The Democrats do have to think about the 2026 election. Even a lame duck has limits.

I’m going to go ahead and respect democracy. Trump won fair and square. He should be able to implement his policies because that’s what the majority wants.

I’m not making a value judgement. I’m explaining why New York City’s murder rate is so much higher than London’s. It’s because NYC has a population of white and Asian people who are as safe as Europeans and another, de facto segregated population of black and Hispanic people who are much less safe.

I presume that a big part of the reason why things are the way they are is that society places a higher value on white people’s lives, but I’m not doing that here. Explaining isn’t the same as justifying.

Source

Source

Black and Hispanic people make up 52% of the city’s population but 88% of the murder victims. The murder rate of the white and Asian population works out to approximately 8.4 per million, so the average European tourist is not in much danger here.

New York’s murder rate (and the overall murder rate in the USA) is shaped by a history of race relations which is quite different from London’s. A white person in New York is much less likely (and conversely a black or Hispanic person is much more likely) to be murdered than the overall murder rate for the city might lead someone to think.

Only 7 murders? The population of London was apparently about 400,000 back then so that’s less than half the murder rate of present-day New York City (which is considered a relatively safe city). I don’t think that can be right…

1632 London: 7 / 400,000 = 17.5 murders per million people

2023 New York: 312 / 8,258,000 = 37.8 murders per million people

I like my women with armor plating.

14 legs

I’m a leg man but that’s going too far!

So it’s not just me? Sometimes my body decides that I must keep my face pointed down and to the side for a few days, and these muscles are the enforcers.

They periodically run out of integers so they have to reuse old ones.

I never thought about Mesozoic fauna having external ears. Birds don’t, so presumably their dinosaur ancestors didn’t. But maybe pterosaurs did? (Would we be able to tell by looking for muscle attachment points on their skulls?)

No leopards here. The title of the article is deceptive because it implies that the attorney general is acting contrary to the new amendment. Actually that amendment explicitly allows for abortion after viability to be illegal.

Do you want to amend the Missouri Constitution to:

establish a right to make decisions about reproductive health care, including abortion and contraceptives, with any governmental interference of that right presumed invalid;

remove Missouri’s ban on abortion;

allow regulation of reproductive health care to improve or maintain the health of the patient;

require the government not to discriminate, in government programs, funding, and other activities, against persons providing or obtaining reproductive health care;

and allow abortion to be restricted or banned after Fetal Viability except to protect the life or health of the woman?

(That’s the text of the ballot measure. The longer text of the actual amendment is substantially similar. It is available in this pdf.)

The voters approved a ban on abortion after viability. They’re not being surprised by this.

He’s got a point… I didn’t spend this long in school in order to treat people who know less than I do without contempt.

The current era of excess is unprecedented in the history of the world. For most of human history, starvation was a serious threat and hungry people would go anywhere where there was food that wasn’t already claimed by someone stronger than them.

(The people in very cold climates would fight to defend their resources too! Ultimately there was no unclaimed land that people could survive in, except shortly after major catastrophes.)

What if what I consider to be the most plausible and persuasive expression of an idea is not the one that most believers in that idea would express or even be aware of? For example, if I read the work of an economist who presents strong evidence that Trump’s tariffs would benefit the American economy, have I actually engaged with the beliefs of most Trump supporters or Trump himself?

The Winter War, which is generally considered a Soviet failure, still ended with Finland ceding a significant amount of territory to the Soviet Union. I wonder how similar Ukrainian leaders think their situation is to Finland’s…

Zelenskyy also expressed readiness to work with Donald Trump, despite reports that Trump’s plans may involve Ukraine ceding occupied land.

There’s no other reasonable course of action available to Zelensky. With that said, Trump might be volatile enough to actually support Ukraine’s NATO bid. I don’t think a rational US President would.

I recently came back from visiting my old boss. I stayed at his house for a week. (He lives on the coast in Florida; it’s great!) I’ve known him and his family for over ten years, and I consider them my dear friends.

But I still introduce him as the guy who fired me :)

(He objects, because he’s actually the guy who laid me off.)

I’m not a doctor but as far as weight loss goes: ADHD medication gives me the option of just not eating. I still enjoy eating but hunger becomes a mild sensation that is easy to ignore, to the extent that sometimes I forget to eat all day if I’m doing something interesting. I lose weight without even trying when I’m taking medication, I don’t feel the lethargy that I would if I were dieting normally, and the slow-release pills have no unpleasant side effects for me. Maybe this is something you could look into with the assistance of a sympathetic doctor - Ritalin was originally intended for weight loss…

It’s not just the posts. The neighbor used nails that are way too long. IMO that’s a safety hazard.

Just driving your Tesla without trying to apologize for it would be a lot more dignified.

When I was at a small company that worked with radioactive material, we had to register and secure all radiation sources, even the extremely weak ones that anyone can order online with no restrictions. Before the state inspector came, we deliberately left one of those weak sources out where it wasn’t supposed to be so that the inspector would find something wrong, tell us to fix it, and leave feeling like she did her job. It would be the smallest possible violation and it wouldn’t actually get us in trouble. We did that because we figured that if there was nothing obviously wrong, the inspector would look for problems a lot more carefully.

(Nuclear physicists are rather more nonchalant about radiation than the average person is, for obvious reasons. By nuclear physicist standards, we didn’t actually have any dangerous sources at all. Thus we felt like we weren’t doing anything morally wrong, but I suppose that the average person might have disagreed.)