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Notes -
Field notes from the usage wars:
Wife and I recently got new phones. She had a cracked screen and mine was so ancient it couldn't run tiktok without crashing so it was time. We gathered up the kids, promised ice cream afterwards, and headed to the phone store. I hate the phone store. It's completely soulless and full of mind-and-social-fabric-destroying devices. I would rather be at the bead store than the phone store (IYKYK).
I was helped by a nice younger dude with a man bun. As he was tapping away at his iPad he tells me I might be eligible for an upgrade. "Great!" I say. He keeps tapping away as I watch my kids run around the store touching things they shouldn't be touching while my wife tries to wrangle them. This trip better not take more than an hour. Man bun tells me his wife is an elementary school teacher, neat. More time passes. I'm getting irritated. I ask, "So... uh, can I get an upgrade?"
Man bun: "May I."
Me: "Come again?"
Man bun: "It's 'May I get an upgrade?'"
I think it's a universal human experience to feel a twinge of irritation when you are corrected, but man o' man it's doubly worse when you're right and they're wrong. I normally would have dropped it but since I was in the phone store, and I was primed for some confrontation.
"No. I'm not asking you for permission to get an upgrade, I'm asking if it's possible. Therefore, 'can' is the correct word."
Man bun thinks for a second, then says, "Yeah I guess you're right." I'm glad he cares about the state of the English language but damn guy at least be right about it. I imagine his wife regales him about owning 8-year-olds asking to go to the bathroom and he got the wrong idea. "I dunno, CAN you???"
This is an example of HYPERCORRECTION. I'm certainly guilty of this; it's probably my worst tendency with language. People usually overcorrect because of something they learned in primary school, like ending a sentence in a preposition (totally fine btw). Take this example:
Sounds correct, right? I kinda vaguely remember thinking that "I" was a more posh way to refer to yourself than "me". But all you have to do is remove the other person to realize you're wrong:
Clearly deranged. "I" is a subject pronoun, "me" is an object pronoun. If you're the one doing the verbing, it's "I"; if you're the one getting verbed it's "me". Thus:
Or the slightly better (imo):
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I am thinking about sports and a persons personality. So my question is does your personality fit a specific sports position/role even if your body type ability doesn’t fit doing that?
I was thinking about this and I find myself having a personality that favors defense over offense in sports. I have a lot of fun figuring out how other players are trying to beat me and being able to stop them even if their a better athlete or if say a defense breaks down and the offense has two threats being able to figure out which one has the highest expected scoring chance and taking that away. On offense something similar as a facilitator rather than the scorer. In football I would be a safety, in basketball a low-scoring pg or maybe wing, hockey a defenseman, and in soccer I guess a midfielder.
If I were 6’6 300 lb my body type would be an offensive tackle. But I don’t think it fits my personality. Which makes me curious if my body type was different would my personality of adjusted because I always played that role?
Didn’t include baseball because I think baseball players have personalities I can’t imagine.
Does anyone say completely have the personality and can visualize being an OL but don’t have the physical ability. WR in the nfl always seem to have loud personalities. Look at me types.
I was a tight end on my HS football team. It's half blocking/half being a receiver. This fits my personality of never really committing to a specialization. Like I didn't fit into any sort of clique in high school because I did everything and my friends run the gamut from jock to geek to theater kid to band nerd to art hoe.
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Per a friend who worked for a major league team, many baseball players are the biggest meatheads you can ever imagine. Absolutely zero going on upstairs besides "see the ball, hit the ball. see the ball, catch the ball. catch the ball, throw the ball." I assume that's less applicable to pitchers and catchers, but I don't find it a stretch to believe about a bunch of the others.
Decision making in baseball is faster than your internal monologue so activates a part of your brain you’re not conscious of. But I assume can be quite frustrating if something gets off with how you figure out curveball or fastball etc. and that leads to yips. I assume can be psychologically frustrating.
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Continuing with fun stuff I've found on The Midnight Special channel on YT: the band Sparks. I had never heard of them before seeing these videos, but apparently they're having a bit of a resurgence lately thanks to a documentary (they're still around and playing shows). They were doing New Wave long before New Wave (or even punk) was a thing--these videos are from November 1974. The singer's range is impressive, and he apparently learned to sing that way to be able to sing in the keys that the keyboard-playing brother would write in, as he would refuse to change the key to make it easier to sing. Some fun, high-energy performances:
while scrolling the firehose view, I misread #2 as "This Toilet Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us", and must admit some disappointment now that I've corrected the misimpression.
I don't think "2 girls 1 porcelain bowl" would be appropriate for the Motte, even the Friday Fun Thread.
I was picturing more this sort of situation, but one must admit it's a phrase with endless possibilities for interpretation.
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I just finished Brave New World. Pretty great!
As World Controller, what are some ways you'd like to utilize Pavlovian conditioning on toddlers? Personally, I think I'd do the trick they did in the book where they had toddlers touch books and get shocked and have alarm bells ring and all kinds of other unpleasant stuff, but do it with guns instead. Imagine how much more safe our kiddos would be.
I'd go the other way, and positively reinforce the idea of putting things where they belong. This would have advantages ranging from reduced toddler deaths to fewer shopping cart-induced auto insurance claims.
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Remember that time when humanity hadn't invented guns yet, and conquerors built pyramids of skulls from tens of thousands of their victims? Sorry: times, plural; there were like half a dozen cases.
Homicide levels in general are much lower post-gunpowder than they were pre-, probably mostly but not entirely for other reasons. Guns are obviously tragically useful for committing atrocities, but they have played direct and more-indirect roles in reducing atrocities too. It's not at all obvious to me what the net impact has been, even to kids; IIRC one of those conquerors helpfully sorted their pyramids into men's, women's, and children's skulls, for extra psychological-warfare power.
I also thought "Brave New World" was great. Controlling people by oppressing them a la "1984" makes for more exciting reading, but controlling people by distracting them feels far more prescient in hindsight.
I'm more referring to incidents where some gun is left out and a curious infant goes and shoot himself or something else. I wonder how often that happened with bladed weapons. What are the statistics on accidental fatal sword swallowing?
In hindsight, maybe you should condition them to not leave dangerous things out on tables...
Even a 5-pound trigger pull (the average full-size handgun, compacts are generally worse) requires some significant finger strength to actually fire, and you're at a mechanical disadvantage if you're trying to shoot yourself (that's really not how guns naturally point- you can only really pick it up one way, where the dangerous end faces away from you). We know that 6 year olds can do this because they've been in the news for shooting teachers before, but before then, maybe not so much.
Revolvers and guns with exposed hammers are more dangerous because the hammer on the back, when cocked, makes the trigger pull light enough for any infant to use- so if you're investigating the device like a very small child might and are properly fuzz-testing the controls, a 3 year old could easily fire it.
The most dangerous age is the one where the kid recognizes what the device is, points it at another kid, and pulls the trigger- for all media with a gun in it that a child is likely to see, and all of the [toy] guns they may themselves possess... well, that's how guns are used, right?
It's not like the other kid is likely going to do that characteristic side-step that gun people do if you point a gun at them; they don't fully understand the implications of "loaded gun is pointed at you" either. They might understand it means "danger", but it's in the abstract, or kid with the gun does that so quickly you don't actually have time to react. (Kind of like how deer will just wander out into the middle of gun ranges.)
And this is indeed unique to guns; injuries caused by play-fighting with knives tend both to be self-limiting (it hurts before you are fatally injured, whereas with the gun it only hurts afterwards), rely on the physical strength of the user to work (not a limitation with a gun due to its nature as a self-powered tool), and the danger is obvious to any child who has ever cut themselves.
It's perhaps more accurate to say that the exercise of political power is automated by guns, in the exact same ways (and with the exact same effects) that conventional warfare is automated by nuclear weapons [so the outcome is generally "don't even try"].
When each man is his own nuclear-armed nation-state, MAD doctrine applies and thus limits the scale and scope of conventional war. The Khmer Rouge or the Hutu don't rack up that kind of body count if every man, woman, and child can simply shoot them. (Genocide doesn't discriminate by age, and under those conditions, you probably can't kill them all. But in the dawn of the decade, in a particular Western country, a nationwide Kristallnacht-style movement was killed in 3 rounds. Even a revolver holds more than that, and if everyone has one...)
(The typical "but does 2A cover nuclear weapons" question is far closer to the mark than I think either side realizes. It's just a matter of degrees. One notes the same question will apply to AI usage in the long run.)
I think you might be right about that, and I hadn't considered it. Seems like the vast majority of those incidents involving children of those ages involve a DA/SA pistol or an SAO pistol. I really am only thinking of this because I own a few guns and having a future offspring shoot themselves with one is terrifying to me, but I also don't want to leave them all completely inaccessible.
My own father kept loaded guns around the house, but I don't recall any safety scares whatsoever... The two semi-auto rifles I can remember were both suspended higher than a toddler could feasibly reach, I think the pistol was stored in disguised Bible case in a drawer. You generally don't keep a round in the chamber on rifles anyway, though. I remember being told not to touch any of them because they were dangerous, but that would have probably been around when I was 6 or so, on account of my being able to remember it at all.
This is the thing I can't properly parse yet- where being able to obey "don't touch, that's dangerous" doesn't necessarily imply "now that you, without questioning or arguing, accept "it's dangerous", you may now know why it's dangerous" (and move on to that stage where you blow up a bunch of soda jugs and watermelons). Then again, I don't have kids yet.
You do a lot of staring down the metaphorical barrel with this stuff and it's odd nobody ever fully acknowledges that. Because yes, them being motivated enough to get to the gun and using it is always a risk. Doubly so because it is a technological terror of a mechanism not found in nature; we don't do that calculus with knives or rope since they're everyday items yet have to consciously do it with guns (I believe hanging ends more kids with a death wish than guns do even when they are available, but I honestly don't feel like verifying that).
It just occurs to me that maybe accidents were more common when the physically smaller guns were the standard home-defense fare simply because they were guns perfectly sized for a kid to use in the first place (and hence more closely resembled the size and weight of their toys at the time). Yeah, revolver triggers are really heavy in DA, and a shrouded-hammer DAO design might be safer because of that, but if my hands are that size I can see me getting enough of a grip on the gun to be able to yank the trigger hard enough to fire it. (With an exposed hammer, I could use my entire hand or some other object to push the hammer down if it's too stiff for my thumb.)
That said, those exact firearms are arguably ideal for actually teaching a kid to shoot. I'd rather give them a pawn shop .32 than a full-size handgun or even a .22 rifle simply because it's not this boat anchor of a thing... which inevitably lends itself to said kid (who is indeed paying attention) getting dope-slapped unnecessarily because they're using so much of their strength to hold the damn thing up in the first place that they can't pull the charging handle back without the gun tracking off to the side. The adult does not know they probably should have told the kid to do this because they're inherently strong/tall enough to never have needed to do that.
Of course I think the real correct choice for this application is a vz. 61 Skorpion (with the shoulder stock) simply because it's harder for that to point the wrong way and easier to actually use, provided you also put one of the really big charging handles on it. But that's also an order of magnitude more expensive than "coincidentally child-sized old revolver" and it's not as simple a manual of arms as "finger off trigger, break it open, loose rounds in, double check finger off trigger, grab cylinder area and close it up, left hand back on grip, [cock hammer and] shoot", so...
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I would imagine that most young children who accidentally shoot themselves do so with a gun that was carelessly left accessible and loaded by a moronic parent. Not to be too harsh, but that just seems like stupid genes weeding themselves out of society.
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Oh, that's potentially more one-sided. Not for infants or toddlers, since gun triggers typically require multiple pounds of force to pull, but for older kids. Unintentional gun deaths kill dozens of kids a year in the US, so the only remaining question would be whether your proposed re-conditioning wouldn't have negative consequences when you needed responsible gun users as adults.
Or maybe we're both just not taking the thought experiment far enough? As an American citizen I'm fairly conscious of how the democratization of military power preceded and helped instigate the democratization of political power, and from that perspective I worry that we're running on hysteresis already and shouldn't risk making it even worse. As a World Controller I would presumably also be fairly concerned with the democratization of political power, but mostly from the perspective of how to stop it from ever happening again, and from that perspective the solution to child firearm accidents is easy: only our cadres of devoutly loyal childless soldiers shall be allowed anywhere near the trigger of a gun, and so we don't need to condition anyone against guns, just against disloyalty.
Obviously, as a real world controller, the world would inevitably end up in the state that the book is in. There simply isn't any reason to not pull a Grand Inquisitor and induce societal heat death, as long as we're talking about stopping coups from ever happening. However, I think that the methods used would probably have to vary a lot more and we'd have to have a lot better industrial capabilities and maybe a better understanding of biology. Sleep hypnosis can't work, we obviously can't grow kids in jars and it might not be possible at all, and I think you'd have to take more extreme measures to eliminate things like hate and jealousy and greed. Like "nerve stapling" like in Alpha Centauri. And people don't like nerve stapling.
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Seems to happen approximately 100 times per year for kids up to 5.
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Yeah, but assuming you agree that guns at least an unfortunate necessity, I wonder what effect this would have on the class of people who agrees to work with them. Would we have particularly broken cops and soldiers (if you already believe they are fundamentally broken people, imagine I said "more broken")?
I guess you'd condition them to dislike guns when they're dumb stupid infants that try to kill themselves all the time and then re-condition them to be comfortable with guns or even like guns once they've grown up a bit.
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Has the King of the Hill revival been greenlit because of its potential appeal to the Zoomer audience? Consider this:
Hasn’t it already aired? I don’t watch any “revivals” because they’re always compromised by the cultural war. In the Malcolm in the Middle revival, they made Malcolm’s black friend some sort of homosexual freak, made the family’s youngest child nonbinary, and did something polyamorous with Malcolm’s other misfit friends. I can’t recall the characters exactly.
How have they ruined King of the Hill? I vaguely recall hearing they made Connie into some radical whore.
They made Connie into a median college student in a "polyamourous" relationship with Chang Wasanasong (mostly one-sided), that Bobby is visibly eye-rollingly disappointed by. Then she gets back together with Bobby and they're monogamous.
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The first revival season aired last year. I'm currently pirating it after watching a few clips on YT.
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My hopefully final fragrance thread. The previous part is here. I bought two more batches of 1ml testers to determine if there really are no alternatives to Lalique Pour Homme (Equus) (woody spicy), Celine Reptile (woody leather) and Chanel Antaeus (1980's fuck
boyman).Aesop Karst, 0. Very resinous juniper, but not as balanced as something like Sycomore.
Bottega Veneta Pour Homme Extreme, 0. Another very resinous juniper, almost pure turpentine in the drydown.
Caron Yuzu Man, 0. Very, very citrusy, like peeling an exceptionally fragrant tangerine. Then nothing interesting.
Celine Eau De Californie, 0. It's like Reptile, but without its signature notes. A very sparse woody fragrance.
Celine Fever pour Homme, 0. Pleasantly herbal and woody, and even my wife likes it, but it's a skin scent at most. Noticeable Iso E Super in the drydown.
Histoires de Parfums 1828 Jules Verne, -1. Very strong nutmeg note, it overpowered everything else.
Issey Miyake Le Sel d’Issey, +1. Novel, I haven't tried anything like it before. Fresh, synthetic, but not harsh like Cool Water. Surprisingly strong.
Issey Miyake Le Sel D'Issey Eau de Parfum, 0. This is the first EdP concentration that is almost identical to the EdT concentration. There's a hit of incense in the drydown, and the fragrance is somehow weaker than the original, but they are functionally the same.
Le Labo Another 13, -1. George's favorite, but it smells like the inside of a washing machine to me: warm wet clean laundry with traces of detergent.
Le Labo The Noir 29, 0. That one is a shame. To me it smells like a summer village: lots of drying herbs with a hint of sweat and something starting to go bad in the pantry, but my wife claims it's an overwhelming, synthetic, sweet stench.
Orto Parisi Cuoium, 0. Yep, it's leather. With a surprising raspberry blast that lasts a split second when you spray it. Not as good as Reptile, though.
Orto Parisi Seminalis, -1. It doesn't smell like anything to me, but my wife hated it with a passion.
Acqua di Parma Quercia Eau de Parfum, 0. It's not bad, but Aimez Moi Comme Je Suis beats it.
Antonio Puig Quorum, +1. Reminds me of Grey Flannel. The same sharp and bitter opening, but the drydown is different: GF is subtly floral, but Quorum is aromatic.
Cartier Declaration, 0. Boring. Smells like everything and noting.
Francesca Bianchi The Lover's Tale, 0. To me it smelled somewhat like the inside of a small leather bag where someone used to keep a decant of a floral perfume. My wife loved it and claimed the rest of the tester for herself.
Francesca Bianchi Sticky Fingers, 0. A very thick scent. My wife hated it, which surprised me after her previous reaction.
Francesca Bianchi Under My Skin, 0. Another very thick scent. Smells like spilt ink.
Gucci Guilty Absolute, 0. Not a bad leather scent, but Reptile beats it.
Hermes Bel Ami, +1. An oldie with a complex, but luxurious scent. Not exactly my type, but I can understand why Hermes has kept it around.
Kilian Dark Lord, 0. Another good leather scent, but Reptile beats it.
Zoologist Hyrax, 0. Smells surprisingly similar to Oud Palao. Thankfully, it's not as strong.
Final thoughts
No, there are no alternatives to my chosen fragrances, and I will buy decants of Reptile and Antaeus. If I had a time machine, I might've replaced Grey Flannel with Quorum, but that's about it. Maybe I'll get a decant of Issey Miyake Le Sel d’Issey as well, since I don't have anything like it.
I'm surprised you don't like it. I happen to have a sample vial of that and tried it just now, yes the nutmeg is coming through but I don't find it overpowering, rather it's warm and pleasant. Different reactions on different skin, I suppose!
Have you tried any of the This is not a Blue Bottle collection? I find often their scents promise more than they perform, but I like pretty much all these ones. Haven't tried the latest one (1.8) yet, waiting for an excuse to spend €52 on perfume when I'm terrible about wearing scent (I buy testers/samples, try them once or twice, then forget I have them and don't wear any).
EDIT:
Now you've got me interested, I kinda wouldn't mind smelling like turpentine (though it might be easier/cheaper to just paint a room and clean the paintbrushes, get the smell that way) 🤣
No, no I haven't. I think I either looked at them at Fragrantica and wasn't impressed by the notes or they didn't have them in stock at the decanting place.
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I've really enjoyed this series.
Though mostly fragrance free now I've a few testers still of Jil Sander Feeling Man it reminds me of my youth.
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Item 1 of 6
I ran two searches on GovInfo, one for "engineer" and one for "architect"—and, hilariously, for each of those searches the first interesting opinion revolved around a stingy insurance company.
A real-estate company buys one of the three lots that constitute a shopping center. A different company owns the other two lots. The shopping center's parking is split between the first company's lot and the second company's lots. The first company tries to exert unilateral control over parking in its lot, and the second company sues. The state trial court rules that the second company has an easement over the first company's lot. The state appeals panel finds only an implicit license, not an explicit easement. (The state appeals panel's opinion is a bit too complicated for me to summarize, but it does have helpful diagrams of the three lots.)
The real-estate company demands that its title-insurance company reimburse it for the lost value of what it purchased, up to the policy limit of 1.2 M$. However, the insurance company claims that the lost value is only 33 k$. The real-estate company sues.
The real-estate company's expert claims that the lost value is 1.1 M$: without the parking encumbrance it was worth 2.5 M$ as the potential site of a mixed-use commercial and residential redevelopment, but with the parking encumbrance it cannot be redeveloped in that manner and therefore is worth only 1.4 M$ in its current commercial form. The insurance company's expert claims that the difference in value between a shopping center with an exclusive parking lot and a shopping center with a shared parking lot is only 33 k$. The jury agrees with the real-estate company's expert. The appeals panel affirms, finding little merit in the insurance company's arguments.
Item 2 of 6
In May 2023, four condominium units are rendered uninhabitable by a fire. The condo company calls on its insurer for coverage. By July, the condo company and the insurance company agree that complete demolition and replacement are necessary.
In August 2023, there arises a dispute regarding whether the concrete slab needs to be included in the demolition and replacement. The insurance company's engineer prepares a report stating that concrete exposed to extremely high temperatures turns pink, indicating chemical changes that make it unsuitable for further structural use. The report includes two photographs (reproduced in the judge's opinion) that clearly show pink concrete in the slab. However, the engineer concludes that the slab need not be replaced! The condo company disagrees with this assessment.
In January 2024, the condo company's engineer conducts a core test on the slab. The test indicates that the slab does not have sufficient strength to support a replacement structure. In July 2024, the insurance company's engineer finally makes a second visit to the site and changes his opinion, and the insurance company increases its replacement-cost estimate from 0.96 M$ to 1.05 M$.
In December 2024, the condo company sues the insurance company for bad-faith conduct that delayed construction and thereby inconvenienced the displaced inhabitants. In January 2026, the insurance company moves for summary judgment to dismiss the condo company's claims, but in September the trial judge refuses to grant it: there is enough evidence for a jury to conclude that the insurance company was unreasonable in (1) blindly relying on its engineer's obviously internally inconsistent report and (2) not sending its engineer out for a second inspection until six months after the condo company's core test brought his report into even greater question.
The trial was scheduled for next week, but the parties settled instead. Presumably, the insurance company folded.
Item 3 of 6
On the topic of structure fires comes a report hopefully funny enough to transcend its culture-war background: In designing the White House's new ballroom, President Trump has been ignoring… the building code!!! 😱😱😱 In response to the architect's complaints, he literally said: "I am the code." 😡😡😡
"Banquet halls" are explicitly included in IBC (International Building Code) occupancy A-2. ("Dance halls" are in occupancy A-3, but only if they do not accommodate consumption of food or drink.) For egress calculations, the number of people in an assembly-oriented space is assumed to be as high as one person per 5 ft2 (if they're all standing rather than sitting).
Item 4 of 6
A rural municipality has an I (Industrial) zone with the stated purpose of accommodating "light industrial" uses and an MI (Mineral Industrial) zone with the stated purpose of accommodating "heavy industrial" uses, where "light industrial" excludes "basic industrial processing" and "heavy industrial" includes asphalt plants. However, the table of permitted uses contradicts these statements of purpose: it says that asphalt plants are permitted in the I zone by special exception and are not permitted in the MI zone at all.
A company files an application to build an asphalt plant in the MI zone. The zoning official denies the application. The company appeals, pointing out that the contradiction in the zoning code makes it unconstitutionally vague. The municipal council and the trial judge reject this argument, but the appeals panel reverses. (One of the three appeals judges dissents: he thinks that the general statements of purpose are merely "aspirational", rather than legally binding, and the specific table of uses controls.)
Item 5 of 6
A 911 call is made regarding a robbery perpetrated at gunpoint by three juvenile males in black clothing. One mile away from the location of the reported robbery, the responding officers find two juvenile males—one in all black, and another, KC, wearing a black shirt and mask and gray pants. The officers pull over alongside the juveniles and start walking toward them while shining a flashlight at them. KC starts walking away. An officer steps in front of KC, blocking his path, and asks him what's in his waistband. KC discards the object in his waistband (a gun) and runs away, but is quickly apprehended. He is charged with various delinquencies.
The trial judge grants KC's motion to suppress the evidence. The officers fully detained him, rather than casually speaking with him, when they shined a flashlight on him and blocked his path; and they did not have reasonable suspicion to detain him, since the description given in the 911 call was vague and KC didn't even match it. (The caller didn't even provide a direction in which the assailants fled. Did the officers have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery? No.) The appeals panel affirms.
Item 6 of 6
Another borderline culture-war item (though it definitely made me laugh when I came up with it):
Write a story with the following premise: A young, skinny man visits a random restaurant to eat dinner alone. His waitress is a young, skinny woman. At first, the man considers asking the woman for a date. But then he realizes that she probably gets harassed constantly by customers and is not interested, so he refrains from asking.
[LLM writes story]
Write an opinion article criticizing the previous story for being a psy-op to promote cuckish/unmanly behavior (though maybe not in such harsh words).
See also Eager Readers in Your Area. (I relished converting " — " to "—" and " …" to "…" in my downloaded copy.)
I actually like the idea that Trump became President because he was tired of having to obey the building code even better than the theory that it's because Obama mocked him at a dinner!
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