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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • That’s not always the case. If a house has a well and later gets water from a utility, they will often keep exterior taps running well water because it’s a lot cheaper than abandoning the well. So, technically, you could have water that’s safe to drink inside the house but still have unsafe water outside.

    Also, if the house has filters or other water treatment that generally isn’t used for the exterior (though that’s typically more about taste and mineral content, rather than anything hazardous).



  • And it’s even more complicated by the fact that Talia was already the replacement for Lyta. And that the revelation about her being a sleeper was never meant to happen unless she left. Oddly enough, that exit was actually recycling the plan for Takashima had she made it past the pilot, only she got replaced… by Susan.

    Plus there’s Garibaldi. His interest in Talia mirrors Zach’s interest in Lyta. Garibaldi’s interest is never resolved because of Talia’s exit. That they tried to reestablish that idea with Zach and Lyta implies there was a plan. Given where things go with Garibaldi and telepaths (including Lyta) that might have been very interesting.

    Instead, Zach’s interest gets folded into the Byron plot. But Byron is also a late addition caused by the whole cancelation and uncancelation around season 5. If they hadn’t lost multiple cast members and rushed key plotlines to fit them into season 4, things would have probably been very different.


  • Babylon 5 has two women start a relationship… sort of.

    They set up a frienship that was supposed to turn into a romantic relationship, but one of them left the show, cutting that subplot short. They still try to work it in, as the last couple episodes before the character exit heavily imply they are romantically/sexually involved, but nothing is explicitly confirmed until the next season when the remaining character briefly opens up about having loved the now absent character.

    It’s not much, but it’s still pretty big for the early to mid 90s.




  • I didn’t say they were equally stupid. I said one explanation was most likely correct, but thr other wasn’t completely implausible.

    Yes, faking an attempted drugging for attention/politics/whatever is less likely to get someone killed. But it’s so a really fucking stupid plan that had to actually be completely premeditated. Just look how well it worked out for him.

    The potential child abuse plan is monstrous and risks killing them, but pedophiles do risky and horrible things all the time. And at least the part of the plan that involves showing the cops the drugs can be seen as a bad decision made in the moment by someone panicking and not thinking clearly.




  • This administration and the Supreme Court have been systematically shredding the constitution and destroying the rule of law. They have declared the president to be above the law, are eroding the limits of executive power at every opportunity, and have essentially declared that the rights of the people can be ignored without consequences.

    This might seem great to an authoritarian when they are in power, but the flipside is that it fundamentally changes the moral equation faced by the opposition. Normally those who actually have principles and want to maintain the rule of law are going to show restraint and reinforce the norms. But when the other side responds by becoming an even bigger threat, there must be a tipping point after which the danger of using unjust powers against your opponent are outweighed by the danger of allowing them to continue damaging civilization and risking their return to power.

    The gerrymandering situation in California and Texas is a perfect example of this. In principle, gerrymandering should not be allowed. But if we want to protect democracy, it is more dangerous to let one side cheat than it is to respond in kind.

    I would like to believe that we will be able to close pandora’s box and return to something resembling normalcy some day. But with each new abuse of power and each attack on the laws and norms that are supposed to keep the government in check, it gets harder to see a way out that isn’t horrific in its own right.


  • For context, it’s incredibly rare for a grand jury to not indict someone. The bar is incredibly low and there is no one representing the defense. Failing to secure an indictment once is an embarrassment and a stain on someone’s career. To fail a second time in the same case basically guarantees beyond a shadow of a doubt that the case is utterly without merit and that everyone involved should be fired immediately.

    To put this another way, this is like a surgeon amputating the wrong limb twice on the same patient. The first time is undeniably bad and raises serious questions about how it could happen. The second time it happens, we don’t need to bother with all those questions before concluding that the people responsible need to go.


  • Voting will still be necessary. Gerrymandering can’t directly affect statewide races. But it can determine control of the House of Representatives and state legislatures.

    The long term solution to gerrymandering has to happen at the federal level, but unfortunately the current Supreme Court is going out of its way to dismantle voting rights and protect Republican gerrymandering schemes. And congress isn’t going to do anything to stop it while Republicans are in the majority… a majority that only exists because of gerrymandering and voter suppression.

    I don’t like it, but having partisan gerrymandering on both sides is better than doing nothing and letting Republicans cling to power because they get to play by a different set of rules.




  • If God is talking to bronze age goat herders, what kind of knowledge is going to be useful to them? What will they manage to pass down to future generations without mangling it horribly? If they were to be given information about scientific concepts so advanced that only God (or aliens or time travelers) could have given it to them, they wouldn’t have the foundation of knowledge to grasp it, the vocabulary to explain it, or the technical means to exploit it. Anything they can actually understand and act on is necessarily going to be something that is not beyond their means, and therefore we are right back where we started with stuff they could have figured out on their own.

    Suppose God did explain something far beyond human understanding, and they wrote it down as best they could. Even if it wasn’t completely incomprehensible to the guy writing it down, it’s still going to be totally lost on future generations if it isn’t anchored in a more comprehensive understanding of how things work. Without context, it will lose all meaning and will be reinterpreted by later scholars who will try and find a meaning that they can understand. It would become a part of mythology and folklore, and would be unrecognizable by the time science catches up to the original ideas. You might have people point out similarities, but they’d probably be taken as seriously as the ancient aliens guys.




  • Reasonable doubt is not a low bar, and you can’t bypass it by just believing. Yes, we need evidence to support accusations. People are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.

    Not that this would ever go to a criminal trial, because at this point the only way Trump is facing justice is if half the government is heading to the gallows along with him Nuremberg style.

    That said, it doesn’t take much for allegations against Trump to be credible. If we just believe the shit Trump himself has said unprompted he’s a sexual predator that molests women and peeps on under age girls. There’s a reason a jury found that he probably sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll despite having almost no evidence of the specific incident. He’s made it abundantly clear how he treats women, and it doesn’t help that he got caught in obvious lies.


  • There was a lawsuit over the previous giant pay package. And I recall at least threats of legal action over Elon siphoning resources from Tesla to his other companies. However, the move to Texas allows them to require at least 3% stock ownership to sue as a shareholder.

    At this point, anyone who chooses to own Tesla stock is unlikely to sue anyway since they’d have to be completely unaware, an idiotic true believer, or just someone who is fully aware and is betting that the bullshit inflating the stock price will be able to push it even higher. The first two wouldn’t know to sue and the third would only be bursting the bubble their trying to ride.


  • Logically, this combined with their insistence that they can revoke legal status means that no one’s citizenship is guaranteed. Everyone born in the US is descended from people who weren’t citizens. And those who went through a process to become citizens can apparently have that yanked away if the current administration get its way.

    If I were the next president and had to try and undo the damage these fascists are inflicting, I’d start by deporting the bastards behind this shit in all three branches of government, starting with the the Supreme Court. Maybe just drop them all off in Antarctica.