Don’t forget pop podcasts hosted by “storytellers” who read one primary source and one outdated secondary source before writing 20 hours of content, mostly about how the generals and kings got ready for the battles.

I feel like some folks are getting the wrong idea about our lovable rageaholic with these recent strips…

LED joysticks that can select from over 16 million color options. This might not be practical, considering only about 25 different color settings would have been sufficient.

So the RGB leds come with 256 levels of brightness for each color. Don’t worry, article-writer, the company wasted zero extra effort on this “feature.”

I consider getting one of these things every once in a while, but then I remember that I’ve pulled my hacked PSP out of the drawer like three times in the last ten years, and I shrug and move on. It’s generally more fun for me to plug a USB controller into my computer for retrogaming.

Oh hey! It’s that thing I use to put on decals and melt perler beads!

Yup, and honestly, looking at the particular takes Gen-X’ers had when they/we were in charge of the culture, this is completely unsurprising.

This is a weird power grab from the court. Chevron already allows that the courts can decide what Congressional intent it. The deference to agencies only comes once they determine the law is ambiguous. In a different world, where we had expert courts full of engineers and analysts, this might even produce better results than the current system, but we do not, and Judges opining on technical fields are probably the only thing worse than engineers opining on the use of language, LOL.

I suppose if Trump wins and guts the career professionals in the executive branch and replaces them with partisan hacks at every level, we could end up glad this ruling happened, but agencies already had to act with a certain respect for internal rules and “reasonableness”. What’s more likely is that this SCOTUS will make sure it passes the final word on every significant regulatory question that arises in the next 20 years, and somehow magically the status quo that was being abused will become the law, even when it has only the thinnest threads of non-technical justification. Or worse, everything is now up for re-litigation and nobody knows WTF anything will mean anymore.

The amount of merch that a company must provide to get on a hobby-centric Youtuber’s good side seems to be depressingly small.

FWIW, you can order a V6 regular cab F150 work truck with an 8-foot bed. Still costs $40k, but it exists.

Ranger and Maverick can both haul plywood sheets with a few 2x4 slats in the stamped slots on the side of the bed and some tiedowns.

This is very specifically how Oklahoma’s AG sold their case against the religious charter school.

[Oklahoma AG Gentner Drummond] said allowing a school like St. Isidore would open the door for state-funded schools to teach other religious beliefs, such as Sharia law or Satanism.

“While I understand that the Governor and other politicians are disappointed with this outcome, I hope that the people of Oklahoma can rejoice that they will not be compelled to fund radical religious schools that violate their faith,” Drummond said.

I wish the Dems had felt more confident in 2020, or that Kamala Harris had proven to be a more vibrant personality able to take the reins in 2024. I wish the Overton window in the US were farther to the left. But that’s not the fight in front of us; we are where we are.

I don’t think anybody denies that Biden is in physical and a sort of general mental decline. He’s old AF. I tend to think “turning it on” just takes a lot out of him and maybe requires a couple of days of R&R which you don’t normally get as president, but I would hardly be surprised if they give him a little chemical helper sometimes. If taking a stimulant just makes you feisty and articulate and able to pop off a solid State of the Union speech then, again, that just speaks to your being old. Someone who literally doesn’t know what they’re doing will be the same idiot, but higher energy…

You know, like Trump.

You need to read it in the context of the other strips. Normally, someone in the first panel defies Everett’s sense of decorum and general decent behavior (e.g. describing a way they took advantage of another person, or being unecessarily), and in the second panel Everett cartoonishly attacks them in a fit of righteous rage. It’s all meant to be a wish fulfillment for someone struggling with the stresses of “modern” urban living. I feel like Larry David would probably have been a fan if he were around during its run, if that helps; just imagine the Seinfeld gang if they looked and acted like Kingpin from the Marvel stuff. I think the audience is invited to sympathize with Everett’s sensibilities and to laugh at the catharsis of someone actually indulging their rage.

This one subverts the trope. It invites the audience to suppose the beggar will be destroyed, especially with the foreshadowing. However, simply existing and hoping for a little generosity does not violate Everett’s personal code, so going against the perceived rational choice, he listens to his better angels, leaves a coin, and moves on. I can almost imagine the cartoonist starting to become a little troubled at how sincerely people, possibly total assholes, professed to admire Everett and so wanted to turn things around a bit.

So whether a charter school can be religious wasn’t really considered.

If it wasn’t considered thoroughly, it was only because the court decided it was obvious. The school tried to say that they didn’t count as a public school, because they’re a private entity contracting with the state, but the court said, “No, you only exist as a school because you pursued a contract to use state funding. You are a charter school, and in OK charter schools are public schools, and public schools are not to be explicitly religious.”

This case was so beyond the pale that it wasn’t even enough to cite state caselaw saying it was okay for the state to pay a Baptist orphanage to house native American kids because the orphanage didn’t make them go to church or convert. The case very clearly confirms that charter schools, as they are structured in Oklahoma, have to at least put on a pretense of nonsectarianism. Otherwise, they need to be private schools and try to leverage less direct ways to extract money from the state. This is harder because the funds are not guaranteed upon enrollment.

Now all THAT said, I assume the school will appeal and find out just how much Clarence Thomas hates reading other people’s court decisions when he can simply skim a pocket copy and decide he knows best and his first instinct is always right.

“Facilitated open computing initiatives and exercised independent judgment and mastery of social engineering techniques and forum software.”

Fair; I guess I should have run some data. I just used gasbuddy.com to run a similar track for what would have been my rather lengthy commute if my employer had asked us to return to office (and kept the lease on that building). Apart from a couple of outliers just outside the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, I’m only getting an 8% variance (about USD 0.23/gallon, versus your 25% and AUD 0.55/litre – is that right?).

That said, Iwill admit that $0.10/gallon suboptimal average price is probably more likely than I thought, though with a less intense driving situation one would still be well under the $260/year “convenience premium.” Outside the US and other oil-subsidizing countries, the numbers clearly work out very differently.

Not particularly helpful for you, but this seemed like the thread to chime in that in general with pizza, it’s always MUCH better to go big. Pi*r², folks. A single 14" Dominos is already pretty much identical to two 10" mediums, and that’s only if you like to eat the crust. Always do your math by dollars per area, not diameter.

the lens of his that stare decisis is a poor doctrine

I can imagine an abhorrent precedent like Dredd Scott leaving a bad taste in a young black lawyer’s mind, but it’s certainly an odd way to approach jurisprudence in a common law country, and it’s a pretty shit way to regulate a complicated body of law that relies on litigation for clarity. Combine it with a simplistic version of originalism once stare decisis is discarded, and I stand by my statement: bafflingly literal and lazy, and I’ll add arrogant. “I know best, the entire body of built up law that came before me is without value, and the decisions that real people make under their influence are gauze in the wind.” It invites constant relitigation and enables the most extreme kind of judicial activism while claiming to be above that fray.

I haven’t kept up with his output, but when I was studying SCOTUS cases years and years ago, his opinions, mostly dissents or concurrences back in those days, were just bafflingly literal and lazy. Shit like, “I would declare the government’s actions unconstitutional because they’re regulating cars and the word ‘car’ is not in the Constitution.”

I can’t believe his thread of, I won’t even call it originalism, more like historical-context-free literalist textualism, has gained any traction.

Citttttyyyy Streeeets, Take me to work.

To the place, with those jerks!

West of Boston, middle manage,

Return To Office, City Streets…

People are weird about gasoline. They’ll drive around looking for the cheapest option, to save 2 cents/gallon. Even with a huge tank, that’s less than 50 cents of total savings.

Bless 'em for keeping the price pressure on, but this is so very true. Once I ran a couple of mental hypotheticals, I stopped giving a shit, beyond avoiding places right by airports that jack it up a dollar or more (Las Vegas and especially Orlando, with lots of tourists in rentals, are the worst offenders I’ve seen).

For a pretty extreme example consider, as you say, a large 25-gal tank, and filling up from dry twice a week, at an average of $0.10/gal non-optimal price: you pay an annual premium of $260 bucks not to drive yourself batty hunting for pennies, and burning at least a tiny bit more fuel to do it. Most people will pay far less. It’s just this weird thing that stuck in people’s brains long past the point where a cent increase was any significant percentage of the fuel purchase.

Sounds like this sinkhole is a non-trivial dive, but depth-wise it’s only 200 meters. Pressure vessel engineering should not be the limiting factor. Also, for whatever reason, this guy left OceanGate in 2013.