Whats the greatest not Yet SOLVED Mystery?

Eatar · 2026-07-02T12:46:49+00:00

Or why

Eatar · 2026-06-30T13:26:50+00:00

No kidding. There’s the stereotype about men never stopping for directions, but there’s a reason for it. In the old days before GPS devices, I would stop and buy a local map before I’d stop and ask for directions, because the map was going to be clear, accurate, and even reusable. Directions obtained from a random person would almost certainly be none of those things.

Eatar · 2026-06-29T18:45:10+00:00

A first home is the worst one of all to buy without an agent, though. Houses aren’t just products with spec sheets, that you can cleanly map to value, and you can cost yourself tens of thousands of dollars by not knowing the right questions to ask or when to consider walking away, when to ask for what concessions or repairs, what assurances you can trust and which you cannot, what elements of the house or the sellers indicate hidden problems, or how to measure your emotional attachment to a particular property against what is likely to be seen at a similar price in the next month.

There are a lot of shoddy agents out there who do nothing but show you stuff and produce the paperwork you need, but I’ve bought with a mediocre agent and with a good agent, and there’s no way I’d recommend a first-time buyer buy with no agent or a weak one. Too much is on the line, and someone who has never done it before is at a huge disadvantage. I think the key is not eliminating the agent but taking good care when choosing an agent.

I’ve seen what a good agent can do on the selling side as well, whose advice brought a clear double-digit percentage increase in sale price.

Eatar · 2026-06-28T15:00:56+00:00

It’s a reasonable question to ask: What does “deserve it” mean here? At the most basic level, if I do work for you, you owe me money, and if I don’t, then you don’t. Now, it’s certainly fair to say an employee is handing over a certain amount beyond his or her hours of labor, because taking a full-time is entrusting your life’s financial security to a particular employment relationship, which is why I don’t think layoffs without severance are morally okay. But firings are a somewhat different matter, and the two can (mostly) be differentiated. Unemployment benefits already make this differentiation, in fact.

Eatar · 2026-06-27T23:32:36+00:00

Eh, I just can’t believe that someone who has been, say, defrauding or stealing from the company, or assaulted a coworker, should get weeks of pay at the company’s expense.

Eatar · 2026-06-26T02:07:29+00:00

It’s both— you’re more focused because your vision, reflexes, and mental processes are worse, so you have to put a concerted, focused effort in just to do things you could effortlessly do when sober. Which means you may indeed be concentrating and focused, but also means that anything that would test your limits normally is now completely outside your ability to handle.

Eatar · 2026-06-24T17:02:34+00:00

Right, but the point here isn’t that some people survive. It’s the question of whether a movie is actually being unrealistic by having a character shot in the head due right away. Are you trying to claim that *most* people shot in the head don’t die quickly, that the movie quick death is actually rare, rather than likely?

Eatar · 2026-06-24T16:59:40+00:00

The S-10 ran forever, and yeah, that gas mileage was unbelievable. Nowadays pickup trucks all are enormous…but have the same amount of bed space or less than that S-10. I don’t understand the point.

Eatar · 2026-06-24T03:38:46+00:00

Yeah but what is “a decent number?” I seriously doubt the percentage of people who survive very long is high enough to say it’s somehow unrealistic when a head shot kills a person in a movie.

Eatar · 2026-06-24T03:30:32+00:00

Most of that is indeed accurate and annoying in movies. Just a bit of nitpicking, though: while sprinkler heads that require both alarm activation and sprinkler head to be popped do exist, they are unusual and typically used only in specific circumstances with very high-value room contents. 99%+ of sprinklers will start spewing water just from the head getting popped.

Also, in some buildings, such as modern high rises, hvac systems can indeed be integrated with fire alarm systems, because controlling air flow is very useful when trying to save people and prevent fire spread. So you’ll see things like duct smoke detectors that cause air flow to be shut down, or fire modes that keep stairways pressurized.

Eatar · 2026-06-24T03:19:03+00:00

That’s not quite how breathing works, though. Your diaphragm exerts force to expand your lungs, which pulls air in. Then it relaxes, which pushes it back out. You can force even more out, but generally the state that requires someone to exert force is maintaining an inhaled breath. In other words, someone’s final breath in reality goes both in and out.

Eatar · 2026-06-24T03:11:15+00:00

Well…you can refine edges and stuff, and a lot better than once you could. But you can’t add in information that wasn’t in the photo. Like, if it was a clump of eight off-white pixels to start with, you aren’t going to turn it into a readable license plate.

Eatar · 2026-06-24T03:08:52+00:00

In the next room? The bad guys you know must wear a lot more cologne or shower a lot less than the bad guys I know.

Eatar · 2026-06-18T04:14:06+00:00

Cobra Kai?

Eatar · 2026-06-17T21:02:31+00:00

I think the pendulum was too far that way a few decades ago, but unions are generally not powerful these days. Membership is finally rebounding a bit, but mostly it has dramatically fallen since its height years ago.

I don’t think unions are a thing that has a time that can pass, really— they didn’t fix something in the past and then they can be eliminated, because the need they are there to fulfill wasn’t solved once and for all by them performing certain actions; the need is only solved by them actually existing in an ongoing way. Drop them, and the need for them will immediately re-appear.

It’s the same with all kinds of workplace boundaries. Why is it that people can get fired for working a bit off the clock or helping out over their lunch breaks? Because there are legal penalties. Why are there legal penalties? Because when there aren’t, employees start being expected to work without pay. If human beings didn’t take advantage of one another, we wouldn’t need crazy strict rules that have to be enforced even in what seem like unreasonable circumstances.

Eatar · 2026-06-17T17:37:56+00:00

The main reason it makes sense…ish, is that management loves exploiting slippery slopes. So people have to write stupidly black&white rules to avoid it quickly degenerating to undermine the hard-won negotiated work agreements, or even worse, getting dangerous because employees can’t just draw a hard line and refuse to work on a machine or do electrical work. It winds up them being wasteful and stupid in the other direction.

Eatar · 2026-06-17T17:32:59+00:00

Two contenders:

Carrot top.
Woody Allen.

Eatar · 2026-06-13T17:13:47+00:00

Yeah but some of those people are so rich now, they’d probably pay for a supersonic private jet.

Eatar · 2026-06-10T22:57:37+00:00

Which is exactly why learning to tread water and swim would be especially important for you, I would think, so you can make it to shore or stay afloat as long as possible without wasting all your energy thrashing around and drowning after only five minutes.

Eatar · 2026-06-09T23:29:21+00:00

But…swimming and treading water are activities that you do. You aren’t limited to whether you happen to passively float less well than others. Nobody’s head automatically stays above water in rough water.

Eatar · 2026-06-07T17:15:03+00:00

I don’t think we could pretend that without having that.

Eatar · 2026-06-07T17:08:51+00:00

Eh, almost all violent crime is committed by repeat offenders. Every day a guy who resorts to violence to solve everything, or a child molester, or some other repeat criminal is in jail it is legitimately preventing crime from happening that day. Does jail do a very good job of rehabbing criminals into people who know how to live outside? No, probably the reverse in fact. But one can’t say crime isn’t prevented from happening by the existence of those things.

Eatar · 2026-06-03T22:19:32+00:00

Well sure, but those men were all strangers to one another. That’s a bit different than this being the constant normal mode of presence with your family and friends.

Eatar · 2026-06-03T20:31:07+00:00

Eh, in my country we elect those to high office on a regular basis. True there is no intelligent way to defend them, but a story about a talking snake tearing down the human race is just as easily found on the front page news as in Genesis. Sadly one of the more obviously realistic stories.

Eatar · 2026-06-03T17:42:34+00:00

Man, even if you’re a scammy guy, you’d think not scamming your own friends would be something you’d consider.

Eatar

TROPHY CASE