I reread 1984 a few years ago and the thing that really struck me is what Orwell got wrong: the notion that you need to erase evidence of factual data (at great effort/expense) in order to propagate lies. It turns out that you just need to shout a little louder and a lot of folks will eat it up.

Which should have been obvious by then, but which was not even obvious to me when I read it the first time (in HS - around '84). But at this point we've all very much lived through it (and continue to).

The number of people who care about what's factual or actual isn't enough.

I don't think squaring the circle is a good example here, since the problem isn't so much a find the number problem, but a find the answer while restricting yourself to a few specific operations problem. So the non-algebraic solution doesn't count because it doesn't follow the rules. People knew what the answer was as a number that you can calculate for ages. They weren't sure if you could do it while following the arcane rules of ancient compass and straightedge constructions. It's turns out that the answer is no.

So my partner (who irrationally worries about such things) will consent to buying one.

That's it.

The reasons don't need to be good. The arguments don't matter at all. 600 mile range is what some people expect/require from their vehicle.

I'm pretty sure that parades help, too. Let's not leave those out.

No.

USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) plays a significant role in global family planning and reproductive health, providing contraceptive supplies and support to developing countries.

I've got news: atoms are not 2 dimensional. I can't help but think any publication that prints this stuff isn't worth the paper it's no longer printed on.

That's just kicking the can down the road. Besides, every function needs memory to store its definition, so you've saved nothing.

Flat butts are the thing!

Now that's good thinking.

Dude. Did you see the poster's name who you were responding to? 'nuff said.

It wasn't California who decided to base both houses on population. It was SCOTUS. They said that it violated equal protection to have geographical based representation that didn't spread the representatives equally based on population. They also said that you have to actually reapportion every ten years or so. Before then, a few southern states apportioned their representatives at the turn of the twentieth century and then didn't do it again because the old districts kept more black people from being represented than if they updated the boundaries. SCOTUS said that was BS, along with strictly geographical districts.

Another interesting thing about that 74 drinks per week statistic is that it works out to almost exactly a gallon of beer per day. I guess they're well hydrated then.

A drink is a standard amount of alcohol. It's specifically defined as 1.5 fl. oz. of 80 proof liquor or the equivalent in any other form. This works out to 12 oz. for most American Lagers and 5 oz. for most wines. Mixed drinks typically have two shots of liquor and so are usually two drinks, but this can vary. Regardless of form, a drink contains 0.6 fl. oz. of ethanol dissolved in however much whatever.

Hey, totally off-topic but I'm going to respond to your sig. It's even worse than you make it out to be. The Slashdot source actually has Unicode support. It has for more than 20 years. The problem is that it wasn't very good, so when they turned it on, assholes got to work breaking things. Rather than actually fix it, they just turned it off and left it that way. What broke, you ask? Direction markers. If you put a right-to-left direction marker in your comment, then entire rest of the page would be interpreted right-to-left as well. Well, until someone else changed it back in a later comment. It was really, really annoying. Rather than forcing the text flow back to left-to-right after every comment, like literally every site that supports Unicode today does, they just said, "Fuck it. We're too dumb," and turned Unicode back off.

You could have gone with the short answer: "no".

While it is true that there seem to be 11 launch capable countries, now, that has not been the case for decades. And certainly not the "China, India, Japan and a dozen other..." that you claimed.

Rocket science continues to be as hard as rocket science.

AI: "how many rocket launch failures have there been in the past year"
In 2024, there were 8 orbital launch failures out of 259 attempts. This resulted in a failure rate of 3%, which is lower than the previous year's 6%.

Pissing on a company whose first attempt was not a complete success says more about you than it does about that company.