I've lived through attempts to switch to metric and Y2K. Tech problems are easy compared to changing direction against societal interia.

This should be always. We could easily have 13 months with an even 28 days, or four weeks, every year. But, you're going to say, "What about that last day?" That's new year's day, it's once a year, not ever a regular day of the week, and every leap year we get 2 of them and make a weekend of it. Those remainder calendar days don't need to be a particular day of the week, we can just make them holidays and stop worrying about it. Or we do keep them as regular days of the week and the calendar shifts by a day or two every year. I don't really care. I just want the months and weeks to be at least a little less chaotic. And if there is going to be a chaotic little remainder weekend every year, it might as well be a party.

For me good country music is about growing up rural poor and making rebellious music with heart and soul. You can't authentically make that music while hating people (be they women, brown, queer, trans, foreign etc.). You can't make that music without being against cops and corporations like Nestle and United Health.

I had typed out an overly long rant about modern country losing its soul and just being pop music with a guitar twang veneer and classic country shit heels like David Allen Coe who still managed to make some memorable songs. Instead I'll just list some contemporary artists that I'd put on the same playlist and call it country.

In no particular order: Jesse Welles, Sturgill Simpson, Lil Nas X, Robert Ellis, Father John Misty, Old Crow Medicine Show, Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile, The Texas Gentlemen, etc. I'm sure others can suggest more and some will dispute some of these. I make no claims that any of these people won't turn out to be bad guys later. After all, I do still kind of like that David Allen Coe song about being drunk the day his mom got out of prison and he went to pick her up in the rain, but before he could get to the station in his pickup truck she got run over by a damned old train.

They may have used the word wrong, but getting parodied by Weird Al is actually more prestigious than winning a Grammy. Not because Weird Al parodies are rare, but because he only parodies songs that are actually pretty good. I have trouble believing that if the song were actually bad, playing it on accordion with jokey lyrics would be an improvement. There's no Weird Al parody of a Nickelback song, that I know of.

Give em The Harkness Test

I don't ask people about their politics. I just act like true things are true, e.g.: human instigated climate change, COVID, the efficiency of a single payer healthcare system, a oblate spheroid earth, and the moon landing. I'm politely understanding of the flaws in their world view, but I NEVER pretend that any of it is even up for debate. You can balance not being rude with not backing down from the objective reality you live in by showing an genuine fascination with their weird cult beliefs.

Conspiracy theories, religion, myths, and magic are all very comfortable fantasies that wither in the face of the existential dread from understanding that the universe is horrific and absolutely indifferent to your personal suffering. Being excellent to each other and maintaining faith in the potential of humanity (tempered by knowledge of our depravity) is our only hope of survival both physical, philosophical, political, and spiritual.

Ok, sorry that turned into a rant. This shit matters though, so not that sorry.

"Sensors" sounds like a magical solution that hasn't been thought through, but the marketing guys already sold it and won't listen to the engineers explaining how difficult it is to actually build such a thing.

Similarly, there are a lot of really lazy bad maps out there that are trying to make some point about a statistic, but are really just population density maps. Give your up votes to the person that links the appropriate xkcd.

I feel your pain.

I edit the URL to remove the first part of the URL and replace it with "http://old.reddit.com". That still seems to work, last I checked, but I fully expect it to be killed any day now.

It's the gritty psychedelic dystopian cyberpunk movie we didn't deserve. Nintendo had no idea how to produce a movie and just let them run fucking wild. Hollywood should be encouraged to take more chances. Fucking electric bumper cars demolition derby style car chase. Dino-people. Devo (the concept not the band). Psychic fungi. And all the other fucking weirdos. It's not even awesomely bad, it's badassly awesome.

What's most surprising to me is how closely the latest animated Movie Bros. movie followed the very broad strokes of the plot of the original, like a sanitized and fully kitsch commercial reboot, which is kind of appropriate for the world we live in.

If I was about to go on tour with my best friend and he said something stupid that put us in danger from real life lunatics with guns, I'd fucking cancel the tour too because I cared about us both and our relationship. Besides, if you can't tell your friends they're wrong when they're wrong, they're not really your friend. This isn't necessarily the act of betrayal you're making it out to be.

I'm betting that making this statement publicly makes it easier to break the tour contracts, rather than backing out of the tour without saying why.

I'm no nationalistic fanatic of the flag, but is it really so difficult to understand that the flag is a symbol?

Obviously each flag, be they for nations or other groups, represents more than just a piece of cloth to many people. Taking offence at someone else's identifying with what a flag symbolizes is not okay. But, I tend to look skeptically at worship of any kind of idol, be it flag, cross, or text. That still doesn't mean it's okay to hate or persecute people for their beliefs, even if they appear silly to you and as long as they don't hurt others.

One group can demonstrate their respect for the nation by physically following some rules around the flag and others can demonstrate their loyalty to their ideals of the nation being violated by flying the flag upside down or burning a flag.

A flag or banner is not just a piece of cloth, never has been.