One time, i triggered some sort of shoplifting detection when I put my credit card up in my purse after paying. I guess the camera thought I did it in a sketchy way?

well, now i feel dumb. yes, that certainly counts.

Did he ever actually have the ring? I know he tried to take it from Frodo, but i don’t think he succeeded. Unless i’m getting confused since i have watched the movies more recently than i have read the books…

Edit: totally forgot about outside moria. apparently i need to do a re-read AND a re-watch lol.

Leggo my prego?

Makes sense to me, but there’s still the whole microplastics issue… But honestly, at this point, anything we can do to keep fossil fuels in the ground is a win in my book. I’d love to see us go down that path for plastic needs that are both necessary and supremely difficult to replace with other materials (like medical and laboratory applications), and stop using plasitic entirely for everything else.

a lot less. we’re talking ~2 microns (ie: 2 micrometers or 0.002mm). For context, the width of an “average” human hair ranges from 18 to 180 microns (there’s a lot of variability due to age, ethnicity, and lifestyle).

If you want to see for yourself, you can dissolve the aluminum to leave just the lining (scrub any paint off the outside of the can first). You can use a solution with pH either lower than 3 or higher than 12.5. For context, draino is about 12 on the pH scale, and coca-cola is about 2.5, but the closer you are to neutral, the longer it will take (so while you could theoretically use the soda inside the can, that will take quite a while). There are sulfuric acid drain cleaners that get down into the 1 to 2 pH range (though note that pH is a log scale, so that’s on the order of 10 to 100 times more acidic than the cola and will fuck your shit up if you aren’t careful).

For whatever you choose to use, be sure to look up safe handling and disposal recommendations before attempting, or simply watch this youtube video instead!

I have always used an ad blocker in the browser, but i recently jumped on the DNS blocking train and it’s like a whole new kind of awesome on my phone in particular.

I’m actually kind of OK with that b/c it pushes it to the bottom of the comments, so it’s out of the way but still easy to find if i’m curious.

LotR is generally published in three named volumes, but each volume is broken up into two “books” (in this context, meaning a major division of a literary work, not a set of bound pages). FotR, Book II starts with the chapter “Many Meetings” (when Frodo wakes up in Rivendell).

Do you think that rich people should have to serve shorter prison sentences because their time is more valuable? Do you at least SEE the parallel I’m trying to draw here?

And I already admitted that I don’t know what the optimal metric is. I just know that a flat fine that is the same for everyone, without taking into account their financial situation at all, is unfair.

I agree that everyone should be equal under the law, but that doesn’t mean that fixed fines are fair. The same amount of money has a different value to different people, and that perceived value changes depending on one’s income and wealth.

IDK if you saw my edit in my previous response with the community service example, but I think that might help clear up where we’re diverging. If it takes me 10 hours of work to make enough money to pay the fine, but it takes you 100 hours of work to pay the fine for the exact same offense because our salaries are different, were we really punished equally?

1. stealing != traffic violation. while stealing may have a fine associated with it, it’s generally based on restitution for the goods stolen + legal fees etc. So, you’re moving the goal posts on me, and my feelings about how to handle theft of necessities is tangential to the discussion (for the record, my feelings are: if you see someone stealing necessities, no you didn’t).

2. You seem to not be getting that the goal should be equal deterrence regardless of income or wealth or whatever the most fair metric happens to be. IDK what the baseline fine should be, nor what the most fair way to scale the fines should be b/c i’m a chemist, not a sociologist or legal scholar. But at the end of the day, if the only punishment is a fine, the wealthy don’t have to give a shit.

Edit: for #2, let’s use time instead of money. If instead of paying a $1000 fine, you could do community service. But the “value” of your community service is tied to your wage/salary. So, someone making $10/hr has to do 100 hrs of community service, while someone else making $100/hr only has to do 10 hrs of community service. Is that still fair in your view?

if the goal of the fine is to deter people from committing a traffic violation, the person making $150k will not be equally deterred compared to the person making $75k. If the fine has too little impact, it no longer works as a deterrent. This is especially true for things like parking tickets, where you aren’t necessarily putting yourself or others in danger like you might be for speeding (though, assuming the two people only differ in their income and all other variables – like how willing they are to drive dangerously – remain equal, then the point still stands).

Is the quality not trash anymore? Maybe it’s gotten better and i didn’t notice, but music over the telephone has always sounded muddy and distorted to me.

But… you never get to hear it because when do you ever call yourself? So it’s just subjecting everyone else to a song that they may not even like… And besides, the quality was like listening to an underwater phonograph cylinder.

(obviously don’t know your music taste; you may actually have had a great song of decent quality. but i wouldn’t trust everyone with that power lol)

y’all remember the “ring back” tones? i don’t think they ever really took off since they are a ring tone that people hear when they call you instead, which is… just… totally idiotic… but i did encounter it a few times in the wild.

And it was installed in the late 90s. That’s not history: it’s a gaudy, racist lawn ornament.

The only thing that makes sense is that they honestly DO believe a big pile of money will save them. Their big pile of money has been getting them out of trouble their whole lives, why would they expect it to all of a sudden stop working in this case? They’re wrong, but they don’t know that (yet).

hell, even with a part number, you still have to sort through a bunch of irrelevant stuff. I swear they must just “select all” when assigning tags to phone cases and stuff.

My mother is a sweet law-abiding citizen, always follows the rules. But cops make her supremely nervous, and she’s terrified of going to jail (even though, like I said, she’s done nothing wrong, but that doesn’t always matter). I’m afraid she’s gonna get pulled over for a broken tail light or something and end up getting hassled because she’s “acting suspicious”.

I would assume cops get training for dealing with people in stressful situations, but from all the instances of things going downhill so fast for little to no reason, it doesn’t seem like the training is sufficient (or like you suggested, maybe they are taught the wrong things altogether). Their mere presence can make people anxious, and stress alone can cause people to have difficulty processing the situation (not to mention the conflicting orders, the dogs, the yelling, the flashing lights, etc). I know that, for the things I’ve been trained to do, it’s a constant struggle to remember that others don’t know even the basics of my field, and assuming that they do is a recipe for miscommunication. But when i communicate poorly, it doesn’t end with people getting shot.