I think it depends entirely on the integrity of the cremator. I have a good friend who does pet cremations. He cremated one of my pets and told me that he had a hell of a hard time getting the bag of ashes into the box I gave him. I laughed and asked him why he didn’t just pour some out so the bag would fit more easily. Who would know? Who would care if there were a few grams missing? Especially if the reason was that the client-provided box was too small. But he was genuinely shocked and said he would never do that.

This is the conclusion I’ve come to as well. I used to be frustrated at how stupid Trump supporters are. I would wonder how anyone could be so gullible, cynical, racist, or mysogynist as to vote for Trump. How does he get away with, even prosper, saying such crazy and harmful things? But I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump voters are just extremely unhappy. A vote for Trump is a big fuck-you to the establishment. Both parties were basically run by a modern day aristocracy. The Kennedys, the Clintons, and the Bushes are the most obvious dynasties, but they also have many, many surrogates. More importantly, they defined a kind of cursus honorum for becoming president, including all of the right schools, fraternities, clubs, contacts, donors, etc that you have to follow to move up through the various offices to get to the top. The Tea Party disrupted the Republican aristocracy, but then Trump came along and just obliterated it.

Now, on the one hand, we can probably all get behind the idea that breaking up the aristocratic hold on political parties is a good thing. However, history has also shown that supporting populist demagogues who specialize in chaos and hateful rhetoric often leads to a bad time for the country and the people.

These last five years are the first time in my life that I’m genuinely worried for the stability of the republic. It has been said many times by people who have lived through it that people never think civil war will actually happen until it does. And then they look back and the signs were obvious. Whoever actually wins, when half of the population is voting for a hateful chaos candidate, that’s a big red flag.

My guess is that assassination isn’t as easy as it is made out to be in the movies. The CIA, the best funded intelligence agency in the world, tried to take out Castro hundreds of times and failed. They couldn’t find Osama for a decade, either, and even then the US used Seals, not the CIA. Sure, killing some rando is probably easy, but not a government leader who is actively avoiding assassination, as I’m sure Hamas leaders are doing.

It isn’t such a simple question and I don’t remember all of Scaramucci’s points, which is why I gave the reference. Also, given how long OP’s post was, I figure they probably do want the longer explanation in the podcast. But since you ask (even though you claim its not important to you), here’s what I recall:

1. Many people, especially uneducated people, can’t tell the difference between entertainment and politics. To them, Trump is entertaining, so that’s who they like. When Trump says crazy shit, as detailed by OP, it isn’t a negative. They love it because it is entertaining.
2. Many voters don’t understand economics and the business cycle. They assume that the current state of the economy/inflation/affordability is the direct result of whatever the current president is doing. So, if affordability is bad right now, it is Biden/Harris’s fault. If affordability was better when Trump was president, they want him back. I think The Mooch called it “economic nostalgia”.
3. Racism and misogyny plays a role.
4. There is a large segment of the population, not just in the US but around the world, that believes in the “strong man” style of leadership. A big, loud and proud alpha male type who never surrenders is comforting to many people. This is lizard-brain stuff that goes way back to caveman days.
5. Straight white males have been either ignored or actively disparaged by many on the left. Things like DEI may be justifiable on a group level, but proponents sometimes forget that people are not just members of a group, they are individuals. As individuals, they may not feel the privilege that they supposedly have. So, as much as a straight white male may support the goals of DEI or “wokeness” or whatever you want to call it, they don’t want to be discriminated against as individuals, anymore than women or minorities do. This is why support for Trump is much higher among white men than women and minorities.

That’s all I can remember right now.

It’s not an advertisement, dumbass. I found the last two episodes of that podcast pretty much exactly answered the question that OP posed.

If you really want to know why Trump is still competitive, listen to Anthony Scaramucci, a.k.a. The Mooch. He worked for Trump for a couple of weeks before being fired by him. The Mooch is a long-time conservative investor-type who knows Trump well and can’t stand him, so he has been helping the Democrats. Thr Mooch really understands Trump and his followers. I’m pretty sure he helped with Harris’s debate prep, especially helping her understand how to get under Trump’s skin.

He hosts a great podcast along with Katty Kay called The Rest Is Politics US (as opposed to the parent program The Rest Is Politics UK). https://tripus.supportingcast.fm

In particular, check out the last two post-debate episodes:

#27 Trump vs. Harris: What You Didn’t See

#28 Why Kamala Harris Still Has a Problem

I think you are misunderstanding the nature of the conflict. The war is between Iran and Israel. Gaza is just one tiny battlefield in the larger war. Iran and its proxies don’t want to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Cui bono? Iran and its proxies, that’s who. Kamala Harris knows this. She isn’t stupid and she is well-advised by experts. You and your fellow protesters aren’t helping at all, you are just making her job of defeating Trump harder. Wake up, my friend.

Hezbollah and Hamas are Iranian proxies that have wrecked Lebanon and Gaza respectively. Hamas’s murderous attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 was all about creating chaos, provoking Israel, and undermining the Abraham Accords. It wasn’t about solving the problems of the Palestinian people, it was done to further Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” goals. In that sense, Hamas’s October 7 operation was very similar in nature and purpose to Bin Laden’s 9/11 plan, and Israel is responding much the same as the US did back in the early 2000s against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Iran and Hamas started the current clash with the purpose of provoking Israel into a drastic response in Gaza. Gazan civilians are caught in the middle, but if you think it’s Israel’s fault, you are falling exactly in line with what Iran and their proxies intended.

The Russians, for all their faults, have a well-developed sense of realpolitik, and they have a term for people like you and your fellow protesters: useful idiots. I prefer the term “naive but well-intentioned”, but there is quite a lot of overlap in this case. That “naive but well-intentioned” outlook is fine, even laudable, most of the time, but it is quite unhelpful at this moment when the competition between Harris and Trump is so close.

I’ve got a 2015 T540p with integrated graphics. It’s fine for low-spec gaming. I only run Linux-native games and haven’t managed to get any Windows games running in compatibility mode yet. Here are the games that have “just worked” for me so far.

Dwarf Fortress

Cataclysm: Dark Day Ahead

Darkest Dungeon

Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2

Caves of Qud

Unity of Command

Stardew Valley

Planescape: Torment

Shovel Knight

If that’s the kind of retro gaming that floats your boat, an old Thinkpad is just fine.

I’ve had this game on my wishlist for years. Maybe time to take another look.

I think you may be wrong. Wikipedia tells me that:

“In 1880, the ages of consent were set at 10 or 12 in most states, with the exception of Delaware where it was 7.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_States

Yeah, but she was his cousin so…

Two things:

1. I have an old refurbished Thinkpad that I originally bought as a backup navigation computer for a month-long sailboat voyage. It had Windows originally and was “fine”, by which I mean slow but acceptable for navigation purposes. When I was forced to update to Windows 10, the performance was no longer tolerable, so I hardly used it for about four years. I also had a Windows gaming PC, so no big deal.
2. About a year ago, I got a shiny new Windows gaming PC. I was trying to decide what to do with my old gaming PC, which had the same problem as my laptop: it could barely crawl under the weight of years of Windows OS “upgrades”. I got it into my head that I should build a media PC with it since Netflix kind of sucks now. That lead me down the self-hosting and Linux rabbit hole.

Before I knew it, I had my old gaming PC running Proxmox and attached to my main television, I bought an old Dell Poweredge server (also running Proxmox), an old Compellant storage shelf with 20 SAS drives, a Tripp-Lite UPS, and a 24-port network switch. I also discovered Docker. So, now I fucking love Linux and I’m a fiend for self-hosting and media streaming. And how do I centrally control all of this infrastructure? That’s right, my old Thinkpad got a new lease on life running Arch and I can run all of my server infrastructure using the terminal, emacs, and web interfaces. Fuck yeah.

And what happened to my beautiful, expensive new Alienware Windows gaming PC? After playing a couple hundred hours of Cyberpunk, it just sits there. Now I’m addicted to Dwarf Fortress on my old Arch Thinkpad and I don’t think about high-spec AAA games much.

I had no idea this would happen when I started this Linux journey. Life is strange.

These girls are old school. You make the money, they pump out the children. They don’t believe in birth control or abortion, so if you want to maximize your reproductive fitness, you could do worse than a Catholic girl.

You, sir, are a poet. And now we all know it.

As everyone else has said, this is a risky practice due to heat-tolerant bacterial toxins. Here is an article about it, if you want to do some more reading:

https://blog.foodsafety.ca/what-are-bacterial-toxins

The reason the meat smells better after you partially cook it is that you are killing the spoilage bacteria coating the outer surface and washing away or destroying their smelly byproducts. Oddly enough, those aren’t the really dangerous bacteria. The ones that cause serious food poisoning mostly do not stink.

Also, cutting the larger chunk of meat up into smaller pieces is a very bad idea. You are just spreading the surface contamination into the muscle. Also, using water as a medium actually limits the upper temperature you can achieve. If you really want to save a piece of meat while minimizing your risk, do this instead:

1. Leave the cut of meat intact.
2. Put a high-heat vegetable oil like canola or sunflower oil into a steel frying pan.
3. Heat it until the oil smokes just a little. The smoke point of sunflower oil is 248 Celsius, whereas water boils at 100 Celsius, so you can easily see why this method is more effective than boiling.
4. Pick up the piece of meat with two pairs of tongs and place it into the hot pan. Rotate it around until a brown crust forms on the outside. This is called searing.
5. Remove the meat from the pan and let it cool.
6. With a clean sharp knife, cut off the seared meat at the surface and discard.

Note that you should not attempt this with poultry, only whole, non-tenderized cuts of beef or pork. This, by the way, is how restaurants prepare beef for serving raw dishes like steak tartar. Or at least that’s how they are supposed to prepare it from a food safety perspective.

Note also that this doesn’t guarantee that the meat is safe, but raw, whole, non-tenderized cuts of meat are usually only contaminated on the outer surface. Obviously it is safer to avoid the risk altogether, but if you must try to save the meat, this method is far, far better than your current practice.

There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, about the Israeli Cabinet, after the surprise attack that started the Yom Kippur War, always requiring a “tenth man”. The theory is that if nine people agree, then it is the duty of the “tenth man” to disagree, no matter what and no matter how much the other members pressure them. They are considered irritating but necessary to avoid dangerous group think.

I’m not sure I completely understand what you mean by a jabroni. Do you think they are the “tenth man” of our communities?

I also enjoyed watching Mr. Bercow’s antics. It is also interesting to note that he was found guilty in 2022 of quite serious bullying charges against House of Commons staff. It is unfortunate that he did not reserve his acid, if entertaining, tongue for deserving politicians alone, but rather used his sharp wit to belittle staff as well. Not cool.

You are totally right. We are living in a golden age of not only video games, but entertainment in general, thanks to ridiculously powerful computers and the internet. People with video game nostalgia remember how those old games made them feel, because the games were new and exciting and they were young. But video games (and board games) have done nothing but improve over the years as developers figure what works and what doesn’t.

Nowadays there is just of ton of…everything. We are spoiled for choice. There are so many excellent games at every price point, and also tons of crap, and yes, too much shovelware and too many rehashed franchise games. But here’s the thing: these things aren’t mutually exclusive. We have all of it, all at once, and reviews and advice are everywhere. If someone is tired of rehashed AAA franchise games, they can spend the rest of their lives playing clever indie games and they’ll still barely scratch the surface of what’s available.

Some companies laser etch and track their natural diamonds, too. It’s to distinguish them from blood diamonds.

This seems like a natural evolution of the market: a period of expansion followed by saturation and contraction. And there can be no doubt that we have hit a saturation point. There has been an absolute explosion in the number of games available, largely because platforms like Steam have simplified the logistics of distribution tremendously.

On the positive side for small developers, if you look at which games are rated “overwhelmingly positive” on Steam, the vast majority are not high-end graphic-intensive AAA games. There is a huge market for lighter, innovative games that can run on a cheap laptop. For every massive Cyberpunk type games in my collection, I have three Stardew Valley, Caves of Qud, and Undertale type games.