But she’s a very liberal person. She seems to always endorse a Democrat and she’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace.

That's an odd comment. It smells like fear. Is he worried she will overtake him in net worth?

I have mixed feelings on this. I grew up in a secular setting as my father had long ago given up on religion and my mother seemed ambivalent about it.

As an adult, I moved to a new city with my wife who is religious, though non-evangelical. She never tried to push me into it but would disappear every Sunday morning. But after a decade or so of feeling like a stranger in my adopted city, I attended a service where I discovered they were in desperate need for musicians. So I wound up volunteering some time and in the process, met a lot of people, and one thing led to another. Today, I do have friends in the city, play in various bands around town, etc.

Yet I still haven't really bought into religion. I guess the value to me is that it gets my introverted ass out of the house and meeting people irl. As a community institution, it brings together people of varying ages and demographics. But it comes with a huge amount of baggage which I could frankly do without?

I just hope that if religion fades away, there will still be something at the community level that gathers together people regularly from all walks of life. There are all sorts of special interest groups, but many of these do not necessarily attract a wide cross-section of society.

Whatever the case, when a church closes as a religious institution, I hope that it can be repurposed to some other activity that is still community-building?

Nice. I had been using the analogy that an introvert at a party acts as a sacrificial anode consuming corrosive extroversion until they are utterly exhausted. But I like your take on it!

I watched a documentary on this awhile back. The municipality asked the public if it would be enough for them to dump treated water into a lake and then draw from that lake? And then someone with expertise in the matter commented that this would necessitate another treatment phase, since any wild animal could take a dump in the lake. So he seemed to think closing the loop made the most sense from a practical standpoint.

From what other posters are saying, it may be the other way around? That is, most mammals cannot see green, so it doesn't matter from a camouflage perspective among mammals. Humans (and primates in general) are an outlier in this repect.

Bird of prey can, though, so there's that.

“Higher-pressure showers were definitely shorter,” said Walker. “The open question is really: why is it shorter? Is it that it just rinses products off quicker? Is it that it’s more satisfying, and you feel clean quicker?”

Or is it that it's less comfortable and relaxing, and people just want to get it over with? I would not automatically assume the shortness is due to a superior experience.

Interesting. I've never owned an electric car, but just guesstimating based on those numbers, my daily commute would cost something like 25 cents in electricity. Not too shabby.

I did buy an ebike a few years back and watched to see how much the bill went up, but frankly never noticed any change. At 2 cents per day, it's basically a rounding error relative to other electrical usage, so that makes sense to me now.

Yeah how's that going? (I don't live in Alberta.)

It seems to me this idea of opting out of federal programmes might score some quick political points if you're a have-province, in that it could be argued you're sinking more into them than you're getting out. But Alberta has historically had a boom-and-bust economy, and as such, cutting those federal lifelines seems unwise. But what do I know?

Even the old game had a noticeable dip in performance by the time you were building airports and stuff, though it never reached deal-breaker levels for me. I suspect you're right that it's the modelling?

It's impressive how much detail Juno was able to capture even on the night side. What I love about Io is how it's instantly recognizable. Nothing even remotely resembles it in the solar system.

I can't get too worked up over this.

For one thing, there are countless languages and dialects in the world today where similar words get pronounced differently. Take a name like José. Spanish speakers tend to make the J sound closer to an English H, while Portuguese speakers will use a more English-like J.

Moreover, pronunciations evolve over time. A lot. My own surname centuries ago sounded nothing like how I pronounce it today.

Diablo is it's own world which may or may not be connected to ours. Usually, fantasy narratives are loosely based on the past, though I was reading some Terry Brooks and discovered his fantasy realm is actually post-apocalyptic Earth. Kind of clever how he tied that in. Anyway, all I'm saying is that both distance and time can distort language quite a bit.

In the US, the state of California has also considered a similar law. In that case, too, Meta has threatened to withdraw services from the state if the legislation goes through.

Interesting. So even the home state of the tech firms feels they are not doing their part to reimburse content producers.