Agreed! Worse, when I try to spell my name over the phone with the NATO alphabet, people just kind of mentally vapor lock. I guess they can’t work out what letter “papa” represents? And, then, when I use the conventional “p as in Paul,” sometimes they copy down b, as in ball.
In the book, the character more lugged it around rather than walked, but did move it under his own power. As far as plausibility, it didn’t seem to me overtly against the laws of physics, as in, you can deliver a lot more kinetic energy to a target than with a conventional gun since it’s spread out over a longer Δt, and the real thing would indeed need a lot of cooling water.
I’d have to say Reason from Snow Crash. Not terribly practical in many situations, but it’s got panache. For everyday practicality, probably a PPG pistol.
Oh, man, when it comes to nautical idioms, I could go on all day. There are so many, and they’ve lost their literal connections so thoroughly, you probably don’t even think of some of them as idioms. A few that occur to me immediately:
Honestly, I’m not sure that I want modern equivalents, since many are so rich in imagery.
And celiacs thank you, because that’s sometimes the only thing at a potluck that we can eat.
The US Supreme Court ruled racial discrimination in zoning to be un-Constitutional in 1917, and barred racially-restrictive covenants in 1948, so local governments and planners had to use various proxies for race to keep Black people out of new neighborhoods post-WWII. Since Black people tended to be economically disadvantaged, wealth was a very useful proxy. They made housing expensive using zoning and building codes to ensure that it was low-density, and required the purchase of a car to access. I keep pushing the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, because he laid out in it exactly how deliberate this was.
Later, the physical isolation of an automobile provided a measure of protection for Black families to exist in public spaces, and publications like the Green Book allowed them some of the same freedoms as white people, through the use of their cars. So, in at least two ways, racism pushed people into cars.
Can confirm. The idiots in my state don’t even allow kei trucks on the road. Farmers still import them for getting actual work done on their own land, though.
I don’t buy the America-big explanation. For that matter, so is Russia. The original colonies weren’t that big, just the Western states with hardly anybody in them. And this culture is on display even in geographically-constrained areas, like Manhattan, Los Angeles, Hawaii, and the like.
The classics of racism and toxic individualism provide better explanations.
I saw an OG F-100 truck the other day. The roof of its cab is about the same height as the hood of these new monsters.
I think that there’s a fundamental disconnect between respect for somebody, and how you treat them. How you treat them reveals everything about you, and not much about them. For example, ICE goons don’t respect the immigrants that they see as breaking the law. But their, unhinged, gleeful violence comes from within their own disordered brains. We can’t tell anything at all about the people ICE targets by the fact that agents abuse them, but we can be 100% sure that the agents are psychopathic shitheels. “Respect” depends on your point of view, while behavior is tangible.
Put another way, nobody can make you behave a certain way, and if somebody doesn’t earn your respect, set a boundary and remove them from your life. Don’t pretend that others force you to behave a certain way.
“You do not treat a man like a gentleman because he is. You treat a man like a gentleman because you are.”
I heard it as, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Ironically, I heard it from a friend who lived his life striving for perfect, and died of a treatable medical condition because his wife’s HMO wasn’t good enough for him.
I used to have an iPad, and watching an entire movie on the Netflix app drained the battery by 2-4%. The Reddit app took 15-20% of the battery over breakfast, so I switched to Apollo. Then, I could get through breakfast with the battery still at, say, 95%. Clearly, the official app did something else in the background; since they didn’t disclose what, it was probably nefarious. One day, Apollo stopped working, and that was that.
For comparison, my daily shower, with a low-flow shower head, uses 12 to 13 gallons. Hand-washing a large item, like a cooking pot, can take several gallons.
I used to feel that the dishwasher should be full for efficiency, environmental reasons, water bill, and such. Then, I added a water flow meter to my Home Assistant setup.
A full dishwasher cycle uses 4 gallons of water.
Four. Gallons.
Yeah, run that thing when you need it.
That flow chart is pure, concentrated evil. At least now I know that zero is: dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dit.