I’d have to agree with the extremes of this entirely subjective and data free map.
I have to disagree with some of the middlin’ state rankings, though. North Dakota is a terrible place, I think it got a higher ranking just for Fargo, which really belongs in Minnesota. I’d rank Wisconsin above Iowa. Texas is ranked way too high.
Yeah, Mississippi is kind of the leaking colon of the country.
About a year and a half ago, I had an absolutely miserable experience. A student and I were going to the American Arachnology Society conference at Cornell University; we paid up the conference fees, made a lovely poster, booked our flights, and traipsed down to the Minneapolis airport…where we sat for two days, watching our flight get delayed and delayed, and eventually, finally, they gave up and told us that our flights were cancelled, we should go home.
That was terrible enough.
All this was paid through university travel funds, and I did all the responsible stuff of getting our registration fees reimbursed (I thought), and while we were miserable and disappointed, we were done. Except…my nightmare had only just begun.
You see, all travel expenses at my university go through some accounting software called Chrome River. We didn’t go? We spent less than we’d told it we were going to? Some of the planned expenses were bouncing back with reimbursements? Total shit fit. I’ve been dealing with its conniptions ever since, getting cryptic demands and threats by email.
What totally threw the software was a) Cornell said we were getting reimbursed, but we didn’t, and I only just got a check for the registration fees this week, and b) the rotten airline did not reimburse us at all, but instead billed the university for $60 for flight cancellation. That’s right, they cancelled the flights, but we got charged extra for the inconvenience.
Chrome River has been dunning me, personally, for the money for the past year. If I didn’t cough up something in the next few days, I was going to be held responsible for spending less money than we had planned, and was going to have to pay up or else. All year long, I’ve been getting these horribly opaque machine-generated emails from some evil accounting software.
Well, I think I’ve finally jumped through all the flaming hoops they’ve demanded of me, getting all the ridiculous paperwork filled out and filed today. I’m done.
Except…I’m told that tomorrow I have to log on to Chrome River and press three buttons to finalize everything. I’m terrified. I’ve seen how Chrome River reacts to tiny deviations from its required protocol. What if I press the wrong button, or press them in the wrong order, or fail to show the proper respect while following its demands? This hell might go on even longer.
I think I might have to retire sooner than expected just to avoid dealing with Chrome River ever again.
Do you want any of this crap? InfoWars is being liquidated, you’ve got to get your bid in by 8 November.
There’s probably some worthwhile electronics in that batch, but I’m not at all interested in picking up their domain names or media rights or backlog of bad videos. I’m just happy to see that morass of lies and misinformation being dissolved.
Do Facebook and Twitter next.
I was once a tech for some fancy computer gear, a VAX 11/750. It got way too expensive to maintain, but we couldn’t get rid of it — no one wanted it, and it had a university ID tag on it. So we stored it in an old quonset hut that was scheduled for demolition, and whoops, where did it go? There’s a solution for the InfoWars set.
Except that they need to get money for it, to repay all the victims of Jones’ lying depradations.
If you don’t care about birds flitting about, here’s another tool, TimeTree. It’ll let you look up the divergence time between any two species, in this case I just chose to compare myself with my house spiders.
700 million years sounds about right, but that’s just the general time since the last common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates. Our shared ancestor would have been some nondescript little worm.
If you’re arguing with Kent Hovind, it might be useful to know that the last common ancestor of humans and bananas lived about 1.5 billion years ago; same time since we diverged from the amoeba. The paleo-proterozoic was a busy time! Or, at least the seas were full of eukaryotes then.
In the olden times, before technology, at this time of year I’d normally be hearing the geese honking and I’d have to look up to see the birds flying overhead. No more! I can just check Birdcast and see how the annual migration is going. Much more data than I can gather with just my eyes.
Check out your county! It’s the only way to know what the birds are up to!
I came home this afternoon to find swarms of dispersing spiderlings — the trees and shrubs were dotted with these tiny little guys on skeins of silk trying to spread out and find new homes.
It’s October, you dopes. It’s getting cold (although this week we’re having a surge of warmer weather), it’ll snow sometime in the near future, unless you’re looking for a safe place to hunker down and overwinter, this doesn’t seem like a smart strategy to me.
Trump is letting it all hang out. His recent comments are all about eugenics and race and heritable criminality.
When you look at the things that she proposes,Trump, speaking of Vice President Harris, told far-right pundit Hugh Hewitt Monday morning,they’re so far off she has no clue. How about allowing people to come to an open border? 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them, murdered far more than one person, and they are now happily living in the United States you know now, a murderer.
I believe this. It’s in their genes, and we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,Trump alleged.
None of that is true. The 13,000 convicted criminals are the sum total of all immigrants over the last 40 years; immigrants convicted of a serious crime aren’t happily living in the US, they are in jail or living as felons; immigrants have a lower rate of criminality than life-long US residents; and it has absolutely nothing to do with “genes.” Trump has no idea what genes are, he just wants to blame the ancestry or race of all immigrants somehow, as if they’re carrying some heritable taint.
Don’t berate me with technical details about what constitutes a literal Nazi, he’s a fucking Nazi in spirit and deed.
My grandson is autistic. I really resent it when some Republican jerk who will do nothing for autistic people jumps on the bandwagon and lies. So this guy, Dave McCormick, booked some space in North Philly for an autism awareness event…and then instead just does a campaign event for his US Senate run. There was nothing about autism at the campaign stop, just a sleazy Republican handing out cheesesteaks and grubbing for votes.
Max’s Steaks, the cheesesteak place the event was held at, kicked him out. Good.
It was organized by a Republican operative, Sheila Armstrong, who is a member of Moms for Liberty. It’s lies all the way down.
After getting kicked out of the cheesesteak place, the sleazebags went looking for another opportunity to leech off an activist group. They saw that East Bethel Baptist Church was holding a fundraiser across the street for a food ministry…so they blithely went over there to suck off that teat. They got kicked out again.
The Rev. Thomas Edwards Jr., who leads the church, told his campaign to leave because he didn’t want the GOP candidate to use photos of his congregation for campaigning purposes.
“You can Photoshop,” he told the Inquirer. “You can make things seem like they aren’t. Maybe they’re going to post we’re eating dogs or eating cats, like in Ohio. Forgive me if I’m wrong. I don’t trust these people.”
That’s the right attitude. They’re parasites.
Also an exaggerated sense of self-regard. I guess this is an ad for a tennis match?
I don’t know any of the people featured, and am not interested in learning more. I suddenly find myself even less interested in tennis than I was before.
Offhand, I know about a dozen interracial couples — some of them are in my family. Republican Senator Mike Braun thinks it would be fine to dissolve their marriages.
In a media call on Tuesday, U.S Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind) said that the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong to legalize interracial marriage in a ruling that stretches back to Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
According to Braun, the decision should not have been made by the country’s highest court and instead been left to individual states. Even though some states had made interracial marriage illegal prior to the Supreme Court ruling.
They’ve discovered this handy circumlocution. They aren’t going to come right out and say that interracial marriage is wrong…oh no, they’re just going to say that we ought to permit states (that is, Republican lawmakers in some states) the right to destroy marriages, if they want. They’re playing the same game with abortion.
Come on, no one is fooled. Braun is a closet racist who has found a not-so-cunning way to signal to other racists that he’s on their side.
