"Obligatory charity." Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

If you've trusted your life to a rocket like these women have, you're an astronaut to me.

It sounds like the point they're trying to make is that Americans don't want to have children because things in the USA are getting bad, but if that was the correct explanation then we would expect to see (1) people in countries where it's worse having even fewer children, which we don't see, and (2) people in countries where it's better having more children, which we also don't see.

It's annoying to repeatedly read the same completely unsupported explanations for fertility rate declines.

Except for the part where the fertility rate in El Salvador is higher than it is in the USA. If we're becoming more like them, our fertility rate should be increasing.

The computer that controlled all the doors refused to open any of them, including the door to the room in which it was physically located.

It wasn't quite HAL 9000 because doors could still be opened from the inside, but control over the computer was regained only with the help of a locksmith.

I was talking to a friend of mine about whether or not we would get along with exact copies of ourselves. He didn't think that he would want to spend much time with his copy, but I thought I would love my own company in that sense. We would have the same values, the same goals in life, the same likes and dislikes, the same hobbies, the same sense of humor, etc. And all that is just with a same-sex copy of myself that I would have no attraction to. An opposite sex (but still heterosexual) copy would also have the same sex drive and the same weird fetishes.

Anyway, it's still probably not worth fracturing one's psyche for but with good arguments for each side. Reasonable people can disagree.

No, not the bees. My eyes!

Or so I've heard...

What can "never" mean here?

For coal, however, if you invest 1kWh you typically get below 0.4 kWh in return.

So people run coal plants to destroy energy? Like, you have too much electricity and so you build a coal plant to get rid of it?

I'm not sure that whatever metric this source uses matches what most people think when they hear "energy amortization".

Bezos looks pretty good for a man his age.

But this is trivially true, and not an argument for or against any policy. If you stopped trying to prevent people from murdering each other, the murder rate would also rise rapidly and then plateau. In general, if you stop punishing people for doing something, it will be done more often but not necessarily 100% of the time no matter what it is.

I presume that the author's intention is to imply that being transgender is like being left handed in that it is an innate quality which cannot be changed even if it is suppressed, but there's nothing in what he wrote here which is an argument for that implication.

I set something on fire in my microwave once and now people complain about the way it looks even when it's completely clean :(

This is Bond-villain level megalomania, and therefore actually kind of cool.

Well, to be fair, there really are a lot of shocking nightmares going on these days.

Built to fail? The Constitution worked, more or less, for over 237 years and 44 different presidents. It hasn't even failed yet now, although it is in a lot of danger.

It's the job of Congress to stop the President from doing this, via impeachment. However, in a democracy the people get to choose their leaders and if the people elect not just a man like Trump to be President but also a majority in Congress to support him almost unconditionally, then the people get what they voted for.

Even now, Republicans in Congress fear that they will not be re-elected if they oppose Trump. Thus they're still carrying out the will of the people.

That's a good point, and I suppose that someone sympathetic to Trump might think that he was being unfairly prosecuted after other presidents hadn't been.

I disagree with your implication that a former president should always be punished for having broken the law. The rules do need to be different for presidents than for ordinary people.

A prince, when by some urgent circumstance or some impetuous and unforeseen accident that very much concerns his state, compelled to forfeit his word and break his faith, or otherwise forced from his ordinary duty, ought to attribute this necessity to a lash of the divine rod: vice it is not, for he has given up his own reason to a more universal and more powerful reason; but certainly ’tis a misfortune: so that if any one should ask me what remedy? “None,” say I, “if he were really racked between these two extremes: 'Let him see to it that it be not a loophole for perjury that he seeks.' He must do it: but if he did it without regret, if it did not weigh on him to do it, ’tis a sign his conscience is in a sorry condition."

Montaigne' Essays, book 3 chapter 1

It's one thing to break a law with the belief (perhaps unjustified) that doing so is necessary for the good of the nation and quite another to do to because power protects you from deserved punishment, but how can the law itself make this distinction?

Even the Trump appointees seem like the sort of people who would want to defend the rule of law at least to preserve their own (and therefore the court's) power, so I wonder how each of the six "conservative" judges was convinced to rule the way that he or she did. I don't imagine all of them doing it for the same reason. Maybe some were rewarded for their votes and others wanted to see Trump wreck things (Alito and his flag come to mind) but did some actually think that it was a good idea or the correct legal decision?

Yeah but he also said to love each other, and people quickly realized that he was wrong.

Do pampered modern dogs even know that meat comes from animals? My guess is that my dog didn't. He wanted to chase animals very much, I never let him catch one, but I suspect that he wouldn't know what to if he did. On the other hand, when I let him chase me he would try to trip me by grabbing my pants at my ankles, which might be a wolf behavior.

(My ferrets didn't even know that meat was food, because they refused to eat anything expect their pellets. They wouldn't touch something like wet cat food even if they were hungry. I read somewhere that ferrets don't eat anything that their mother didn't teach them to eat when they were young.)

My dog had nightmares sometimes, or at least I think he did. He would twitch and do his sad/pain squealing noise. I woke him up whenever I noticed him doing that, and he always woke up calm and happy. I don't think he remembered his dreams at all.