The majority of assholes in these areas are still vaccinated, unfortunately. It's the kids that will be suffering, from the decisions of their parents. If disease would eradicate the unvaccinated quickly enough to wipe out the texas undesirables, we wouldn't have had the current election outcome in the first place.

Bah, scientists who care about the phosphorus cycle are screwy in the head. Real sciency types are all about the nitrate cycle!

-paraphrased from a microbiologist

If my voting rights were stripped by this law, I would know what to do, and who to do it to. I wouldn't become a secondary citizen (at best), or nothing but a (wage/birthing) slave.

Huh, well, that's an odd route you've forced my brain to take this morning. I'm now having to wonder... dogs and cats drink by lapping up liquids as adults. They don't really have lips like humans do. How do they suckle as infants?

It's amusing to me how true this was when I was a kid playing. Now as an adult, the 'clues' they give you are so obvious I feel like I'm barely even playing.

You can't go ~~home~~ adventuring again

I was hoping it would say someone finally told Trump, "Bitch, get back in your place because no one is putting up with your shit." Imagine my disappointment at the reasonable attempt to lower tensions and appease.

For a second I was very confused, as I wondered why there was a second artist with the same style.

New conspiracy: Wugmeister=ahdok backwards in the ancient sumerian curse language.

Is that what Ayn Rand is about? All I really remember is that having a name you chose yourself is self-fulfilling.

because if we’re going to do anything good as a species, it will be making sure our dogs outlive us

So, funny thing about this, is it's not at all true. I have a friend who is a vet, and he quite succinctly clarified with some good journal articles that the real issue with dogs' short lives is we just don't care. If we had been breeding for longer lives at any point, they would have no issue with living for decades longer than their current spans. It's never been a priority (and might even be a poor business decision) for breeders to focus on longevity. Even health is only a passing concern for their 'working' period.

Maybe humanity will become better. Someday.

Worst experience of my shitting life was when I didn't defecate prior to the monthly jog. Luckily I could squeeze through the fence of the golf club I was near, and it was early enough nobody was around to 'report' me, AND they had the course's bathroom door unlocked. Now I just exercise at home where there's a bathroom within safe jumping distance.

The reason is likely to compete with Uber, 🤦

A few points of clarity, as I have a family member who's pretty high up at waymo. First, they don't want to compete with uber. Waymo isn't really concerned with driverless cars that you or I would be owning/using, and they don't want (at this point anyway) to try to start a new taxi service. Right now you order an uber and a waymo car might show up. . They want the commercial side of the equation. How much would uber pay to not have to pay drivers? How much would a shipping company fork over when they can jettison the $75k-150 drivers?

Second, I know for a fact that the upper management was pushing for the cars to drive like this. I can nearly quote said family member opining that if the cars followed all the rules of the road, they wouldn't perform well, couching it in the language of 'efficiency.' It was something like, "being polite creates confusion in other drivers. They expect you to roll through the stop sign or turn right ahead of them even if they have right of way." So now the waymo cars do the same thing. Yay, "social norms."

A third point is that, as someone else mentioned, the cars are now trained, not 'programmed' with instructions to follow. Said family member spoke of when they switched to the machine learning model, and it was better than the highly complicated (and I'm dumbing down my description because I can't describe it well) series of if-else statements. With that training comes the issue of the folks in charge of things not knowing exactly what is going on. An issue that was described to me was their cars driving right at the edge of the lane, rather than in the center of it, and they couldn't figure out why or (at that point, anyway) how to fix it.

As an addendum to that third point, the training data is us, quite literally. They get and/or purchase people's driving. I think at one time it was actual video, not sure now. So if 90% of drivers blast through at the moment of the red light change if they can, it's likely you'll hear about it eventually from waymo. It's a weakness that ties right into that 'social norm' thing. We're not really training safer driving by having machine drivers, we're just removing some of the human factors like fatigue or attention deficits. Again, as I get frustrated with the language of said family member (and I'm paraphrasing), 'how much do we really want to focus on low percentage occurrences? Improving the 'miles per collision' is best at the big things.'

HA! I made it to elder wizard status. Your memes have no power here! croak, die