Levis makes a huge range of quality. The stuff at shopping mall department stores is crap. But the made-in-Mexico shrink-to-fit 501s you can find at hardware stores are phenomenal. And they are still only like US$50.

Tall data centers do exist in cities where land is expensive. It’s the same reason everyone builds up in cities. Where land is cheap and available it’s usually easier and less expensive to build things low and wide.

I always assumed the translators were simply doing a heroic job. Getting puns and wordplay to work across languages is hard. I would not be surprised if some jokes had to be significantly changed for different languages or countries.

Thanks! This has become a January tradition with my kids. We are trying a different winter camp location in 2026, and I really hope there will be enough snow to do this again!

Pile the snow into a big mound, pack it down, then hollow out the middle. Camping overnight is optional.

Hell yeah. There’s an unassuming restaurant in my town that hosts local all-ages punk and metal shows after the kitchen closes. The underground scene is alive and well. I’m looking forward to having your experience myself as my kids grow up.

Maybe related to the Sunshine Act? The intent of the law is to prevent companies from bribing doctors to use their products or drugs. I have seen companies extend it to other employees to be extra cautious.

They are all in medical or medical-adjacent careers: nursing, radiology, pharmaceutical R&D, medical device R&D, etc. These fields seem to attract empathetic people who want to do good.

Don’t let Java try hallucinogens. It will get lost in the public static void.

I have many times, and I agree that travel is a good thing. But don’t be so quick to scoff at Americans who don’t travel overseas. Traveling is expensive. The flight alone from my house to Frankfurt or Tokyo (for example) is at least $1,500 per person, and a day of travel each way. That’s out of reach for a lot of people. Hell, it’s out of reach for me now that I have a family to bring with me. The most basic, banal holiday overseas would easily exceed $10,000. Nevermind the luxury of being able to spend enough time there to understand local takes on geopolitics.

Borders have existed as long as humans have claimed territory. Borders are only meaningful to the extent they are enforced, so border control has existed in some form or another for all that time.

Borders have been a bit fuzzy at many times and places. The farther one travels from a seat of power, the harder it is for that power to patrol and control the area. Thus we get borderlands, places at the fringes of a government’s authority.

In addition to borders, documents analogous to passports have existed for millennia. If you wanted to travel from your kingdom to another kingdom, your monarch might send you off with an official letter requesting your safe passage through whatever kingdoms you need to cross. Without papers you might be deemed a vagrant or worse, and wind up in a cell.

The top three priorities of a true libertarian are I, Me, Mine.

All of the self-styled “libertarians” I know are simply looking for an excuse to not pay taxes.

Maybe one of these?

[email protected]
[email protected]

Yep, he adopted the stage name of his father, Martin Sheen (Ramón Gerard Antonio Estévez).

I think the issue is people getting hung up on the gender identity, not the name. I have known lots of people who go by preferred names, whether chosen themselves or given to them by friends as nicknames. Hell, there are a few people I knew for years only by their preferred name/nickname without realizing it wasn’t their given name.

And stage names make a lot of sense from a practical standpoint. Being famous by your given name can make it hard to separate professional life from personal life.

You might get some downvotes for mentioning that book. The author makes a few sloppy assumptions, and the anthropology/sociology/history communities love to hate him for it. His overall thesis is still generally good though, IIRC.

One thing I don’t think is in Diamond’s book: once Europe had realized they could sail far and wide to get things, the Dutch invented the idea of a stock market to fund voyages (the British took this idea and really ran with it). This system made long, risky trips easier to finance. Instead of a single monarch funding a single expedition, many people could pool their money to fund many expeditions.

I agree that none of this means Europeans have some special intelligence or attitude. Any other civilization that developed in similar conditions could have followed the same path.

I remember an mp3 going around where a guy turned it into a song, complete with the chorus, “I don’t like the DMCA.”

And it continues up to the present day. There was a Ukraine war fundraiser where you could pay to have a custom message written on munitions.

https://signmyrocket.com/