Clearly he’s out of practice.

I once had a package marked as having arrived despite never moving past the “shipping label printed” stage. But the company did send me a second one, and then a week later the first one arrived too and they told me to keep it.

Not really archaic - if this was valuable stuff washing up on shore, the law would still be relevant.

Members of the British government have been calling for strong efforts to ensure the shipping company and its insurers will pay the costs of the cleanup. Seatrade, which operates the vessel, said its insurers are fully engaged in the process, and in the meantime, volunteers are scouring the beaches, aiding in the cleanup (and possibly taking a few bananas home as a reward).

I would often use both the title and the person’s nickname, but never just the name. So, for example, “Papa Mike” but not “Mike” or “Michael”. It made more sense for grandparents because I had two of each, but I did it for my parents too.

I refuse to separate out my compost.

Speaking of mind blowing… I took ketamine for the first time a few months ago (by prescription from a psychiatrist, yada yada yada). I have just come back to normal from a ketamine trip during which I constantly kept thinking about what you’ve said. In fact, I was thinking about it so much that I couldn’t relax enough to get the full effect of the ketamine. For me, the first thing that lets me know that the ketamine is kicking in is that I become able to “see” even though my eyes are closed. I remain aware that I’m sitting in my living room and wearing a blindfold, but in my mind there are patterns that I can look at and think “Ooh that’s pretty.” Not just the abstract sensation of seeing a pretty pattern, but actually an experience like vision, complete with the ability to look at a different part of the pattern and see something new. When I stop being able to do that, I know that the ketamine has worn off.

I thought that that’s what people called hallucinating, which seemed odd to me since I never felt like what I was seeing in my mind was real, whereas people say that hallucinations can seem real. Now I wonder - can some other people, like you, just see things in their mind that way all the time? Amazing!

I don’t mean to imply that I think your experience of the world is the same as mine is on ketamine, since ketamine does a lot more than let me look at pretty patterns. The first time I took it, I was sad since I realized that I was all that existed and the entire world was a figment of my imagination, a dream that I woke from. But being able to look at things in my mind has been beautiful and very dramatically different from the way my brain works without ketamine. So far I’ve only seen patterns like twinkling lights, clouds, or mazes. You’re saying that you can see anything you want… Excuse me because I’m going to say something immature: if I could see things in my mind like that, then it would take me a really long time (if ever) to get tired of just seeing naked ladies.

But if I really have aphantasia, how is it that I’ve always been good at “using my imagination”? I love reading fantasy novels and they’re not just words on a page for me. And how do I solve geometry problems in my mind? I’m better than most people at geometry. Strange.

Interesting… I can’t do what you describe with regard to the mouse. If I focus on actually picturing the mouse, the most I can do seems like a child’s crude sketch, and only the parts of the scene that I am particularly focused on are pictured at all. The rest is abstract. And yet I can entertain myself by daydreaming in visual impressions. For example, just now I thought about a cool car chase, and I was thinking visually rather than verbally, but then I noticed that I hadn’t bothered to imagine what color the cars were - I can assign them colors now, but before there was just no impression of seeing any color.

Edit: And now that I think about it some more, the same is actually true with sounds. I can, for example, imagine the feeling of hearing a woman’s voice, but I can’t hear the voice. And the same goes for sounds that aren’t speech. I can imagine the feeling of hearing one piece of metal hitting another, but if I try to hear it the best I can do is the sound of myself saying “Clang!”

I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let’s say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.

This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.

(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)

Bing used to be better than Google for a time but it has gotten worse too to the point where I use Google again. Edge is, IMO, unfairly maligned. It’s a perfectly good browser, although Microsoft begging me to use it is quite annoying.

In the modern day, mostly because poor people live in undesirable areas and black people are more likely to be poor. Rich black people aren’t living near chemical plants.

(Black people became more likely to be poor because of a long history of racism, but social mobility is sufficiently difficult for everyone that they aren’t necessarily staying poor because of on-going racism. They would be living near to chemical plants disproportionately often for generations to come even if all racism disappeared today.)

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It was me.

I’ve never understood how being a wanker to someone whose job it is to sort issues out somehow nets you a better end result.

I saw a guy yell at an airport employee who kept telling him that she couldn’t legally let him on the plane because the cabin door was already shut. He kept at it until a supervisor showed up, contacted the pilot, and let him in. I get where the guy was coming from (because he loudly proclaimed that he was missing a connecting flight through no fault of his own) but it was still weird to see him get something by being angry which he probably couldn’t have gotten by being nice.

I think the emphasis of the article was more on people who resent having to spend two more cents in any circumstances than it is on people who can’t round.

I think most people will interpret that as confessing a crush.

I used to work for a guy who was never wrong. He didn’t talk much but when he did say something, it was always correct. He still hedged a lot, so he would say “I’m not sure you’re right; I think the answer might be X.” What that meant was “You are certainly mistaken and the only reasonable answer is X.”

True, but I still think it’s interesting to consider if some of these people wouldn’t have been willing to vote for something with consequences. Or if some people who didn’t vote for this would have been willing to vote for something with consequences.

The legislation passed in a 52-48 vote, with five Republicans – senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and the former Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky – joining all Democrats in favor.

I wonder which of these Republicans would still vote for this if it weren’t an empty gesture.

The PSF is (presumably) already required to comply with Federal anti-discrimination laws. Am I misreading the text or does it not actually create any new obligations for the PSF if they were to accept the grant?