But that’s not the way standards of evidence work. Without a blood draw, there’s no evidence he was drunk. If he’s charged with a crime, if insurance won’t pay out because they say he was intoxicated, this guy could challenge it and say “what’s your evidence?” and there would be absolutely none.

The kind of attitude that other cop showed can ruin someone’s life nearly as effectively as a bullet. Sure, in a few years, things might get straightened out, but during that time, who know if you’ll be in and out of jail, unable to keep or find employment, unable to buy a house or a car, and you may encounter…

But even in Republican areas they’re usually decent about “voluntary” stuff (like “telling us when you think a coworker may be an illegal immigrant so we can round them up”); plus if they had a program that would help, say, buy cots and first aid kits for churches, it’d also tickle the right’s fetish with “blurring…

Joel’s.... rationale.... notwithstanding, can we talk about bad city planning here?

Right, and reading them is the only way to get through it. One useful tip, at least on Amazon: Looking through reviews with photographs shows you both some really good reviews at all levels of the spectrum (5 stars, seeing the product set up and in action; 1 star, showing how the product broke), as well as some of…

I think it’s important to think of statistics when looking at reviews, and this is just one example.

I always read 1 star reviews and 5 star reviews, along with a couple 3 stars (if it’s a product that I care about - if I’m spending $5, not a big deal). A lot of 1 stars seem irrelevant - “I ordered black and I got red,” and sometimes 5 stars are either fake, or someone who clearly just took the product out of its…

“Olds the world over may be lamenting the death of the REAL CAR where you did everything yourself because the REAL CAR MEN like to do everything themselves”

I think you’re right on a number of counts. What’s interesting to me as an American who grew up overseas is the attachment that people in the South have to the Civil War and the Confederacy as part of their identity even though it only lasted for a few years, and despite the fact that not only is there no one alive…

Right, but those are larger place names that would be a lot harder to change; town names change all the time, but I can’t think of places that are state level changing often.

I think that the answer is “no.” There’s a lot of places in the US still named after British figures, even ones that were alive during the American Revolution. Just around Washington DC, there’s Loudoun Countynamed after the 4th Earl of Loudoun, Fairfax Country, named after the Earl of Fairfax (though he was a…

If NK makes an ICBM with a longer range and nukes Washington while Trump is out of town, he’d probably say that he told Kim to “drain the swamp” and take credit for it.

It really depends. I’d say if you’re shopping used, a used rental is often a good value, because you know, at least, that it was periodically inspected and taken care of (at least, no one tried running a “how often do I need to change the oil really” experiment on the engine), on the other hand, the cars often aren’t…

This is one of the biggest reasons not to take a “normal” job at a startup: You’ll generally have to be paid market rate from the beginning, but unlike working an established firm, the chance of losing your job (the startup closes, it “pivots,” etc) are way higher. The only potential upside is stock options, but you…

Also, the engineering calculation (“can I function in your absence?”) is different from the economic/business calculation: Does the time you save me in a day result in more value than your cost to the company? Even if her work only saved Musk 15 minutes a day, there’s a good chance that 15 minutes of Musk’s time is…

I’ve really felt that the Avalon is a good body double for a Lexus; which makes sense because the ES shares its platform (you could make a similar-ish argument for a Camry), but you’re right, I think the Acuras arew orse.

Got to love a league where a guy performing an act of civil disobedience in an effort to make a more just America can’t get a job, but Ben Roethlisberger can rape and pillage like a Visigoth and has no fear of pushback from ownership, fans, significant chunks of the media, and quite possibly law enforcement in the…

Well, that’s even less excusable, because they lacked the understanding of their role to treat someone who might be a customer as a potential sale.

Isn’t that the ass-backwards way of doing it, though? If a random person asking tons of questions like a little kid who’s interested in seeing the real-life version of his Hot Wheels, then you can find a (nice) way of brushing them off.

The worst thing is that McCain, even before his cancer diagnosis, had said it was his last term. He has the committee appointments he’s going to have for the rest of his time in the Senate. He’s not running for anything, so he could really just stand for whatever he thought was right, and, yet, when push comes to…