I love this thing where buying something has been replaced by buying an alterable, revokable license to access that thing. It lowers costs and adds flexibility for producers, which allows them to save money, and they pass that savings on to me in the form of higher prices and my shit that I paid real fucking money for just disappearing one day. Then they explain that I never really “owned” it despite the fact that they use the word “own” in the marketing material, because it’s also legal to use words that have known definitions in agreements and then later explain that you were actually using an entirely different, secret definition of that word that’s actually the opposite of what you very purposefully implied.

rules aren’t there to be enforced, they’re there so that when you break them you take a second to think about why.

I never understood why that phrase was ever used as if it were an excuse.

A thought-terminating cliche is a rhetorical device intended to end a discussion without actually resolving it. The idea is to say something that the other party more or less has to agree to without regard to whether it actually has any bearing on the discussion at hand, and then refuse to discuss further. This makes it seem like the discussion is over and, as the last person who scored a point, you’ve won. “It’s just a few bad apples” is one. “Let’s agree to disagree” is another. Trump almost singlehandedly invented one in the phrase “fake news”, which is ostensibly intended to mean “I don’t trust the source of that information” but is often used in an infinite regression where everything unfriendly to the arguer is fake news. It’s basically a deus ex machina for arguments; a way to escape a corner you’ve been backed into without ever admitting that you were wrong about anything.

this one is just trigger-happy incompetence, but the phrase “a few bad apples” ends with “spoil the whole barrel” and the police are a perfect example of that. The way they close ranks and try to protect one another from responsibility for really egregious shit means that not every cop is a criminal, but that every cop ignores crimes that other cops commit.

my wife’s friend is a big believer in “not all cops” and “only a few bad apples”

does your wife’s friend know how the phrase “a few bad apples” ends?

Looking forward to when taxpayers who did absolutely nothing wrong have to pay a 7 figure settlement to you for your medical damages and a second 6 figure settlement to the officer for wrongful termination and then a further 5 figures a year to the officer in disability payments for the trauma he went through in having to shoot and kill an unarmed man who was on his knees with his hands in the air and sobbing (TW - that last link is the body cam for the murder of Daniel Shaver, don’t click it unless you like utter depravity and really high stakes games of Simon Says).

The worst part is he killed a dude

It’s simultaneously better and worse than that. The suspect in the cruiser wasn’t hit. This means that not only can the officer not tell the difference between an acorn and small arms fire, but that he was also unable to hit a restrained target at very close range. The only thing keeping us safe from police incompetence is police incompetence.

“You fit the description of a suspect.”

“The description is white male between 5’5” and 6’5" wearing jeans and a t shirt."

“SHOTS FIRED! SHOTS FIRED! OFFICER DOWN!”

your conclusion doesn’t follow from your premise. the ability to live indoors is going to be important to people even if they think the system by which we decide who is allowed to live indoors is kinda shit.

How do you think it came to be that most Americans believe that in China you can have your home seized for being impolite?

Mfw face when Pizza Jimmy eats his 2 millionth pizza on a given day

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that would condemn my rats to a lifetime of constant terror

The vast majority of human waste is generated by a fraction of that 8 billion

to what end do they generate all of this waste?

If you want a picture of the future, imagine 8 billion orangutans all pooping— at the same time

George Orangutanwell - Nineteen Eighty Fur

Wholeheartedly agree. The only thing I’d add is that I think it’s in theoretical discussions that we underestimate how much a wild animal’s life sucks shit. In the US at least there’s enough forest that if a person wanted to get lost and be totally self-reliant they could take an honest shot at it. I think each of us has had that thought deep down in our secret hearts and, when we do, in that particular moment we make a very frank, honest and accurate estimate about how much fun it would be dying of an infection while lying face down in the cold muck. And this coming from a person who prides himself on being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

I keep finding dead things in my yard because of this. There are at least 3 “neighborhood cats” that someone lets run wild. They’re definitely fed, groomed and collared, they have somewhere to go at night. Do you know of any techniques to reduce the impact short of just letting them come into my house during the day?

we generate enormous amounts of excess capacity and waste very rapidly and then simply displace it onto distant habitats in order to keep it out of sight and mind.

In fairness, the other apes also tend to walk a little bit away from their nesting sites before they poop. The reason there aren’t great big mounds of orangutan poop visible from space is probably more due to the fact that there aren’t 8 billion orangutans all pooping at the same time than anything else.

you can work for food or you can work for tokens then exchange tokens for food but to imagine that every other living thing is just having a lovely time vibing and munching on infinite, freely available grindage while humans are the only species that has to do shit that sucks is just ignorant Rousseau noble savage dumbness