MetaFilter

Clearly, we need a 50-year experiment of heavily taxing the rich, for comparison.
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 4:34 AM on January 4, 2022

Best. Present. Ever.

(Thank you)
posted to MetaFilter by thivaia at 6:06 AM on December 24, 2021

If it helps to hear from a lot of people, you need to talk to a lawyer immediately. You need to have your own lawyer, someone who is obligated to look out for your interests. Your sister and brother-in-law are acting in a very shady manner. Yes, it will be better if you can work things out with them in a nonadversarial way, and a good lawyer will tell you that. But you need representation for yourself because right now, you are in a very bad situation that they have caused. Right now, you have... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by FencingGal at 5:46 PM on December 18, 2021

I'm very much on the “talk to a lawyer before you talk to them” team. You don't have to take action the minute you talk to a lawyer, but you very much need the lawyer to tell you what documents you need to find and what your options are before you approach your sister and brother in law.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by ambrosen at 5:33 PM on December 18, 2021

IANYL, but I would highly recommend spending an hour with a good general practice attorney. You've got a number of issues that I see here, from probate to real estate law, and helping you make a plan on how to proceed. I don't know what part of the country you are in, but the $200-$400 investment would be well worth it. It is better to find out what you are facing at this point, than to let things progress into something worse where you end up *requiring* an attorney.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by furtheryet at 3:38 PM on December 18, 2021

Their case rate right now with Omicron is basically a vertical line. But their hospitalization nor death rates have not followed the same trajectory. So it's not quite doom and gloom.

Hospitalizations typically lag two weeks behind the wave of detections.
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 9:38 PM on December 17, 2021

So when are we getting Quake ported to JBIG2?
posted to MetaFilter by clawsoon at 3:17 PM on December 16, 2021

The Texas law itself sure seems ripe for trolling by a friendly litigant. It says that only the first successful lawsuit can collect the $10,000. What's to stop a woman from being the first to sue the clinic for her own abortion, claiming the bounty, and then donating it right back to the clinic?
posted to MetaFilter by ContinuousWave at 3:49 PM on December 13, 2021

Newsom has his flaws but if he's gonna troll both the Texas Legislature and the gun fondlers in one go, I'll happily hold his coat for him.
posted to MetaFilter by The Ardship of Cambry at 12:50 PM on December 12, 2021

I like this. You open Pandora's Box (imma call it legal vigilantism) you suffer the fallout. The Supreme Court is likely to approve of state funding of religious schools. What about when tax-payer money is then going to madrasas? Or the L'il Tikes School of Satan? Can't wait.
posted to MetaFilter by jabah at 4:56 AM on December 12, 2021

Australia, which look to the US as a model of modernity and/or moral upstandingness

A what the who, now?
posted to MetaFilter by soundguy99 at 4:34 AM on December 12, 2021

The good news is I already live in the top city they recommend. The bad news is I can't really afford it. :(
posted to MetaFilter by Space Kitty at 3:45 PM on December 10, 2021

We’re very far from feasible fusion power.

About 93 million miles, although it varies a bit.
posted to MetaFilter by notoriety public at 5:58 AM on December 9, 2021

I think I would have pocketed the orange, and tried eating the plate decorations.

Probably the 2nd time I visited a seriously high-end restaurant, our table was decorated with two small bud vases, each containing a flower in some kind of bubbly liquid. It smelled *incredible* and my dining companion, after some discussion, picked it up and began to like...very discreetly sniff it.

A server who was walking past swiveled... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:40 PM on December 8, 2021

I was surprised that I didn't find NFTs on the menu.
posted to MetaFilter by SPrintF at 2:10 PM on December 8, 2021

This sounds like the sort of surreal experience I'd enjoy, as long as someone else paid for it and I had a good meal beforehand.
posted to MetaFilter by Faint of Butt at 2:04 PM on December 8, 2021

I wouldn't ask those three individuals where the bathroom is, let alone to prognosticate on the doings of DJT.
posted to MetaFilter by dragstroke at 12:02 PM on December 2, 2021

We're never going to see the end of this, are we.

Well, we might, but not like, for the reasons you'd hoped.
posted to MetaFilter by pwnguin at 1:42 PM on November 28, 2021

Zeynep Tufekci's latest newsletter contains a heartening reminder that I am holding fast to in this time of uncertainty:

"Thanks to South African scientists, their public health infrastructure, their talent and dedication and the transparency of their government WE HAVE AN EARLY WARNING. A VERY EARLY WARNING.

I cannot overemphasize how valuable this is, and what a gift they have given us.

Thank you, thank... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rogerroger at 1:25 PM on November 28, 2021

After Greek we go to Cyrillic, then Hebrew, and then we challenge western readers with kanji.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 12:48 PM on November 28, 2021

I've been following hippybear's Sondheim retrospective posts with pleasure. Highly recommend going back through them to rediscover his work.
posted to MetaFilter by fight or flight at 2:16 PM on November 26, 2021

.

+1 on hippybear’s posts.
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 2:17 PM on November 26, 2021

But a nearby table of women on a girls night out were not okay with it and chose to take it out on their server, also female and of colour. Well, after hearing this poor server just get the shittiest treatment from this table of women, she decided to say something to them.

That's the mistake. If you want to intervene for a server, just walk up silently, hand the server a small cash tip, and stand there silently. If the Chad/Karen continues, hand... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ocschwar at 8:47 AM on November 8, 2021

What's utterly normal is for someone who works for an American health insurance company to deny coverage for something they know full well that they do in fact cover in the hope of making it enough of a pain in the ass to get them to fulfill their promises that you just sigh and pay it yourself.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:20 AM on November 3, 2021 marked best answer

The US Constitutional order was not designed to accomodate anything like the modern Republican Party. It cannot. Its days are numbered.

I’m unsure whose days are numbered here… The modern Republican Party’s, or the US Constitution’s
posted to MetaFilter by Stu-Pendous at 10:19 PM on November 2, 2021

It's really hard to build trust without a sense that everyone is putting skin in the game. In 2016, I reached out hard to family and relatives to try to find common ground, as many Americans did, and.... I got abandoned, quite literally, at a point of vulnerability I had advanced into because I was looking for reassurance that I-the-human was worth reaching out to listen to. I still have nightmares about the incident, years later; I wound up on the side of the road in an Alexandrian suburb with... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by sciatrix at 7:00 PM on November 2, 2021

At this point I don’t believe asking conservatives what they think provides any insight into their motivations or future actions.
posted to MetaFilter by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 6:23 PM on November 2, 2021

what do you expect is going to happen when you withhold evidence to a Federal court? Of course you end up in jail.

Man o man, I wish this was actually reliably the case.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 4:37 PM on October 30, 2021

I shudder to think about how badly calling an entity "meta" is going to pollute search results on so many other subjects.
posted to MetaFilter by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:35 AM on October 28, 2021

What Squid Game Is Really About: How decades of Korean trauma have spawned a pop culture phenomenon

If you did a show like this set in the US, and had Chinese or Koreans or Nigerians betting on which American would survive

If America had been occupied by the Chinese, Koreans, and Nigerians it would make sense.
posted to MetaFilter by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:42 PM on October 22, 2021

Somehow happened upon it in the app completely by chance. (Well not completely, had an inkling it was toward the start of a streak and that this was a week that got me hooked.)

Will Shortz’s “never been done” week was the week of October 12, 2015– Wordplay blog here with some hints and spoilers.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by supercres at 12:37 AM on October 21, 2021 marked best answer

Episode 6 though.

JFC

It got very quiet in the living room. Tears streaming down our faces. So well done but we could barely handle it.
posted to MetaFilter by Hairy Lobster at 10:18 AM on October 20, 2021

Vienna Vagina is right there for the taking

Not to mention Vienna Sausage.
posted to MetaFilter by dobbs at 6:33 AM on October 18, 2021

Oh, this is delightful.
posted to MetaFilter by ivan ivanych samovar at 1:59 PM on October 17, 2021

Well, from a frequentist perspective I'd argue that if P(brained by space rock within time interval T) is independent and identically distributed for any T, then the relevant probability isn't conditional but joint.

P(brained by space rock | almost brained by space rock) = P(brained by space rock), because "brained by space rock" and "almost brained by space rock" are independent events.

However, P(brained by space rock AND... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by biogeo at 2:58 PM on October 15, 2021

Exactly the same as the chances of being brained by a space-rock generally.
posted to MetaFilter by biogeo at 1:10 PM on October 15, 2021

(Which, btw, poses a big problem for any UBI scheme.)
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 11:16 AM on October 15, 2021

Is anyone else having trouble? I click to download the game but I can't get past the CAPTCHA.

You see a grid of pictures, some which show street signs and some which don’t. You’ve been asked to click all the pictures that show street signs, and you click some of them but not all of them. Why is that?
posted to MetaFilter by wemayfreeze at 6:59 PM on October 13, 2021

Have they tried claiming religious exemptions?
posted to MetaFilter by Faint of Butt at 6:08 AM on September 27, 2021

One does wonder where they got the idea of arbitrarily claiming other people's land as their own from. Surely there's no precedent for it in the history of Western civilization...
posted to MetaFilter by clawsoon at 6:14 AM on September 27, 2021

So I worked in the pinball industry for about a decade and I spent half of that time at Williams, which bought United Manufacturing in 1964 and moved into their factory on the north side of Chicago. The pinball/bingo stuff got pulled into the Williams brand but United remained a trade name for years afterward and only for shuffle bowling machines.

The old-timers used to talk about the engineers that designed the relay logic and worked in a corner of the factory with a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mookoz at 7:17 PM on September 23, 2021

I think there is too little attention being paid to how the actions of anti-vaxxers have made life shittier, in varying amounts, for basically everyone. So many people have missed out on what should be fundamental human experiences—comforting a dying loved one, being present for a child being born, even just stopping by and cheering up someone who's sick and having a bad day—and these small emptinesses add up and make everyone poorer, make life just that much shittier, in ways that are... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:55 AM on September 22, 2021

The striking thing about the sub-reddit is the sameness of the posts. Each award-winner posts the same half-dozen memes on their Facebook, accompanied by the same kind of hyper-aggressive rhetoric (which is abandoned upon admission to hospital). The same requests for prayers when they enter the ICU. The same hopefulness from loved ones when the patient is intubated (survival is unlikely at this point). The same eulogies about what a wonderful person the deceased was, and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cyanistes at 8:30 AM on September 22, 2021

This has nothing to do with the death penalty. Nobody is sentencing these people to death; their misfortune is (a) entirely self-inflicted, and (b) blowback from their own actions which have also caused harm to others. This is Wile E. Coyote atop a rocket slamming into a cliff, entirely unassisted by the Road Runner.

What is the alternative? To celebrate the rich tapestry of the marketplace of ideas in which they have so enthusiastically peddled the dogshit sandwiches of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by acb at 8:27 AM on September 22, 2021

Okay, pedantry time: "Just deserts" is the correct spelling. "Desert" (emphasis on the second syllable) is a mostly forgotten English word meaning "that which someone deserves." The etymology is obvious once you see it. The expression has nothing to do with either sand or sweets.
posted to MetaFilter by Faint of Butt at 8:08 AM on September 22, 2021

I don't believe in punishing ignorance and wrong-headedness with death.

SARS-CoV-2 Delta does.
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 7:22 AM on September 22, 2021

A significant part of the scam is that a lot of centrist Dems are in on it
posted to MetaFilter by Pope Guilty at 12:54 AM on September 21, 2021

This one:

Are you in pain?
- No, my body feels fine.
- Yes, something hurts.

...needs a third option: Yes, but I'm old so it's a given
posted to MetaFilter by Greg_Ace at 2:22 PM on September 19, 2021

I don't want to drink a glass of water, damn it.

To be fair, it does mention other liquids as well (or at least it did for me). It didn't specifically mention beer, but I'm willing to make that cognitive leap.
posted to MetaFilter by Greg_Ace at 2:20 PM on September 19, 2021

And when this happens again: “Well they weren’t using the pouch, your honor, which I determined was immediately suspicious.”
posted to MetaFilter by mochapickle at 11:12 AM on September 17, 2021