Actually, this is very normal practice — and if you think the Limitation of Liability Act is “ancient” because it’s 173 years old, hoo boy..... You are in for a big surprise when you go and google “general averages” for the first time! Because wow, you obviously have not researched this at all if you’re talking about…

Yeah, this is a pretty impressive bit of work.

It just makes us feel better about our own tenuous situations to believe they are.

A wildfire, sure. But this structure could certainly burn itself down, and fire rescue will need to respond to that.  Is that a reason to shut it down?  Not necessarily, but it is a reason a sympathetic person can be concerned for the safety of the occupants.

Well, and since the police are generally averse to providing security to homeless encampments (their preference is to remove the encampment), they typically will not call the police. Therefore, they’ll usually deal with it themselves. It’s not because they want to. It’s because they have to. So a person living in a…

I’m not at all keen on tying executive compensation to market valuation, regardless of the amount or form of compensation. There are a lot of ways to affect market valuation, and not all of them are good for the long-term future of a company. As a shareholder, I want to reward behavior that will ensure consistent…

I don’t think they’re low IQ. I think they’re low *experience*. Tesla and SpaceX I think seek out new grads because, being new to this kind of work, they have no idea what they’re worth or what kind of working environment they can expect or when they should be speaking up about quality or safety. They’re easy to…

Ah. My mom came from a 3M family — grandpa, uncle, aunt all worked for 3M. I would say she made a smart move leaving in 1992. That’s about when the company started to lose its magic. They used to call it “the womb” for how it would take care of you, nurture you, and you’d stay there your entire career. Then they…

Just don’t feed it after midnight.

The water ingress is very concerning.  I’ve driven into some pretty serious rainsqualls on the Interstate.  I remember one particularly memorable one on the high plains of Montana.  That’d be a really sucky place to get stranded for five hours.

I’ve always taken the presence or absence of a helmet as an indication of how much the person values their brain.

I always wonder what the attraction is myself. I mean, I know the helmet’s gonna be hot and stuffy, but BUGS!!!!!! I find them annoying enough on a bicycle, and that doesn’t go nearly as fast.

That’s actually a pretty good idea. Really drive home the consequences of not wearing a helmet by highlighting one of the classic sources of donor organs. After all, if the major organs are in such good condition after that crash, it probably would’ve been survivable if the brain hadn’t bought it.

Maybe this whole thing is just a bad idea in the first place.

Indeed you do not. ;-) Note: this in no way conflicts with my version of Pascal’s Wager. Nearly every belief system (theistic or otherwise, organized or not) contains some version of it, so it probably has a very high likelihood of being either true or, if not true in any universal sense, at least a pretty good idea.

I don’t remember who it was who said this, but I read a suggestion we should lay empty clothes and shoes on the ground outside and then hide after the eclipse, just to mess with the Rapture believers. :-D

Definitely “Nightfall”, but it also makes me think of Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness” (which may have inspired “Nightfall”):

Yeah, that’s where things go off the rails, because that’s when you lose the ability to tell right from wrong, fantasy from reality, truth from falsehood. Me, I have the firm conviction that all religions are wrong about something, and probably quite a lot of things, but are also right about a lot of things, and the…

“in aviation you also have multiple redundancies as well and can switch on the fly for inputs.”

Battery replacement is something that can be expected to eventually happen if the vehicle lasts long enough — and please DO note, you’re making this comment in response to a story involving a battery replacement, so clearly it’s not an unreasonable expectation. Making it more difficult to replace the battery means…