Even for those who don’t build their identity around their job, a lot of folks are just used to having something to do.

I work in retail, and I’ve had a surprising number of old folks ask if we have any part time jobs available - they’re not looking for steady paycheck, they’re looking for something to do two or three days a week. Even if your job isn’t necessarily who you are, it’s still a reason to get out of the house.

…Wait a second, that shooting was at a different nightclub named Pulse.

Pulse might not be the Titanic of clubs, but apparently naming your club Pulse is about as lucky as naming your ship the Titanic.

I never really thought about their succession of consoles, but to me, seeing them listed like that feels surprisingly additive.

Like, the N64 had analog sticks, and the Gameboy was portable… And people liked both of those, so they released the GameCube, which had analog sticks and a handle, so you could take it to your friend’s house. They followed up with the DS’ touchscreen and the Wii’s motion controls, and when people liked those too, they bundled all of that into the Switch: it has analog sticks, a touchscreen, and motion controls; it’s a handheld and a very portable plug-in console.

But, as they’ve done that, they’ve always pushed the limits of what they could do. As it stands, there’s not much that can be added to the Switch, so they’re releasing an improved version - like they did with the Gameboys Color, Advance, and SP. Essentially, the limiting factor isn’t Nintendo’s ability to innovate, but rather the technology available to them.

Give it a few years for other aspects of technology to advance, and I’m sure they’ll start pushing the envelope again. They’ll probably wait until they can pack an entire console into a VR headset without a bulky battery pack, then release it with something wacky like a charging dock with a built-in projector, or something crazy like that.

A lot of people conflate “knowledge” and “intelligence.” Not the guy you replied to, they seem like a troll; but still, a lot of people.

Our ancestors had intelligence in spades. They figured out an insane amount of stuff just to survive; and it’s not too far back in the grand scheme of things that they had to remember it all because they had no way to record it. The first caveman to make a handaxe had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but they figured it out. Wheels, bows, fire, the entire concept of agriculture… They figured out how all of that worked from scratch, with no reference material.

Modern humanity builds on that with knowledge. We’ve figured out how to record everything our ancestors discovered, and all of our new discoveries as well. We’ve put men on the moon, figured out how to make electricity from things like waterfalls and glowing rocks, and almost everyone has a tiny computer in their pocket.

None of that means that we’re more intelligent now, though. All of that knowledge is iterative, so we’ve just been applying that same intelligence at a continually higher level throughout history.

maybe a little less sweet

I see what you did there

I grew up rural too, but in a less conservative area, and… Honestly, it made for some hilarious moments in sex ed.

I think the crowning moment was in high school health class - at the start of the sex ed unit, they split us up by gender, and had both groups try to draw both reproductive systems as a baseline for what we knew. Both groups did pretry well with the male stuff, but there was a stark (and unexpected) difference in the diagrams of the female reproductive system:

The girls group did an excellent job of drawing and labeling a vagina, but almost none of the internal bits.

The boys group, though… One dude had noticed something about the general shape of female reproductive system in an earlier class, and came up with a his own mnemonic for it: turns out, you can sketch oit the general layout of the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, and birth canal pretty neatly over the dodge ram logo.

I think the issue started a little over a decade ago, when the Boy Scouts got in some hot water for discriminating against gay kids and they actually tried to be better.

Up until right now, I always thought Coachella was just the name of the festival, not a place - sort of like Burning Man.

I’ve never been more confused by a headline in my life.

They also usually use some weasel words like “up to.” That way, if it doesn’t last the full 72 hours (which it won’t), they can claim that they stated “72 hours MAXIMUM” rather than just “72 hours.” It’s basically shifts the statement from “lasts three days” to “definitely won’t last four days.”

Wait… Y’all are talking about X-Wing: Rogue Squadron and Star Wars Episode 1: Battle for Naboo, right?

I owned those windows ports!

They worked great back in the day - I had such a blast with them that I begged my parents to get me a shitty Logitech joystick! If you want to check them out, it looks like Rogue Squadron is only $10 on Steam; and Battle for Naboo seems to be abandonware, but it seems to be hosted on a lot of “better spread than dead” game sites.

I think there may have been a tragic misunderstanding… It looks like they were using X as a placeholder, rather than the noun that Elon wants it to be; but the sentence construction could have been clearer.

Something like “I think X is wrong, but I want it to be legal for me to do wrong things Y and Z” might be a bit closer to what they were going for.

That makes a lot of sense, actually. I also saw “fully electric” and immediately thought of electric/hybrid/ICE cars, and my brain went straight to “hold up, did I miss the fully functional diesel-powered humanoid robot?”

Nah, it looks like it was sarcasm. “Unalive” and “commit sodoku” are both sort of combination meme/euphemisms, in the same way that we might have said that someone “an heroed” a little over a decade ago.

I don’t want to be a downer, but… The rats probably aren’t high if they’re just eating weed. Buckle up, y’all, time for a stoner science lesson:

THC is present in cannabis in two main forms: THCA and Delta-9 THC. Throwing around those delta numbers can seem scary given all of the unregulated Delta-8 in illegal states, but it’s really not. THCA breaks down into Delta-9 THC naturally with time and heat, through a process called decarboxylization… Which is great, because THCA isn’t psychoactive, while Delta-9 THC is. Because of this, smoking a joint or eating a properly made edible will get you high, but eating an entire ounce is just having a terrible salad.

That’s actually a really good analogy. Mind if I throw some numbers on it to flesh things out?

Let’s set that moving walkway going at 5mph, and we’ll put ourselves on that walkway, on a turned-off rascal scooter. The scooter is stationary on the belt, but it’s still moving at 5mph - that’s your tailwind pushing the air around the plane forward.

Now, let’s turn that scooter on and throttle it up to 5mph. The scooter is plugging along comfortably at 5mph, but it’s actually moving at 10mph. This is your plane flying with a tailwind, performing normally for its indicated air speed, while having a much higher ground speed.

Curiously, this does make the phrase “supersonic speeds” somewhat debatable. While they were traveling over the ground faster than sound would, they weren’t moving faster than sound would in the air around them.

Sorry, I think my phrasing might have been kind of weird - I was referring to the weights of H2 and N2 relative to CO2, which weighs a whopping 44 grams per mol.

…Although, I just did some quick estimates last night, and “almost twice as heavy” was still pretty far off. CO2 is much closer to 1.5x the weight of N2 than double the weight of N2.

I’m not a scientist, but one could argue that it’s likely that all three planets had nitrogen, but only Earth still has it.

I don’t know much about Venus, but I know that part of why we have way more atmosphere than Mars is due to Earth’s magnetic field. Earth has a much stronger magnetic field than Mars, and it does a pretty good job of shielding us from the solar wind; meanwhile Mars has been slowly trickling atmosphere into the void for ages because it lacks that shielding.

Given that CO2 is actually super heavy, it makes sense that Mars would lose almost everything else first. You mentioned H2, but it’s also almost twice as heavy as N2 - because of this, nitrogen would concentrate at higher altitudes, eventually becoming exposed to the solar wind as lighter gases were stripped away.

As for Venus… Again, I’m not an expert, but a quick search suggests that it has a weak magnetic field as well. With a primarily CO2 atmosphere and a weak magnetic field, one could infer that Venus is in a similar position to Mars, and any significant nitrogen that may have been in its atmosphere has simply been stripped away by the solar wind.

I feel like I would use it voluntarily if it put the sponsors in the “add a destination” menu. I tend to use Google maps for longer trips, and I try to add any stops on the way to my route so I don’t miss them - if I hit “add destination” and it offered, for example, Citgo stations, 7-11s, and Dunkin Donuts on my route, then I would probably get gas and snacks at sponsored locations almost every time.

As it is, though… Well, just having a Dunks on the way to the laundromat doesn’t make me want to stop in and buy a coffee. Driving by ten of them “randomly” on my way to another state isn’t going to make me any more likely to stop at one.