inspectorst

'Ah, Kamala, my old friend. Do you know the MAGA proverb that tells us cats and dogs are a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold in space.'

They can clearly enforce that more

Or, you know, at all...

I see far more Lime bikes sitting in the middle of the pavement than I do parked appropriately. Lime clearly has no incentive to punish bad parkers as all it does is lose them business for zero benefit.

The way to make the cost-benefit analysis work - and therefore to make Lime enforce against bad parkers - is for Lime to face a cost when their riders park badly. Local councils should just drive a van round and impound any Lime bikes thrown in the middle of the pavement and charge Lime £200 a pop to recover them - that would quickly get them to stop renting bikes out to hooligans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun

Imagine the queue to see Larry lying in state.

Yes - that was the next sentence I wrote?

In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s. It felt at the time that this line risked dating the episode but I don't think anyone could have expected just how much he would go on trash his own reputation.

The only thing that saves this line is that we found out a few episodes later that the character who spoke it secretly came from the Mirror Universe - where he grew up Musk's embrace of Nazism was probably seen as a virtue.

NIMBYs' excuses are becoming more and more elaborate.

Sky invented football in 1992.

Never heard of him. Do you mean Stephen Yaxley-Lennon?

I was disagreeing with you perpetuating the lump of labour fallacy that one can be anti-immigrant for pro-worker reasons.

When nativists use this argument, it's usually shit-stirrers deliberately trying to pit people against each other. They rely on the fact that the average person probably hasn't taken the time to conduct a literature review of the economic studies of immigration, but might be able to be seduced by a superficially easy argument that all their ills can be blamed on some minority and drawing on some cherry-picked anecdotes.

The reality of immigration bears little relation to the skewed narrative the nativists are trying to sell. Irregular migration represents only a tiny fraction of UK immigration. Immigrants are no more likely to commit crime than natives. Immigration grows the economy and has little or no effect on jobs and wages. Immigrants are net contributors to the NHS and public services. Once you knock away all the far-right's factual lies, it's hard to find the nugget of a 'legitimate' reason why people might consider immigration to be one of the major 'problems' facing this country that doesn't start and end with xenophobia.

The idea that the unions would legitimately oppose immigration is nonsense. Economic analysis of the actual impact of immigration has consistently shown that immigration has little-to-no negative impact on the incomes of native workers - immigrants don't undercut the wages of native workers so the unions shouldn't be worried about them.

A large part of that is because of the 'lump of labour' fallacy. Unthoughtful people assume there's a fixed number of jobs to be filled, but the reality is that immigrants don't just fill jobs but also create jobs through their own demand for goods and services. But there are other factors too like entrepreneurialism and business start ups - immigrants, as evidenced by them being part of the small subset of people who are prepared to pack up their lives and move to another country, tend to be more entrepreneurial than the general population in either their home or host countries. Some of our biggest high street names like Tesco and M&S have immigrant origins.

The small caveat to this is that immigration in recent decades has been shown to have a tiny negative impact on the incomes of the lowest paid 20% of the population (of about -0.5%) but this is dwarfed by the positive impact it has on those further up the income spectrum (e.g. +1.7% for the richest 10%). Obviously +1.7% of a very rich person's income is a lot more than -0.5% of a poor person's income. So if the unions are rational and actually want to improve the lot of the poorest in society then they should be campaigning for a lot more immigration and a very small increase in taxes on the richest to fund redistribution of this income, which will more than compensate the poorest for the fraction of a percentage point of lost income from over two decades worth of immigration.

What I find so dumb about naming children Khaleesi is that:

a) It's not the name of a character anyway. Apparently a lot of casual fans thought Dany's actual name was Khaleesi because several other characters often addressed her by her title. So there's a good chance that either these parents are casual fans who nonetheless then misnamed their child after a character, or they are serious fans who named their child in a way that will lead other people to infer her parents were casual fans. (Nothing wrong with being a casual fan, but I'd find it a bit dumb to name my child after an IP that I was only loosely into...)

b) The child is six years old. The final episode aired only five years ago. That means they named their child before Dany's story had even concluded. George RR Martin had been dropping hints throughout the book series that Dany might or might not end up as a genocidal mad queen like her father (the TV show had laid the groundwork for this less effectively, which is in part why the abruptness of her turn was so unpopular) and I find it bizarre that a parent would name a kid after a character who might still end up as a murderous tyrant

I think about the amount of thought and research that many of my friends have conducted when naming their children (including looking up famous real and fictional people with that name, doing word associations, etc). Then these guys come along and just say 'fuck it, let's just call her after that blonde girl off TV, Khaleesi I think?'