I own a house [^1]. It’s of an age, and we’ve had to replace the windows and doors, and the roof. With that cost, we could have bought a second, smaller house. I once had a house on a road that was lined with a stone wall; every property owner was responsible for their part of the wall. Some just let it collapse into a shitty looking pile of rocks; the rest of us paid exorbitant mason prices to maintain their walls.

I look at castles, and the first thing I wonder is how far £91M will really go when the roof needs to be replaced, when the mortar needs re-pointing, when it needs to be heated in winter, when the plumbing needs fixing. £91M is a nice chunk of change; it doesn’t seem like as much when a castle is involved.

[^1] a bank lets me live in a house that it owns while it extracts interest payments from me.

Lemmy does. I don’t, but Lemmy will shank you in a dark alley for drug money, like an American Badger.

Converse man lives in a converse world.

Most heads of state of western democracies do not have the authority to enact such measures, much less in so short a deadline. And their political opponents will simply drag their feet on any approval process and let you eliminate a rival. Most of the billionaires live in countries without a dictator (quite yet, anyway) who could comply, even if they wanted to.

You’re most likely right. No checking account at any bank has an interest rate that’s going to pay enough interest in 2 days to make such a scheme worthwhile, even if the sums were an order of magnitude greater than the numbers GP quotes. Especially with a $6 check processing fee, which is itself a scam.

It can’t have been for the interest.

Esperanto is going to be in the lower left somewhere.

The issue with the graph isn’t the contents, it’s the axes. What’s “objectively easy” for Europeans is not necessarily objectively easy for Asians.

I feel safe in my house, but I didn’t reacquire my concealed carry permit when I moved states, mostly because I almost never carried in all the years I had it.

I really need to get off my ass and complete the requirements in this new state and get that permit.

Sounds like a great time for literate programming to make a come back.

OTOH, that’s a strength of OpenAI: writing reasonable-sounding explanations in plain speech.

He could certainly degrowth the planet. But, than, we’re well on the way to doing that ourselves.

Remember those found-footage style videos that were going around a decade or so ago, where there was this mysterious figure in black who just appeared and was offing criminals in fairly graphic ways? There was speculation that it was a viral ad for some anti-hero superhero movie, but it never materialized.

That’s the way. Be mysterious. Be featureless. Don’t talk. Give them no way to track you after it wears off: appear, do, disappear. Repeat for 48 hours, then disappear.

I still think it wouldn’t last long. The temptations of power and wealth will override any fear; after year, it’ll be back to business as usual. 5 years later, it’d be mostly forgotten.

Now, if you could parse out 48 hours in 2 hour chunks over 12 years, with a couple of “examples” every year at random times, that might have a lasting effect. Do it 4 years in a row, give it a break for 2 or 3 years and let people think it night be over and strike again… that would probably have a more lasting effect. But I still think, at some point after your powers run out a decade or two at most and the shenanigans would start again. Humans believe what they want to believe, and what they’re best at deluding themselves and is “that can’t happen to me.”

You got me.

It’s surprisingly far away! Shockingly far. It baffles me every time I stop to think about it; it’s so incomprehensibly far, I am incapable of visualizing how far it is, no matter how many times I play with the scrollable solar system web page.

I tried to be careful about the biblical reference. It’s been translated as “apple” since at least the 12th century CE.

The biblical comment was not to argue that the Torah said “apple”, but that it has been translated as “apple” for centuries, demonstrating that the apple has been a commonly known fruit in Britain for a long time; and that ripe apples are frequently red.

I agree with you!

Word definitions are like the lowest common denominator consensus version of those individual meaning, but they are changing slightly all the time as people change. Dictionaries are just documenting that evolution, but are constantly playing catch-up

This is my pet peeve, and yet I know I’m wrong. I hate Miriam Webster for being a catalog of slang; it’s not a dictionary, anymore. OED is the only English dictionary. Words have meanings, despite 20% of the population misunderstanding or intentionally redefining them.

And yet, and yet… it is not possible to argue against popular usage in natural languages. The best you can do is use a conlang that enforces strict no-evolution rules, such as the stance Esperanto has traditionally taken. Or learn Volpuk, a logic based language that strives to eliminate all ambiguity and achieves only being impossible to use outside of extremely narrow circumstances, because that’s not how humans think.

This is one of the great internal conflicts in my world: natural language evolves and changes, and context alters meaning even further; and yet I desire reliable definitions and disambiguity, and shudder when I see MW has added “boomer: N. An older person.”

Naw, giant lava trenches sound like a good idea.

No. The inner edge of the Oort Cloud is 10 light days away. The outer edge of 100 ld away.

The math looks like:

• 1 AU is the distance from the Sun to Earth.
• The Earth is 8 light minutes from Sol
• The inner edge of the Oort Cloud is (minimum) 2,000 AU ≈ 16,000 light-minutes, or 11 day light days.
• The outer edge is about 100,000 AU away; that’s about a year and a half to get from the inner edge to the outer edge, traveling at the speed of light.

The Oort Cloud is not only mind bogglingly far away, it’s about 50x deeper than it is away from the sun.

Those are minimum estimates; some estimates have the inner cloud edge 28 AU away.

The original Superman wasn’t a god, but it got hyperbolic over the years with one-upmanship until he was indistinguishable from a god. Canonically, beings regularly travel between star systems, so FTL is not uncommon in the DC universe. Heck, in Invincible (not DC), even relatively low-power beings travel FTL all over, all the time. Spacetime doesn’t work the same in comics. So, Superman can travel FTL, and the Oort Cloud would be reachable. But he’d have to travel at least 20x the speed of light to get to the Cloud and back in a day, and thousands of times faster if he wants to explore it at all, or see the outer edge.

That’s a pretty good starting list. I don’t know that I’d waste time trying to show them anything; just go straight to disposal.

I, too, was thinking “murder.” It solves only a sort term problem though. Within a few years, you’d just have a new batch.

The system is broken. Capitalism as we practice it is broken; our political systems are broken (some more than others). That won’t be fixed by DXing a bunch of oligarchs.

They’re great shoes, after they’re broken in. Last forever.

NK is really taking “cannon fodder” to the extreme. Too many mouths to feed, I guess.

I thought briefly about editing that to say, “in this context”, but I thought it might be redundant.

It’s like the whole fruit/vegetable debate, and there not really being a scientific category of “vegetables” that aligns with the common usage. However, in common usage, the loose, lay definition of “vegetable” is far more useful than the scientific, taxonomical one.

Context is king.