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  Plus, the implication that your taxes should only pay for services that you personally use, or even for services that you might use, is just plain uncivilized. Some people have that situation, for example, where they can choose whether to pay for fire services, and if they don't and their house catches fire, the fire department won't do anything except protect neighboring houses that have paid for it. It's pretty backwards for modern sensibilities.

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  That's surprising. Based on his previous behavior, I thought his most likely course of action would be to guarantee that gas prices would go down, and then to declare that gas prices had gone down, even though anyone could easily see that they went up.

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  Whenever capital punishment comes up, I am reminded of the hypocrisy of American Christians. Pretty much every Christian claims to believe that killing is prohibited by the ten commandments. In a democracy, if you vote for a politician who supports the death penalty, you are asking them to kill a person on your behalf. A Christian should not be able to vote for a politician who supports the death penalty. Compare that with abortion. The bible says virtually nothing about abortion except how to...

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  It's just like Jesus said: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and render unto me all of that cash in that inexplicably bulging wallet over there."

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  There are some youtube creators who frequently cover the great green wall, like Andrew Millison. I've noticed that lately the videos seem to cover the failures more. You need tons of local buy-in to make anything work. One problem is that in many places, they have a culture of herding animals, and if nobody is there to stop them, they see these areas growing grasses and saplings, and what do you think they're going to do? Of course they send their animals in to graze and end up destroyi...

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  One thing I learned while living in Japan and teaching English is that people who speak foreign languages might hear things differently from you. The most striking example was that my students often couldn't even hear the difference between "she" and "sea" unless I was pointing it out in isolation. The difference is obvious to English speakers, but subtle to Japanese speakers. And yes, there are examples the other way, but they're harder to explain here. Often, it&#...

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  Counterpoint: Fuck cars.

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  One other way of saying "melt that horse" is "cook that horse." I forget the exact recipe for hide glue, but I think it mostly is a process that involves soaking and heating hide with lime (not the fruit). Also materials that can be used in the production of leather. Anyways, if you cook enough horse and you make enough horse leather in an area with lime, and you're observant enough, hide glue is sort of an inevitable discovery.

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  [This a recent favorite bit about Epstein, that jokes about normalizing knowing Epstein.](https://youtu.be/P_1kvp5p-DQ) It's from legendary comedy writer Jim Downey when he was on Conan O'Brien's podcast. I put it here because it kind of tangentially makes a similar point as the main post. A somewhat normal person has no need to explain that they didn't know Epstein. It's ridiculous on its face. In fact, a normal person would have to go a long way to explain how they hell...

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  I used to be like this. If I started drinking, my filter would start to let the 90% of alternatives I usually rejected before saying anything pass through.

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  I’m not sure what “left wing architecture” means. Because, to me, this looks like the sort of thing you have to do when the population grows like crazy. Those tend to be areas where women have little education and little power.

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  I got one a few years ago that had a setting to automatically go to a specified input when the TV started (similar to how normal TVs used to work). My only mistake was leaving the TV connected to the network, as it updated and caused some hassle recently.