ffs USA, surely you know that democracy is about electing the people most citizens like, rather than the people most citizens don’t not like…

I can’t believe no one has given this advice yet: https://piped.video/watch?v=vvmpc83nv4A

And meanwhile, in Ireland:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheela_na_gig

Around the same time, in Turkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_inscriptions_in_Hagia_Sophia

In 1976, Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother died. A flight from Israel to Paris had been hijacked by some Palestinian and German terrorists, and flown to Uganda, where they demanded release of prisoners, threatening to kill the Israeli and Jewish passengers (the rest were released). Israel decided to launch a mission on foreign soil to rescue them, and I think Bibi’s older brother was the sole Israeli casualty.

What we are seeing today in Gaza is most likely, mostly, as a direct result of that death. Raw caveman emotion. (with a few decades of carefully layered public relations)

[now I’m going to go upvote all the heart-warming examples of human kindness in this thread]

In Biostatistics - only ever use pi in the variance of the logistic density. Using 3.14 gives substantially equivalent results to using arbitrarily large precision. But I use whatever my calculator or R give me.

Absolutely, imagemap. Extra kudos if you use a pre-v1.0 GIMP, pen and paper.

I’ve heard the socioeconomic differences thing many, many times, and have kids that wear uniform. But I’ve never understood that argument.

It conceals socioeconomic differences. Which in the case of economic differences, is probably not egalitarian, strictly speaking? Ditto for social “class” in the sense of whether the family is historically “monied” and has particular dress style. In the case of cultural or ethnic differences, I do not see how the egalitarian logic follows either, as freely expressing your identity is restrained.

In terms of bullying… in my experience bullies will always bully. They will just do it on your overcoat, or how old your uniform is, or your earrings, or your accent, or the colour of your hair. I don’t know, maybe the uniform helps a bit…

So many suggestions possible with that prompt.

I might suggest the Vlad Taltos series, starting with Jhereg, by Steven Brust. Reaslistic characters, snappy dialog, interesting premise of human’s status in the society, and a pretty far-out series of villains. It comes down to more or less a first person assassin- / intrigue-based plot with cleverly set-up who-dunnit elements here and there, and an overarching storyline, and a good sense of the universe.

Some good suggestions in this thread. If you want even more options - I have been tapping into this Slashdot thread for a decade now, and it’s still giving me winners - which might not work for you, mind (e.g .“Little, Big” by Crowley, it led me to “To Reign in Hell” also by Brust, “Jack of Shadows” by Zelazny,)

Or when you’re looking for the Chinese consulate.

Time to go smol.

Unfortunately, no it’s not catastrophic. I think we’ll run out of adjectives before this is over, so we need to ration them now.