Me too, the clouds overhead parted just before totality and the corona was so dazzling and magnificent. I really hope there aren’t clouds in the way during this one.

Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), but because alcohol is stupidly easy to make from a wide variety of substances so most cultures around the world produce some kind of alcohol with their local crops. You can use pretty much anything sugary: fruit (wine), honey (mead), and grains like rice and wheat (sake & beer). It is really hard to ban a substance when half the foods in our diet can be turned into that substance if you let it sit in a jar or bucket in your closet for a few weeks.

Prohibition was repealed primarily because it was a futile effort and with alcohol being banned, very strong distilled spirits were the economical way to discreetly transport and serve alcohol since it is easier to hide a few bottles of liquor from authorities searching your truck or business than to hide large barrels of low ABV drinks like humans had been brewing and drinking for millennia. It is also a lot easier for people to drink themselves sick with distilled drinks, so ultimately it was decided that it was safer to make alcohol legal and regulated instead of having it still plentiful, but getting people sicker and funding criminal empires. It’s a lot easier to ban one plant than to ban every food source with sugar in it, but the marijuana prohibition has clearly led to many of the same problems as alcohol prohibition did.

There are still people who would love to ban alcohol if they feasibly could. Many places in the US still have local alcohol bans, I currently have to travel two counties away to legally purchase liquor and one county away from home to purchase beer or wine. Prohibition only ended on a federal level.

Plenty of us live nowhere near any skiable snow. It isn’t particularly surprising to hear about, but not everyone sees the snow receding for themselves over decades. Personally, I find it bizarre that the focus of this article is primarily on the migration of a sport and barely touches on the ecological impact for all the species that are adapted to and dependent on snowy weather. We don’t need skiing to live.

I had a chick tract with that exact message left on my car recently, it was very disturbing. The tract’s solution to global warming was war in Israel so Armageddon happens and we all get raptured away from this trashed planet. I didn’t keep it, but I found a copy on their site. I am sharing an archive link because I don’t want them getting more traffic and thinking they need to print even more of these.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240323153015/https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=50

Mountain lion only describes one type of habitat cougars live in, they have the widest distribution of all the big cats and live in a variety of habitats, including the Everglades swamp in Florida, in canyons, and in areas with a lot of scrubby brush they can ambush from.

These polygamist Mormon cults have a long history of child abuse. It is relevant that they continue to arrange child marriages and facilitate child abuse even as their previous leader is spending the rest of his life in prison for the exact same thing.

It is the same group, Warren Jeffs is technically still that group’s leader from prison, but Samuel Bateman started telling followers that Jeffs died in prison to convince them he is their new prophet and they need to give up their minor daughters to him as wives.

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2023/05/25/53-felonies-polygamist-leader/

The CEO of the streaming platform was participating in the stream, I think this visit was meant to be a publicity stunt to drum up more interest in the platform which is trying to become an alternative to Twitch. It’s investor money that was lost here, not the streamer’s money.

He already had a past history as a sex offender and one of the victims in this case was a child.

Someone has to stock and clean and maintain all that space and pay for the electricity it takes to illuminate and air condition such a huge area. Good luck convincing people to increase their taxes in exchange for indoor tennis courts and lounging areas. I love the idea of having more free community spaces, but the last city I lived in had the downtown library basement essentially become a homeless encampment until they closed off that entire floor of the library and then the city sold the entire library to developers who plan to demolish it and build something else there. With people struggling financially and spending most of their time staring at screens, there isn’t much demand for government spending on new public spaces.

I don’t know if something like this is available where you are, but in the US there is a brand of milk owned by Coca-Cola where they filter out the sugars (lactose is a sugar), it is called Fairlife and is marketed as high protein milk. It still retains the fats and proteins and flavor of ordinary milk. It comes in a variety of fat percentages like ordinary milk for people with different dietary preferences.

My favorite plant milk is soy milk, but that isn’t as readily available out here as it used to be since conservatives decided drinking it would turn men into girls. I find oat and almond milks too watery and unsatisfying in drinks.

In some places it never left.

All of the big hotel chains use the same plastic key cards that are credit card sized, they are durable and can be reused many times but also cheap enough to not fret over them if a customer forgets to return it before leaving. As a former aircraft maintainer myself, I don’t personally think it would be an issue if Boeing or its contractor ordered a bunch of standard hotel card blanks for seal testing, but if they were meant to use that as their test device it should be documented , there should be a part number for that card and authorized suppliers, and there should be a specific procedure to follow when using them. The article mentions the lack of documentation, so this was probably an unauthorized improvisation on the fly. I doubt these were being used to measure a specific tolerance, this case was probably something stupid like “the cabin pressurization check failed after we replaced the door, let’s poke a card along the seal to find where the gap is and squeeze extra sealant in that spot.” My specialty was avionics though, so I will admit I don’t really know much about the pressurization checks and seals, I was always at the plane for some other work whenever I encountered them.

I knew Taft had been widely regarded as one of the worst presidents, but I had no idea he only managed to collect 8 electoral votes when running as the incumbent. That is really extreme!

Paper tea bags usually contain polypropylene or another plastic so they can be heat sealed shut. They aren’t fully compostable.

Senator Mitt Romney has been a vocal never-Trumper all along.

Well keeping it cheap and poorly regulated helps feed into the dependence on it. If it was treated like a precious good only meant for essentials that can’t be replaced by anything else, maybe we wouldn’t have ever built up sprawling suburbs and exurbs that require a car to do every little thing, are searing hot asphalt hellscapes to walk through, and are poorly served by mass transit systems because of the previous issue. Maybe we also wouldn’t have plastic in mothers’ placentas today if we had cracked down early instead of covering it up for the oil producers’ sake.

Oil is a finite resource, if all the droughts and mayhem from climate change don’t get us first, sooner or later the party will end and we will have to become a non-fossil fuel dependent world again. I doubt we will produce enough vegetable oil to replace it.

I find it helpful to have the thing being imitated as part of the name, but not the full name. It makes for an easy way to know what the taste and texture should be and how it can be used in cooking. My kid developed a dairy allergy recently and vegan butter in particular is so easy to substitute in old favorite recipes without changing the flavor much or cooking method. As for meat imitations, a “vegetarian steak” (or ham) label conveys a lot about the texture, moisture, saltiness, and cooking techniques you can expect to use while a generic name such as “plant protein block” leaves you much more clueless as to what the texture and cooking method is meant to be for that item. I don’t think it should be legal to sell plant substitutes as only “steak “ or “butter”, but calling it “plant steak” or “plant butter” is way more straightforward and easy to fit on a label than a lengthy description of “plant patty with a fibrous, chewy texture and savory flavor resembling steak.”

You’ve lost Fox News viewers at “(not all, obviously)”. Nuance isn’t allowed, people can’t be varied and have different interests within a particular group. All sneakers are the same, so Trump shoes equal grandpa’s New Balance shoes equals shoes from the latest brand collaboration with a celebrity that isn’t Trump.

The point is that it would be better as a nightmare that never truly happened instead of our present reality.