This thread starts off with the wrong basis. All clothing choices are political. Just because she didn’t realize it didn’t make it less so. Ignorance is sometimes convenience, I guess.

I don’t really buy the Clash of Civilizations narrative, but at the same time I believe that — no matter what the participants therein say — that the burka/niqab/hijab is a form of forced servitude.

That said, I don’t know that banning the wear of such garb is the answer. I lean that way, with laws similar to those in France, but I’m not certain of it.

All these folks come out of the woodwork when there is some effort to preserve secular society, but there is nary a word when forced veiling or the politics of the veil is brought up, or Muslim oppression of women….

To me, preserving a secular society at pretty high cost is worth making some people’s lives worse or more inconvenient for a while.

God this is such a stupid discussion.

That you sexually harass people doesn’t mean you are terrible at everything else. It just means you are an asshole, and assholes have many other talents — just like anyone else.

In fact, I’d wager that sexual harassers because they are boundary breakers might produce slightly more and better science individually but harm science overall. Note: this is not condoning their behavior! I’d like to tase all of them right in the face. But people who push too hard in one area tend to do so in others, too. The “benefit” though is probably outweighed by the massive drawbacks such as good people (mostly women) being ejected out of science.

Most people are pretty horrible. I just can’t get behind the “I can’t watch, read, listen to, or trust the science of anyone who is not completely perfect.”

It’s just senseless, and if one were to practice that, you’d have to live in a cave eating bark.

Sarah Hörst’s Titan dress is titanically cool:

So excited about how the Titan dress turned out. Thanks so much @ShenovaFashion #dps17 pic.twitter.com/LRxKgmqtyC

— Sarah Hörst (@PlanetDr) October 18, 2017

I hear people say things all the time like, “If you get a 30-year mortgage, you pay more in interest than the house cost!”

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Wrong.

If you get a 30-year mortgage, in a stable monetary environment, the value of a particular dollar deflates over time, so that each year you pay progressively less relative to your starting year.

I’m explaining this poorly. The 1st year of your mortgage, your 2018 dollar is worth about the same as your 2017 dollar. Just a little less. But your 2027 dollar is worth a lot less than your 2017 dollar. Yet, you still pay the same amount to the mortgage company. They don’t raise the payment (in a standard fixed-interest loan). And generally, salaries at least keep pace with inflation, as do house prices.

In other words, you are giving less valuable dollars of the same absolute amount (say, $800 a month) to the mortgage company while you make more and your house is worth more relative to those fixed payments.

If you actually do the math on a 30-year mortgage vs. inflation, and you include housing price rises and a few other minor factors, the cost of a mortgage (the interest) should roughly equal these numbers — in other words, you “really” pay roughly zero interest over time….

By the way, this is why it’s not always to your advantage to pre-pay a mortgage especially.

Don’t believe it when you hear someone say, “You paid more in interest than you paid for the house.”

It’s only true if you don’t understand a damn thing about anything.

I remember in high school my biology teacher got fed up with me because I insisted on calling Charles Darwin and his contemporaries, “Chuck D and the Beagle-y Boys.” God, I was annoying. But funny. But still annoying.

(It was strange that my high school even taught an evolution unit considering at least half the teachers and 80% of the student body didn’t believe in it. A state requirement, though, at the time.)

I couldn’t be happier with my new 5K iMac. It’s faster, quieter, more capable and just overall better than the late 2014 model.

But the new MacBooks sound like utter pieces of garbage.

First, no escape key and a useless touch bar. Then, like the iPhone, dongle hell. Now, a keyboard that a single piece of dust can destroy.

My next laptop will definitely not be made by Apple, unfortunately. I need more than one or two goddamn ports, and I definitely do not need a keyboard that a single piece of dust can destroy.

Have you noticed that we live on a pretty dusty planet?

I love it that every time someone has told me I shouldn’t invest in Amazon, I’ve made over 400% on that stock.

God I love other people’s advice. So good. If I do the exactly opposite.

To quote Dev09, “If I followed your advice, I’d be where you’re at.”

Do not impeach Trump. Just don’t do it. If you hate women, I guess, go ahead.

Do you not understand, impeachment virtue signalers, that if you impeach Trump, Pence is in like mortal sin? He’s a Christian nut bar and he despises women in ways Trump doesn’t even dream about.

Impeaching Trump is a terrible idea. Just don’t.

I can’t bring myself to give a single crap about Catalonia’s independence movement. Admittedly, I know very little about it and wish I knew less than I do.

To me, it seems a modern expression of neoliberal-infused identity politics and consumer “choice” as an expression of those politics.

I could be wrong, but I also don’t care.

What the hell is the deal with Harvey Weinstein wanting to shower in front of women? Is that some fetish I just wasn’t aware of?

That man is a damn creep circus. He makes regular creeps look like Ned Flanders. He’s so creepy that when Radiohead’s first big hit comes on the radio the DJ just calls it “Harvey.” If Jeffrey Dahmer were still alive, about Weinstein he’d be like, “Home slice is all kinds of fucked up.” Harvey Weinstein is like the exaggerated example of creepiness you bring up in front of the campfire to scare kids.

But he’s real. And he likes to shower in front of unwilling women for unknown reasons.

What working out can do for you:

oh my god. oh my god https://t.co/BnLbFRe2tR pic.twitter.com/5fAEEma3UY

— Casey Johnston (@caseyjohnston) October 16, 2017

Alicia Vikander’s traps are unbelievable, as Casey Johnston noticed. She looks like a sculpture.

Here’s the same actress’s traps in Ex Machina (they basically don’t exist in any noticeable form):

Good fucking job, AV. I know exactly how much work that takes. And Caleb probably wouldn’t like you anymore, looking all swole like that. So, win!

Another reason not to upgrade Firefox, as if you needed one. It’s now installing spyware garbage processes on your PC.

FUCK THAT.

It’s disappointing how hobbled Firefox 57 is. Anything I want or need to do is basically just impossible. Tasks that used to take me less than a second now take 30-45 seconds. Sometimes up to 10 minutes in extreme cases.

It’s a browser for morons, by morons.

A former friend of mine argued that you didn’t actually understand something until you could work it out mathematically.

Then he’d get angry that I could accurately reason about what would happen in complicated relativity problems intuitively, without doing any math, and that he couldn’t do this.

Sorry, buddy, you know the equation. But I know what the equation means.

How do so many people stand to browse sites on their smartphones?

Phones — even the very best ones — are so weak and terrible compared to any decent computer.

I’m constantly shocked by the willingness of people to subject themselves to just horrible experiences for the sake of artificial convenience.