Those suckers are nasty! I had one on my deck a few years back. It started boring a hole in one of the posts to make a nest. You could actually hear it chewing through the wood! I tried to swat it away, but it would keep coming after me, and I didn't want to get stung, so I decided to wait. It dug about half an inch into the wood in about 15 minutes. I figured it was safe at that point, so I took the hand spade I had been using in my garden and chopped it in half at the abdomen. Had to pull the head out by the wings and it was still chewing, but that was probably just reflexes. I stomped it on the deck - just to be sure...

Sounds like something whose name starts with "bumble" would do. ;-)

Quoted for truth. Most of the roads I drive on in Michigan are atrocious. Then again, maybe that's why so many libertarians want to privatize them. It's about my least important issue on the spectrum, but it would be hard for them to do worse.

It's not about what the cops did, it's about the sheepish reaction from the neighbor, whose "Don't question authority" attitude lends itself to the formation of authoritarian regimes. Eternal vigilance to tyranny is the price of liberty, but most people are more concerned with bread and circuses because thinking is too hard.

Because mundane microbes wouldn't make a very good science fiction plot.

Seriously though, if we were constantly getting hit by alien microbes,we haven't found any yet, so constantly seems like a bit of a stretch. Panspermia on the whole seems entirely improbable. First, you need a planet on which the conditions for life exist. Next, you need some sort of cataclysmic event like a meteor impact which strikes the surface of the planet hard enough to eject a portion of the impacted planet. Then the life forms on that portion need to survive the rigors of space including radiation, lack of normal gravity, lack of food & water, etc., plus travel through gas clouds, possible impacts with other objects, and so on. The life forms would have to survive that most likely for millions of years and then the ejected portion would have to come into contact with another planet capable of supporting the same type of life forms. Then the life forms would have to survive the entry into the planet's atmosphere and impact with the planet.

Because patriarchy.

That depends on whether or not you're a Malthusian...

Think of it as right-totalitarianism vs. left-totalitarianism. One's mostly concerned with your bedroom activities, and the other's concerned about your bankbook. The problem is your bankbook can impact your bedroom activities, or vice versa, so eventually fascism/socialism have to regulate those activities as well. Hence the cause for your confusion. The difference is probably more easily explained using cows.

Somewhere in the Swiss Alps, a poor delivery drone lies buried in an avalanche, only to be rescued by a Saint Bernard trained how to change drone batteries.

Especially when the queen of asset forfeiture is in charge. If I was Snowden, I wouldn't take any deal from this administration, because you can't trust them. No honor among thieves, as the saying goes.

You can easily avoid a lot of the offensive stuff on Reddit by not visiting those subreddits Maybe a more sane alternative would be to allow people to filter out subreddits they don't like. Maybe this is in place already, but I don't know. Reddit has too high of a noise to signal ratio for my taste, so when I do check it out, I don't even bother signing in any more.

Yeah, but could they afford the lawsuit? The smartest move would have been to never hire her in the first place. It seems clear that she's trying to drive it into the ground.

Well, you're not going to make money if you continue to arbitrarily ban things that you find offensive or someone else might find offensive. There are things on the internet I don't like. I just don't go to those sites. I don't demand that they take those sites down. Aside from that, I don't know how a BBS makes money these days with ad block, etc, unless they're selling user info, which would probably go over huge with the reddit crowd.

But if Jimmy goes on a shooting spree, then it gives the gun banners more ammo (pun intended). One thing you'll notice is that in most instances where there's been a mass shooting, the proposed remedy for gun control would not have prevented the mass shooting from happening in the first place.

I just drove 1000 miles over the past 3 days. Yesterday was 500 miles hauling a 3000 lb. camper. There is currently no electric vehicle available to do that. Plus, I commute 45 miles to and from work each day. What do I do if there's a power outage at my home, but no problems where I work (It's happened before), and my car isn't charged up enough? I can't even telecommute if that's the case, and none of my friends or coworkers live close by so that I could hitch a ride with them. There's too many issues that come up like that which most people haven't even considered. Let them be curiosities for the rich until somebody figures out how to address these problems.