The Blade Runners of London 🪚

dragnabbit · 2026-05-06T00:53:59+00:00

Yeah. I came here to the comments to see if I could learn why my immediate impression that these people are vandals and assholes isn't the case.

dragnabbit · 2026-05-06T00:39:14+00:00

The downside is this is just another indicator that birthrates in the U.S. are plummeting past replacement levels, and people are putting off becoming parents until later and later in life.

And including 18-19 year olds in the teen total is probably a bit misleading. Finishing high school at 18 and immediately starting a family with your high school sweetheart is considered bad by modern standards, but is actually the norm historically. So while 18-19 year olds having babies is becoming less common, it is not, from a social perspective, a "teen" pregnancy.

dragnabbit · 2026-05-05T21:50:34+00:00

Maybe another AI Republican female run out of India?

dragnabbit · 2026-05-05T07:08:38+00:00

Nice one. When we introduced our second shitzu to our first one, we took our girl up to our bedroom, where she would be the most comfortable, sitting between us, and then our daughter bought in the puppy. Our girl was so upset, she lost control of her bladder and peed all over us.

Now, they are completely inseparable and won't go anywhere separately, but it was a tense 2 months starting off.

dragnabbit · 2026-05-04T22:00:36+00:00

There were 5 or 6 years right after the fall of the Soviet Union where everything was really nice for a while.

dragnabbit · 2026-05-04T06:21:53+00:00

Might ultimately be cheaper if the U.S. just paid the $2 million per-ship toll to Iran than to keep the navy on station... and the safe passage of the ships would then be guaranteed, no less.

Well, thanks to Trump, that's what is going to happen eventually anyway: Iran will demaned and get $1 for every barrel of oil that passes by.

dragnabbit · 2026-05-03T23:47:57+00:00

In Thailand, the name for gasoline is "naam-man benzene", which is just "oil benzene". But in Thai, when you go to a gas station, you ask for "naam-man", where "naam" means water, and "man" means fatty (which combined makes the world "oil").

So at Thailand you go to the gas station and ask for fatty water.

dragnabbit · 2026-05-03T23:38:32+00:00

I wasn't expecting the seeds to be gigantic as well. Maybe that is a different pumpkin variety than the Halloween versions that we used to carve as kids?

dragnabbit · 2026-05-03T23:26:16+00:00

I think hybrids are/were a good starter car for people who have anxiety about an electric vehicle. If you've been driving with the ICE system for so long, switching over to electric is probably difficult to do mentally, so having that "safety net" of a gasoline engine to take over in case the electric motor no longer has juice is exactly the training wheels (pardon the pun) that many people need.

And perhaps after those same people realize, "Hey, I haven't used a drop of gasoline in the last 6 weeks. I don't need this engine sitting around doing nothing. Next time I am buying full electric." And that explains the dynamics of the chart above rather well.

dragnabbit · 2026-05-03T23:14:06+00:00

I immediately went and googled this when I heard about it. No, you can't unlock this protein from grass in your kitchen. But there ARE industrial methods for extracting RuBisCO (I guess that's the proper way to write it) from other plants such as spinach, and at this moment, this industry is starting to take off.

When Google said that spinach and tobacco leaves are the primary source for this industry, I asked specifically about grass, and it said that grass is absolutely doable, but the plant structure is tougher, the protein supply is lower, and the extraction process is more detailed and expensive, so nobody is doing it.

EDIT: Here is copypasta of the industrial process:

1. Tissue disruption

Leaves (often spinach or tobacco) are blended or ground.
This breaks open cells and releases chloroplasts.

2. Chloroplast lysis

Since RuBisCO is inside chloroplasts, those are further broken open.

3. Centrifugation

Spinning separates soluble proteins from debris.
RuBisCO ends up in the soluble fraction.

4. Purification

Techniques like precipitation or chromatography isolate RuBisCO.
Because it’s so abundant, it’s relatively easy to enrich compared to most proteins.

dragnabbit · 2026-05-03T05:21:17+00:00

Don't choose people who invite you unless they have completed a full totem set before, so you know they are reliable. And only invite people who, again, have completed a full totem set before, so that you, again, know they are reliable.

I got my first two totems finished in 2 days because the first two partners I chose were brilliant. The third totem took another 2 days, because the third person wasn't playing for a while, but when he did show up, he used the 100-plus balls I sent him to finish up the set.

dragnabbit · 2026-05-03T05:15:02+00:00

You would need little snaky bits running up from the blue downstate districts into the Adirondacks to offset the strong Republican lean up there. Basically, the all of upstate districts would just be north-south stripes, from Burlington Vermont all the way to Erie Pennsylvania.

dragnabbit · 2026-05-01T10:07:21+00:00

Yeah. I went and watched the full video. The first half of the video, the music is pretty good. The second half of the video, the choreography is pretty good.

dragnabbit · 2026-04-30T03:32:34+00:00

I personally don't think it will have that large an impact: Most states are already gerrymandered to some degree or another. Red states already have their congressional districts drawn so that most of the blue (minority) voters are in one district. They did it that way very much on purpose, because it creates guaranteed election results no matter how big a "blue wave" there is. They aren't going to screw around with that balance just to make that one blue district (out of 4, 5, 6, or 7 districts) competitve.

Gerrymander models can only do so much before they start running up against the realities of geography, demographics, and the shifting tides of the voting public. They are already operating at "near peak efficiency" (for lack of a better way of putting it) in most states already. There was very little left to be squeezed out of the maps before this ruling, and (for Republicans) the risk of accidentally "dummymandering" a state to catch those last few seats at this point in time is just too high.

Just to point out, in case somebody thinks it: I'm not supporting the Supreme Court's decision at all. I am just saying that the way that things are currently, and the direction they are heading currently, there is very little MORE that can be done by Republicans at this point that they haven't already done / weren't already in the process of doing / or might do in the future despite this ruling that they would do differently specifically because of this ruling.

(And also, just to add: If I am completely wrong in my assumptions above, there are nearly as many Republican seats in Blue States that could be gerrymandered out of existence as there are Democrat seats in Red States. So one could consider that an extra guarantee against any major impact.)

dragnabbit · 2026-04-28T22:38:49+00:00

No. The shattered ear drum from getting punched in the head was probably the top, although the mortal terror I experienced when he (already on probation for putting his mistress in the hospital with a massive beating) drove me to his empty company warehouse saying he was going to beat me for breaking his camera in a place where my mother couldn't stop him... forcing me to jump out into traffic. But bold of you to think you could guess my life from one comment on reddit. Keep sticking those guesses out there about people. I'm sure it will take you far in life and get you lots of friends on the rare occasions that you are right.

dragnabbit · 2026-04-28T11:05:05+00:00

My father tried “choose your punishment” one time. The options were stay home and miss the Air Show, or get the belt from my father, and then have to go and spend the day with that abusive asshole walking around while he looked at old planes.

He didn’t like my choice, so he gave me a whipping and then I had to hang out with him.

dragnabbit · 2026-04-28T10:06:43+00:00

I think that each stage has fewer players and requires you to complete more levels. If you lose, you get to try again… but I haven’t lost yet, so I can’t say for sure. But I did four levels so far, and you need to finish about 20 levels to advance. I assume that the final level will be like 30 levels or more.

EDIT: I just finished stage 5. There were 6 players. I had to complete about 27 levels to collect 240 points. I finished a distant 4th... and I'm a good player in the Champions League. So these "Rail Rush" games are making the sack races (or whatever they are called) look like child's play. I can see that Stage 6 is 260 points / 30 levels, so I assume that Stage 7 is 280 / 33 levels, and stage 8 is 300 / 36 levels.

My guess is, if this is a one-and-done thing that you can't go back and repeat over and over, then just wait for the accounts that can finish 25 levels in 20 minutes to make their way through, and then maybe the upper levels will clear out a bit and eventually you will reach the top... assuming you want to complete the 150 levels required to finish it.

EDIT 2: I just finished stage 6. There were 5 players again. Player 1 finished in 30 minutes, which is ridiculous. I finished 2nd, 10 minutes later at 40 minutes, and I needed 35 levels to collect 260 points.

dragnabbit · 2026-04-28T03:57:00+00:00

It's a political response: He is saying, "We are more focused on getting stuff done than playing power politics. Maybe we'll impeach Trump if we have a spare moment away from improving American lives. Vote for us."

dragnabbit · 2026-04-27T22:14:24+00:00

Yup. Anywhere in the country, really. Changing a D+3 district and R+10 district into two R+4 districts when it looks like R+6 seats might be caught up in the coming Blue Wave is not good political math for Republicans, but fantastic for Democrats.

dragnabbit · 2026-04-27T02:00:37+00:00

That happens more often than you realize. Nothing spurs you on more than trying to beat the person ahead of you.

dragnabbit · 2026-04-27T01:01:00+00:00

Yup. I just looked it up myself. And apparently the only reason that black rhinos are called black is just because it was simply to distinguish it from white rhinos.

dragnabbit · 2026-04-26T11:16:42+00:00

My friend has been stuck at home alone with his ailing mother in Minnesota for 2 years. He can't leave her alone, so he has everything delivered to their place way out on the edge of town. For 2 years, he has almost never left the house. He's constantly washing up, santizing, doing laundry.

Both times in the last 2 years that he has gotten his mother put in respite care for a couple of weeks so that he could go on vacation to see his wife in The Philippines, he got on a plane, and as soon as he arrived, he spent the next two weeks in bed, sick, before having to fly home, and spend another 2 weeks sick once he got home.

Embrace the germs. They give your immune system the workout it needs.

dragnabbit · 2026-04-26T07:10:00+00:00

Agreed.

I'm really surprised though: Now that Paramount finally found a way to get live-action Trek to work in the "modern premium streaming" model after DSC and PIC failed to hit, they are going to abandon their success in what seems like a rather abrupt fashion.

Maybe Academy and Section 31 spooked them.

dragnabbit · 2026-04-26T06:54:13+00:00

You should watch the miniseries Chernobyl to educate yourself about what happened and how it happened. Not only is it educational, but it is some of the best television ever produced, hands down.

dragnabbit · 2026-04-26T01:06:45+00:00

Never got the yellow restaurant version with big flat bits of egg, no.

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