Alderwood Mall? That’s the nicer one! If it were the Everett Mall, I’d be unsurprised, but Alderwood? That’s wild.

And the US military. I was studying the supply manual (not for fun, a large portion of our promotions are based on a test we take once a year), and saw there was a hierarchy for ordering. Most of our stuff is from Skilcraft (“Made with pride by people who are blind”) and thought that was our preferred source. Nope! Our first source we have to try to order from is Unicor. So I looked up Unicor, and it’s prison labor.

So our first focus is buying cheap products from slave labor lining the pockets of truly awful business people. The secondary choice is one that helps blind people. Way to show priorities, right?

Oh, no, I get that, I’m just saying those things make him annoying. It gives lots of opportunity for character development, but he’s still annoying until he develops.

He had a tendency to be immediately dismissive, impatient, and often outright insulting to other cultures and non-Federation types. The kid needed some humility, and often showed his age and closed-mindedness when he shut out ideas that didn’t come from his superiors.

It made it so I couldn’t play the game, because my computer didn’t meet the spec requirements.

Not saying it was a bad call. My computer was old and shitty, but now I’m out another $900.

They have some pretty impressive tourism videos too.

I bet Simone Giertz’s Truckla had working windshield wipers…

Front seat? Sure. Back seat? Nah. You have to remove paneling, pull a tab up, then pull a cord forward. That is a three step, non-obvious and non-intuitive way to open a door.

I got pepper sprayed in the military. In order to be allowed to wear pepper spray on our belts (for law enforcement), we had to be pepper sprayed and fight someone off.

I found it strange, because it’s not like we had to know what it was like to be shot and fight back. It was also one of the worst experiences of my life. Getting accidentally splashed across the eyes with hot sauce ended up not so bad simply by comparison, so I had that going for me.

Think of it like a river. If you were getting washed away down a river, would you try to save yourself by swimming up river to where you were? No, you swim to the bank and make your way back from there.

A rip current is just a river in the ocean.

Edit: meant to reply to Not_Rick

Here’s your monkey’s paw.

Time goes on, and you overcome a lot of those anxieties with age. You get married, start a great job, buy a house, have a couple kids, and generally start feeling comfortable with life.

Then in a flash you are back in your high school head, knowing that no matter what you do, you’ll never get the mix of circumstances just right to do it again, which means at best your kids cease to exist and at worst, you lose everything that gave your life meaning. And you can’t share that pain with anyone. And on top of that, you’re now mentally a 45-year-old in a teenagers body, and rather than feeling attraction to your peers, they now look like children to you. You’re full of confidence, but any attempt to use that confidence feels like taking advantage of a child (even though you are physically the same age).

I think of that, because your wish is a horror story for me. Whenever it’s brought up, I think no amount of getting in on the ground floor of k-cups stock or bitcoin, no preventing catastrophes, nothing I could do would make me feel it was worth losing my kids. And worse, making them never exist.

By the way, mine is “I wish for a blowjob.” I’ve got what I need. But I’ll always take a blow job (FROM MY WIFE, TO BE CLEAR).

It’s the tenets of a religious organization, so public schools should not endorse them specifically.

Interesting read, thank you for that!

It’s the 7 tenets, not ten non-commandments. And they’re really good and honestly better to have in the classroom.

Neither should be in classrooms except in relevant textbooks.

They’ve put them in every full set I’ve received the past several years. So I have a bunch of them now.

A put a hole in the side of a helicopter that left it grounded for a week.

I accidentally tapped it with another piece of the helicopter. I’m happily working on helicopters that are made of metal now, so no more of that nonsense.

Edit: also, honorable mention because it wasn’t my fault, but I made a helicopter drop an external fuel tank when it took off… by replacing a light bulb. It was on the button that makes the helicopter drop the external tanks, but there are failsafes so it will only do it in the air. Apparently the internal switch got stuck, so the second the weight was off of the wheels CLONK… and a tank was laying on the active runway. Excellent.

Seriously. He said his defense attorney was inadequate and asked for a different attorney. The judge said you take this one or you decide to represent yourself. And then the defense attorney asked to withdraw.

He never chose to defend himself. He never got the option to continue with his (to his mind) inadequate attorney. They made him defend himself for even questioning if he could get another attorney.

And then instead of explaining or trying to rectify the situation, she just yelled at him and sicced her goons on him.

I read the bill, it’s very short and to the point, and just makes some very small, seemingly uncontraversial additions to the bill. I am curious what possible justification they have for opposing it? That a Democrat sponsored it maybe? Their finger slipped?

Edit: a Republican sponsored it. I understand even less.

Seriously. Like, okay, you think that the whole transgender thing is a fad, or “attention-seeking,” or any other nonsense. Everybody is entitled to opinions, even stupid ones. I guarantee I have some stupid opinions, myself, about things that have no relevance to me.

But feeling the need to express those opinions, and feeling so strongly about it, and wanting to make legislation for it, and pretending you give two shits about girls’ and womens’ sports when 5 years ago you were talking shit about the WNBA because they were a joke to you, when you will knowingly interact with a trans person once or twice in a year, maybe, in your little podunk town, and since you are talking to them you won’t have an opportunity to use a pronoun for them… well there’s obviously something else at work here.

It makes it clear it’s just an excuse to hate, because trans people don’t affect them in the slightest.

So the argument is, it costs so much to maintain the filter that tries to keep innocent people from being executed, so let’s make it cheaper by removing some of that filter.

It costs more to execute somebody than keep them in prison forever in order to make as sure as we can that a person is guilty before executing them, by allowing more appeals.

Suggesting the solution to that is fewer appeals is directly saying that it is better to kill more innocent people at a lower cost than it is to not kill anyone.

Also, that it’s worth killing innocent people as long as bad people die. Not to prevent them from committing further harm, but just to kill them.

I’m struggling to see the benefit in that cost/benefit analysis. It’s not about protecting people (because it actively kills innocent people), it’s about killing people just to kill bad people.

Edit: I misunderstood what you were saying. But I would also say that while it would be great to improve the system for the initial trial, removing appeals would have the opposite effect and wouldn’t help the initial trial at all. However, if the initial trials are better, everything would still be cheaper regardless of the appeals because there’d be less people falsely imprisoned on death row.