I love the idea (and it’s definitely true) that there are irrational numbers which, when written in a suitable base, contain the sequence of characters, “This number is provably normal” and are simultaneously not normal.

You can instead put off buying the sticker for the three years of placement decision time, then frantically search for a sticker that used to be widely available, be unable to find it, and regret the decisions that lead you to this place.

Turn hard to the left while accelerating, then hard to the right while braking. That usually shakes it out.

Won’t someone think of the children('s rights)?

The 13th ended slavery. You’re probably thinking of the 12th which says that no person constitutionally ineligible to “be” president can be elected as vice president. Importantly, the 22nd only places limits on being “elected” as president, so it’s not (necessarily) creating a constitutional requirement to “be” president by some other means.

Like I said, it could be an interesting legal fight if it even came up.

You can only be elected as president twice. You can probably hack the system by getting multiple other presidents to select you as vice president, then resign. If you serve more than 2 years of the term they were elected to, that reduces the number of times you can be elected as president to one.

The 22nd amendment doesn’t say that someone that serves 3.99 years of another president’s term multiple times can’t still be elected, and it doesn’t say that someone not qualified to be elected as president can’t be elected as vice president, but the 12th amendment might. Either of those could be an interesting legal fight.

George HW Bush was the last one to leave office while the economy was doing well. It was going fine at the end of George W Bush’s first term, then the 2007 housing crash brought it down. Trump’s first term ended with the covid lockdowns severely harming the state of things. So… 3 Republican presidencies ago, but that’s a lot of years.

Trump was pretty ineffective in his first term, largely because he did a terrible job of supporting people who really agreed with his agenda, and an even worse job of removing people from influential positions who didn’t.

He said during his campaign that he knew much better who to trust, but now he’s got Elon Musk and RFK Jr. prominently featured. I don’t think he has learned anything, and I think he will be just as ineffective this time.

It’s possible that some of the Republicans in Congress will support more of his agenda, but even there if they have to overcome the filibuster, I don’t think mass deportation, a federal abortion ban, or most of the rest of the potential worst of it is in the cards.

I have made fun of another man for peeing sitting down, but in a manner comparable to making fun of an ugly outfit. The very hidden secret is I sit to pee sometimes too, and I have ugly clothes that I wear sometimes. To answer the other questions:

If I’m already sitting, I’d pee sitting, 100% of the time.

Yes, and that’s one reason I would sit to pee.

Not spotless, but it seems normal to me. If there’s pee visible anywhere, I wipe it with paper. My wife mops the floor more often than I do.

I don’t have a ready answer for this.

Whenever I’ve been on the hiring side of an interview, the people seated in the interview aren’t given any special “Keep the company safe” training, but the HR person coordinating always have been. I suspect that’s why it works much better to ask in the interview than after it.

Brain one way, but other brain other way. Chemical stuff is making brain stuff happen. Makes see different.

If you’re in the US, run for Congress, win, reform the medicaid backed doctor residency program, with the aim of opening it up so many more people can become doctors. Then watch as the new supply brings down salaries, and eventually gets lazy/ineffective doctors fired. Revenge is a dish best served nation wide, as they say.

I’m mentally well, I just like thinking about hypotheticals. I have no plans (nor any desire) to fight any number of squirrels to the death, and I do not condone doing so as entertainment or sport.

There are details missing in this question that matter tremendously. Squirrels are faster and more agile than us. If they are well coordinated, and behave optimally to win (without concern to their individual survival, only the group’s success), I think it would take only a small number of squirrels to brutally murder most people, something like 5. I think their best strategy would be to go for the eyes first, then inflict bleeding injuries and escape again before the person can react. Without tools, and without backup, this approach wouldn’t take long to wear down most people.

If the squirrels don’t care about their own survival, but make straightforward attacks, I’d think closer to 10-20. The person’s injuries will still compound quickly, but once thet have a grip of a squirrel, it wouldn’t be especially hard to lethally injure.

If the squirrels still behave like squirrels, and are instead attacking because (for example), they are starving, then the number probably doesn’t matter much, as they’re more likely to go after each other, and the person would have the opportunity to plan and ambush small groups at a time.

Companies try to maximize green per red. By paying less, and getting the same, they maximize that, year after year until (in a temporary and unforeseeable setback) you leave for… Bluer pastures, apparently.

There are different sorts of companies, and the more they think of employees as a number of years of experience plus a stack of skills, the more susceptible they are to believing that replacing humans with other equally skilled humans is a productive way to spend their time.

The rubber band trick is great, and very low effort/cost. I want to say, though, that it can take substantially more force than it looks like it should on small screws like this. You also don’t have to use something shaped for the original driver of the screw. With the rubber to help it, a round cylinder a little smaller than the head of the screw can work very well.

I ran out of crtcs, but I wanted another monitor. I widened a virtual display, and drew the left portion of it on one monitor, like regular. Then I had a crown job that would copy chunks of it into the frame buffer of a USB to DVI-d adapter. It could do 5 fps redrawing the whole screen, but I chose things to put there where it wouldn’t matter too much. The only painful thing was arranging the windows on that monitor, with the mouse updating very infrequently, and routinely being drawn 2 or more places in the frame buffer.

If you take the sun out of the equation, the planets fly apart in all directions. Hope that helps ;)

“Bigger” is easy, because there are obvious ways to measure the size of a government, like the revenue the government gets, the amount of government spending, the number of people working directly for the government, the number of people currently imprisoned, or who have been imprisoned at some time in their life. There’s also slightly more abstract things like the amount of time people spending doing paperwork for the purposes of the government, and the total volume (pages might be a reasonable measure) of government laws, and regulations.

As for controlling more of our lives, I think it’s significant that many of the most influential regulations are local. Cities design with building codes with the idea of servicing car traffic, emergency vehicles, and parking needs. This prioritizes cars over other forms of transit by government mandate, and puts a pretty steep upper limit on how walking friendly (or bicycle, or mass transit) city areas are allowed to be. In most places, you need exceptions to the rules to have areas without roads running everywhere.

A similar thing happens in food regulations. Many places around the world have small food vendors that sell a single (or a few) food items from a stall on the street side. The US has strict food regulations that require sinks, refrigeration, and other items that don’t fit in that kind of environment. Most US cities also control the number of street side vendors that are allowed to exist. If you watch “street food” videos, that doesn’t exist in the US because of our regulations.

Regulations add to the cost and complexity of housing. My great grandfather built a house. I read the requirements to do that now, and gave up. There are hundreds of pages of regulations and requirements, inspection schedules, and licensing requirements that must be followed. Some of those regulations aren’t even free to access.

On the other hand, these requirements placed uniformly on many industries have some benefits. When you buy a house, you can expect it to be suitable in a huge number of circumstances. Self built, self designed houses sometimes have major design flaws, and sometimes collapse or burn down or flood for surprising reasons that could have been foreseen by experts.

It’s very likely that more things we do are regulated, and those regulated activities are more tightly controlled than they were in the past. A part of that is that politicians are systemically more willing to make additional regulations than they are to remove existing regulations, even if some of those regulations are known not to work.

Modern operating systems have made it take very little knowledge to connect to WiFi and browse the internet. If you want to use your computer for more than that, it can still take a longer learning process. I download 3D models for printing, and wanted an image for each model so I could find things more easily. In Linux, I can make such images with only about a hundred characters in the terminal. In Windows, I would either need to learn powershell, or make an image from each file by hand.

The way I understand “learning Linux” these days is reimagining what a computer can do for you to include the rich powers of open source software, so that when you have a problem that computers are very good at, you recognize that there’s an obvious solution on Linux that Windows doesn’t have.