You don’t have to believe me, but I’m happy to show my work:

The state of Israel has always rejected the one-state solution and the right-of-return. (It makes political sense, as the Jews would be outnumbered in their own state in a few decades.) It has also rejected or sabotaged a two-state solution by expanding settlements, a process which has ramped up in recent months, so there’s nowhere for a second state to exist. Thus, the people of Palestine cannot live in Israel, and they cannot live in Palestine. No other nations would take that many refugees, so they also cannot leave. The, uhh, remaining solution is to kill them, and the IDF feels no compunction about doing exactly that. For decades, genocide hasn’t been the avowed goal of the state of Israel, just the inescapable conclusion of a cruel logic.

That brings us up to last October. So what would a genocidal regime do in Israel’s place, if it wanted to exterminate a group of people with enough plausible deniability to avoid triggering intervention by the rest of the world? Cut off incoming food, water, and energy? Check, Israel has done that. Contaminate the groundwater? Check. Destroy the energy, sanitary, and transportation infrastructure? Check. Render civilian homes destroyed or unlivable, and destroy businesses? Check. Destroy the health care system? Check. Drive the population toward the border with progressive waves of attacks? Gaza City -> Khan Younis -> Rafah, check.

And all of this, after several Israeli government officials stated explicitly that the goal is, at least, ethnic cleansing.

Oh, hey, Jerboa is not so good about updating the Inbox tally…

I was responding to your question about kW per hour, and I was going for the intuitive sense of why that’s not right. The more “it’s just so” reason is that the math just doesn’t work, since the word “per” signifies division. So if we discharge a battery at a rate of 100 watts for 3 hours, that’s 100W * 3 hours, or 300 Wh used. If we say 100 watts per hour for three hours, that’s 100W / 1 hour * 3 hours. The hours cancel, and the result is 300 watts, which is a rate.

It’s totally confusing, I know, because people often use “watts” and “watt-hours” interchangeably, but they’re as different as speed and position.

Anyway, the watt is a derived unit in SI, and it’s equivalent to kg·m² / s³. The per-unit-time is hidden when you write it as a watt, but clearly there when you write it in terms of base units. Of course, the joule is kg·m² / s², so energy also has time in the denominator, and I guess could technically also be a rate, but understanding that is way above my pay grade. 😀

Grosskreutz (the one who survived) could have shot Rittenhouse and justifiably claimed self-defense under the law. He had a gun pointed at him by a dude who had just wasted two other men with it. The law’s fucked.

He was being beaten with a skateboard after he killed somebody with a gun. So, uh, y’know, just out of nowhere. /s

Nitpick: It wasn’t a BLM protest. It was protests and unrest following the shooting of Jacob Blake. The events over many days in Kenosha included some organized BLM protests, but also outside agitators who wanted to stir shit up. BLM protests took place in daylight hours. Rittenhouse went there for the unorganized unrest in the nighttime hours.

I mention this because it’s a right-wing rhetorical tactic to link BLM to violence in people’s minds to discredit the organization and movement, and it’s bogus.

I feel like this would be the opportunity for just about the most epic, passive-aggressive forward of one’s previously-sent email in history.

Ah, I see where you’re coming from with that interpretation, thanks for the clarification! (For what it’s worth, for this English speaker, “articulate” has a very strong connotation of speech.)

Genocide is not the goal, but we have been able to accurately predict Israel’s next action every step of the way by simply looking at the script for what a genocidal regime would do. But genocide is not Israel’s goal. It just looks that way. Maybe a weird coincidence.

I’m really confused then, since “articulate” to me means clear, distinct speech, being good with words, or having the power of speech. I don’t know what it means in this context.

Perhaps it means “aggressive” in Autocorrectese?

What is it about these particular words that frazzles people’s brains and makes them forget that homonyms exist? The two continents are collectively called “America”, and “United States of America” gets shortened to “America”. Like all other homonyms in human language, these two pronouns are distinguished by context.

It must really confuse the hell out of people that the America’s Cup isn’t named after the Americas, or the United States of America. The America’s Cup is named after a racing yacht, which was named after the nickname for the United States of America, which was named for its location. So, I say America is not a continent, or a country. It’s a boat.

Seriously, though, I’m guessing the downvotes for saying that are for pedantry.

Yes, “continent” is a cultural category, and as such, definitions will vary across cultures. So if Europe considers America, north and south, to be one big continent, though they are connected by only a narrow strip of land, how is it that Europe and Asia are different continents, and nobody can quite agree where one becomes the other? They’re not even on different tectonic plates, like North and South America are!

My previous answer to this question was about buying a phone instead of renting from the phone company. I realized that something today’s children may never experience is the government actually enforcing antitrust law, and in the bigger picture, the feeling of trust that the government is there to look out for us and will do the right thing.

(Yeah, that trust was sometimes misplaced, but it existed. We also used to believe that the violators of that trust would be held accountable.)

And, if the villain were played by esteemed character actress Margot Martindale…

It’ll never happen, because they’d just have to pack up the Academy of Motion Pictures and go home, because it’d be all downhill after that film.

Probably the smallest that could be called a city is Dieppe, because a Huguenot ancestor of mine was from there. The smallest municipality that I can think of easily is John o’ Groats, which is reasonably well-known for its location.

The excitement of being able to go to Shop-Ko to buy a telephone for the first time.

Setting the clock and a timer to record something on your VCR

And then the #&@)#% sportsball game before your show ran long, so your recording cut off before the end of the show because the tape ran out…

The 5¼" floppy disks consisted of the floppy disk coated in magnetic substrate, encased a plastic envelope. The drive mechanism would only have one read/write head, to read one side of the disk. Disk manufacturers would sell single-sided floppy disks, as well as double-sided floppy disks that you could physically flip over to store more data on the other side. The double-sided floppy disks were a lot more expensive. The only real difference between the two types, though, was that the manufacturers warrantied that the second side would work; to save production costs, the disks were otherwise mostly the same.

The drives had a simple, mechanical write-protect sensor. If the edges of the plastic envelope were intact, putting a disk in the drive would block the sensor, and the drive wouldn’t allow writes. But, if there were a small notch cut in the edge, aligned with the sensor, the disk would not trigger the write-protect mode, and you could write to the disk.

The single-sided disks had a notch cut in one edge of the envelope to allow writing to one side of the disk. But, if you cut a notch in the same spot on the opposite side of the envelope, you could disable write-protect mode on the flip side of the disk. A hole punch was the easiest way to make the notch. Voilà! You could store twice as much data on the same disk.

A watt is a derived unit for a rate of change, an amount of energy used in a unit of time, so P = E / t. A kW per hour would be a rate divided by time, or E / t^2, resulting in another rate.

More colloquially, think of watts/power by analogy to another rate, that of speed. Moving at a speed of 100kph for 3 hours results in 300 speed-hours of distance. Saying 100 kilometers per hour per 3 hours sounds awkward, but is actually a weird way to say acceleration, a rate of change of speed. (And probably a hint to get your car serviced.)

Anyway, the key is to think of a kilowatt as a rate, not a quantity.