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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • In 1971, Rep. Tom Moore, Jr. of Waco, Texas sponsored a resolution commending Albert de Salvo for his unselfish service to “his county, his state and his community.” That resolution read, in part:

    This compassionate gentleman’s dedication and devotion to his work has enabled the weak and the lonely throughout the nation to achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their future. He has been officially recognized by the state of Massachusetts for his noted activities and unconventional techniques involving population control and applied psychology.

    Albert DeSalvo had another claim to fame.


  • Kamala is the best version of a normal politician fighting against Trump. It remains to be seen if that’s enough, because he’s just so goddamn weird that it’s difficult to even compare Tool A to Problem B.

    I think she’s incorporated virtually all of the strengths of any of her comparable peers, and almost none of their weaknesses. I think that, given the nature of the opponent and his total lack of seriousness, she said everything I would reasonably hope she would have said during this debate.

    I also think that I don’t properly understand the collective psyche of the American electorate. I don’t understand how the election could be this close, when it is a choice between a serious, competent, passionate, talented professional, and a man who is literally a collection of all of the worst possible traits a person could have. That it could come down to such a narrow choice is a mystery for the ages.



  • GraniteM@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzClueless about Biology
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    11 days ago

    Maybe you get “digested” in the sense that you get incorporated into the sarlacc’s body, like it’s using you in a parasitic sense. It makes you one of its internal organs, and it keeps you alive as it slowly uses you up over the course of a thousand years (assuming we take that phrase literally). I think acting as a gall bladder for an underground sand monster sounds like a fate worse than death.






  • Not to mention the security that comes from being able to not pay if you get scammed for whatever reason. I paid for a course at a community college with a credit card, but then my schedule changed so I tried to cancel the class before it even started. The college gave me a whole runaround, and whether it was willful or just simple incompetence, I wasn’t able to get a refund. So I called my credit card company and explained the situation to them, and they resolved the whole thing for me. Sometimes even mentioning that you’ll refer such a problem to the fraud department at your credit card company is enough to get someone to back down and give you a refund.

    Credit cards have issues, especially if you have problems with using them responsibly, but that’s one particular way in which they can save you a lot of headache.





  • Not GPS, but I found myself waking up in the back seat of a car when some friends and I had driven all night to catch a Violent Femmes concert in Pittsburgh. The sun was coming up and they hadn’t found our motel. This was in the days of printed MapQuest directions.

    I asked “Did you follow the directions from where they started?”

    They said “We don’t need to start from there, we’ve already been there!”

    I said, “Let me fuggin drive.”

    So I get behind the wheel and start back tracking to the previously established starting point while they say over and over that we don’t need to start from there, they already know that spot, they just need to drive around a little longer and they’ll get there eventually.

    And then I followed the directions, to the letter, from the starting point on the directions, right straight to the motel.

    So the moral of the story is always follow the directions and don’t try to improv that shit, because you’ll find yourself lost in Pittsburgh.

    Also, holy shit, Pittsburgh is laid out on a triangle rather than a rectangular grid, and that will throw you right the fuck off your sense of direction if you’re not familiar, which none of us were.




  • If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

    —Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government


  • GraniteM@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyz8 Minutes
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    1 month ago

    There’s a pretty cool short story where a guy is looking at the full moon and he realizes that it’s gotten way too bright, and that could only happen because the sun has just spontaneously exploded, and he basically just makes peace with the fact that the world is going to be destroyed very shortly.