u/ContextEffects01

I was recently thinking about Ottawa's Canada Day celebrations. I don't know how probable they thought a thunderstorm was, but if someone got hit by lightning before they could get to shelter that would have been remembered as tragic, rather than the "amusing story" people remember rushing to shelter during the storm as being. Why don't they have wire mesh around these venues to act as a sort of Faraday Cage against lightning strikes?

Environmentalists called rainforests the lungs of the Earth. I don’t know what’s more ridiculous, that kind of phytoplankton erasure or comparing a biome valued for producing oxygen to an organ known to aid in consuming it.

Environmentalists took breeds of rats known for growing tumors on their own, and pretended GMOs gave them cancer.

Environmentalists took tsunami height maps and pretended they were radiation maps. (Now, I’m as sceptical as anyone else of humanity’s capacity to competently tame the atom, but you can’t in the next breath be incompetent yourself.)

Then, they had the nerve to throw a de facto tantrum in the context of the “we’re the virus” meme, as if thinking their biggest mistake were to be too kind and gentle, instead of their biggest mistake being to be too full of BS. A mistake they repeated again by falling for hoaxes in the context of that very meme.

When you point the finger, there are three pointing back. You want to know who’s at fault for the current heat wave? Look in the mirror.

So I assume by now you’ve heard of the situation in France. Heat waves are getting people killed, but the architecture isn’t designed to accommodate air conditioners.

I would think spraying oneself with cold water could accomplish at least two things:

A. Direct cooling from thermal contact between water and skin, and…

B. Evaporative cooling, to tide one over between sprays.

Is there any particular reason people aren’t doing this right now?

We have a walk of life, marketing, that by its very nature accepts money to hype goods and services that, because it's given to them, isn't invested in actually making the goods and services as good as marketers pretend it is.

The result? You either attract the scum of the Earth in the first place, or you bring out the worst in even them.

We all single out the offensiveness of the "dishpan hands" ads from the 30s, but in another few decades future generations might feel the same about today's ads. Even as recently as the 90s, you can't even watch game console ads without seeing them trash-talking their competitors' customers in ways that leave the overweight and the rural poor catching strays.

There are even allegations that the popularity of gemstones on wedding rings isn't because it's something a couple can pawn off when they fall on hard times, but because the companies involved in these gemstones had more incentive to brainwash their own customers into buying them than to pander to pre-existing demand. I think such allegations infantilize the customer, but the thought that such companies would have even tried should have been the end of advertising once and for all. If advertising brought you such a bastardization against love itself, why should advertising be allowed to continue to exist?

If free speech doesn't cover false advertising, why does it cover advertising's inherently perverse incentives that set the stage for lying in the first place? Marketing is ultimately poison for the mind. At best, ordinary marketing is a more dilute dose, and I'm not sure it's even that anymore.

If we can't outlaw all advertising, we should stop this pretense of having laws against false advertising, and treat it advertising as the poisonous, untrustworthy free-for-all it probably already is. These laws are a joke. Elon pretends his self-driving cars are safe and then they get people killed. By comparison if an engineer falsely pretends a mall is safe and it collapses and gets people killed they go to jail. Maybe if people either stopped having laws against false advertising and/or started having laws against all advertising and there was a cultural shift toward "never believe anything any marketer ever says ever again" without the false promise the legal system will hold the consumer's hand, marketers would waste their money, be cut loose, and spend the rest of their lives doing something more honest like flipping burgers or pumping gas.

Today it’s just colds and flus. Tomorrow, what if it’s some unknown airborne pathogen?

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. New illnesses shouldn’t be allowed to spread to everyone just because a few people were inconsiderate enough to be out anywhere but the hospital while contagiously ill.

You could ask “what if someone sick needs to get to work?”

If it’s essential work and no one can be found to fill in for them, society should pay for their private transportation, on a cab with the windows down and the passenger compartment sealed off from the driver compartment.

If it’s non-essential work, or the employer didn’t even try to find a replacement, nationalize the entire company by force and throw the CEO in jail. Make an ex post facto law about it. I don’t care. The legal system clearly wasn’t designed to account for biological realities. It’s the same reason it says corporations are people and teenagers are children.

Enough is enough. Force the issue already.

I feel like if he’s doing this out of ignorance, I don’t see how someone either too dumb; or too lazy; to check if there’s a reasonable expectation of a phone message making it to their own XO, isn’t too dumb; or lazy; to get promoted to Captain in the first place. Isn’t that rank typically associated with soldiers who have a degree?

But if he’s doing this out of malice, what purpose could it possibly have served? Sobel claims Winters spends his weekends “on the base” anyway, so as malice goes isn’t that a half-measure? And over what? The difference in popularity among the non-commissioned ranks? Clearly impressing the Colonel matters more to Sobel than impressing NCOs.

To be clear, it is not individual consumers of beauty accessories to whom it is owed to count it as a business expense.

I know something must be wrong with makeup use if the behaviour of some of its defenders is anything to go by. The only mystery is what the "something" in question is.

However, it IS owed to the truth itself.

We might never know why it works. But employers are competing for customer attention, and employees are competing for employer attention. Which, when you treat employers as customers of an employee's labour, is not as distinct a statement as people pretend. This can only mean one thing. Intentionally or otherwise, cuteness or beauty in customer-facing staff can attract attention even before the quality of services sustains it.

Customers cannot prove they weren't there for the beauty in ordinary contexts any more than the Hooters context, and even if sincere, can't prove they weren't lured in by it subconsciously.

Some employers even expressly require makeup use. The ones that don't, maybe don't need to because individual employees already use it anyway.

It needs to be counted as a business expense, officially, legally, and in every sense of the phrase. Get it in writing, so people can't ignore this. They can dispute it all they want, and maybe they should, but we shouldn't ignore it.

Then, maybe then, we'll have a better idea what, if anything, should be done to address it, assuming it is our place as a society to do anything about it in the first place.

In a world where millions of voters decided that the worldview of serial adulterers like Trump were compatible with being the leader of the free world, the notion that an, as far as we know, lesser degree of infidelity is disqualification for a lesser political office is obviously preposterous.

But it’s no longer enough to call it preposterous.

We have to accept that the fact that people who were ok with Trump feel the need to get him on this also discredits the other critiques they have of him, including of his tattoo.

Plenty of people get tattoos unaware of what they mean, just thinking they look cool.

Some Mandarin or Japanese lettering that means something different than they thought for instance.

But even the historical context doesn’t always have to be damning.

Swastikas as a symbol were stolen by the Nazis, and failing to “take back” the symbol has left any noticing of its use in hinduism feeling awkward… which to be fair it might have anyway.

By comparison, moustaches aren’t forever tainted by the fact that Hitler had one.

The question is which category this tattoo belongs in, and again, coming back to the first paragraph, the fact that his detractors feel the need to throw everything but the kitchen sink at him is pretty damning that they know they don’t have a leg to stand on in getting him on the tattoo.

Town names being overused isn’t just annoying, it’s costing people money. People intending to go to Sydney, Australia end up going to Sydney, Nova Scotia.

At best, people’s unoriginality costs people money.

At worst, this incentivizes future town founders to deliberately name their town after a pre-existing, more famous town, to confuse travellers on purpose and not bother having anything better to offer.

This needs to be reined in. It needs to become public policy that town names aren’t valid unless they’re the first town to go by that name.

I’m not saying people can’t informally call these towns things in their capacity as private citizens.

But we need to make it public policy that for the purposes of notaries, for the purposes of airline tickets, etc… that town names that repeated existing town names are no longer valid.

So you might’ve heard of the tweet referring to Stephen Miller as an “ugly ****.” I won’t repeat the particular cuss word, not because it’s necessarily as bad as the shallowness, but because it isn’t even a small fraction as relevant as it.

Most people obsess over the profanity. They shouldn’t.

They should be obsessing over how it emphasized looks, as if to imply that were the most valid criticism of Stephen Miller.

Perhaps that wasn’t the intended message.

That doesn’t matter.

A reasonable person could have wondered, why, if some of the other criticisms of Stephen Miller are as valid as they seem, do people who would otherwise condemn shallowness in a wide variety of other contexts focus on the superficial and skin deep instead?

The other criticisms seeming valid tells us nothing of whether or not they are. When a public official is that unpopular, especially outside the USA, hearing criticisms of him that you think sound valid doesn’t tell you whether it’s that they are as valid as they seem, or that 7 billion people throwing everything at the wall until something sticks inevitably just from the laws of random chance land on something that seems valid independently of whether or not it is.

To prove that’s not what’s happening here, there is only one option left; focusing on the substance of the matter.

Tone is negotiable. Integrity is not.

(Disclaimer: this is not about anything happening right now, I am thinking of a time more than a year ago I accidentally locked myself in the lobby of a building and how grateful I am I at least didn't need to wizz.)

If a parent doesn't care what happens to their kids, they have way too little incentive to raise them right.

If a parent is in denial that they are raising their kids wrong, they have way too little incentive to raise them right.

If a parent knows that they are raising their kids wrong, and think their kids will magically turn their lives around at the age of 18, they have way too little incentive to raise them right.

If a parent knows that they are raising their kids wrong, but think they can magically shield their kids from the consequences of their actions forever, they have way too little incentive to raise them right.

We need to stop merely condemning parents who raise criminals from bad parenting and start prosecuting them. Give them an incentive to raise them right.

You know the one... the one you encounter in the dark hallway and can only see its eyes. Do they ever reveal more about what it was or what any other part than its eyes looked like?