That and Magnolia.

One person making all the decisions is a dictatorship, which is distinct from both fascism and monarchy.

Unless we replace the meanings of distinct words with the principle that all bad things are the same thing.

Is it legal for you to make this comment?

For Use of Weapons, the flashbacks are essential to the story, but you have to wait to the end for their full relevance.

I’m using Wheeler’s version of the MWI, because it currently seems to be the most common one—but I think Wheeler’s version is a misunderstanding of Everett’s. So if that’s what you mean, I agree (although in that case I’d say “the Everettian interpretation” instead of “many worlds theory”).

According to the quantum many-worlds interpretation, such a world would only exist if it could arise due to a random quantum fluctuation at some point in the past history of our own world—which doesn’t seem plausible in this case.

The password to my home server is a salted hash of my primary (memorized) password, so I can recover it from any computer that can run the hash function. From there I can access the rest of my saved passwords, bookmarks, etc.

Whether apple stems are perpendicular or parallel to the surface of the fruit.

not the UK who histrionically dominated most of it

I’m sure “histrionically” is a typo, but it still kind of works.

If I make a typo, rather than autocorrecting or deleting a few characters I delete the whole word and re-type it from the beginning. That way the correct spelling gets into my muscle memory and I’m much less likely to make the typo again in the future.

Yeah, but sesame oil is customary.

“Shit, did I leave the stove on?”

Even if every human on earth had their own pet since dogs were first domesticated ten or twenty thousand years ago, their ancestors were facing the stress of migrating into new and unfamiliar environments for several hundred thousand years prior to that.

Beneficial mutations are random, but the odds of them persisting are proportional to the frequency of the events in which they affect our fitness. And the proportion of stressful events in which pets were available would have been only a fraction of the total number of stressful events our ancestors experienced.

If pets are available in 10% of stressful events, the selection pressure for stress reduction that doesn’t require pets would be ten times greater.

That’s a personal benefit, but it’s not necessarily an evolutionary benefit. If it were an evolutionary benefit, the selection pressure would have been for our bodies to generate that response spontaneously without needing an external stimulus that wouldn’t have been available to many of our ancestors.

Accept that there’s going to be political diversity and social change (for better and worse) in spite of anything I might impose, and instead try to create an overarching framework to channel it into something other than violent conflict. One idea:

Let societies do whatever they want, but institute a “risk mitigation” tax (or other form of resource redistribution) based on size and similarity: if a social strategy is popular and widely adopted, it’s taxed at a marginally increasing rate until it reaches an equilibrium level; and the revenue is used to fund other, more experimental social strategies. This flips the historical dynamic on its head: instead of each society trying to forcibly convert the rest of the world to its own system, each society has an interest in discouraging others from following its example and trying something new instead.

Sometimes the articles themselves are fine, and it’s just the editorial department that adds the sensational headlines. I don’t know if it’s worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I claw my way out of a few feet of soil, and walk about thirty minutes to where the local Olhone maintained a ceremonial shellmound from 800 BCE until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s. By all accounts the Olhone were chill hunter-gatherers, so my best bet would probably be to befriend and join them.

They’d be more knowledgeable than me about everything in the local environment, so I don’t think I’d have much knowledge that would be of use to them. (They seem to have known of other nearby groups that practiced agriculture, but saw no need for it themselves.) I might eventually consider traveling north or south along the coast, but many other groups in western North America practiced warfare and/or slavery (unlike the Olhone), so I’d probably be best off staying put.

The two that immediately come to mind are Clarence Darrow and Cicero.

I think it’s a reaction to another institutional tendency, which is to treat the best known theories as if they were incontrovertible facts.

Science and history are largely the search for closer and closer approximations to truth, but those approximations are always flawed and incomplete. And if they’re presented as already-attained truths, a critic can point out the flaws as evidence of deliberate deception—and then present any alternative they like without its being subjected to the same scrutiny.