extra power under load to the rear wheels

Lol like there’s enough room back there to add a load.

“Shoot the bad guys before they shoot you.”

It might be even more entertaining if I said who this famous author was. But on the other hand, it might punctuate your equilibrium!

Russia chose to invade a nation that had recently discovered large reserves of natural gas - more than enough to supply Europe’s needs while they transitioned to alternatives - and that sat astride the pipeline that Russia uses to provide their gas to Europe. Even though Russia has not proved capable of conquering all of Ukraine, their occupation of the Donbas region has prevented Ukraine from becoming a viable natural gas competitor in the European market and kept their primary source of revenue alive, at least in the short term.

Nice to see the phrase “global heating” instead of the wimpy “global warming” or the even more milquetoasty “climate change”. I prefer the phrase “anthropogenic runaway global heating” because it makes clear the scale and severity of the problem as well as its origin, and also for the handy acronym.

Remember, the Constitution allows slavery! Plus, it only bans punishments that are cruel and unusual - punishments that are just cruel or just unusual are fine!

It should be DUH rather than MBA. Maybe “Doctorate of Unabashed Hyperbole”.

Desperately. And it’s a decent gig, or at least it will be until they decide AI can do it, at which point we’re going to get a bunch of flattened children.

LOL “Leading from the Middle”. AKA “Sucking Up and Punching Down”.

I had a 25-year career as a programmer. Not once did I ever have a company I worked for verify my academic or employment histories or even contact my references. I could have put down anything I wanted and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference - my continuing employment was based on my ability to actually do shit.

I’m now a school bus driver and they checked out everything. And of course threw in drug testing and a criminal background check for good measure.

I remember once borrowing a friend’s MBA textbook to see what it was all about. I opened to a random page which turned out to be in a chapter on negotiating strategies. There was an offset bit of text that read “your skill at negotiating will affect the outcome of the negotiations.”

My college had a professor of communications with a degree from a supposedly ancient (like, 13th century) Italian university. He only got exposed because we had a big ceremony for the newly-hired President of the college, with a procession that featured faculty and alumni walking in an order determined by the age of the oldest institution they were associated with. One of our alumni was a very famous author who was on the faculty at Harvard, and he was like “why am I not the first in line?” He looked up this comm prof’s “university” which turned out to be basically a prep school that wasn’t even close to being 700 years old. Comm prof was promptly fired, which was kind of a shame because he was actually a really good teacher.

believing they have a degree is useful for telling clients who specifically sometimes ask about the degrees of the people they’ll be working with

I used to work for a company that provided programming consultants for the US military and for defense contractors. The hourly rate we could be billed out at was entirely dependent on highest degree attained, so PhDs could be billed out at the highest rate, followed by Masters, then Bachelors of Science and then Bachelors of Art. It didn’t even matter what field your PhD was in, so my company was chock-full of useless people with advanced degrees who got put onto every project and told to just stay home. The worst thing was when they insisted on showing up and doing something.

This is one of the things that annoyed me about the latest Dune movies: all the switches in the cockpits of the ornithopters. Nothing else in that universe seems to require switches, but the ornithopters are set up like 1980s helicopters for some reason.

Roe Jogan said “that guy [Elon Musk] saved us.” Before the election.

I (M) saw Sinead O’Connor in the early '90s and almost the entire audience was 13-year-old girls dressed in black who screamed every time Sinead made a weird hand gesture. Still probably the best concert I’ve ever been to - Sinead was a fantastic real singer and her band was tight. RIP and fuck Joe Pesci.

It was last year! I found out they were playing in my area … the day after they played. I haven’t been to a concert in 18 years but I would have gone to that one.

He doesn’t even write his tweets, let alone his speeches.

Hitler actually put a great deal of work and practice time into becoming a good public speaker. Can you imagine Trump putting that kind of effort into anything? Even golf?

At the start of every summer, I rediscover grape soda and I’m like “holy shit this stuff is great”. And then about 7 cans into the case I remember why I stopped drinking it. It’s kind of funny that it’s only ever available in the store brand, never in a “real” brand.