Milhouse is not a meme!

Interesting how the ‘vintage’ ‘black border’ meme has a remarkably modern website watermark. Go back to sucking on your pacifier, you wanka.

I’ll forever be grateful to those thronal thespians of the page, who told me exactly whence the phrase, “Close, but no cigar,” came from.

This is a big one, and I’d add in an aggressive tax for owning multiple properties. Make single land ownership ~70% of what it currently is, and each additional property increases all your property tax by 300%. Couple that with getting rid of idiotic exemptions (seriously…I have a friend with parents that owned more than a hundred different properties in a semi-rural area [one that was going to become suburban soon] and paid nearly no taxes because they plunked a few cows onto each one until the development companies paid the big moolah for them) and there would be plenty of homes for everyone. Last report I remember said we had more than enough empty homes sitting around to house every homeless person multiple times over.

It was, when it was just people looking to get a tiny bit of income from renting a room in their house. Then people tried to make it their sole income, and then companies got into the game. Part of it is that the service became popular, so any cheaper rooms are snatched up instantly, and the user now gets to choose between a hotel-looking hotel, or a house-looking hotel, with nasty fees to get more money from you.

1. I’ve had to wear bulletproof vests, and now choose not to because they are a massive pain. So that’s why I felt like I should explain why they aren’t a good solution. They won’t be of any help in the majority of cases, and will likely slow you down. Unlike the ABS example, the amount of help a vest that would fit underneath your typical clothing is so small that it would be next to useless. At the distance you’d have to be from a shooter in order for it to be effective against a round it isn’t meant for, the reason you’d survive is because they can’t accurately aim at you. Anywhere within reasonable accuracy distances, it would be worthless. Most individuals aren’t going to be accurate with a pistol past 10-15 yards, well within the range that a 9mm, .45, .40, etc. are effective against level I or level II armor.

2. You’re right, I looked quickly and it looked like you were replying to MrVilliam’s post, where he said he was afraid the locals would leak his home address. Obviously, on a re-look, that’s not the case. So… oops.

3. No. Concealable guns (handguns, for the most part, leaving aside the ridiculous sweatpants video) easily penetrate all but the best armor. The Ft. Hood shooter, for example, used a pistol that was chambered in .223, the ‘civilian’ version of the 5.56.

3b. Also, yes. While I wouldn’t want to use a handgun against a rifle or shotgun, I’d still much prefer to have one, especially in the situations where the majority of shootings happen. It wouldn’t help at all in the Las Vegas shooting, but in the rest? Schools, grocery stores, large chain stores? A pistol would work well. The range you’d be engaging the shooter at will likely be within those 15 yards that people can accurately aim a handgun. That kind of carries into your last, unnumbered point. Right now, non-lethal (which should really be called less-lethal, but that’s a whole thing I personally roll my eyes at) options don’t have anywhere near a large enough range. The longest Tasers reach around 40’, I think, while the 37mm or 40mm bean-bag shooters are never going to be carried around by a civilian casually. The taser almost certainly won’t be effective at that range. I think it’s an 8 degree spread between the two probes, which works out to about 1 foot of spread every 7 feet of distance to the target. At the maximum range of 40’, that’s nearly a 6 foot spread. A taser isn’t going to be super accurate either, so you’d have to aim for the head and get lucky, and also get lucky that your nearly 6 foot spread of the barbs hit the other guy’s foot. Otherwise it isn’t going to be very effective at stopping the shooter from shooting you.

As an aside, sure, I’m an American. I think I’m pretty logical about everything, though. I think societies that don’t have guns outnumbering folks are great and wish we could get there. I also think that we’ve gotten ourselves into a shithole, and it is at the point where the first person to disarm is fucked. It’s just like this stupid nuclear weapon situation. Can you really imagine America, Britain, France, etc. giving up their nuclear weapons after seeing how Russia is acting? That’s what it’s going to be like for at least a decade if we vote now to get rid of civilian ownership of guns. ‘The Purge’ wouldn’t be a good depiction of what it would be like, but I don’t want to wait 30 minutes for the police to come help when my meth head neighbor decides to get revenge for all the ‘slights’ I’ve ever given him (like asking him not to dump his tires and burn them next to my chicken coop because he thought it was funny) with his little dump gun in hand and here I am having turned over my guns to the sheriff.

I have an honest question for you. Have you ever seen a bulletproof vest?

Also, the person you’re replying to gave a very frightening scenario: being hunted down at your own home. If you’re not shooting back, what do you think the enemy is going to do? Give up and go away? Molotov cocktails are an easy, low-tech solution to a barricaded enemy you don’t care about taking alive.

Now, if we assume you’re in public, there are still issues with a bulletproof vest. They’re not really all that great at being concealed. If you truly have a bulletproof vest that can fit underneath clothing, it’s not going to stop many bullets. You can look through the wikipedia page on different levels of body armor, and do a quick search to see how bulky the different types are. Police armor is rated for most handguns, and is super bulky already. Military armor can hopefully stand up to a rifle bullet, but they’re often ceramic plates, which don’t last against multiple rounds, and are very obvious and stand out. Your slim-fit vest may be able to handle a very small subset of rounds. If you go the route of more protection, you’re going to find yourself targeted by the gunman due to your visibility and because your potential as a threat is large compared to others. Even a very high quality, military vest/suit is not going to cover you well enough to make a difference if a single person is shooting at you and A) you don’t have buddies to give you cover fire and make them put their head down and B) space because you knew the shooter was an enemy before he pulled out a gun and started shooting at you.

Okay, I think this is the one I read way long ago, but it says it was updated in 2021. I remember when I read it must have been early 2010s, and this dude even admits his grandmother was an impasta so… /shrug Amazing how memory gets skewed. I must have remembered the grandmother not being Italian line and somehow mangled it into him being Italian.

This is why pasta instructions will tell you to add the pasta only when the water is at a vigorous boil. Either you stir, or you have the pasta boiling like it’s a volcano about to pop.

There was a neat cooking blog where an italian fella went into all the ‘old myths’ that his grandmother used to tell him: Vigorous boiling; Large Pot; when to add sauce; etc. It all boiled down to knowing what you’re cooking. Pasta is starchy, so if it sits in hot water instead of being tumbled about, all the starch that’s been liberated into the water settles back on the pasta (and not in a good way).

The equator and its rain forests are much more pleasant. Plenty of shade and the temps don’t reach quite as high. It’s the tropics that get nasty. There was a stretch of the border between the US and Mexico that reached 115 this week. The summer I spent in Texas years ago broke a record for never getting below 90 for something like 45 days, and the apartment I had didn’t use AC. That was a nasty summer.

The amusing part is that we can’t even guess (accurately) what the actual tell will be. Somehow I don’t think the time gap between blinks is going to be it. I’m betting it’s going to be slang-based. There’s a reason kids use slang readily, and it’s often to separate the worlds of adult regulators and the ‘more free’ children/teenagers. Imagine AI trying to keep up with the slang, but just like adults, it will be unable to use it in the same way with all the pseudo-information packed into it.

They did that with a 30-40 foot stick a few years ago, and the initial attempts by the driver were hilarious. They didn’t show improvement because I’m sure it wouldn’t be as funny, but I think we all forget how difficult it first was to match up how far to push the stick left or right for a particular turn. Now imagine an actual wheel.

Okay, I like it, but… How do you load the payload?