Bay 12 Games Forum

"build a 2000 year lifespan affordable house out of non-renewable resources"

This is fundamentally impossible. Even if we halve your obviously hyperbolic figure (a structure 2000 years old would be on par with the Flavian Amphitheater in Rome) you find very few structures still in use that are that old. Even fewer such structures have persisted without extensive remodeling, and the handful that aren't disqualified under that criteria have received an enormous amount of maintenance. Most of the other buildings from that same era, built to exactly the same standards and quality, fell down centuries ago.

And the issue doesn't end there. Most of those old buildings are absolutely horrible to actually use, and are probably a net loss (in environmental and economic terms, not cultural/historical/heritage ones) compared to what would have been spent with regular demolition and replacement, because the people who were putting up buildings a thousand years ago had very different priorities and understanding of requirements than we do today. Hell, a lot of buildings a tenth as old (as in, early 20th century) are outright nightmares to climate condition and waste enormous amounts of energy. It is pure folly to think that anything we build now will be of great use to the people of the 31st century.

Maximum Spin is also completely correct here. The study only tracks English literacy, and the highest rates of "poor literacy" are in the California-Florida band along the southern US border. Where a pretty large portion of the population speaks Spanish as their primary language.

I had a very vivid dream last night where I was a 27 year old office worker named Alison. Nothing particularly odd, but the extreme specificity of it is a bit unusual.

These amendments weren't something shoved in to get support, they got forced in by a minority of hardline nutcases who have vastly disproportionate power because the GOP majority in the House is so narrow - if the 8 nutjobs that make up the MTG wing decided to boycott proceedings in protest, the Dems would have the ability to dethrone McCarthy and put in a Dem Speaker. Note that four Republicans voted against the revised bill, and four Democrats voted for it (presumably because having it outright fail would be Bad).

This bill now proceeds to the Senate, and the Senate does not have to just do an up or down vote on what the House gives them. They can alter the bill as much as they want, it just doesn't go to the President until after both houses of Congress have passed the same version. More importantly, a bill that comes from the Senate, even one that originated in the House, is not vulnerable to the same sort of procedural shenanigans that a bill originating in the House is. Forcing a simple up-down vote on the Senate version is trivial, and an otherwise identical bill without MTG's amendments will be very popular on both sides of the aisle. Note that the Senate is not only Dem majority (if only just), a fair chunk of the GOP senators are from the wing of the party that isn't deeply invested in the Culture War (which is an explicit reason why Senate terms are so long - insulation from random political fads) and aren't likely to want to jeopardize the military in order to please the nutty obsession of the week.


What's going to happen is that the bill will go to the Senate, all of the stupid amendments will get stripped out, then it will go back to the House and get rubberstamped in the Senate form.

No it must be tin, which surprisingly is more expensive than copper actually

Tin is a fairly rare metal. In antiquity entire wars were fought over a single tin mine.

Because of course providing size to the nearest 0,1mm is important! 

It actually is. It is the easiest way to make sure you're complying with the regulations of all countries you might be dealing with. Particularly in the case you mention, because the metric measurement is the one that is most often cared about.

We'll know in another few months. Even ignoring Operational Security, these kind of campaigns tend to be slow grinds until they suddenly aren't, just like the last big Ukrainian offensives were.

That doesn't make any sense. The most common ways to dispose of unusable books are to either pulp them into slurry to make new paper, or grind them up for insulation. These are commercially viable enterprises, to the point where there's multiple companies that buy books en masse from libraries and thrift stores for the purpose (usually with an intermediate "see how many we can sell on Amazon" step to recoup as much money as possible). Burning is just totally wasteful.