Cultural malice can certainly cause offense, but to me cultural appropriation is a distinctly different offence, due specifically to willful ignorance. When cultural symbols have a very specific meaning, and are misused as vaguely exotic, people of that culture, who know those symbols and see them being used ignorantly and improperly, and now know that you didn’t really care about their culture, couldn’t even be bothered to ask anybody or look up how to use them authentically.

As a non-example, I don’t consider it cultural appropriation when culture when I eat tacos, assuming I eat them for the same reason the Mexicans do – their people’s food is better than my people’s food.

Sometimes I walk around town late at night. Last week I saw a guy with a sleeping bag napping in the park gazebo. He wasn’t bothering me or anyone, so I just let him be.

It’s enough to keep an individual housed and fed, but you’d probably have to go on the dole to treat a serious medical issue. I wouldn’t want to have to raise a family on it. I would not consider it a good income by local community standards.

(lower CoL part of the USA)

Why is Chicago so windy?

Adapt the geography as appropriate to the audience.

You need therapy bills to economically quantify your emotional damages so that you can sue somebody for them.

That Pete Seeger song (which isn’t really his, but that’s the version I heard) has Cuban Spanish lyrics and isn’t at all about a One Ton Tomato.

A definition I heard and considered useful included a few required elements. A hero:

• Acts voluntarily and altruistically

This excludes most military and first responders, such as the prison laborers in your hypothetical. Hero is not a profession. Heroes also can’t have any moral or legal duty to the rescued, such as pulling victims out of the fire you started yourself.

• Leaves a place of safety

You can’t be a hero by saving others incidental to saving yourself. A hero must have had the safe option to merely be a bystander to the emergency.

• Subjects oneself to risk of death of serious injury

Heroes don’t have to die in the act of heroism, but they must have been cognizant of that possibility and chosen to act in spite of the risk.

• To aid an stranger

You can’t be a hero by saving your children, or anyone you have a duty to protect, or anyone you expect to be able to reward you in the future.

Summit County (Akron) Ohio. It’s $1.25 now, but I think $1 per ride was the rate then. No free transfers, but all busses meet at the courthouse so that didn’t matter.

I’ve answered a jury duty summons, but never even got to voir dire.

1. Get summoned by mail.
2. Check website or call ahead to see if you need to show up.
3. I check website. It’s owned by domain squatters.
4. I call number, recording says go to courthouse tomorrow morning.
5. Take bus because I don’t want to deal with downtown parking.
6. Check in to juror waiting room. Get jury number. It’s high.
7. Can we validate your parking? No but you could reimburse me a dollar for bus fare.
8. LOL. We don’t do that. The bus. LOL.
9. I tell clerk about their website. They know. They lost it last year. (But still direct unsuspecting citizens to it?)
10. Okay everybody. We have enough jurors and the rest of y’all can go home now.

A philosophy major explained to me that studying philosophy isn’t really as useless as it seems. That’s because whenever philosophers start to understand what they’re doing, they stop calling it philosophy and branch into real scientists. He said it’s unfair to judge the value of philosophy by the useless proto-sciences currently under study, but to consider the whole history of philosophy which includes every other field of study one can get a PhD in.

I got Buzz Aldrin’s at some university watch party for some incoming space probe pictures.

You don’t need that sort of instructions, just vague feedback on what’s good and what isn’t is sufficient. Do more stuff like what got good feedback and less stuff like what got bad feedback. Think of it as AI training set and hope you have enough I to learn without the A.

One neat thing about solar and wind energy, that might have national security implications in light of recent events, is that it’s really hard to blockade.

I just wait. They’ll eventually understand and present my “losing” position as their own.

I know a couple of math tricks you can do with playing cards.

• Give an audience member a pre-sorted deck of cards. Remove any card. Riffle shuffle the deck 3 times (4 if you’re bold). Return the removed card to a random position in the deck. Magician examines the deck and identifies the card.

• Audience member selects any 5 cards and hands them the the magician’s beautiful assistant. Assistant examines these cards, and reveals 4 of them, one at a time, to the magician. Magician predicts the 5th card.

Jingle bells Jingle bells, Santa Claus is dead // GI Joe the Eskimo shot him in the head.

Row row row your boat, gently down the stream // Throw your teacher overboard and listen to her scream.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school // We have tortured every teacher and we’ve broken every rule.

Chinese, Japanese, Dirty knees, Look at these.

If she’s used all the pieces and solved enough to reverse engineer the shape of all the missing pieces, then it is fully solved. If the missing pieces cannot be individually identified due to shared edges, then it is still solved, but is no longer a 1000 piece puzzle and she should only claim to have solved the 999 or 998 piece subpuzzle.

If you indexed minwage to the local affordable housing costs, there might be more interest in building some.

Yes, I switch between a few OTA stations. Usually just on as background noise. There’s a couple of NPR programs that I sometimes try to listen to.

You shouldn’t kill anyone in private that you wouldn’t kill in public.