Can you still buy a star? Obviously dubious that you actually own it. But certainly bigger than anything on earth and a bit tricky to deliver.

He was TOO good at the satire. On the left dum-dums thought he was actually right, while on the right dum-dums thought he was on their side.

Also, I think people are hitting their limit of joking about the collapse of democracy and civil society. I know I am. I know there are now movies, TV, and books that I might have found interesting in less interesting times; now it all just hits too close to home. John Oliver can hit those “too close to home” topics and move on to other things. But it always felt like when Colbert was doing his conservative pundit schtick, he was trapped in it. It was harder to laugh along with him about other things that weren’t specifically about that kind of satire. He might have had some more material of a particular idiom if he’d stuck with it, but that idiom can wear thin.

Aggressive is modifying “virtue signaling”. I guess I could have been more clear by adding an “ly” to make it clear that aggressive was an adverb.

But, honestly in my experience there is ALWAYS someone finding some new way to understand your comment so that they have something to argue with. I was both making a joke AND making a point. Complicated, I know.

And it is something to criticize: OP asked about “X”, commenter replied about NOT “X”.

I downvoted your comment because it’s doesn’t really add anything to the conversation, it’s just aggressive virtue signalling.

Oh yeah, I’m aware. I don’t really disagree in general, but that dependency on devices is problematic. Also, I think that dependency is almost entirely a fiction. The only vendors I’ve ever met that don’t take cash, weren’t selling anything I’d generally need in an emergency or miss if I couldn’t get it immediately, e.g. craft/art fair vendors and fly by night food trucks. And I mostly managed to navigate everywhere without a map, even though I kept one in the glove box. The U.S. (I assume we’re talking about the U.S. because carbrained) is fairly easy to navigate without either as long as you can find a highway and you can read road signs. Maps helped sometimes sure, but the lack of one never made me feel unsafe. Sure, things can go badly, but that’s due to a lack of ingenuity and knowledge (street smarts as we used to call it), not the lack of a phone. In fact, I’ve gotten just as lost while looking at a map and trying to follow a friend’s directions. Maps, physical or digital, are almost always wrong or outdated to some degree.

You’re only as dependent on your phone as you make yourself. That crutch is the real danger.

It’s amusing to me that the very idea of leaving the house without your cellphone is seen as very dangerous. But I guess payphones and landlines at every tiny shred of civilization aren’t really a thing anymore. Nobody could track me and I could get genuinely stranded occasionally for the first few decades on my life, but I never felt that lifestyle was dangerous. Just raw dogging life before it was cool I guess.

Reminds me of a sci-fi story I read. A detective (wait was this in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, maybe? I don’t remember, anyway) is looking for a person and asking around. I stead of carrying around a picture of the person they are looking for, they compare the person’s features to a list of celebrities and just go around asking if anyone has seen someone that looks like that celebrity. Point being lots of people have surprisingly similar features and there really are “doppelgangers” out there.

But just try explaining that to some stranger that just caught you staring off into space directly at their face because they look like a person you had a crush on in college, only you’re an old fart now and they don’t look like that old crush would look now, but like the memory you have of them. “You look like someone I know” always sounds like a pickup line.

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Focusing at a point behind the image is exactly what we’ve always done for every other magic eye poster because it only requires relaxing your eyes (staring off into the distance) for the image to pop into focus. Cross eyed viewing is damn near impossible on any screen at less than an arm’s length away without significant eye strain or external devices (like the stereoscopic viewers that photogrammetrists would use to view these kinds of images without inducing a migraine) and since the dot is on top holding a finger up as a guide ends up obstructing the entire view unless your arms are growing out of your forehead. The wall eyed view has none of these issues.

I appreciate the post and your effort. But, the images themselves are frustrating and have killed my initial reaction, which was to share them further. Because I’m nearly the only person I know that wouldn’t loose interest in the explanation for “correct viewing” half way through. If they were wall eyed stereoscopic images, I could just say “Magic Eye”, they’d remember Mallrats, see the schooner, and go “Ooh neat.”

With no more due process, an ID and proof of citizenship do not matter at all. They’re not checking ID’s before hauling people away. And given ICE is going around masked and without uniforms there is no way to verify their authority either. I absolutely loath violence to a point, and that tipping point is the safety of the people in my family and community, regardless of their citizenship. If a group of unidentified masked gunman are attempting to kidnap someone, the only truly patriotic American response is to defend their liberty with all necessary force. Given the murder happy training of our law enforcement, that will obviously result in tragic deaths. But that, protecting the people (all the people, not just citizens) from a corrupt government, is the fundamental justification for the 2nd amendment, always has been.

We killed our trajectory because the cold war ended and we were no longer engaged in an arms race involving rockets. Once capitalism figures out how to exploit space for infinite growth we’ll get back on track assuming we don’t great filter ourselves first.

I just assumed that this was near where they joined a photo from the top of a set of stairs with a photo from the bottom of a set of stairs.

<insert jackdaw != crow copypasta>

Have you checked your blood pressure lately? Salt intake? Hydrating okay? Hormones? Allergies?

Could be an early warning sign of something more serious.

A little swelling and water retention especially on hot days is normal. But, if your shoes stop fitting due to a little water retention, they probably didn’t fit very well to begin with. It’s easier than you’d think to get used to shoes that are too small. Your feet adapt, but suffer.

Value was making value as you put it, long before rapid trading. Speculation and arbitrage are like the first two things that develop in any economy. Any entrepreneurial grade school child trading candy, baseball cards, pogs, hotwheels, or whatever the hot new thing is has probably seen both first hand.

Tell us you don’t have a clue how the electoral college works without telling us.

I’ve felt that. In my story, I’m an adult out on a date. I order a molcajete dish from the local Mexican restaurant. I’ve had this dish before at a few places. I know it’s usually spicy. I want this. I have a vague memory of the waitress confirming I was okay with a spicy dish. I enthusiastically confirm.

I had never encountered this level of spicy before. Those other molcajete dishes I’d had were milquetoast. This was flavortown gone nuclear. My entire head turned red apparently. The sweat started on my forehead, then my neck, and eventually my entire head was running like a sock over a faucet. I hadn’t encountered real heat like this before. I was in experienced, so I didn’t know that drinking my beer between bites was only making the heat worse. The waitress kept bringing them though. At one point I could hear people laughing together in the kitchen. It was a quiet restaurant, we may have been the only ones there at this point.

I was not bowed or broken. I ate the whole damn thing. It was otherwise also a delicious dish and now that I had broken through into the fire dimension I was tasting flavors I didn’t even have words for. These flavors were here the whole time but I couldn’t experience them until I had set my mouth on fire. I eventually won the day, or so I thought until the next day when dinner had it’s revenge on the way out.

Jalapenos don’t get the respect they deserve. Sure they don’t have the face melting power of some other peppers. But they taste fucking great in ways the other peppers can’t match. They are also sneaky. I’ve had jalapeno with little to no heat, almost like a better tasting green bell pepper. And I’ve had jalapeno that were face melty sweet awesomeness. The secret I eventually learned was to seek the peppers with those little brown stretch marks. More stretch marks mean more fire.

Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.

The best part is the random bill.

• Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
• Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

Or another variant.

• Go to the emergency room.
• Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.

Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?

It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.