With the primaries over you have two choices and they’re not even close to being equal.

Throwing your vote away does nothing to advance the causes you’re most concerned about but stands a strong chance of allowing a fascist to be elected, one who will try to dismantle the democracy that permits your voice at all.

But then it also says after that Originally Published: November 18, 2020 Who knows?

Great article, and shocking to see the prices mentioned and this at the end: This article originally ran in the February 1997 issue of Reader’s Digest.

I can’t fathom how a husband can know his wife has been raped but do nothing and say nothing about it. Did he sit and watch? How does he know it happened if not? Where was he when this happened? How did he justify not telling you? Why would he not report this crime? How has this rapist not been held accountable, by your husband at least? If I knew with certainty someone raped my wife the police would be involved immediately. If there were some details that meant we couldn’t get the authorities involved, I’d mete out some violent justice myself assuming the rapist isn’t going to report me since he doesnt want the authorities involved either.

I suspect i might be the winner here. My friend had an alley behind his house along with a nice strip of open land near a busy road. Eventually a strip mall was built and then another large commercial building started to go up. Being basically behind my friends house we walked over to this new building on weekend to check out the construction site.

The building was being built with cement block and had lots of scaffolding and yet-unused block scattered around. I found a pipe-bender - a very heavy tool made out of high quality steel - and found you could just tap on of these cement blocks and it would shatter to pieces. I was fascinated, as were my friends. I have no idea how many cement blocks we destroyed over the next couple of days, but it was a huge number. Then we decided to see if we could go through a wall with the pipe bender… we could indeed, making a hole in the side of the building we could walk through. Looking around we eventually realized what we’d done was awful… we had decimated this construction site. We finally slinked away and come Monday when the crew returned, police were called and neighbors interrogated but thankfully with privacy fences all around, none of the neighbors saw anything. 11 and 12 yr olds are stupid.

Thanks for sharing that. It was terrible and depressing read, 5½ years in the future.

That’s all good info and explains some of the problems that could be resolved for us programmers if we were on UTC, but for the most part these are programmer problems and the computer handles it for everyone else. Additionally, it makes a few issues clear that won’t be resolved with a UTC switch.

First, as mentioned countries all over the world decide for themselves what timezone they’re going to follow. Even if countries were to switch to UTC, we know they all won’t do it nor at the same time, so programmers will have to deal with that added complexity too having some on UTC, some off, some switching on this date or that… if the movement got serious we’d have another Y2K frenzy, but not one that ended on a specific date… it’d linger for years as various countries came on-board. Additionally, we’d still have to deal with all the historical calendar, timezone and DST switches he mentioned. Those wouldn’t go away… in fact we’d be introducing a bunch of new ones.

Fact is timezones are understandable and work pretty good for normal people and their day-to-day tasks. Normal people aren’t going to want to understand UTC and then have to translate their normal day times to and from others around the world. No matter where you are I understand what you mean when you say your morning started at 6am or you eat at noon or you go to bed at 11pm or 23:00 for that matter. With UTC I don’t know what 23:00 means in Australia, Germany or India relative to your day… not only programmers but even normal people would have to know how to translate that to a time they can relate too, so you’d have to know timezones anyway. So while I’d know 23:00 was exactly the same point in time for each of us, I wouldn’t know how it relates to your day the way it relates to mine… is it morning, night, mid-day? It would actually make today’s programmers problems - which isn’t too common for most of us - a problem for everyone.

Why switch? It’s not too complicated a concept for the average person to understand and deal with. In fact, it’s intuitive. Sure in software the logic has a few nuances that are a bit complex when needing to deal with local time and timezones, but that’s why we make the computers do the tricky work.

I was once very poor and now pretty well-off. I’m generally happy to try and pick up the bill when I go out with friends and family because I’m thankfully in a place in my life I can do that and I remember how thankful I was for the generosity of others early in my life. Unfortunately I’ve found some people get offended… that my picking up the bill is some power move to show I’m rich so I’ve become reluctant to do that unless I’ve explicitly invited them to dinner or whatever. I don’t want people to think I’m showing off and trying to make them feel inferior so if they’ve invited me or it’s an otherwise group event, I assume they’re paying their own way and didn’t come with the idea that someone else was paying for them. If somehow I’m the one whose credit card it ends up on because the place won’t split the bill, I’ll let people know how to Venmo me or whatever. It’s not because I’m worried about the money though.

Give an example of where it’s led to less truth. When X perpetuates lies, truth and the world’s welfare is harmed. Look at the number of people that died thinking covid was a lie and people that think vaccines are somebkind of conspiracy to harm them.

I takes abject poverty to lose weight though. Carbs are cheap and highly addicting. Poverty often brings a high bmi but poor nutrition.

You need lawn darts for that.

And cheap oil is bad for the US oil industry and US energy independence. Under ~$3 a barrel and our fracked oil fields become unprofitable. Something like ¾ of Texas’ oil fields were closed in the first year or so after covid and most fracked wells suffer damage from closing process and can’t be re-opened. Putin intentionally kept production high during Covid, causing the prices to plummet more, to damage the US oil industry as we’d become the world’s top producer.

Heck the stupid XL pipeline not being available keeps prices low for the US Midwest because Canada is forced to sell crude at a discount to US midwest refineries. But Republicans repeat the Koch brothers promoted, well-rehearsed lies that that somehow that pipeline allowing Canada to get their crude to refineries on the Texas coast and sell on a world market would lower gas prices.

My understanding is DST did still save appreciable energy until we replaced incandescent lights with fluorescent and leds. Longer daylight in the evening when people are awake and less in the early morning when people are asleep means lights aren’t being used as much. The average light bulb used to consume 60 watts or more and also let off significant undesirable heat, so with a house full of lights DST really did cut back energy usage. Now though with led lights low consumption and virtually no heat, it’s not nearly as significant.

My Vizio smart TV’s smart features won’t work if you don’t accept the terms of use. HDMI inputs worked though, and probably TV tuner… didnt try it. I eventually accepted of course, but that might be an option for you.

The difference though is the most important. We can change our minds and vote someone else in after Biden. If we elect Trump he will do his best to completely dismantle our democracy, something he almost accomplished the first time.

Strange that all countries aren’t just going off the rails with gun violence in schools huh? What’s unique about the US??

Not even modern. Never been good but as they say, the dose makes the poison. Insidious really as we give it to our kids and ourselves, thinking nothing bad about it until a few decades later we realize how it’s ravaged our bodies and left us diseased. And then we get to watch our kids doing the same to their own.

You can hear the first VP debate question… “How did you feel the first time you heard Trump say 'I just grab ‘em by the pussy!’ ?”

The kids have no idea what you’re going on about…