Broadly speaking, failing to put in effort does tend to lead to worse outcomes.

…Unless your parents have the last name “Musk” or “Trump”.

Probably not the ideal way to go about it, no.

OTOH, I have serious questions for anyone that could raise a child to be a white supremacist that’s trying to start a racial holy war. Or I would, if the suspect hadn’t already murdered them.

…Huh.

Right idea, wrong motive, I guess?

Satanist.

Raised Mormon, was a Mormon missionary. Had a nervous breakdown, and religious leaders said that I must be sinning, and needed to pray more, read my scriptures more, and repent. But… What sin? And how was I supposed to pray/study more when I had already dedicated two years of my life to preaching? E.g., there’s 24 hours in the day, and I’m already spending multiple hours doing that stuff, so where am I supposed to fit that in?

That was the first crack in the foundation. Took a while, but once you realize that religious leaders are just men (and yes, it’s always men in the Mormon church), and that despite their claims they don’t have any prophetic powers, then you start questioning a lit of things, like how you can even know truth. (Spoiler: you can’t know truth without some kind of objective evidence, and all religions’ truth claims are based on subjective evidence and “see?, it says so, right here in my book!”)

Atheist is a label that says what you don’t believe. Satanist is a label that says what I do believe. So I eventually settled on Satanist.

10,000 acres of land in the northern mountains, with all associated rights (mineral, water, etc.).

I really, really, really don’t want to have neighbors. I already live in a rural area, and I still have neighbors 1/4 mile away that blast their music at 11pm loud enough to make out the lyrics. I want to be able to see the stars at night with no light pollution, and see wildlife that’s barely seen people.

that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws.

I dunno. Sounds like he’s not opposed to them, just doesn’t think that they’re effective without going after root-cause issues. (…Which, I would like to point out, is one of the huge fucking problems that people in favor of banning guns have. E.g., address the root causes of violence, and you stop the violence without curtailing the civil right.) He doesn’t seem to have a problem with addressing the root causes so that there’s no need for the laws in the first place, and doesn’t appear to be arguing against the things he lists as being ‘social ills’ in the first place. (He did think that the youth of his time were declining morally, which is a tale that goes back to at least the Greek city-states.)

Fundamentally though, yeah, laws alone rarely change behavior; you need to change the material and social conditions to change behavior.

I feel like a lot of people forget just how wildly different the time Heinlein was raised in was. He may have been wrong-headed in our current view about a fair amount of things–particular his work prior to the mid-60s or so–but that’s a cultural issue, rather than someone that was pig-headedly stupid. The quote you have–"[…] forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath […]–is especially ironic because AFAIK Heinlein appears to have had open/polyamorous marriages (…or multiamorous/polyerotic, if you’re a linguistic pedant); that sort of inclination should be quite antithetical to laws enforcing religious doctrine or sexual morality.

Well. He’s not wrong. Admittedly, many people in the US are opposed to socialist policies largely because of propagandizing by corporate interests, but when they get really popular anyways, that’s def. a sure sign that everything is going to shit.

2012 Indian Scout. The price was decent, the miles were low. It was my first motorcycle, and I was sure that I wanted a cruiser. It seemed perfect for me.

It had some pretty major issues. The stator failed in the rain; it got fixed under warranty. Then a coil pack failed, stranding me two hours from home. That took about a month to get fixed under warranty. It wouldn’t start in cold weather worth a damn; anything under 50F, and it was a bitch to start. To top it off, I live in the mountains, and once I got past my initial trepidation of riding without anything but skill and luck between myself and the pavement, I was out-riding the capabilities of a cruiser. It’s really unpleasant to drop into a corner and get your foot knocked off the foot peg because it’s dragging on the pavement…

It turns out that the way I ride is much more suited to a sport bike.

I did a title swap with someone that had a '12 CBR600RR that needed some work; I took about a $5000 bath on that trade, but I got a bike that I loved. I ended up putting 80,000 miles on it before I wore the engine out, and then bought a '16 Triumph Speed Triple that I rode to work today.

1 point. I’ve never personally owned a physical encyclopedia. I’ve def. used them though.

I have an earlier version of this (got it on sale from Costco, and it was the highest-rated model by Consumer Reports at the time); I love it. It’s not great for carpets, but it’s fast and easy for hardwood floors.

Would I have bought it if it needed to connect to my cell phone? Absofuckinglutely not. Not in a million fucking years. It could have been the best goddamn vacuum in the world at sucking, powered by a miniature black hole, sucking dirt to the event horizon, and I still would have passed.

I need LESS connectivity in my life, not more.

Mine def. was not an impulse, mostly because I had to make an appointment several month in advance. Brian Decker travels, but it ended up being easier to go to NYC rather than wait for him to come near where I lived at the time.

I have a Meta Quest 3 that i use every single day. I bought it specifically so I could use AceXR, which is a “game” that’s a dry fire practice simulator. It’s significantly improved my shooting ability, since I now get feedback, and I’ve saved tens of thousands in ammunition prices versus going to a shooting range every single day. No, it’s not perfect–there’s no recoil control in dry fire simulation–but it’s very, very good for what it is.

People saying that VR is stupid sound a lot like people that didn’t see any reason to switch to LED from CRT.

I doubt that they would show their hand publicly; they don’t want to poison a jury pool.

On the other hand, if they had better video of the shooter, I’m sure they would have released it, because they were trying to get people to ID the killer. One shitty video of half of a face doesn’t really help a lot.

Not really; without the items that were seized, they don’t really have much of anything that would link him to the location, aside from some bad security camera footage that, IMO, doesn’t really look like him. Insisting that he needs an alibi is reversing the burden of proof; it’s saying that, unless he can prove he was elsewhere, then their claim must be correct. But they have so little without the evidence seized at the arrest that the case would be very thin.

Look, if you asked me where I was when The Asshole Brian Thompson was shot, I’d have no fucking idea unless it was something that was a big enough deal that I noted it in my calendar. I don’t even remember where I was when 11 Sept. happened.

“She says they would still say ‘Don’t do the shots,’” an unidentified translator for the parents said. “They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be.”

Their child literally died. How could it have been worse, exactly?

That’s an exceptionally dangerous claim to make; it’s going to cause people to further alienate people that are on the autism spectrum. When you look at the report that the US Secret Service released on mass shootings (I’d have to find it; I’ve got a copy saved somewhere), autism spectrum disorder is not listed as a factor, while things like divorced parents is.

Perhaps you missed the part that said, “[Forensic psychiatrist Dr Iain Kooyman] found Prosper had an ‘extreme lack’ of empathy and remorse - something that could not be explained by ASD alone.”

And, BTW, people on the autism spectrum lack effective empathy, not empathy. That means that a person on the spectrum has a reduced ability to understand what a person is experiencing or feeling, not that they don’t feel empathy when they do know.

The thoughts I’d be sending are all “fuck this dude, I hope she divorces him when she finds out this is what he voted for”.

Well. No, not really. Owning a house is just stressful, period. And sometimes really expensive things happen that you couldn’t foresee.

For ants, you want to get food-safe diatomaceous earth, and a bulb-style dispenser. If you can tell where they’re coming from, blow some diatomaceous earth in there. It’s completely safe for people and pets, but will kill insects. There’s also some non-toxic treatments for wood–Nissin Boracare, for instance–that will help prevent termite, ant, and powderpost beetle infestations.

If you have a damp moldy spot on a ceiling, that’s likely leaking from the roof. Roof leaks can be very difficult to find; if you have asphalt shingles that are starting to curl at the corners, then it’s probably just time to replace them, along with flashing. Thankfully, depending on the pitch of your roof, re-roofing isn’t that awful. It gets ugly it you have a really steep roof pitch, or if you have an flat EPDM roof in a brick home.