Yes. Good for him, and for everyone who got to use his road too!

Note that

Despite the Kelston Toll Road not being approved by the local council, Watts hadn’t committed a crime.

The road was in use for 14 weeks before the council asked for retrospective approval and the nearby highway A431 reopened early.

He stopped because there was no longer construction for drivers to avoid by paying his toll.

The actual transcript:

But [Dick Cheney’s] daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face, you know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh, gee. Well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy, but she’s a stupid person. And I used to have, I have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.

I’m no fan of Trump but this is unambiguously not a threat. The clear meaning is that she would would change her mind if she was one of the soldiers who would be fighting a war that she supports, not that Trump would threaten her with a gun until she changed her mind.

Not all older people are sexually attracted to other older people. A 70-year-old friend of mine confessed that he’s sad and frustrated because any woman he is attracted to is way too young for him. (He’s not a creep who would actually bother younger women.)

I worry about this myself. I’m still young enough that I think women my own age are attractive, but to be honest I can’t imagine being attracted to a retirement-aged woman unless she is one of those celebrities who have a hidden painting that ages instead of them.

I did a 1000-calorie daily deficit for a few months, in order to lose two pounds a week. I got used to being hungry all the time after a couple of weeks, but having a lot less energy and being sleepy during the day were harder to deal with. My body was trying to conserve calories that way, but pushing through it was possible.

The hardest part was actually accurately counting the calories. It was relatively simple for off-the-shelf food, but a lot more annoying for things someone else home-cooked for me. I had to ask for the recipe every time, weigh how much I ate, and then track the calories per ingredient on a spreadsheet. Restaurant food was effectively impossible to count, but that didn’t matter much because I was so focused on filling food that I wouldn’t have eaten it anyway. I’m a vegetarian, so I ended up eating mostly beans, tofu (which is also beans, now that I think about it), and vegetables. Other things weren’t as filling per calorie as those foods.

Have things really gotten that bad?

My impression has been that Harris is indicating that her economic policy will move in the opposite direction with her talk of “price-gouging”. Is there a reason to think she will do what this article suggests, other than the fact that some donors are asking her to?

If you’re a billionaire intent on becoming even wealthier, that usually implies that you really enjoy being a successful businessman. I don’t see why business success for its own sake would be inherently less satisfying than other sorts of accomplishment.

The police are thinking that too.

Investigators are trying to determine if the perpetrator was actually a pro-Palestinian activist or someone using that prominent cause to sow discord, one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

In either case, the actions of one person don’t prove much about the larger movement that he intends to support.

This law was already not being enforced. Only 463 people actually got in trouble for breaking it in 2023, so the odds of being punished for jaywalking that year were about the same as the odds of being murdered.

I do wonder what effect repealing the law will have on civil suits. If a driver hits a pedestrian, are there now new situations in which the driver is liable? The article says

People may also still be liable in civil actions for accidents caused by jaywalking

but that’s quite vague.

I think that’s quite a stretch. Girdusky’s comment is clearly a response specifically to Hasan’s expression of support for Palestinians. What’s the connection between “all supporters of Palestinians are terrorists” and being an Arab?

The answer does say

The reason isn’t some special string of A’s, G’s, T’s or C’s found in dad’s DNA.

It’s true that two same-sex parents of either sex have the basic genetic information to create a female child (a male child needs at least one male parent) but the natural process of embryo development is a big deal!

On Monday’s prime time show, after Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan stated that he supports Palestinians, conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky responded, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.”

The remark is offensive, but how is it racist? The implication was that Hasan’s ideology is similar to that of Hezbollah, which isn’t a race.

Galadriel and Celeborn were married in the First Age and the story takes place at the end of the Third, so they were married for at least six and a half thousand years. During that time, they had one child. How often do you think they had sex?

I don’t see much of a connection between the two stories: one man is a politician falling in line with Trump’s policy against illegal immigration and the other man was a legal immigrant who died after working for too long in very hot weather. The article does briefly mention that the politician is also against increasing legal requirements for protecting workers exposed to heat, but the article devotes almost no attention to this. (Apparently already-existing legal requirements for protection were not being followed.)

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Wasn’t there a 3.5 build that could in theory throw the moon?

“[Hancock] presents his theories as being superior to what the first inhabitants of the area say about their own history,” said Stewart Koyiyumptewa, tribal historic preservation officer for the Hopi Nation.

The Hopi people have lived in or near the Grand Canyon for at least 2,000 years and claim a sacred site inside the canyon as their place of emergence. They also have strong ties to Chaco Canyon.

Obviously Hancock is a crackpot but saying that he offends other people with equally falsified theories is not exactly strong criticism…

Don’t forget about device drivers. I can’t even install a newer version of Android on my Android phone because the community never managed to get the antenna to work after upgrading the OS.

You don’t have to go to a specialist to get antidepressants; many GPs will prescribe them if you ask. I also see a lot of online clinics offering prescriptions without an in-person appointment, but I don’t have personal experience with that. The standard antidepressants are fairly safe and I wouldn’t be too worried about side effects to take them without a psychiatrist’s supervision. Nothing except antidepressants worked to end my depressive episodes, as opposed to making them easier to bear.

Other than that, what helped me most was realizing that I couldn’t trust my own thoughts. It’s hard, because generally “X is true” and “I think X is true” are subjectively the same thing. When I went through periods of depression, I sincerely believed that I had never been happy and that my depression would never end, but as a matter of fact I had been happy (or at least reasonably content) for most of my life and prior episodes of depression had ended. Being able to realize that I had actually been happy and probably would be again, despite what felt true in that moment, made depression much more bearable.

Another key intervention for me was moving closer to my family. It felt like a huge defeat (here I was, an adult who couldn’t handle living on his own) but I told myself “plan based on who you are, not who you wish you were”. Having supportive people around helped a lot; when I’m depressed I don’t want to be around other people but that is actually the wrong strategy. “I just want to be alone” is one of those thoughts that I shouldn’t trust.

Finally, a really useful mental strategy is to consider what advice you would give to a good friend in a situation similar to your own, and then to act on that advice yourself. My depression was accompanied by a great deal of self-loathing but that loathing didn’t extend to my friends (even my imaginary friends). I found that I often knew exactly what advice I would give a friend, and it wasn’t to do what I had been planning to do.

I would be worried about causal mechanisms if we were discussing artificially introduced mutations. However, these are naturally present alleles and they would be considered only for the purpose of selecting among otherwise equally viable embryos. In such circumstances, I think that the risk of proceeding without knowing the casual mechanisms is minimal.