Next you'll be telling me he didn't invent kites.

Yeah, two of them should be Israeli flags.

Lol 2. There's also Saudi Arabia, Elon Musk and a bunch of other billionaires. Trump is a corruption drive-thru.

One reason lead was so plentiful is that a lot of the silver ore in Europe contains a hundred times more lead than silver by weight and the lead has a lower melting point, so the quest for silver produced an enormous amount of lead as a byproduct.

No, it's competence that I'm flushing out.

There's actually quite a bit of rust and sludge that I need to get out of the lines in addition to the air. Yes, this system is not long for this world.

How dare you leave out the Bone Saw Kingdom?

Low life expectancy has always been caused mostly by high infant and child mortality

In demography, the life expectancy of a modern population is calculated by fitting a curve to the most recent infant and child mortality (< 5 years old) measurements. Not relevant to ancient Rome, but for the modern world life expectancy is not just heavily influenced by infant and child mortality, but is rather 100% a measure of infant and child mortality.

I did the dumbest thing I've ever done last fall, on a house I own but don't occupy yet. It didn't really turn cold enough for the furnace until November, when I went over the get the 40-year-old thing running again so my pipes didn't freeze. The heating system uses hot water and radiators and periodically needs to have the water flushed out to work properly. I opened the stopcocks but nothing came out right away, so I closed and re-opened them a few times and then forgot which positions were open or closed. I then went home and it turns out I had left the cocks open.

Came back the next morning to ten inches of water in the basement. I have a sump pump but I had forgotten to plug it in. Had to walk barefoot through freezing cold water to plug it back in and at least it emptied out the basement in about 45 minutes. My front yard was hilariously soaked.

Am I forgetting anybody?

Liberty Fuel lol.

My brother spent eight fucking weeks with a constant migraine unable to walk or even stand up without falling over, before his insurance finally approved the MRI that discovered the golf-ball-sized tumor in his brain. Muigi Langione is all I can say.

I don't think there's any debate as to whether trump wrote that book or not. The only debate is over whether he ever read it.

historical accuracy in movies

It would be nice to have this occasionally.

There is precedent for paying for healthcare with chickens.

Funny how the Supreme Court used precedents from other countries, some from before the US even existed, to overturn Roe v. Wade.

I just tell people what team I'm a fan of (Cleveland Browns) and they back away slowly with a look that combines horror and pity.

it might be nice to get out of this entire industry, if only I could afford to

I got pushed out of the industry right before COVID hit, so I haven't ever dealt with AI. I'm a school bus driver now, which is infinitely more satisfying than programming since I get to drive a big Tonka truck around and gaslight children all day. The only downside is making 1/6 of what I used to make so this is not really a viable alternative for most people. At least I get subsidized health insurance.

Also, the superiority of Pabst Blue Ribbon when compared to Heineken.

Eraserhead was certainly my most spiritual film -- no other movie has ever made me pray for death.

Homebuilding in the US did make some serious efficiency improvements, just many decades ago rather than a couple. Sheetrock is massively more efficient than lath-and-plaster, trusses are more efficient than onsite rafter roofs, and prebuilt windows and doors are more efficient than the older casement windows and hand-hung wooden doors. Never mind that these more efficient alternatives are much shittier in so many ways than what they replaced.

More recent efficiency improvements have been confined to massively underpaying construction workers and bribing inspectors to cover up the incredibly shitty quality work this inevitably produces.

I was talking to my mom's tax preparer a couple of months ago. He was telling me how his $30K/month software system went down this year and fucked up his whole business (which was why he had to file extensions for all of his clients) and I told him how that was probably because of AI and vibe coding. He then launched into a diatribe about how great AI is which was hilarious by itself, but then he started telling me about how he had invested in some dude's "reactionless space drive" because the dude had solved all of his problems with this "technology" by using ChatGPT. I don't think I've ever had a professional convince me that quickly to use someone else.