If you’re rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

Yeah, there’s a pretty big difference between a lawn in Vermont or Ohio, and one in Nevada or southern California.

Grass really, really depends on location and climate. I literally never water or fertilize my lawn; it looks fine.

The worse thing here is ecological. I keep my mower set to 4", and keep my lawn a bit longer than my neighbors. I see a ton of fire flies in my yard in the summer, and see a fraction as many in my neighbors yard.

Short lawns are terrible habitat, which makes them good for sports or a children’s play area. But 80% of my neighbor’s lawn is just aesthetic, which is something I really don’t get. Lawns are about as visually exciting as a beige wall. They’re a waste of space.

Fair. I should have said that many legless lizards aren’t snakes.

Not in the right clade, basically.

They look similar, but aren’t directly related. It’s similar to why legless lizards aren’t snakes, and bats aren’t birds.

There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.

The last three third party candidates who won more than one state were Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Theodore Roosevelt.

The first two won the south on account of regional anger at the civil rights movement.

Roosevelt split the vote. 50.6% of the country voted for the Republican candidate or a former Republican, but the Democrat won a landslide with only 41% of the popular vote and 81% of the electoral college vote.

The closest a third party candidate has ever come to winning is Breckenridge, who got 18% of the popular vote and 23.8% of the EC vote running as a Southern Democrat because the south didn’t like Stephen Douglas (who got 29.5% of the popular vote but only won a single state).

Voting third party basically doesn’t work. Any time its been significant, it’s just caused a spoiler effect.

Dinosaurs are currently defined as anything that descends from the most recent common ancestor of triceratops and the pigeon.

Which, as others pointed out is mostly due to dinosaurs being originally defined before we found the first pterodactyl.

If you want to refer to dinosaurs and pterodactyls, you could use avemetatarsalians (anything more closely related to birds than crocs) or ornithodirans (dinosaurs + pterosauromorphs).

Also fun is that there’s a number of crocodillians that look suspiciously dinosaur- like, like Shuvosaurus. Convergent evolution is wild.

Can, sure. I’m having difficulty finding the fatality rate for unseatbelted people in car crashes at 25 mph, but for pedestrians it seems to be somewhere in the single digits.

According to the UN

In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and others of 7 October, the UN mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape in at least three locations in southern Israel.

The team also found a pattern of victims - mostly women - found fully or partially naked, bound and shot across multiple locations which “may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence”.

In some locations the mission said it could not verify reported incidents of rape.

Or is the UN an Israeli propaganda machine, now?

I see e.g. https://nltimes.nl/2023/08/01/trauma-surgeons-express-concern-e-bike-accidents-among-elderly

Dutch trauma surgeons have raised concerns over the rising number of elderly people suffering severe injuries from electric bicycle accidents, AD reported on Tuesday.

While some injuries result from collisions, most accidents are unilateral, caused by incidents like falling from a stationary position or losing control due to high speed,

It sounds like it’s particularly impacting 65+ year old men - the same types who die from breaking a hip slipping and falling while walking.

I’m not sure to what degree this is caused by ebikes encouraging them to keep biking when they should have stopped, or ebikes just being more dangerous when they fall over.

Many more accidents than what?

More accidents than traditional bikes per passenger mile, or passenger hour?

More accidents on ebikes than 5 years ago on account of more people buying them?

For example, drivers will give unhelmeted cyclists more room while passing, on average.

There’s biking and there’s biking.

In the Netherlands, for example, people wear helmets if they’re doing bike sports like road racing or BMX.

But if they’re just cruising down the street on their granny bike to get groceries, they don’t bother because that’s fairly safe.

It’s rather like the need for a seatbelt on the highway, vs the need for a seatbelt on a 25 mph neighborhood street.

Yeah, it doesn’t really belong in the ‘no’ column. It’s not an appropriate cat food because it’s not nutritionally complete.

So it’s rather like how just eating bread or cornmeal that don’t have added vitamins will give you scurvy or pellagra. But obviously they’re not poisonous or anything and most of the world eats them without a problem.

I mean, this is mostly about treats, so…

Cats being obligate carnivores means most of their calories must come from meat because they e.g. can’t synthesize taurine like a human or dog can. But eating a bit of cat grass isn’t gonna kill them.

They particularly look like diffraction spikes/starbursts.

Astigmatism, cataracts, glaucoma or smudged glasses can cause you to see starbursts when you look at bright lights at night.

Depends on how the product is described and what the warranty covers.

Like, if these are sold as decorative art pieces, swinging them around probably voids the warranty.

The only problem is that the functional replica anime sword section is probably going to be entirely empty. They’re basically all decorative wall hangers.

They’ll differ in build quality, though. Some might break if you swing them hard, others might break if you hit something with them.