Recent Comments

1. about 19 hours ago on Agnes

   Congrats, you’ve been influenced by advertising.

   Women did not shave body hair until about 100 years ago when Gillette started pushing the practice to create a new market. Sexually mature females should have body hair. IMO it’s gross that our society only finds women not “gross” if they have some appearance of being illegally young.

2. 7 days ago on Non Sequitur

   And birds aren’t real.

   Conspiracy theories are bad regardless whose purpose they serve.

3. 10 days ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   I believe you’re incorrect. Falsely accusing an identifiable person of crimes, yes. Falsely accusing a general population, however, no.

   The idea of a class-action defamation suit is extremely intriguing. It would have to be very carefully framed to avoid using it to destroy free speech. Carefully and correctly implemented, though, it might be the closest we could come to making lies hurt.

4. 15 days ago on Luann

   Yes, but debit fees are lower than credit fees.

5. 22 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Don’t try to bypass it. If the mods see one, they remove it anyway. Just describe the source so people can find it.

6. 26 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

   This is sadly true of most bright, imaginative students forced into the meat grinder of standardized education.

7. 26 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

   Peaceful protest is patriotic, enshrined in the First Amendment. Accusing someone of being anti-American for exercising their Constitutional rights is, ironically, anti-American.

8. 30 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   And by “bans” I mean really weak legislation. For instance, in California, plastic straws and cutlery are only supposed to be given to customers when they ask for them. But then you get a lot of restaurants that just shrug off the law and hand over the stuff without even asking if you want them. There’s no enforcement that I know of.

9. 30 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   In the US, it’s not so much about the government lying to us, but the plastics industry. They’ve been raking in cash telling us all this plastic is recyclable and we’re just not trying hard enough, to keep us consuming while plastic waste builds up. Governments have struggled to maintain viable recycling programs when they’re being inundated with types that can’t reasonably be processed. For quite a while they were shipping it out, to China for instance, until those countries quit accepting it.

   When any kind of ban is considered, the industry throws money at the government to sabotage it. If any ban is actually implemented, disinformation spreads turning us against each other over it. People have stupidly strong views over plastic straws these days. And bans end up poorly enforced.

   It’s good to know that other countries have figured out how to do it. Maybe at some point the US can rein in the toxic capitalism and manage something similar, but it’ll be an uphill battle all the way.

10. about 1 month ago on Pearls Before Swine

    They have to pay personnel to take twice as long to pick up trash if there are two different bins. It makes no financial sense to pretend to recycle.

    There may be other types of trucks out there capable of keeping the loads separate. Split-body are the ones I see and the ones that came up in search. For a little while I had also questioned if everything was going into the same load.