Missed opportunity with the fuel efficiency OP…so close to 42.0

Your insurance company isn’t just fucking you with premiums, they also expect the guys that come and fix things up after a disaster to lose money doing it, 0 overhead, 0 profit

I think they use that to help track whether you’re watching or not (I don’t recall ever seeing the “are you still watching?” prompt when skipping intros… but my sample size is 1)

Damn…I was looking forward to my future as a Burgundian

Shut the front door!

98% of the time when you see a military aircraft, it’s because all the military does when not actively fighting a war is practicing to. We would literally just go up and fly circles around the airfield, practicing a few normal approaches with a touch and go landing, then a few practice aborts, then some combat approaches, then some instrument inly landings. Day, night, good weather, bad weather. Practice flying high, low, pressurized, unpressurized. There’s 500 ways to land each airframe, and every pilot in every unit needs to practice each type dozens of times a year or more to keep their pilot qualifications. And it’s not just the pilots. The hospitals **practice wartime medicine, and the maintenance guys practice their craft in Chem gear. The LEOs pretend there’s an active threat on the base and a thousand other types of exercises. It’s a big part of what our military budget each year goes to, and it’s why, while we have a LOT of issues in our military that need fixing, we don’t have the types of problems you see Russia having with entire units defecting or surrendering, losing aircraft/equipment so frequently, and it’s why so many of us come back alive. The US hasn’t seen personnel losses like Russia has seen in Ukraine since WW2. The price of that is a lot of money and a lot of time spent practicing, even at home.

Most likely, if the US were going to be attacked, you wouldn’t find out because jets were flying overhead, you’d get an emergency broadcast on your phone telling you to stay in your house or move to a specific shelter site or provide some other type of instructions or you wouldn’t see it coming at all because nobody else did either.

Godwin’s law (of spiders)

I got my first PC in the mid 90s. 1st task was to take it apart, but after that, I first learned about the internet through friends, and we had a few computers at school in the library or the BASIC programming classrooms. My primary uses were the Blizzard chat rooms and playing OC starcraft with my friends (though we’d usually just get together at someone’s house and LAN for that.) I had AOL for a while, but couldn’t really afford it and neither could my parent. There was a thing called netZero I used for quite a while…it was free dial-up internet that displayed an ad banner on your desktop, but it wasn’t very intrusive, especially if you had a crazy high resolution (crazy high at the time being > 480x768). My primary uses were picking 2-3 mp3s to download overnight while I slept so nobody would pick up the phone and disconnect the internet, sharing dangerous and stupid amounts of personal info to basically anyone on IRC that asked (a/s/l anyone?), playing around with kitchy little hacker tools (one of my favorites allowed you to attach a malicious executable to your picture you’d send to people that would allow to do goofy shit like open their cd rom or flip their screen upside down). My mom’s only complaint about the internet was when she couldn’t use the phone (so I mostly browsed late at night). It was harder to find things, and there wasn’t much content…what was out there was just text since even images took 10s of seconds to download sometimes. Security and parental controls (beyond fear mongering) were practically non-existant and even when someone’s parents were competent enough to try and lock it down, most of the pare tal controls could be overridden with the local admin account, which we all knew the passwords to because we had install the stuff our parents wanted on the computer anyway.

Good question, thanks for the trip down memory lane!

I’m not even sure it’s safe for her to go to any event he’s speaking at…

Animals don’t taste the same way we do. For example, cats don’t have the receptors for tasting sweet things…so they can barely detect sweetness at all.

Dogs only have 25% as many taste buds as humans, so most things have a very mutes taste for them. Plus, every dog I’ve ever had absolutely LOVED cat shit covered in kitty litter, so I never put much faith in their sense of taste.

Yeah, they’ll have flavors they like more or less, just like us, but even we can’t trust our sense of taste as a metric for nutrition…if we could, we’d all be addicted to brocolli and spinach instead of processes foods and sugar.

You can have airtight or in the sea… not both.

Jesus gets sad when you get DNA in Uranus, or so they say

Fuck you buddy, we’re gonna cook ourselves first!

That’ll teach ya…

Have you considered the possibility that you’re a computer?

Sorry that you’re going through something OP. Everything I say after this is probably something you don’t want to hear, so read on at your peril.

The reason people tell you to go to your doctor when you ask for medical advice online is because the question itself implies you want good or useful advice and nobody besides you’re medical team can give you that. You can find some general stuff online or ask to speak to a different doctor if there’s trust issues with your current provider, but nobody without access to your personal medical history is able to advise you accurately. It takes at least 8 years of constant study to be a newbie doctor. Human bodies are extremely complex, and we still don’t know how everything works. Even if we did, not all bodies work the same way. On top of that, humans are shit at statistics, and we heavily bias anecdotal evidence, especially when it is our own anecdote or from someone we know.

Here’s a simple example.

Say I get an upset stomach after eating meals and I complain about it to a friend. Trying to be helpful, they told me they used to get that too, so they tried switching to a vegetarian diet, and they got better. Sounds innocent enough, right? I know what vegetarian means (it’s “common sense”, right?) so I stop eating meat and start getting salads or fruit for lunch instead. After about a week, I fell asleep while driving home. Turns out, I’m anemic. I was getting just enough iron on my old diet to keep the worst symptoms that would have scared me enough to see a doctor at bay, but when I cut out meat I went from iron deficient to anemic. Had I gone to the doctor, they’d have easily seen my iron deficiency and put me on a supplement or advised me how to change my diet, and the nausea would have gone away. Instead, I end up imaking my condition worse and landing in the ER after an auto crash.

That didn’t actually happen, but I think it’s a good example for several reasons. It’s a common side effect (nausea) of a common problem (iron deficiency) that you’re likely to think doesn’t warrant a doctor, but you’d still mention to a friend. It’s a super common symptom associated with lots of conditions. The friend even gave good advice (for most people, changing their diet wouldn’t have been an issue, but because of an underlying medical condition specific to our protagonist, it was bad advice FOR THEM). The friend had no way of knowing or even suspecting it could be dangerous advice because most people don’t spend a decade learning about the body and disease more generally and they didn’t know about the specific issues related to the specific case. It’s the same reason you shouldn’t get legal advice online… It’s a super complex system, and every case is literally different.

It’s worse than that, even another doctor should not be diagnosing or advising people online…they don’t have access to your medical history, current medications, comorbidities, etc and all of that data is VITAL to giving sound medical advice.

Anything beyond “eat a variety of foods - not too much or too little, get enough sleep, and exercise within your comfort limits” without any of that additional information should be considered bad advice and there’s probably even cases where those 3 very general rules would be ill-advised.

Do you know a moth who’s good at conversation?

Even that’s not technically accurate. That’s the kind of thinking that makes people think a snowball means the climate isn’t changing. We’ll still have some summers that are marginally cooler than some previous summer, but the average over time is gonna keep going up.

You really don’t need anything near as complex as AI…a simple script could be configured to automatically close the issue as solved with a link to a randomly-selected unrelated issue.

Jupiter says, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”