SwingingTheLamp

Gosh, so owned. So very, very owned. By such an intelligent and aesthetically pleasing being. What an honor!

Ah, so we judge actions not by their merit, but by who performs them? Or, put another way, if you wrestle a pig, you both get muddy.

What’s hilarious is that I knew that this kind of reply would be forthcoming. Thanks for not disappointing!

You know nothing about me, and very little of what I think, yet you conceptualized my motivations as attacking my enemies, and now you’re telling me what I think.

I just suggested some introspection.

Look at the other replies I’ve received, and think about how people outside of your online community might feel being on the receiving end.

Yes, the reflexive “allies and enemies” framing of the situation does reinforce the image of a harassment campaign.

Oh lordy, ever have one of those moments when you know you’re about to do something dumb, but do it anyway? Well, I would ask that you folks stop for a moment, and observe this situation from an outsider’s perspective. From where I sit, this very thread right here looks like a harassment campaign.

It makes sense: The right wing is defenders of the ancien régime, and there’s only one way for things to remain the same, so they easily agree. The left wing wants something new, and it would be shocking if everybody agreed on what change should look like.

Without doubt, the turkey. Buckle up, it’s a wild ride: The North American bird is named after the Eurasian country because it reminded settlers from Europe of an African bird, the guinea fowl. Allegedly, they called the guinea fowl “turkey fowl” because it was first imported to Europe through Turkey.

That’d be crazy enough, if it stopped there. The French call it dinde, as in d’Inde, or Indian fowl, because it came from a land originally confused with India. The Dutch, though, call it kalkoen, which derives from “fowl of Calicut,” which is a city in India now called Kozhikode. Lots of other languages use a derivation of this word. Apparently, they got turkeys from India after Portuguese traders brought them from the Americas. I say Americas, because the Portuguese name is perú, a South American name that they used to refer to Spanish settlements in the Americas, generally. The Spanish, on the other hand, call the bird pavo, derived from the Latin word for peafowl, which actually are from India.

Germans, at least, call it Truthuhn, or Pute, onomatopoetic names based on the birds’ calls.

As the other commenter shared, in Germany they’re working on an interchangeable battery system. In the U.S., the manufacturers sell intro bundles cheaply to get us locked into their “ecosystem.” That’s the scam part. I’ve got a drill and impact driver set that i paid less for than the replacement cost of the included batteries. It’s the same scheme as inkjet printers.

Cordless power tools. Yes, they are useful in concept, but today they’re just a loss-leader to sell you overpriced batteries.

Technically correct, but there are… several intermediate steps.

Until this moment, I kind of thought that Zendaya was a brand of yogurt.

Shit, man, there are probably even people out there who don’t even know who Norman Borlaug was, if you can believe it.

Kind of meta, but does anybody remember garage door openers back in the day? My family had one for which the “security” consisted of an 8-bit “key,” as in, the remote had 8 jumpers, and the lift unit had 8 DIP switches. You’d cut jumpers in a certain pattern, and flip the switches to match. What was fun was seeing how many garage doors around town we could open using the default pattern.

Smart locks have got to be at least a slight improvent, right?

(Yeah, AI slop from the early days when I was checking it out.)

For that matter, then you don’t need to put any radioactive material in it at all, but just claim it.

I’m kind of skepitical of the “dirty bomb” idea. Frankly, it sounds like a load of bullshit, because of the πr² thing. Namely, if you want to irradiate and area to a sufficient extent to cause immediate radiation sickness, then keeping it concentrated is your best bet. A very small bomb, at most.

The other extreme would be a huge bomb to spread radioactive material over, say, a city. At which point it barely raises the radioactivity above background levels. Or at least doesn’t cause immediately apparent effects. Imagine terrorists issuing a statement like, “Sure, it doesn’t seem so bad TODAY, but wait 'til you see the slight bump in cancer rates in 20 years.”

Indeed, on looking it up, I see that the experts are skeptical, too, and tests conducted by Israel didn’t find much effectiveness. That could be why we haven’t seen one used.

Babies don’t have a notochord, though. It disappears earlier in fetal development in vertebrates.

If it’s not satire, then calling it “malice” is too on-the-nose.