Ertebolle @ Ertebolle @kbin.social

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466

Joined

2 yr. ago

Vonnegut wasn't a Too Good For This recluse like Pynchon or Salinger or whoever, and the content of his books made him fairly well insulated against charges of being a sellout; they probably offered him a bunch of money and he shrugged and said sure.

The tourist-y parts of it are pretty much all newly rebuilt anyway; there's not much of the original wall left at Mutianyu or Simatai or wherever.

They very well might, but Biden has already had 3 years of appointing judges, and he's already gotten probably the only Supreme Court appointment he's going to get for this term. Refusing to let them replace Feinstein now gains them little - maybe a couple of extra unfilled district court slots - while if a Republican wins the White House and then Grassley dies in 2025/2026, the consequences for Republican judicial confirmations could be catastrophic.

Placeholder Senate seat isn't so bad, you still get to be a Senator even if only for a little while.

They only said they'd do that if she took a leave of absence. The next 4 oldest Senators are Grassley (90) - who's on Judiciary, Bernie (82), McConnell (81), and Risch (80 - Republican from Idaho); if they start playing the "no committee replacements for dead senators" game it's likely to come back and bite them in the ass very quickly.

Here's a video of her arguing with children about climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu-VzZ45MwI

Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don't forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.

Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.

Ginsburg was worse; Feinstein at least was doing this in a situation where if she did keel over, a Democratic governor would replace her with somebody whose politics were broadly similar to her own, but Ginsburg knew perfectly well that her replacement might undo everything she accomplished and she refused to retire despite that.

Posthumous trials may be rare, but aren't there an awful lot of creditors / banks / tax authorities / etc in a position to make claims against the estate? (debts certainly don't go away just because you're dead)

I feel bad that she spent her final few years Weekend At Bernie's-ing for her staff instead of getting to retire + relax a bit.

I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.

(I think the reality is that they're mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)

locals may have to accept that same-day delivery is a thing of the past

In a pedestrian-friendly city like Amsterdam, couldn't they mostly replace this with a pickup depot / Amazon locker type setup? (maybe residents with wheelchair / limited-mobility / etc permits can still get front-door package delivery, but it's not something most people need)

Honestly, good for her but any agreement predicted on the assumption that Trump will still have, y'know, money a year or two from now is not worth the paper it's written on; if she wants to set up Barron nicely for adulthood, the best way to accomplish that is to divorce him and write a tell-all book.

Connecticut is especially dicey because they have a 1:4 ratio right up to age 3; if you have 2 kids under 3, like one of the mothers in this article, you're effectively paying 1/2 of a full-time employee's salary plus your share of all of the other costs (rent, utilities, insurance, supplies, administration) associated with running a daycare.

Childcare is an absurdly labor-intensive business and I don't know how to make it work for non-wealthy people without massive subsidies.

I mean that was more-or-less Werner Herzog's natural delivery, they just had him go in and read a buncha lines; somebody decided that Basically Werner Herzog was the right fit for that character and then they went out and got him to do it.

(I imagine this is how Stephen Tobolowsky gets many of his acting jobs too)

I wouldn't discount Harris' innate advantages there too; he was 10 years older than Gambon, aged more poorly (having been an alcoholic hellraiser in his younger years), and his natural delivery - even when he was much younger - had that sort-of wizened wheezing sound to it; "old and physically frail but with incredible magic power" was sort of baked in even before he added any actual acting to the mix.

But I don't know if there's an alternative who would have been better in that regard; the three I'm aware of them talking about were Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, and Peter O'Toole, but the latter two would have played him very much like Gambon did, and I'm not sure if Lee could have pulled off "frail" either given his voice + physical stature.

One of the few non-Avengers in the list of all-time highest grossing actors.

One of Chief O'Brien's more elaborate holodeck simulations

With him, Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane, and Alan Rickman all gone, the only members of the Hogwarts Professor Tontine left are Maggie Smith and Warwick Davis.

This Friday or last Friday?