> color does do something

Yes. But in this case, the color RED does NOT. You may recall that a couple of decades ago, there was a flirtation with making fire trucks and other emergency vehicles a certain shade of yellow-green that looked like you just drank a glass of Nickelodeon slime, chased it with a florescent highlighter's innards, and then vomited the whole mess back up. But that color wasn't random. Actual studies were done. And that neon green puke color is actually MORE visible to the human eye and MORE attention-grabbing to the human brain than red is.

But there was a mass backlash and now fire trucks and other emergency vehicles are red again... because tradition. Red == NFR. Puke-green == functional.

Also, BMORG has gotten awfully snooty and hostile and contradictory toward the attendees over the years.

The last year I went was the first year you had to create a "Burner profile" online in order to justify to them that you are worthy enough to be allowed the privlidge of buying a ticket... only available online and through their purchasing system. Or... if you were special and connected to a certian set of politically powerful theme camps, you could be allowed to buy a ticket through them. But everyday joe and jill with no connections and no history of attendance? Forget about it.

Fun fact: Before that year, you could simply pop up to the Upper Haight, walk into Distractions, and buy a ticket with cash; no justifications, no proving to some "more burner than thou" asshole that you're worthy, no hoops at all. Just plonk down the cash, and go.

And yeah... the quality of the crowd and event dropped dramatically that year; to the point that certian thinks that happened that year soured me on the idea of going back for a good number of years. And even though I do, now, occasionally get the idea in my head that I might want to go back... the idea of working that much for my vacation, while paying nearly 4x just to BMPRG for the privlidge to do so, and getting a less fun and more hostile event? Yeah... no thanks.

And then there's the whole: Bring everything you need to survive in the desert for a week. BUT... don't bring it in a car! Oh, no... there's a penalty fee for that. Just ride the Burner Bus with nothing but your clothes, tent, and sleeping bag. Other people will take care of you. And also... don't you dare rely on anybody else for anything. Practice "Radical self-reliance!" If you rely on anyone else for anything, you're a parasitic sparkle pony who doesn't deserve to be there and should just die. But don't you DARE expect to being your week's worth of everything you need to live in the desert in a dirty, stinking, CAR... you monster.

> Involuntary celibate is the correct term.

No, it's not. The correct term is just "asshole," and "incel" is perfectly cromulent as an informal synonym. It's the 21st century, for crying out loud. No one with a smartphone is "involuntarily celibate" in the era of Grindr and Tindr. And even before the hookup apps moved the menus to our phones, for better than the first decade of the century all you had to do to get laid pretty much any time you wanted was load up the personals on Craigslist.

The difficult part is not and has never been finding someone and getting laid. The difficult part is finding someone you'll want to wake up to the next morning, have sex with again, date, and maybe even have a relationship with. But if all I wanted was to get off? I guarantee I could fire up Grindr right now; and within the hour I could be on my back getting screwed silly.

It's a map, not a painting, which means the vast majority of the time, I want it to be useful for navigation, so... Mercator. And yes, I know about the great circle "problem" with that projection. But as others have mentioned, you almost never sail a real great circle route anyway because no one wants to apply the rudder for the whole trip. It's fatiguing for the crew, and causes unnecessary wear on the equipment.

If I just want to admire the majesty of the landmasses at their realistic proportions instead, I'll either look at a globe or fire up Google Earth.

Oh, come on.. It's not hard. Just show a modicum of empathy, flip it around, and imagine if it happens to us instead. Suppose the US and China go to war. It gets so bad that the US invokes wartime powers to force Boeing to convert it's Renton plant to bomber production. So, to break it down:

1) If China bombs the Boeing plant in Renton, killing civillians who work there: Not a war crime. Once the factory converts to wartime production, the workers knew the risks, made the choice to take their chance to work in a facility producing weapons, and took their chances.

2) If China bombs the Boeing plant in Everett, killing civillians who work there: War crime. That factory was not producing arms. Those civillians should have been left unmolested.

3) If China bombs the Boeing plant in Everett, killing civillians who work there, and the guidance on one of the bombs or missiles malfuncitons and lands it in a residential neighboorhood: Not a war crime. Yes, it's still horrible. But intent does matter and equipment does fail

4) If China decides they simply can't be bothered to even to try to target the factory and nukes Renton: WAR CRIME!!! And every single person involved, from whoever gave the order down the chain of command to whoever pulled the trigger, deserves to be strung up at Nuremberg with the rest of their kind.

Now, instead of China/US/Renton, just change it ti US/Japan/Hiroshima. Easy peasy.

Yup.

When PG&E paid off the CPUC to slash surplus solar rates down to a fraction of what they charge for sending electricity TO me; is why I paused my solar buildout and re-worked the plan to include batteries and a switchboard with a cutout that lets not a single joule out to the grid. Because I'll be damned if the equipment *I* pay for is going to benefit PG&E instead of me; particularly when that pack of rat-bastards have still never faced a proper reckoning for all the people they've killed though their incompetence and negligence lately.

Bullocks. I'm not demanding anything at all. What I'm doing is refusing to hate people based merely on the circumstances of their birth and calling out the hypocritical "justifications" of those who've chosen to do so.

> You're scared of Trump, your neighbors are scared
> of losing their jobs or seeing their wages cut
> because Democrats want to import cheap, illegal,
> labor. One of you has a legitimate concern.

Oh, what jobs are they scared of losing? I don't see trump supporters giving up their cushy suburban McMansions en masse to go live in a bunkhouse in Salinas and pick lettuce for 14 hours a day. When that does happen, THEN you can get back to us about the "threats" to people's jobs. And no, my neighbors are NOT afraid of losing those jobs because they are not seeking and have never sought those jobs. They (and I) don't want to move to Salinas and pick lettuce any more than you people do. We just don't pretend that we do in order to conjure an excuse to hate brown people.

Well, guess what? No immigrant ever scooped six figures of value out of my 401(k) and IRA accounts. Your dear leader did that in less than a week with his little "liberation day" stunt. Depending on the rate of return over the years going to take at least half a decade for me to make good that money. And since I already contribute the the maximums, that's a half-decade I will have to delay my retirement. My other accounts took a similar beating. And I very seriously doubt that your shitstack in chief is going to write a check to make me whole for what he took away.

So yeah, you can fuck right off with your "legitimate concern" bullshit. No immigrant working out in a field somewhere I'll probably never see has ever harmed me. Thanks to the fine folks at Intuit, I can quantify how much dear leader has harmed me, right down to the last fucking red cent.

Tech CEO discovers the Streisand Effect.

So... the company is named after the most notorious drug cartel kingpin, like... ever... and somebody is shocked... SHOCKED, I tell you... that it turns out to be a criminal enterprise. Somebody get me the internet's manager!

And then you've got Palantir. Sure... the company we named after the evil talisman that the dark lord Sauron used to drive Denethor the Steward to madness and suicide and Saruman the White to full-up villainy is a good-faith actor, and totally not a creepy-AF big-brother enabler that spies on you for the three-letter agencies. Really. Trust us.

And don't even get me started on Khaaaan's Academy.

Actually though... I'm not sure what's daft. The fact that people give their companies like these expecting that anyone in the general public would trust them farther than they could spit a rat; or that these companies actually do get customers willing to trust them farther than they could spit a rat.

Fewer people smoke. So proportionally, more lung cancer victims will be non-smokers. No surprises there.

But it's going to be decades until we see some real numbers and improvement. Because non-smokers don't live in a vacuum. Both of my parents smoked, my mother right up until the day she died. And both died from cancer. I never took up the habit, in no small part due to teenge rebellion against my parents. And to this day, it disgusts me. But also, I'm generation X. When I did move out of home, the dorms were non-smoking and when I got an apartment I only had non-smoking roommates. But in those days it was still socially acceptable (and legal) to smoke... on-campus but outdoors, in "non-smoking" sections of resturaunts, concerts, bars, raves, nightclubs, et cetera. I even tended bar in those days for a while.

So, despite having never smoked a cigarrette in my life, I was around smokers for much of my first three decades. Hopefully the odds will be in my favor. But I'm pretty certain that I am at elevated risk for lung cancer. And no doctor or scientist worth his bones would be surprised. It is, as others have said, a numbers game.

What we need is a few more decades... maybe a couple of generations... of smoking continuing to be socially intolerable. Once we have a good number of non-smokers, who were raised by and mostly social with non-smokers, who were raised by and mostly social with non-smokers; then we sould see some real numbers about the proper rate of lung cancer.

Define communism.

Have you actually read Marx's manifesto or any of his other works? Did you understand them?

I have... a translated version anyway... and I did... the English translation, though I admit it may not live up to original German. And I would guesstimate that maybe only one in twenty people who use the words communist or communism have read Marx's little manifesto, much less understood any of it. And I don't just mean you and the rest of the MAGA types with your empty accusations. I also include the actual self-labeled "communists" and "socialists" I have known or met in my life. In fact, I would guesstimate that even fewer of the people who call themselves communists know what it means than the people dishing out false accusations. To most of the ones I have ever encountered; "communism" and "socialism" entail buying a $40 Che Guevara t-shirt from store or vendor on Telegraph Ave, entirely missing the irony, growing out dreadlocks, smoking a lot of pot, and hanging out in front of Blakes and Fat Slice pissing off their parents by throwing away their tuition money.

Communists and communism are stupid, sure. But so are the accusations of, hysterics about, and feeling threatened by, them.

I haven't had a word/office license, or even been plagued with a windows machine of any kind, since 5 jobs ago. Maybe the stodgy old legacy grandfathers of tech still use office and windows. But all the startups I've worked for since have all used gSuite (or Google Workspace after the re-branding) for everything the house of gates used to provide. Endpoints have been all either Mac or Linux laptops in that time. At my current startup, windows machines aren't even allowed on the office wifi. And the only microsoft licenses we have for the entire company are a handful of Teams accounts for the devs and QA who work on that integration and one office license for our bookkeeper who for some reason just really, Really, REALLY loves Excel.

Variable names and what constitutes good or bad ones have been a point of contention and flame wars since most of us were toddlers, or even not even born yet. Remember those crusty old neckbeard rants we used to find on BBSs, usenet, and gopher about how "real programmers" don't eat quiche, program in Pascal, can diagnose bugs by watching das blinkenlights on the front panel, and write and deploy their code fixes by using the bit toggles on said front panel to directly change the assembly in-memory? Yeah... those had a lot to say about variable names too. And they ranged from "Just use a, b, c, etc. And don't comment your code. If some shit-for-brains idiot can't figure it out, they don't deserve to be on the system in terms of first place." to "Your variable names should be so descriptive... use full sentences if necessary... that your code should be readable like a book to a layman and no comments are needed." to every point in-between.

> Kansas City, it's a big destination for conventions
> because it's in the middle of the country.

Really? I used to have to travel there for work occasionally... not conventions or anything, just a remote site. So I'm not sure about its convention facilities. But KC's airport is just bloody awful and most definitely not suitable for the level of traffic of a major convention destination. The only airport I've personally experienced as worse is Newark... and that's mostly the people that make the place so unpleasant. MCI's people are nice. But the airport itself is just so god-awfully designed I have to think the architect was an active misanthrope who intentionally set it up it to make people miserable. Arrivals aren't so bad... but departures or transfers... ugh... it's like they wanted KC to be a roach motel. You can enter, but you can't leave.