You unambitious fools. I’m going to en passant onto the board of the people playing next to me!

That’s how you expand your territory.

This is recreating the Civ weapon progression. Start with swords, then rifles, then cannons, then ICBMs.

We’re gonna need a bigger board.

Are the Indian soldiers a UN unit or is that their regular uniform?

I’m pretty sure there would need to be an argument made that this is a federal issue. This isn’t something like voting rights, which is potentially a constitutional issue.

Trust me when I say I am not a fan of SCOTUS, and I supported candidates who said they’d appoint additional justices (to a total of 13, for instance) to rebalance the courts. I just don’t think they can take every case, especially those like this one.

If you mean SCOTUS, I am not sure they have jurisdiction.

Jarosław Stróżyk said Putin is in a position where he could begin planning a small-scale invasion but is holding back due to the West’s response to the attack in Ukraine.

“Putin is certainly already prepared for some mini-operation against one of the Baltic countries, for example, to enter the famous Narva [municipality in Estonia] or to land on one of the Swedish islands,” Mr Stróżyk told Polish paper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

Tl;dr - We think that Putin has the capability to mount a small scale invasion, but isn’t doing it because of NATO’s potential response. But if we assume he really wants to, then he will.

A 1971 Chrysler Newport.

The thing was a boat. You’d hit a bump in the road, and the car would act like you crested a wave and bob front to back a few times. It was wider than most pickup trucks and probably heavier. Not only could it not fit in most parking spots, it could hardly fit in some lanes. Required leaded gas, which was getting hard to find at that point. If you needed to go uphill you had to build up speed because you would slow down, even with the gas pedal floored.

The best part is that when I finally brought it in for service, the mechanic came out and said “You’ve been driving that thing??” Three out of four motor mounts had broken and the last one was about rusted through.

It did have an 8-track though, and came with a bunch of Elvis tapes.

I hated Elvis, but did manage to find an 8-track of Peter Paul and Mary.

Thanks!

I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.

That’s exactly my perspective.

I came of age with the birth of the web. I was using systems like Usenet, gopher, wais, and that sort of thing. I was very much into the whole cypherpunk, “information wants to be free” philosophy that thought that the more information people had, the more they could talk to each other, the better the world would be.

Boy, was I wrong.

But you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So now, in addition to having NPR online, we have kids eating tide pods and getting recruited into fascist ideologies. And of course it’s not just kids. It’s tough to see how the anti-vax movement or QAnon could have grown without the internet (which obviously has search engines as a major driver of traffic).

I think you’re better off teaching critical thinking, and even demonstrating the failings of ChatGPT by showing them how bad it is at answering questions. There’s plenty of resources you can find that should give you a starting point. Ironically, you can find them using a search engine.

That was amazing! I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve seen this.

“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”

The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.

“No stupid questions” is intended to be a topic, not a challenge.

Yup! I really love the whole story there. It was sort of like the space race but with tall masted ships and pirates and such.

I mean, you also had the slave trade, but if you blithely ignore the discomforting parts of history, reading about it can be fun.

Yes. CA is looking to get single payer, but that has a longer runway because America.

I’m know I’m going to get downvoted for this, and a witch will put her curse on me, but here it goes.

I actually like audible. The subscription runs me somewhere around $12-13 per month, and includes one credit that can be used for any book. You can also buy extra credits for about the same price, and you can give audiobooks as gifts. My partner also has a subscription and I’ll frequently steal unused credits. I used to try to game the system and get the longest or most expensive audiobooks I could find with my credits. It was fun to get a 40 hour long $45 audiobook for $12. Now that I have an audible library that’s starting to rival my Steam library in terms of unplayed content, I’ll just grab whatever has caught my eye and pay cash for anything under $12. They have a lot of sales. They also have free content, but it rotates and sometimes they’ll pull the free books after a while.

Being Amazon, it’s pretty platform universal. Their apps are pretty much everywhere, like with kindle. They also have a very large library with a number of books labeled as exclusive to audible. These include full cast productions, which can be really fun.

All of that gushing aside, their software is fucking horrid. Every few months they’ll do an update that breaks something. It doesn’t make the app unusable, but it’ll change the invisible hit box size for the buttons or screw up the logic somehow. I currently have negative 56 minutes in the book I’m listening to, and although I can go back and forth using the +- 60s buttons, the scrubber/progress bar isn’t working. I suspect they have major QA issues at Amazon, like a lot of the big companies do.

Anyway, between the ubiquity, the prices, the free content, and almost seamlessness of the experience, that’s the service I use. I listen to audiobooks every night while falling asleep as well as when I’m working around the house or whatever. I listen to the point of having two pairs of AirPods so I can swap them when the batteries die after 4 hours. Plus, depending on the book, the kindle edition and the audible edition can stay in sync. Sometimes that’s helpful, sometimes very much not.

I know there’s more open source options out there. I had to do that to get Cory Doctorow’s new book since he refuses to publish via Amazon, but it was a much bigger pain in the ass than I’d prefer. At this point in my life I really want something that just (mostly) works and requires zero attention. I’m mid to late stage career in science/tech and I want to dedicate exactly zero brain cycles to listening to an audiobook. Audible does that. Plus, like I said, they have Amazon money so they have a number of exclusives and freebies and sales.

I might have recommendations as far as books go if I knew your or your daughter’s tastes in literature, but as far as the base app, I’m sticking with audible.

California comes pretty close.

To little fanfare, as the new year has gotten underway, California has closed one of the largest remaining gaps in its healthcare coverage system. As of January 1, all low-income Californians, no matter their immigration status, no matter their age, qualify for healthcare coverage.

There were so many problems with monitoring time. Even today I always dread it a bit. While we’ve tried to at least move the issues from the mechanistic to the philosophical, we still run into things like the Y2K and the 2038 problems. Hell, I remember running into an issue with calculating leap years and such as an undergrad.

I like to think that, if nothing else, it gives me a greater appreciation for Discworld.

So I got scooped on the whole candle thing, which I really wanted to go with. Instead, I’m going to pivot and say that accurate timekeeping - day or night - was actually driven by the needs of navigation. 

You could get a pretty good idea of when it was based on the position of the sun and stars, as long as you knew where you were. The opposite is also true - you could figure out where you were, as long as you knew what time it was (and had the appropriate charts/data). The problem was that, while sailing around the world, ships often didn’t know either one.

For rough purposes, people used things like candles. In some cases, monks would recite specific prayers at a given cadence to keep track of time overnight and so know when to wake the others. These methods, as well as later inventions like the pendulum clock that used a known time component to drive watch mechanisms, were all but useless for navigation due to inaccuracies. They were good enough in the 1200s to let the monks know when to pray, though.

I was thinking that we could replace the board with a hexagon map and replace the pieces with printed cardboard squares.