I know several people who have had cochlear implants since childhood who are all young adults now. None have regretted it, nor have their parents. I know this is a major issue in Deaf culture with a capital-D, but if the rest of the family has normal hearing this seems like a no-brainer these days. The surgery is well tolerated by almost everyone and the younger you do it the easier the transition period is.

Closer to the equator means less fuel to orbit because the Earth spins fastest at the equator so you don’t have to add as much delta-v.

The Alaska one I’d bet is for military ops or maybe polar satellite installations.

Right? Looks like a Countach with a body kit

The interesting thing about mutualism is that it isn’t even a degrowth strategy, it’s more like a de-escalation-of-capital-accumulation strategy. Economic growth for the mutual owner/operators still happens (otherwise it would never have taken off in the first place).

The amazing thing about this is that The Onion could literally repost most old Infowars headlines as-is since they were already usually the kind of absurd nonsense that hardworking Onion writers normally have to think up themselves.

Just wanted to drop a note and say I binged this and then Murder in the Tool Library in 2 days. What a nice little universe you’ve built! I had never even heard of smashwords before your mention, but I’ve made a couple of other purchases in the last few days and will certainly use it to try and build a big enough library to distract me for the next 4 or 5 years :)

Out of curiosity, do you have any recommendations for other solarpunk or similarly utopian indie fiction?

I’m specifically using Voyager on iOS and MacOS (and in Windows via BlueStacks) because I do exactly this. I block several whole instances (lemmygrad and hexbear), the active politics communities, and also specific keywords (elon, musk, trump, gop, republican, etc.), so I’m even able to browse All without my eyeballs being seared.

I moved to Florida specifically so that I could live at the beach. Go to Hawaii.

Dec/Jan is the Florida high season, so everything is crowded and accommodations will be pricey. If your vacation truly is in Jan though, Hawaii will actually be quiet (end of December is super crowded tho).

If you do go to Florida, look at Naples up to Tampa on the gulf coast, or key west. The people are much nicer than Floridians on the east coast

Oxfam International released in October that looked at 50 of the richest people in the world and their carbon footprint. In it, they found that these people release more carbon through private jets, yachts and investments in a year than the average person does in their entire life.

Fuck them.

I feel like this would have been a useful article 15 years ago, but now it’s kinda old news is it not?

Skittles and starburst above sour patch kids is just madness.

he aged

Not that I know of, I’ve only seen it in book form. But there are some people who quasi-animate it on Youtube while “reviewing” it.

There are a number of graphic novels that continue the story, so you can kinda watch the gaang grow up. The first series, I believe, is called The Search, and it’s about finding Zuko’s mom. There are also a ton of spinoff novels about the other avatars if you want more lore.

From TFA:

Showing sympathetic figures with differing beliefs, discussed over a drink. Highlighting a shared identity. Correcting misperceptions about opposing partisans’ views on democracy. Those are a few of the most effective strategies for reducing political polarization in the U.S., identified by a “megastudy” that surveyed more than 32,000 Democrats and Republicans to test 25 ideas crowdsourced from social scientists and other experts around the world.

The duck’s name was also the inspiration for the blaster’s iconic sound

I don’t want to be forever young, but I’d love to feel like I’m in my 20s until I’m 100.

I came across this, which shows the actual trend line for hurricanes and tropical storms, including those that did not make landfall - https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/historical-atlantic-hurricane-and-tropical-storm-records/

I was under the impression that the number of hurricanes that made landfall had been increasing in recent decades, but the bottom chart suggests it’s about constant. Maybe it’s just the total number of storms then?

I don’t get this meme. I don’t see Saddam and it doesn’t look like loss?