Well, the [vehicle] has been towed outside the environment.

I definitely agree about Christmas. It’s secondary to Easter. Ash Wednesday is not even a holy day of obligation for Catholics, but the Octave of Christmas, January 1st is.

The provincial governments in charge of our single payor health care system made the conscious decision to keep the liquor marts open while banning in-person sales of tea kettles (and we call ourselves a commonwealth nation!) during a pandemic.

I think our single payor at least partially did this to themselves.

The headline said “could,” so I’m going to assume the headline is clickbait and the price hike will in fact make it cheaper, or dare I say, free.

It’s street drug, otherwise known to chemists as 3,4-Methyl​​enedioxy​​methamphetamine. Some white trust fund billionaire got stoned and decided it would be funny to hear the media say a politician said something “on twitter,” so he decided to buy a website and name it that.

/s

Read between the lines in Amazon’s response.

They probably monitor the drivers for lip movements to see if they’re talking on the phone, but their monitoring can’t differentiate between singing or talking to one’s self and talking or singing to someone else, so everyone gets flagged. The drivers know the best way to avoid the ire of management is to simply not move their lips.

It may not be an outright prohibition, but it does have a chilling effect, which makes it as good as one.

[In my best nature documentarisn voice] Behold, what appears to be moving goalposts to the outside observer is actually a side-effect of the first-past-the-post system’s tendency towards two dominant parties.

Well, it’s not exactly in charge anymore.

And it’s not so much “made” as “funded”, and that was the one of the issues with Galileo. Galileo turned his anger towards the individual signing his cheques, when it was a layman who was rallying clergy against him. A good analogue would be the lay-led organization “The Catholic League” in the United States of America.

There’s so much that’s facinating about the Galileo affair, and that’s only the most recent thing I’ve learned: it was a secular opponent, Lodovico delle Colombe, who started adopting the appeal to authority fallacy by using religion as a defence against the theses behind Galileo’s studies.

If you mean humanity is filled with hypocrites, then definitely. I’m a hypocrite, too. Not that kind, but the “I want to raise my child to be at least not worse than I am” kind. Yes, the scandals are shameful. That’s why they’re called scandals, and it’s absolutely idiotic that the bishops (the administrative heads of particular churches) repeatedly thought covering things up was the right choice. Administrative ability should be a job requirement. Government transparency is a new thing, though, just in the past couple of generations, and business financial transparency more recently, so I imagine ecclestiastic administrative transparency will get will become an expectation in a few more. Give it 100 years or so, at least. Like I said: Slow.

As for the priceless artwork, would you rather the grubby little hands of the public and researchers have access to it, or keep it in a private collection? I suppose both have their pro’s and con’s.

There’s a subtle difference between backwards and slow. Slow moves forwards, but… slowly. It turns out “giving away the bride” was introduced by protestants, I’m guessing recognizing pagan practice at the time as a result of no longer treating matrimony as a sacrament.

Wow, even the Catholic Church is ahead of the game on this one.

Yup, and it’s just regular antihistamines. I took seldane for a while until they took that off the market, then it was on to reactine. It was a bit of a slap in the face when the reactine became non-prescription, and therefore somehow not medically necessary according to my insurance provider.

When I got married and had a kid, I discovered “trouble swalling pills” is indeed a phenomenon.

I have been taking pills since I was five thanks to my temperature-based allergy. I just salivate when I see a pill. It’s quite inconvenient when I am handling my child or spouse’s medicine.

no Morse code

Found the American, even before you mentioned the FCC. I’ve been wondering how much of an effect the different amateur radio licensing requirements have had on the airwaves. For myself, the main thing holding me back is my lack of confidence in passing the analogue electronics portion of the exam.

Perhaps his stident, Aristotle?

This story is more uplifting:

https://theonion.com/worlds-youngest-person-born-1819568725/

I’m surprised you haven’t found many people who meditate. There are a lot of people who follow abrabamic traditions on meditation (though they use a different word for it), and they can be found pretty much worldwide except for a few scattered spots.

I should caution you, though, the terminology used by these groups may seem quite foreign, but you’ll have to trust me – they meditate even if some of them don’t call it that.

Also:

• Any vacation spot with a lot of Russians, like Cuba. Nobody wants to tell a drunk Russian to put out their cigarette indoors, and smoking is allowed in open spaces (even covered spaces like open lobbies)
• Rome. Igneous rock is very porous, and everything ancient is made of it. Decades after smoking is banned there, the stonework will still be leaking the fumes out of its pores. The smoke was inescapable when I toured 15 years ago despite it being banned in indoor public places, and it will be inescapable 15 years from now.