Hate to break it to you, but those are suicides, either attempted or successful. Just because someone who gets pulled alive from the wreckage isn't willing to admit it doesn't make it any less true.

Cooling in space is entirely by heat radiation. No taking advantage of those helpful convection currents Not really an advantage at all.

OK, I actually support the proposition that this warrants an environmental review. But what about Reflect Orbital's "sunlight on demand" project that actually stands to disrupt plant life, atmospheric temperatures, etc. if actually carried out, not to mention permanently deface the night sky for astronomy?

I taught there as a grad student a couple of decades ago, and the level of academic motivation of the undergrads I encountered was shockingly low even then. Of course, I had done my own undergrad at a school best known for its high level of student suicides, so I suppose it's all a matter of perspective.

Ironically enough, my best, most motivated student by far was the "nepo baby" in the class, the child of a very famous Hollywood star.

In that case, maybe Uber drivers aren't actually taxi drivers after all. In all seriousness, though, you must not be in the U.S. Loads of taxi drivers here are drunk and/or nuts.

I've studied both languages, but the other way around, and my Spanish vocabulary has certainly seeped into my spoken Italian, and the different orthography of specific sounds (qu/ch, etc.) sometimes trips me up when writing. Doesn't seem to affect my ability to read either, though.

There are thousands of microbreweries, yet unfortunately for the past decade and a half, most have been focusing on making one after another trash variation of IPA.

The variety and quality of American micro brews was better 20 years ago than it is now, and it was cheaper, too, since the price of hops hadn't been driven up in the arms race to make the most undrinkably bitter swill possible that so many micros are churning out.

Animal cruelty for sport might be less prevalent/visible, but the incidence of cruelty to animals in terms of sheer numbers is easily/ the highest it's ever been. This can be chalked up to the ever-increasing prevalence of factory farming and increased use of modern agriculture, which has a side effect of mercilessly harming and killing wild animals, to feed the exploding middle classes in places like China that 25 years ago were considered "developing" countries.

This isn't meant to be any kind of racist insult against the Chinese or any other group. Meat eating is a sign of social status and prosperity in nearly every culture of the world, and it's totally predictable that as formerly-poor people become better off that they'll want to enjoy the same luxuries that their counterparts in "developed countries" do.

It's a sad fact of life that this level of consumption is only possible through systematized large scale cruelty to animals with current technology.

Perhaps this will change in coming decade as "vat meat" becomes a more viable alternative, but I am not holding my breath.

Arizona? You live in a place where people shouldn't live in the first place.

I don't know where the fuck you are hearing that, but it's not here.

Gross simplification, as there are loads of things that, via common law, statutory law, or public policy, that you can't contract around. So, for example, you can't create a contract term that would oblige someone to engage in or excuse someone from criminal behavior.

There's also a rule of interpretation that in adhesion contracts, i.e., ones where one side is significantly disadvantaged in setting the terms through relative levels of bargaining power, or expertise, that any disputed terms will be construed as favorably as possible toward the disadvantaged party.

Yet the Bialetti "espresso" makers that so many coffee snobs swear by are ... percolators. And very primitive ones at that.

Yet the Bialetti "espresso" makers that so many coffee snobs swear by are ... percolators.

They "othered" themselves.

Pretty hilarious that people who will fight tooth and nail against the idea that sexual orientation is anything other than a choice can't seem to wrap their head around the fact that it's pretty fucking easy to choose not to be a billionaire.

Wrong, yet again.

In Anglo-American property law, property taxes have historically been levied at the prerogative of the sovereign (in Britain, the Crown, and in U.S., the elected government of the states) from whom property rights in land ultimately flow and were historically used for things like municipal improvements and civil defense. Nothing to do with church tithes.

William the Conqueror's famous Domesday Book was compiled as part of an effort to regularize the recording of land holdings in order to establish taxation to fund defense efforts against a threatened Danish invasion.