How many cars driven by humans run over cats each day? Do these outraged people think robotaxis are somehow worse than human drivers? If the humans in the car didn’t see the cat, then it doesn’t matter if it was a robot or a human driving at the time.

Just finished Emberdark and started The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. Only a few pages in, but I already like the writing style and the tone of the story.

My friends and I all loved Lies of LL. The second book is a lot worse, and the third book was a dud from page 1.

Getting rid of the heat is going to be an issue for that… along with the massive pollution from the many launches required to get this in orbit.

It still is 100% centralized.

All “teams” or clubs are just franchise licenses. All players are actually employees of the league, not of the clubs themselves. The league can also dictate which clubs are allowed to sign which players. It’s kind of wild.

Holy fuck, I was only joking when I said crazy eyes. I had no idea I was actually talking to a genuinely crazy person.

How much, in your mind, would have been a sufficient budget to come to a conclusion that you trust?

In my mind, $3M is roughly $2.9M too much since I could see with my own non-crazy eyes what caused the collapse of the buildings.

I’m torn between upvoting the TIL part of this because it’s something I know a ton about, and downvoting OP for such a wildly stupid take of “LOL go work somewhere else, hurr durr.”

A) You only have to fill it out once every 5 or 10 years, depending on what level of clearance you are going for. And when you go back to fill it out again, nearly all of the stuff you filled out is unchanged.

B) It takes a few hours to do in order to be eligible for very high paying jobs.

C) You do realize, don’t you, that tons of private sector jobs ALSO require you to fill this out? Working at Lockheed or Boeing or Booze Allen Hamilton or Microsoft or Google or… you get the picture. Any company that does business with the federal gov will have jobs with the possibility of needing this.

D) Private sector jobs can also be impacted by the gov shutdown, since many of them are on contracts with the gov that don’t get paid when the contracting officer is furloughed.

EDIT: E) Private sector companies will pay a HUGE bonus to people who already have a TS clearance. Back in 2018-ish, Raytheon was paying a $50,000 sign-on bonus to new employees if they already had TS.

The biggest thing I will miss when I finally move to Europe is how rarely I encounter smokers in public in the US. I can only hope Europe keeps making smoking less enticing, because it’s really jarring walking around a beautiful city and having to smell smoke everywhere outside.

2500 years ago we didn’t have computers and cell phones. We do now, and they all use gold.

My computer and my phone are preeeeeeeeeetty important to my life, though.

The value of gold lies in the fact that other men may be disposed to work their ass off in order to have some shiny things to gift to women in order to have sex. As you can imagine, the power of gold amongst married couples drastically decreases.

Gold is actually useful for things other than jewelry.

Do most people have bars of gold sitting around? No. Do most people have gold jewelry like wedding rings and earrings and necklaces? Yes. Can those bars of gold sitting in banks be easily melted down into coins in the event of a society collapse? Yes. Can Bitcoin be usable at all without internet and power? No.

Yes, the thing that doesn’t work in case of an internet or power outage. Yeah, that’s a good idea to use in societal collapse.

I think you are viewing this book from the lens of today, after two hundred years of perfecting the genre. This was a rather new type of writing back then. Edgar Allen Poe was only 8 years old when this was written. This was an 18 year old author exploring a new type of story telling heavily influenced by at-the-time revolutionary philosophical ideas. Yeah, it’s clunky, but it also explores things that weren’t being explored back then.

Also, your question about how the monster was created was somewhat described. We ARE told where he got the biological material. He sourced the body materials from the dissecting room and slaughterhouse. Additionally, he didn’t stitch the body together like the idea that was created by the movie in the 1930s. He discovered a fundamental element of life that could imbue dead tissue (not necessarily body parts, but not-alive tissues) to have it form into something that lived. This isn’t a book about science, so the author didn’t go into details for how the thing was created. Also, it’s one thing to create a work of art that sucks if you aren’t a good artist. It’s another thing when that ugly drawing or sculpture you tried to make suddenly springs to life.

Two things:

Back then, authors were paid by the word.

In Victorian times, at least, people actually DID talk like that. The privileged class were taught extensively growing up on how to talk in overly flowery language and how to debate and express thoughts. Saying simple things in a very pretty way was a skill people practiced. The reason all books of that time have people talking like that is because some people did talk like that. It’s weird for people of our time to hear it, since it sounds so contrived and excessive.

You can’t make a freakish monster without breaking a lot of beakers.

I really don’t want to click on the article, due to the clickbait title not saying who the author is.

It’s about Saul Bellow (thanks /u/protist), who was one of my favorite authors when I was in college. They say to never meet your heroes, so I think I might choose to not read about how awful he likely was as a religious conservative male in the Midwest in the 50s.

EDIT: I decided to read it. Yep, as I suspected he was a violent misogynist. While I loved Henderson the Rain King and Adventures of Auggie Marsh (both excellent reads), looking back 20 years after reading most of his books I can see how misogynist his writing was. I noticed it less when I was a 22 year old college kid. I still recommend those two books, but Herzog was blatantly woman-hating.

Thank you! I fucking hate clickbait titles.

No, because there is no reason to feel bad about not finishing something you don’t like. This isn’t eating vegetables for 10 year olds. You’re an adult and can choose what you like and don’t like. If you don’t like something, there isn’t some group of people standing over your shoulder judging you for your tastes.

Also, I don’t get super invested in books. If I’m reading a book that is not that good, I can be fine finishing it if it isn’t a very long book. It’s (usually) not physically painful. I can also be fine putting down a book I’m really loving for a long time if my life is really busy. I’ll pick it up when I get a chance.