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There, fixed that for ya.

That's hilarious!

Yeah, I was gonna comment that when they can mix H&M's computer-generated models with Realdoll and some robotics, there will be quite a few guys who won't even *try* to get a date :p

In the long run, this may result in significant changes to the gene pool as they remove themselves from it and society once again turns to polygamy out of a shortage of males who are interested in non-robotic women. Granted, they may by then have robotic men who are good enough to cause some women to go down the same road, but overall I would expect more men than women to go for a robotic companion.

According to every source I've been able to locate, the heaviest MM got was 140, but that wasn't her normal weight. It was the result of an eating binge resulting from depression before making "Some Like It Hot." She got back down to her normal weight (115-120) for filming, and her weight at death was 118. She was 5-5 and 1/2. 115 - 120 pounds is a normal weight for a woman of her height and age. By way of comparison, my wife is 5-2/105 and is actually slightly overweight (belly fat) but that tends to come with age (40). She doesn't weigh what she did when she was 21. OTOH, when she was 21 she only weighed 100, so 5 pounds over almost 20 years and three kids bothers me not at all - she has a great body and doesn't really even need to work much at maintaining it :-)

Depends. My wife is 5 foot 2 and weighs 105. If she weighed 120, she would most certainly be not just overweight, but downright chubby. Even at 105, she has some belly fat, but that kinda goes with being (almost) 40. Not many women who have three kids under 10 can claim to weigh only 5 pounds more than they did when they were 21, but it's true about her.

I'm not complaining about the belly fat by any means - she still has an absolutely hot body overall and you get a little of that when you're 40; anyway, she has less of it than I do - but saying a 120 pound woman isn't overweight unless she's a midget is just plain wrong. A guy who is 5-2 and 120 is OK is not overweight. Or could be: when I was 16 I weighed 125 and am 5'9. I wasn't what you'd call skinny, I was really average. A guy 7 inches shorter than me who weighed almost as much would have been a bit on the stocky side.

I had to scroll down this far to find a Vger reference?!?!

These young whippersnappers!

My younger brother, one of our friends, and I ditched school to see first Star Trek movie on opening day. Amazingly, none of us got caught.

A lot of Chinese stuff still is just the lowest-quality garbage you'd ever not want to see, but yeah, some of it is pretty good. More than a little of the Taiwanese electronics industry has re-outsourced to the Chinese mainland and the quality is good. I expect China to move toward quality in more markets in the coming decade.

My mother - who is in her 80s - has some kitchen appliances that belonged to her mother and were made in the 1920s or 1930s. They still work and she still uses them.

I doubt our own mixer - a Kitchen-Aid that was over $200 - will last that long, although it might surprise me. I bet my mom's mixer will still be working when I'm in my 80s. Will probably pass it down to one of my kids. That wasn't some hugely expensive mixer, either. My maternal grandmother came from a lower-middle class family, only a generation or two removed from the immigrant generation. She could speak some German that she learned when she was little.

Why aren't there software engineers' unions? IIRC there is (or was?) a small IT workers union that was always trying to gain traction but never could, for one simple reason: hardly anyone wanted to join it. I do not perceive being a member of a union as something that would improve my income, my well-being, my prospects, or my job satisfaction. I perceive being in a union as something that would have me going along in convoy with everyone else and getting nominal raises and promotions based on seniority, not merit. Ultimately, it would send my job overseas. That last thing could conceivably happen anyway, but I'm quite sure being in a union would both increase its likelihood and hasten its occurrence.

My mother - who is 81 - has and uses a couple of appliances (a mixer and some other one) that belonged to *her* mother. They date back at least to the nineteen-thirties. She has some pots and pans that old or more, too. She thinks some of it is closing in on 100 years.

With all due respect, the coffee you get at Starbucks (or better, Peet's or other Favorite Local Store) is not the coffee you get at a diner or lunch counter. That stuff is the same crap it's always been. What Starbucks did is to offer significantly better coffee than that stuff, plus some coffee-based drinks that people like, good ambiance and (usually) much better service, and they found that people would pay a premium for that.

Note that I'm not arguing that Starbucks is necessarily good, just that it's much better than the usual crap. I didn't start to experience truly good coffee until I started buying coffee roasted by small, local custom roasters. From there, I went on to home roasting my own coffee. It's much cheaper (5 - 7 dollars a pound for great quality green beans), really interesting, gives me full control over the entire roasting process, and let's me drink the freshest possible coffee. My co-workers love it whenever I bring in some of my home roast for our team coffee machine.

The diner coffee is probably still cheap, but you get what you pay for. I had no idea how coffee should taste, or how good it can be, until I started drinking locally roasted and home roasted coffee, brewed in a French press.

I could see banning hardballs. Even when I was in primary school (seventies) they weren't allowed. Anything else was fine, including bringing your own bat for playing softball at lunch and recess, something many of us did. They were better than the school bats.

Actually, we know that it works perfectly well. It's going swimmingly even in countries that are still nominally communist.

What capitalism requires, however, is that you get your ass out and work hard at something, instead of hanging around in a park all day, living in a tent, banging drums, trashing businesses that actually employ people, chanting "Hey hey, ho ho" and whining that people who worked for what they have shouldn't be allowed to have it and some should be taken away and given to you.

In the Occupy version of the story about the grasshopper and the ant, I can see the grasshopper being turned into some kind of oppressed hero, held down by the evil ant, rather than being the victim of his own stupid choices. Ain't communism grand?

Socialism paints itself in a shitty light without any help.

I've had one of those at the base of my thumb for about 35 years. Graphite in the body is pretty durable, it seems.