beyond our observable universe is being expanded away from us at faster than the speed of light, so nothing outside will ever reach us. Causality is completely and irrevocably severed at those distances so, arguably, anything outside the observable universe is not part of “our” universe.

It’s a common rhetorical shortcut to anthropomorphize evolution. Doing so doesn’t necessarily indicate that the writer doesn’t understand how evolution works. It’s just cumbersome to repeat an explanation of random mutation and natural selection in every discussion of evolved trait.

Neither creatures nor evolution get to “decide” to develop a trait but, as countless evolutionary arms races show, useful traits and refinements do tend to happen in a way that evokes a sense of conscious decision making.

Defense contractors have started entire wars to manipulate the market. It’s all market manipulation.

Jesus only used unisex bathrooms.

At over 50 years old, I don’t think I’ve ever seen another man’s dick in a bathroom.