It’s not that pits are more likely to bite, it’s that their bite is way more damaging. If a retriever (bred for a “soft mouth”) bites me, I am way less likely to need medical attention than if a pit bites me. Even biting at lower rates than many other breeds, pits come out on top of medical reports because each bite is more damaging.

The oxytocin release lol

That is a neat detail I would not have zoomed in to see without it being pointed out, thanks for sharing!

The out-of-focus part of the whiskers blends into the lighter tower background on the cat’s left (picture right), but is still visible against the darker cat body on the cat’s right (picture left). The photo has definitely had at least sharpening done to it, but those kind of photo-editing tools were around long before AI, and many smart phone cameras now by default apply them automatically.

The repair was the frame (the hitch took quite a bit with it), but no, the impressive part was gluing a pair of 2" cylinders, tying a rope to either end, and picking the truck up with it.

Zach at Jerry Rig Everything snapped the hitch and nearby frame off his cybertruck with an excavator (for science!), and Tesla repaired it for him and let him film the repair. They have a really impressive adhesive that lets them replace partial panels. (One neat engineering speck in the sea of Tesla awfulness.)

It might not be that the truck is truly unrepairable, but it’s a relatively expensive repair, and insurance weighed the immediate cost plus future liability (the repair will always be blamed for future problems even if it’s not really the culprit) and decided totaling was the best decision for their business model.

Someone else posted firefighters working in high rises are trained on this. I haven’t seen anything more plausible.

I am sure boarding and deplaning takes longer if everyone is getting into or out of a prone position. The idea might have been standing seats for short flights where turnaround time between flights was a large percent of each trip leg.

doesn’t it seem silly to remove the leaves from a lawn, then buy and put down commercial fertilizer

I think you are imagining leaves from small and widely spaced trees. We do not put down fertilizer, but we remove leaves from the part of our yard we want to include grass. The parts of the yard we let the leaves stay kills all the grass (hardier plants grow there, but they are not compatible with mowing to a walk-over height). Leaf mould easily takes two years to create, and grass needs sunlight in a half year from fall. Chopping it up helps, but at the volume created by our over-hundred-year-old oak and several other large trees, even chopped there is just too much mass per lawn area to be able to leave it and not kill the grass.

Because our society has widely available public transit and pedestrian/biking options, of course there is no overwhelming pressure to drive to be able to hold down a job and purchase food. /s

Salt in the wound: The default judgements locking in wage garnishment to pay illegal parts of the debt (on top of the immorality legal ones) because the kind of people who get these loans have many responsibilities and often can’t make an arbitrary court date, and it’s not clear to them the stakes are “show up or lose all recourse” (no appeals are possible).

A lot depends on how far the Supreme Court lets the Trump administration go with blatant law breaking. The veneer of system unity across multiple branches of government would give them a much better chance of avoiding '28 elections entirely, but if they are faced with the choice of following at least some critical laws or abandoning the veneer of lawfulness, it really increases the chances of a “divided they fall” scenario.

It also depends on whether MAGA coalesces around a successor. Factions with different visions of government have agreed to work together with Trump as a figurehead. If they don’t path to Trump term three, the successor selection is another opportunity for internal infighting to break their grip on power.

Scary times, and horrible unnecessary suffering for huge numbers of people on the way, but I still see hope to come out of it without the country disbanding.

Vacant homes in general, yes. Similar numbers of people have second homes for vacations as are homeless in the US. There are also quite a few abandoned homes in dying rural communities with no jobs.

Property management companies are managing rentals, not squatting. Some investors hold properties empty, but they aren’t in large enough numbers to be THE problem.

Sure you can: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html

The Koch foundation made a long-term investment in making it seem like grass roots movements were pushing society to the right. They kept it up for over twenty years, and that persistence has paid off for them in ways that will likely take a similar amount of time to reverse https://time.com/secret-origins-of-the-tea-party/

The difference in the size of left- and right-leaning media isn’t in news or comedy sites. The right-leaning news and comedy media is only modestly more watched than left-leaning media. Where the right really dominates is sliding politics into every single popular subject - topics like sports, games, wellness, and religion have tons of audience for right-leaning shows and basically no audience for left-leaning ones. https://www.mediamatters.org/google/right-dominates-online-media-ecosystem-seeping-sports-comedy-and-other-supposedly

The people who care about executions being humane are generally opposed to the death penalty. People who support the death penalty generally want suffering to be inherent to the process. Only limit is whatever the Supreme Court deems “unusual”. Cruelty is allowed by the Constitution as long as it is “usual” cruelty.

In states that have death penalty (and federal when we have a president who supports death penalty), it’s the pro-death penalty groups - the ones that want it to cause suffering - that get to pick the process.

My local grocery store has half the self checkouts they installed permanently disabled, and plans to remove them. They never got rid of human cashiers, but they misjudged the optimal ratio of selfcheck/cashier way too heavily on the self check side.

There is deeply emotional resistance to the idea of topics being too complex for the average person to understand. The “experts” promote something that superficially contradicts our lived experience? They must be corrupt liars! Down with the experts!

The economy had, on balance, positive trends in 2024? We felt poorer, so economists should be lynched! /s

Feels scarily like America is moving towards something like China’s Great Leap Forward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals… Mao was dismissive of technical experts and basic economic principles…

Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies… Mao did not retreat from his policies; instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and “rightists” who opposed him…

…dozens of dams constructed in Zhumadian, Henan, during the Great Leap Forward collapsed in 1975 (under the influence of Typhoon Nina)… with estimates of its death toll ranging from tens of thousands to 240,000.

The failure of agricultural policies… suppressed the food supply… The shortage of supply clashed with an explosion in demand, leading to millions of deaths from severe famine.

I think they lack a diaphragm. It was weird reading in my cockatiel care books that some handling on the neck was fine, but even small pressure to their chest could prevent them from breathing.

Neat to see some competition developing in this space.