The taxes are ultimately a wash. It’s revenue in/revenue out.

Your second sentence is the real reason.

A scripture so inconvenient that they had to spend a good chunk of the last 2,000 years contorting an explanation for why the obvious reading must be wrong.

Not necessarily a nepo hire, but they are scraping the barrel.

Project 2025’s playbook was to fire all the existing people in the federal government and replace them with Trump loyalists. To that end, they created a list of pre-vetted replacements.

Problem is, those people are vetted for loyalty first, and competence a distant second. Also, a lot of them likely have jobs already that are more lucrative than a federal position. In other cases, their circumstances change in the months in between vetting and the offer becoming concrete. So even though they may have a few thousand people on the list, a big chunk of them aren’t going to accept when the time comes. Those that do aren’t necessarily going to be qualified in any way.

What may be surprising here is that they’re scraping the bottom so quickly. You’d think out of several thousand possibilities, they could find someone more qualified than this guy.

This tends to be destructive in the short term, because incompetent people are making important decisions. In the long term, it’s one of the self-defeating factors of fascism. A system just can’t work this way, but it can destroy the rest of society before it implodes on itself.

The best examples of raytracing are in applying it to old games, like Quake II or Portal or Minecraft.

Newer games were already hitting diminishing returns on photo realism. Adding ray tracing takes them from 95% photo realistic to 96%.

The claim that the Psalms are just poetry is going to be heartbreaking to anyone that cites them as prophecies about Jesus

That’s completely fine. The early Christians went to great lengths to try to say “this bit here was prophecy, and here’s how our guy fulfilled it”. But nobody was viewing those passages as prophecies before then. It was all marketing for a weird little offshoot of Judaism on the fringes of the Roman empire which happened to take off centuries later.

Historically, this is what the NRA was for. They had basic designs setup that were very safe, and they’d offer grants to build them. There’s a local range by me (a private club, not state owned) that was developed that way. It’d be hard to shoot a bullet and have it get out of the range area.

They still kinda do it, but it looks like the industry is sending the funds on their own rather than funneling it through the NRA. Makes sense given the current state of the NRA.

Besides all the points everyone else has mentioned:

“Even if just one rapist changes his mind about raping a child, I will take that.”

Always be skeptical anytime anyone uses an argument of this form. There are tradeoffs for everything, but this phrasing only serves to stop people from weighing them fairly.

Oh, and the above quote comes from the co-sponser of the bill, who is a Democrat. Just in case you thought this was a Republican problem.

US water softeners are usually only on the hot pipe. They tend to add sodium to the water, and it’s not recommended to make it your primary drinking water source.

Southern US is the best place for developing new methods to kill yourself in delightful ways.

You get 3-phase in the US if you live in a large apartment complex. Especially if it has an elevator. Since this combines to get 208V, the math works out to making your 240V stove only 75% of what it should be.

For residential use, split phase is fine. We just run the two legs to get 240V on the specific things that need it. That’s generally electric stoves, water heaters, AC unit, electric dryer, and more recently, EV chargers. 3-phase is great when you’re driving something that spins with a high draw, and of those, only the AC unit does that (electric dryers spend most of their electricity heating, not spinning).

As a combo tea/coffee drink, it tastes horrible. Nobody wants tea flavored coffee or coffee flavored tea. Although you usually don’t get tea flavored coffee in those hotel drip makers, but only because the grounds they use are shit tier quality and taste too burnt to even get tea flavors.

Have to drop the US number by 20% for continuous loads like a kettle would be.

That said, US homes built in the last 40 years or so tend to have a lot of separate circuits in the kitchen. My house has one for the fridge, one for the disposal, one for the dishwasher, one for the lights that’s shared with lights in adjacent areas, stove has its own 240V outlet, and then one for all the other plugs. If I ran the microwave and a kettle and a mixer all at once, I’d probably still trip it, but that’s a lot of multitasking going on.

Zojirushi. They last. Since it’s BIFL, I don’t see the extra cost as a big problem. That’s what you deal with when you BIFL.

Microwave magnetron efficiency is around 65%. Since a kettle turns electricity directly into heat, it’s basically 100% efficient.

A caveat is that microwaves will heat water directly and won’t lose as much to its surroundings. This is similar to why induction stoves are more efficient; they’re less efficient on paper than direct electric heating or burning gas, but they heat the thing you want in a more direct way.

Even so, a microwave isn’t great for this task. If you’re short on space and don’t want even a small travel kettle, I can see why you’d take this option. Otherwise, no.

Most residential outlets in the US are going to be a 15A limit. You also have to reduce that by 20% for a continuous draw.

UK might be able to get away with the full usage because their plugs are designed to have a fuse built in. Not entirely sure on that, though.

That said, kettles are still a better option most of the time. Technology Connections has real world tests of this.

We have a Zojirushi. 120V does limit it somewhat, but it’s fine.

The water in our area of country is also hard as shit. We have undersink RO now, but before then, mineral buildup in the kettle was bad. Crusted like concrete if we didn’t stay on top of it.

Along those same lines, they didn’t put parking lots in Sim City. They tried, but it completely fucked everything.

A good reminder that the system was already broken before Trump got here.

Would recommend getting a ham license if you’re going to use these. There are flashcard apps that can run you through the tests. Morse code isn’t required anymore. Not hard to pass.

So they aren’t weeks away from a functioning weapon, and we can recall all the military buildup, right?

Right?