Nah, Vegas isn’t so much a city as a big theme park. Hell, the casinos aren’t even in Las Vegas.

In the city of Houston, you can eat any cuisine, from any nation on the face of the Earth…as long as you’re willing to do it in an old run down 1980s strip mall.

People have a hard time understanding that in a capitalist economy, everyone is bidding against each other for resources like housing. If two areas have comparable median income levels, they will tend to have comparable costs of living.

But that “cost of living” includes way more than just the mortgage payment. If people are paying more for property taxes, homeowners insurance, and commuting costs, there’s less money in the budget to go to the mortgage payment. Areas where property taxes, insurance, and commuting are cheap have high housing prices. Texas has extremely high property taxes, insurance, and commuting costs, so people can’t afford to bid the houses themselves up as much.

And this effect can trap people. The real value of a mortgage goes down with time - inflation helps you. But property taxes and commuting costs go up with inflation. And insurance costs rise much faster than inflation due to climate change. If your wages don’t keep up with inflation, then your total cost of housing goes up with time rather than down.

Please, everyone knows the most widely-recognized Fourth City is Salem, OR. 🤣

Life found a way.

Hell, sometimes trans women need testosterone. I am, and I do. My body doesn’t really make much hormones naturally anymore. If I take nothing, my testosterone levels are lower than those in cis women. I take a very very small dose to get my T levels back up into the cis female range. Men and women both have testosterone and estrogen. And while the ratios vary, you still need both, regardless of your gender.

The problem with Kings is they don’t live up to the marketing. Royals are a group of people that claim they have some genetic superiority to the rest of the species. They deserve the right to rule because they simply have superior blood. They’re smarter, stronger, faster, than everyone else. And in an era before modern nutrition, this was a lot easier case to make. The core thesis of monarchy is “ability runs in families. Let’s find the family with the genes best for governing, and just let them run the place.”

If that idea actually worked, monarchy would be a great system. But governing is not a skill that is passed on genetically. Royals are just ordinary human beings in fancy hats. In fact, they tend to be far stupider than the average person, as they’re born into wealth and privilege.

But King Kong? His elevated position over humanity truly is an inborn genetic trait. He is not a common human, and that’s undeniable. President Kong would imply we elected him as first among equals. King Kong is more appropriate in this situation.

Even better, don’t use a Spirit Halloween skeleton. If you really want to do it right, use the real deal:

https://www.jonsbones.com/

https://www.boneroom.com/

https://www.skullsunlimited.com/

Little known fact. You can actually order human skeletons on the Internet.

You do not own a creator’s code, film, or digital ecosystem, and you never did.

Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.

Art is the common property of all mankind. Art is the human soul. The very idea that you can restrict the creativity of another human being is an affront to the human spirit. You know what is truly a modern anomaly? Copyright and all IP law. For 99% of human history, artists would laugh in your face if you suggested that a musician had some God-given right to prevent others from singing a song they just wrote.

You have no natural right to “intellectual property,” because ultimately what you mean by “intellectual property” is the temporary right to exclusive sale of a product. And that is not a natural right. It’s not a natural right like freedom of speech, or even ownership of tangible property. Copyright violation is fundamentally different from real theft because it doesn’t deprive the owner of an original. Yes, you as an artist may feel you have some innate ownership to an idea, but that is a sense of privilege and entitlement that comes from misunderstanding the history and purpose of IP law. Hell, for most of history, artists were not even considered the source of creative works. Medieval painters didn’t sign their works, because they considered God to be the real creator. Before that, the Muses got credit.

Here is what you are missing. Copyright is not an innate right. It’s a useful legal compromise, nothing more. We discovered through trial and error that providing a limited period of exclusive use of a work to an artist helps get more art made. But that’s all it is, a pragmatic compromise. Do not confuse it for a natural right like life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

No one creates art in a vacuum. Everything is inspired and derived from works that came before it. There are no original stories. Artists are only able to create works because they’ve trained and studied on the works of countless other artists that came before them. Your work as an artist is just one tiny piece of a grand cultural tapestry. And as you were able to benefit from the commons, in turn your work will return to the commons to inspire others. A drop from the ocean. An ocean from a drop. That is the nature of art and creativity.

I want to believe there is not in fact porn on the internet of Light Yagami and Ryuk. But knowing Rule 34, there almost certainly is. I’ll avoid searching for it and keep my blissful ignorance.

This is pretty silly. Superhero movies constantly feature superheroes and supervillains causing mass property damage. Superman will be thrown through buildings. Cars will be used as throwing weapons, etc.

It’s a deliberate cinematic choice. Superheroes just flying in the sky punching each other doesn’t convey the power involved in these characters. No, if you want to portray superheroes in a way that actually feels real to people, you need to show them interacting with our ordinary world. You show them treating things we experience as solid, indestructible, and immobile as mere tissue paper.

This is just “show, don’t tell.” Sure, you could have some character verbally explain that “Superman has the strength of a million men!”, but if all you saw was Superman fighting in a cloud or an empty field, that wouldn’t really mean much. You can’t feel it. Watch Superman casually pick up a skyscraper, and suddenly your mind can actually grasp the scale of his power.

Rather than attributing this to the lack of modern medicine, I would attribute this to the lack of television and the internet. 🤣

Go to your bank wearing an N95 mask. Wear a hoodie and put a banana in the front pocket. Keep your hands in your front pocket, grasping the banana. Walk up to the teller and ask them to put $100 in a bag.

In tiny print at the bottom, include your bank account number. After they have a second to look at it, hand them your photo ID.

How do you think your produce ends up in the bin in the produce section?

Work that grocers have passed onto their customers that they used to do themselves:

• Gathering the groceries from the shelves.
• Bagging the groceries.
• Checking out the groceries.

Do you think every person that works at a military base interrogates prisoners?

I propose the most practical option possible:

Simply isolate the washing machine completely from the building. Levitate it entirely off the ground, suspended in the air via a massive toroidal superconducting electromagnet, 3 meters in diameter, cooled by liquid helium. (Which will need to be regularly topped off. It tends to slowly leak through solid walls.)

The noise would be greatly reduced. As the machine thrashes about, it will do little but disturb the air around it. Little noise will be generated, except from the sound of the machine’s own parts acting against each other.

Though, if you really wanted to optimize this for this setup, a different design is in order? Perhaps a non-standard design would better handle internal vibrational damping? Have you considered calling local stores and asking if they have any spherical washing machines in stock?

There has to be some hippy out there selling organic fabric softener in a wooden cask.

That’s why you prepare a hallway with like 20 of these alcoves. When one machine breaks, you simply pump it full of cement and plaster it over. It just becomes part of the wall. It remains there, entombed forever, like some latter-day washing machine Pompeii. Or maybe you don’t plaster over them at all. Maybe you proudly display them. “These are the washing machines of my ancestors…”