We were taught a similar trick in physics - point your right-hand thumb in the direction that current (or electrons, same same) is travelling and the curling of your fingers shows the direction of the resultant magnetic field that the current creates.

Many forget that a meme is simply a concept or idea that grabs hold within a human community and is propagated and promulgated. Patriarchy is a meme. Capitalism is a meme. Doing ‘bunny ears’ behind someone’s head in a photo is a meme (h/t Parker and Stone). Doing cave paintings of animals is a meme. Fashion of an era is a meme. Our entire social structure runs on memes.

I donate regularly to a charity and don’t try to dictate how they spend that money, because I have faith that they’ll responsibly use my donations.

And their venom HURTS. They’re not particularly deadly or anything but their venom will land you in the hospital or at least laid up in bed for a while. My stepmother grew up out in the bush in NSW the ‘70s and received one of the few recorded platypus envenomations and she described it as the most painful experience of her life. She said childbirth was a breeze compared to the platypus sting!

You guys can use €0.50 coins?! Over here in Australia it’s either a $1 or $2 coin. I wish I could chuck a 50¢ piece in the trolley.

And that edit can be as minute as changing a single bit of data that is imperceptible to the human ear. As long as a human being has put input into it, they’ve edited it, and there’s copyright that can be protected.

It’s really sad to me that Americans get put in the awful position of choosing between tipping, which supports the low wages, and taking responsibility for ensuring another human being has a living wage. It’s just such a terrible position for a consumer to be placed in, having to make ethical and moral choices about how much money to pay for goods and services.

For reference here in Australia my wife has been asking to get mammograms for years now (in her 30s) and she keeps getting told she’s too young because she doesn’t have a familial history. That issue is a bit pervasive in countries other than the US.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=796VtspzH0I

We got a small taste of that during the Obama years… just imagine what happens when you multiply African-American with South Asian and female! I think we’ll see those whose masks have been slowly cracking through the ‘45’ years go absolutely balls-to-the-wall mask off. It will be an interesting four years to say the least!

Honestly, a part of me wants the Dump to be completely disqualified from running; Biden to step aside; and Nikki Haley to come back from the grave so that there’s a contest between two South Asian women for president. The voting public’s mind would EXPLODE.

While I loved PropertyCity while I lived there, my early years in RuralTown showed that’s where the real Country really is. We had a herd of FarmAnimals and would always go down to the WaterBody on the weekends where the LargeMammals roamed free and wild!

I had a little chuckle-up myself

The first thing I played when I bought mine was Losing My Religion - so much fun to jam out to some REM on these beautiful lutes. Looks like you’ve got yourself one sexy sounding songmaker right there!

Uhhh, no. That’s not how RCV works at all.

Let’s say there are five candidates - A, B , C, D, and E.

Let’s assume candidates A & B are the most popular.

Personally I choose to rank them as C, E, D, B and then A.

Out of all of them, no one gets over 50% of the #1 vote. Whoever gets the lowest #1 vote is knocked out first. Let’s suggest that this is C. All of their #1 votes and therefore my vote is then transferred to E.

Let’s suggest that after this there’s still no one who has over 50% of the vote between the other four candidates. Let’s further assume that candidate E has the lowest resulting vote after the first round of knockout. My vote is then transferred to candidate D.

Out of A, B, and D, let’s assume none of them still have over 50% of the vote after this redistribution. Let’s further assume that D has the lowest vote of the three. My vote is then transferred to B.

Given there are only two candidates left, one will have to have a majority. That candidate wins.

Under RCV, as long as you mark every box with a preference your vote can never ever be wasted. It will always end up with a candidate that wins or one that loses, but it cannot ever be exhausted and therefore meaningless.

Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.

That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.

Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!

The reference is to Rupert Murdoch; a man who hasn’t been Australian since 1985 when he gave up his Australian Citizenship to become naturalised as an American. He created NewsCorp which became the Fox Corporation; one of the most politically viable and mainstream news sources of the 20th and 21st centuries in the US media landscape.

The revocation of the word ‘mate’ just honestly shows that Americans are so very alien to the concept of immigrants that even an Anglophonic immigrant who’s been a US citizen for almost 40 years still isn’t somehow ‘American’ if their slang hasn’t been fully naturalised as well.

That’s really interesting! In the Australian content, we would only ever call a strip of shops a ‘mall’ if they weren’t connected by some interior structure. In fact, our ‘malls’ are almost all outdoor connections of shops. So interesting how our vocabularies vary!

Exactly right; sex work has always existed (relative to the existence of currency/bartering tribute and some semblance of homo sapien societies) and will always exist in some form. There have always been those who are willing to be in relationships with sex workers and those that won’t. The landscape has changed, but the world’s oldest profession remains.

Out of curiosity; where are your grocery stores, pharmacies and post offices? Because here in Australia, most of them are in shopping centres (Aussie for ‘mall’). The vast majority of us go to do our weekly shop, grab medication, send back returns from our online shopping etc. so they’re still very much alive and well.

Simps don’t suck; they do the dating world a service. Anyone whose concept of self-esteem is so external that they derive it from the admiration of strangers is not someone who is ready for a serious or monogamous relationship. Simps help identify those people and weed them out of the regular dating pool.