My cat’s name is Nancy Reagan. She’s almost lived up to it. And no, she doesn’t like you either and if you try to pet her you’ll get what you deserve.

Some cats have official titles. I had another cat whose title was “Chief Inspector.” He was known to do home invasions and conduct snap inspections of my neighbors houses. He had more friends in the neighborhood than me.

Fair play. That said, please do look up Hanford. It’s way bigger than Westlake and is potentially a much bigger problem, though granted, Westlake is problematic as well.

The problem isn’t fire, it’s that the waste at Hanford has leached into the soil and a plume of it is headed towards the Hanford Reach on the Columbia River. There’s a mitigation plan in place and it looks like it’s ultimately going to work, but it’s very expensive and not something that anyone wants to see happen again.

You are a liar and an intellectual coward.

While it’s not entirely ruled out, the lab leak hypothesis is looking less and less likely for a variety of reasons. The most likely suspect at this time is a raccoon dog sold at a specific wet market in Wuhan about 7 miles away from the WIV lab. This has not been proven yet either, it’s just the most likely, so ultimately we still don’t actually know.

There was a deep-dive article about it in the NYT Magazine recently.

Health insurance. Actually that probably doesn’t really count since most of us know it’s a scam.

Fully agree. Unfortunately we are a very small minority.

Meritocracy in the US is almost entirely a myth, outside of a few sports.

Free will as it’s popularly understood doesn’t actually exist.

Most shoes are bad for us and cause injuries over the course of our lives .

Man, I have an iPhone for work, issued by my employer, and I fucking hate it. Sure, it has a fancy camera and a slick-looking user interface together with a suite of proprietary apps that we use to track production, man-hours and the like, but apart from that, it really is a “walled garden,” and isn’t something I would ever consider for personal use.

Again, I fuckin’hate it.

I don’t think “skill” is the right word here. It’s more of a basic competence issue.

Capitalism is fine as long as its well-regulated and is only one component of a larger system. It’s no accident that the best countries in the world to live in all rely in part on well-regulated capitalism together with robust democracy and relatively high levels of what in the US would be called socialism.

Construction industry project manager here.

Sure, we use lots of tech and actually build a lot of the data-centers and fabs that are the backbone of the internet and modern computing, but the on-the-ground nuts and bolts of what we do is very much about highly-skilled tradesmen performing manual work that can’t be done remotely or by robots.

So it’s not really “tech” per se at all, even though we do a ton of work for companies like Intel, Google, Meta and the like.