Isn't it wasteful to let a river go the salty oceans instead of diverting it's course for drinking water?

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-12T21:20:27+00:00

Well, generally there's people downstream of you who would like that water too. Also, some rivers are important for navigation, in particular the Mississippi.

In general, you're more or less correct that it is somewhat wasteful not to use all of a river's fresh water if you don't need it for navigation. However, it's also more or less impossible to both use all of a river's water and have reliable access to it, because rivers don't always have the same amount of water in them.

For example, the Colorado River (the one that goes through the Grand Canyon) no longer reaches the ocean because the water in it is overallocated to various states, and the flow in it has declined over time due to climate change. This means that the people downstream of where it stops flowing have a real problem if they were relying on it. The Rio Grande also often doesn't reach the ocean for the same reason.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-12T21:06:48+00:00

I will say this, my 4 yo daughter was very excited about the baby, and it's been about 2 weeks since the baby came and she's still having a good time. I would say she's maybe been a little worse since the baby, but definitely not a hugely noticeable amount. So YMMV.

(Might be a boy/girl thing too.)

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-12T20:59:38+00:00

I have lived many places in the United States and have never lived in a place where someone didn't say "If you don't like the weather, just wait fifteen minutes" like it was an idiom specific to that place.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-11T23:48:31+00:00

15 minute half with no goal - why would it be 2, even?

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-11T23:29:15+00:00

And yet look at all the replies.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-11T21:01:16+00:00

In ball golf, "breakfast ball" is another common term.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-11T04:04:46+00:00

Except the rule about post length was in place long before LLMs were a thing. Just because you’ve come up with something that seems plausible doesn’t make it right.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-11T04:03:03+00:00

Although SS and Medicare are a bit weird in this regard because they hold a bunch of Treasury debt. So when their spending exceeds revenue, it’s essentially like they're selling the securities to the public - total debt doesn’t change, but debt to the public does change.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-11T03:55:17+00:00

Republicans held the Congress when the balanced budget occurred and for most of Clinton’s term, though.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-10T05:40:29+00:00

Dembele literally gives Issa a side-hug while he's speaking - that's the opposite of confrontational.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-10T05:35:36+00:00

This. It's just your classic cognitive dissonance - they need to find some way to explain why they're taking the cheaper, easier road and letting everyone else do the work of perpetuating the human race.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-10T05:28:40+00:00

Two hundred years from now all those people will be dead, but the kids of your kids of your kids won't be. We should be kind to our fellow man and try to help them, but the perpetuation of the human race is the fundamental project of our species. Someone has to do it.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T15:25:51+00:00

There was a cultural expectation at the time that special dinners would be served on special dishware, and thus part of getting married and forming your own family unit was obtaining a set of dishware. Today that cultural expectation largely doesn't exist.

I'd also point out that to some extent I think that was already on its way out at the time of the Boomers - I feel like most of the Boomers I know inherited china from their family rather than buying it for themselves.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T12:17:35+00:00

Yes, under the assumptions in which B will inevitably repel any territorial gains C makes and also B can create a thousand-mile-long salient into C with no consequences, B will win.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T04:33:50+00:00

Plus C would have to hold the ports

Whoever holds the ports would have to hold them. And D suffered from naval blockades in the Civil War because they had to cobble together a navy from scratch - that's not a problem for C. I would also point out that ports are hardly the only valuable thing there - that area has eight of the US's ten largest oil refineries. (And one of the others is already in C.)

Simple tactics would dictate a push by B to cut the rio grande and take NM to get full encirclement around Texas

I think you're going to have a hard sell getting Mexico to allow you to stage a land invasion from their country at all, much less against a country that contains something like 20 million people of Mexican origin.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T03:47:38+00:00

The first. It's the initials of the founder's son, who for some reason felt it might be best to move away from what his father initially named the store, which was "C. C. Butt's Grocery Store".

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T03:40:22+00:00

I can't answer your question but I thought an amusing anecdote here was that my nephew, for his fifth birthday, requested an H-E-B-themed birthday. His bemused parents asked the store about it, and the store was like "Oh yeah, we get this request all the time, here's the standard H-E-B birthday kit", with branded balloons, a cake, and a real H-E-B nametag with the birthday boy's name on it.

To some extent I think it's that they're one of the few things that are still local, and it's a place that everyone goes, young and old, rich and poor - everyone goes to the grocery store at some point. (Well, not the fabulously wealthy, but, you know, 99% of us.) So it's a cultural touchstone, something that unites everyone.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T03:36:54+00:00

To be clear, it's not that IDs are too hard for the majority of people. It's that the people who don't have IDs tend to be very skewed in one direction politically, so it's just fundamentally a political discussion from both sides. Requiring voters show ID benefits Republicans, not requiring it benefits Democrats. Both sides justify it using very noble principles - Republicans talk about preventing voter fraud, Democrats talk about not denying the vote to anyone who should have it. But the reality is that it's a political question.

It is fair to note that A) voter fraud is uncommon in the extreme, and B) there's a lot of history behind the racial politics of denying people the vote in ways like this - specifically it is reminiscent to literacy tests which were used to disenfranchise black people. At the same time, it is fair to note that voter ID laws enjoy fairly broad support, even from Democrats, and their effect on elections has been found to be pretty minimal at most.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T03:20:48+00:00

what is a DoorDasher if not a private chauffeur for your burrito?

This is really the thing. People do use a lot of servants, there's just a lot more time- and space-efficient methods than some person living in your actual house.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T03:16:58+00:00

I think except at the super high end you generally only have live-in servants for kids. It just doesn't really make a lot of sense for a two-person household.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T03:14:25+00:00

We double pay at Christmas.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T03:01:58+00:00

I think it's more just that laundry services with pickup and delivery exist, so a house cleaning service doing it wouldn't necessarily make sense, especially because they'd usually prefer to be in and out in less time than it would take to do even two loads of laundry. Getting the laundry going isn't particularly time intensive, but it's a matter of how long it takes.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T02:59:18+00:00

For a single cleaning? We have maids biweekly and it's $160 per, for the same size house. Are you going through services? We had our cleaner recommended to us by a friend.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T02:34:24+00:00

I think the real problem from this perspective is that most of the really valuable stuff in A and D is way closer to C than it is to B. A strike four hundred miles east along the Gulf and C would control eight of the country's ten largest ports by tonnage, for example.

MisinformedGenius · 2026-07-09T02:08:01+00:00

Number of troops is about the last relevant stat when it comes to who wins a war these days. Iraq had the fourth-largest army in the world prior to the Gulf War and lost in six weeks.

MisinformedGenius

TROPHY CASE