1. That SMBC was excellent.
2. I wasn’t really casting aspersions, just noting that physics types would have a particular interest in seeing what happened when JJ Thomson’s family finally regressed to the mean.

Interesting reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Thomson

Wait until you get to the personal life section, Physics dorks…

Doesn’t seem like anyone necessarily asked at all. He just volunteered it. I doubt it’s true, for the record, but it is a very Utah answer.

I totaled it at 200k miles.

I hope the shopping cart that dinged your bumper was okay…

“Facilitated open computing initiatives and exercised independent judgment and mastery of social engineering techniques and forum software.”

Fair; I guess I should have run some data. I just used gasbuddy.com to run a similar track for what would have been my rather lengthy commute if my employer had asked us to return to office (and kept the lease on that building). Apart from a couple of outliers just outside the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, I’m only getting an 8% variance (about USD 0.23/gallon, versus your 25% and AUD 0.55/litre – is that right?).

That said, Iwill admit that $0.10/gallon suboptimal average price is probably more likely than I thought, though with a less intense driving situation one would still be well under the $260/year “convenience premium.” Outside the US and other oil-subsidizing countries, the numbers clearly work out very differently.

Not particularly helpful for you, but this seemed like the thread to chime in that in general with pizza, it’s always MUCH better to go big. Pi*r², folks. A single 14" Dominos is already pretty much identical to two 10" mediums, and that’s only if you like to eat the crust. Always do your math by dollars per area, not diameter.

People are weird about gasoline. They’ll drive around looking for the cheapest option, to save 2 cents/gallon. Even with a huge tank, that’s less than 50 cents of total savings.

Bless 'em for keeping the price pressure on, but this is so very true. Once I ran a couple of mental hypotheticals, I stopped giving a shit, beyond avoiding places right by airports that jack it up a dollar or more (Las Vegas and especially Orlando, with lots of tourists in rentals, are the worst offenders I’ve seen).

For a pretty extreme example consider, as you say, a large 25-gal tank, and filling up from dry twice a week, at an average of $0.10/gal non-optimal price: you pay an annual premium of $260 bucks not to drive yourself batty hunting for pennies, and burning at least a tiny bit more fuel to do it. Most people will pay far less. It’s just this weird thing that stuck in people’s brains long past the point where a cent increase was any significant percentage of the fuel purchase.

On the plus side, this particular router will work fine as a stand for a fondue pot.

Headline is probably not wrong, but it’s definitely overdramatic compared to the actual story. Everything awful MS is actually doing is there barely a millimeter under the surface, but the story is more directly about how they’re jerking AMD and Intel around.

Still, it’s an impressively clear showcase of how much power Microsoft really has. It’s taken two companies that usually have their product cycles planned years in advance and kicked them into panic mode. Hopefully we don’t see a repeat once Microsoft finds it fit to bring Copilot+ to desktops.

It’s common, but it’s still not anywhere near the majority. The majority would be uncomfortable with religion being lumped in with the rest, and would be deeply uncomfortable with sports being there. The majority view is generally pretty chill, if (and it’s a big god-damned ‘if’) you toe the line on a few doctrinal issues and supply-side economics: get baptized in a protestant denomination, donate and/or go to church, don’t be queer, don’t be atheist, don’t be a single pregnant woman (and certainly don’t stop being one before the baby is born), be appropriately shamed of your vices, and understand that taxes prevent good Christians from having more to donate to charity. Check all the boxes, and you can go to college to get a business or even engineering degree and consume the milquetoast remnants of the monoculture. It’s more about conformity than religious ardor or theological purity.

I actually did forget mine. I think it was in the low six digits though, 2-something IIRC.

CAN YOU OPEN YOUR MOUTH?

Relax, you guys. It clearly says to use non-toxic glue. SHEEESH. People with their anti-pizza-glue agenda.

Butlerian Jihad intensifies…

Could be a metaphor, you know. Who knows what, or who, Babo’s is encouraging you to bet against.

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This quote is from her father in '84, and it was in a televised interview. However, just two years ago she refused to denounce those comments, and pulled millions of dollars from support from Australian Netball’s governing body because an indigenous player raised the issue.

You don’t really need to know anything else about her for this story.

Well, maybe a liiiittle bit more:

Perhaps the most well known controversy in the history of the company centres around the racist views of founder Lang Hancock towards Indigenous Australians. Hancock is quoted as saying,

“Mining in Australia occupies less than one-fifth of one percent of the total surface of our continent and yet it supports 14 million people. Nothing should be sacred from mining whether it’s your ground, my ground, the blackfellow’s ground or anybody else’s. So the question of Aboriginal land rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist.” In a 1984 television interview, Hancock suggested forcing unemployed indigenous Australians − specifically “the ones that are no good to themselves and who can’t accept things, the half-castes” − to collect their welfare cheques from a central location. And when they had gravitated there, I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future, and that would solve the problem."

Executive Chairman of Hancock Prospecting, Gina Rinehart, caused controversy in 2022, when she failed to apologise for or denounce comments made by her late father in the 1984 television interview. Hancock Prospecting subsequently withdrew an A$15 million sponsorship from Netball Australia after Indigenous netballer Donnell Wallam voiced concerns about the deal and the impact of the comments, pertaining to a genocide, by “poisoning” and “sterilising” Indigenous Australians to “solve the problem”; as well as concerns about the company’s environmental record.

I had to look this up. An indigenous Australian artist, famous by antipodean artworld standards, included an unflattering portrait of the woman who owns the most profitable mining company in Australia and depending on the day, she’s usually calculated to be the richest Australian in the world, and sometimes the richest woman.

The company is infamous for doing as mining companies are wont to do, and also specifically for her late father’s old-school racism on the topic of indigenous Australians, and then her own actions that suggest she was fine with his attitudes. Frankly, the fact that her portrait looks to have been just a bit more exaggerated than the rest should have been viewed as a minor win that she could ride out, but she decided to raise a stink about it and be the biggest Karen in the world, accusing the national gallery of doing the Chinese government’s bidding, even though she is on record saying nice things about them to get their business.