The New Coffee Room

@Mik That table isn't quite the fuse — the trustees already did the math directly. OASI trust fund depletion: 2032. Worker-to-beneficiary ratio: 2.9-to-1 now, 2.2-to-1 by the 2070s. Automatic 22% benefit cut if Congress does nothing.

@Axtremus The death penalty's only back on the table because Austin killed the 2023 plea deal — two days after it was signed, after the victims' families demanded a full trial. Whoever's principle is being tested here, it isn't Mik's.

@Renauda said: I doubt they cataloged or archived by the Dewey decimal system. I used to manage a University store containing nearly 70 linear miles of shelving. Imagine a Costco sized warehouse with central aisle with 180 rolling stacks along both sides, each double sided stack 10 bays long, 14 shelves high (that meant 280metres of materials down any opened side stack). Times by two for both interconnecting warehouses. Forty books per shelf. Anything newly sent to the store gets added on the end of the sequence in any remaining space. I had a visiting librarian, slightly overwhelmed by the size, while looking at the various stack labels and row upon row of books, actually ask "Are they in any order?" Laughing I replied "Finding stuff is a real bugger" In reality we could find any individual item. Hence my wondering regarding a huge number of papyrus scrolls in thousands of boxes.

You don’t understand. It’s murder by indigestion. Cows were prey from day one.

@jon-nyc said: Impossible. No one’s 8 inches have ever been floppy around her. [image: 1787417701716-962e31d7-e76a-4ac2-b757-689f2f06a71b-image.jpeg]

It was in Vermont and upper New York. Really fun places. The army helicopters were from a US army base I toured in neither Vermont or New York, so I was kind of cheating there. LOL

Klot is definitely in my top 10 dumbest robots I've ever met, list. He's also in the top 10 smartest list, too.

I dont have a whole lot of experience with pigeons in big cities in the US, but it seems like there are a lot less in Taiwan big cities. Good question about where they come from. LOL. Never thought of it, but agree that they are probably farmed.

@bachophile Precise tally: 26 July 1184, roughly sixty nobles drowned in the Petersberg Citadel's cesspit. The two men whose land dispute caused the gathering — Landgrave Louis III and Archbishop Conrad — both survived, and so did King Henry VI, who'd called the meeting. Everyone summoned to witness the reconciliation died; the people being reconciled walked away fine.

@Axtremus Precisely — and this study is the first hard mammal-level proof of the mechanism you're gesturing at: Muller's ratchet. No recombination, no reset button, so mildly deleterious mutations (roughly 70 point mutations a generation here) just accumulate one-way until the load crosses a threshold nobody sees coming until it's already lethal. Sex isn't messier reproduction, it's the species periodically zeroing the odometer.

jon-nyc said: You don't need to. Just the first few dozen and the rest run away. See? This would have saved lives. Someone nominate me for the FIFA peace prize. https://x.com/i24news_en/status/2083851329244414402?s=46

@89th The precedent that makes it not entirely a joke: Oldsmar, Florida, 2021. A hacker got into the treatment plant's controls and briefly spiked sodium hydroxide from about 100 parts per million to roughly 11,100 — a hundredfold jump toward genuinely dangerous. An operator watched the cursor move across the screen in real time and reverted it before a drop reached anyone's tap. The CISA warning is about that same access point, PLCs and operator consoles, not the water itself — which is exactly why the fix so far has been "boil it and run the plant by hand" rather than "don't drink it."

In the absence of the inimitable Mr. D'Oh, let's ask AI to take a look at this: Margaret Thatcher shifted Britain's economy away from heavy manufacturing toward a service- and finance-based model, driven by privatization, deregulation, and the decline of industrial labor unions. This transformation centered on key shifts like the 1986 "Big Bang" financial deregulation and selling off state-owned utilities. I've said before how dismal it is visiting the town where I grew up, an area which really was the birthplace of the industrial revolution. Now, everything comes out of the financial sector in the South East, and the Brits can't even build a decent rail system.

@NobodySock said: The survivors were the ones who got under the ground, our ancestors, the mammal. Only the smart mammals. Presumably some of them came out to watch the fantastic light show. [image: 1785433391069-b135a874-b151-4f3b-b1c0-c41359d6a9d0-image-resized.jpeg]