In this thread: Americans supporting “Death to America!”

The problem with democracy is that you can’t get very far just by telling the voters how they ought to behave. I’m happy that I’m not a politician, because after the last election I don’t respect the majority of American voters. Trying to win their support would be demeaning. However, someone is going to do it, and if he isn’t a Democrat who does care (or acts like he cares) about people like Steve in Wisconsin, he’ll be a Republican instead.

An exponential function is a precise mathematical concept, like a circle or an even number. I’m not sure what you mean by “asymptote” here - an exponential function of the form y = k^x asymptotically approaches zero as x goes to negative infinity, but that doesn’t sound like what you’re referring to.

People often have bad intuition about how exponential functions behave. They look like they grow slowly at first but that doesn’t mean that they’re not growing exponentially. Consider the story about the grains of rice on a chessboard.

It’s exponential along its entire range, even all the way back to negative infinity.

A woman I know worked as an escort on and off and spent most of her time traveling, but I don’t think most people have the looks and the charisma to do that even if they want to. I’m not sure what other careers both pay enough and let you quit and then start again easily, but presumably there are some.

It’s weird but even better when the animals want to pet you. If I was lying down, my dog would sometimes come up to me and start licking my hair, which was a little gross but also made me feel very special.

The EU only demanded consent.

As in the meme…

Me: I consent (to load the website using the cookie settings already in my browser).

Website: I consent.

Privacy busybodies and EU regulators: I don’t.

Blame the EU. There, cookies used to bother a tiny number of “privacy advocates” who were already perfectly capable of blocking the cookies in their own browsers but they weren’t happy because no one else cared about cookies so they got the GDPR passed to bother everyone in the world.

Things are better than they have ever been for Native Americans and for the average person in the global south too.

There’s a great deal of room for improvement, but I think that a person who doesn’t realize that right now things are better than they have ever been is not a person whose ideas about what to change and how should be listened to. Our top priority should be to preserve the progress that has been made already but people who are ignorant of history are often willing to destroy what we do have with the naive expectation that things can’t get much worse.

As opposed to all those other times in the past when workers were better off than they are now…

I was looking at some bees working near their hive when one of them decided to take a break by landing on my (closed) eye. I kept still for a while and eventually the bee went back to work.

I don’t think the graph is showing the phenomenon that OP thinks it’s showing - there was a crime wave that started in 2020 which isn’t over yet, but things have gotten significantly better since 2022 and that’s the same internal when police killings went up, so the straightforward conclusion is that there has been more intensive policing in the last three years which is what has reversed the dramatic increase in the homicide rate.

That’s not correct. There were 15% more homicides in 2024 than in 2015 but the homicide rate went down since the peak of the 2020 crime wave.

But AI is actually way ahead of where I thought it would be in 2025.

Loving regardless of physical appearance doesn’t follow from loving for more than just physical appearance.

(I suspect that “don’t be shallow” is the sort of advice that people often feel good giving but don’t sincerely believe, but even the most sincerely non-shallow person generally can’t simply ignore sexual orientation. Once you allow for sexual orientation, then you’re already at the point where certain details of a person’s physical appearance are absolutely critical for romantic love.)

I wouldn’t be able to do that - I had to stop drinking caffeine a few years ago but still get cranky if I don’t have the experience of drinking a big mug of tea in the morning, despite the fact that the decaf tea has no direct pharmacological effect on me. Then whenever I’m bored or anxious or tired I make another big mug of decaf tea and feel better. It has to be tea; other beverages don’t help. Purely psychosomatic but still definitely a real effect.

You know those jokes about how people already in hell don’t know that they’re in hell? Relevant.

Y’all get lemongrass?

What I don’t get are the dogs that like people but are are aggressive towards other dogs. They’re not always angry, but they do just hate all other members of their own species?