Wait, you’re telling me other countries have long processes for immigrating? I’m shocked. SHOCKED! Well, not that shocked.

Save your money, y’all. You might need it if you ever need to flee to Canada as a refugee.

Flowers together strong 🪻

Amtrak currently runs trains on the freight tracks, but as Amtrak essentially leases the privilege of using the tracks at all from CSX and BNSF and Union Pacific and the like, their traffic gets heavily deprioritized to freight trains. You can totally catch a train from Fort Worth to Los Angeles, but it will take a few days longer than driving, will be almost as expensive as flying, and the train will be delayed many times for freight traffic.

If the federal government nationalized the rails, put them under the care of the FRA, properly funded Amtrak, and gave it a healthy advertising budget to let people know rail is the clear choice for medium length trips (like Chicago to St. Louis), there’s no reason we couldn’t send passengers on the same rails and with the same priority as freight trains. They’re perfectly safe, and the reason we’ve been hearing about so many train wrecks lately is the degradation of work conditions for rail workers. Longer trains and longer hours make for more dangerous operating conditions and more frequent wrecks.

And while the trains wouldn’t run 190 miles an hour, many long, straight stretches do exist, and it’s not unheard of for a train to be running 80-100 miles an hour on those stretches. That kind of speed is very doable for passenger rail. Hell, some Amtrak trains are capable of 150 miles an hour.

My point wasn’t to use 150 year old rails. It’s that the rails already exist so it doesn’t need to be a decades-long multi-trillion dollar project. It’s highly unlikely that any of the rails in use today are from the 19th century.

I only have one. It’s built for a few thousand square feet, consumes nearly 1 kW, is about as loud as a vacuum cleaner, and will raise the temperature of the whole house a few degrees.

But damn, does it WORK.

Don’t even need to lay down rails. The rails are already there. Built by Chinese slave labor 150 years ago. We need merely to seize them.

Or just cut a check to the freight companies.

Auto parts, YOW!

wait wrong song-

They did Bernie fucking dirty in 2016.

Then Biden knew he could run on name recognition alone and trounce Bernie in 2020. He knew people were pining for the Obama days and played off that nostalgia.

Fuck Hillary Clinton, fuck Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Kamala Harris is okay, fuck Joe Biden, and fuck the DNC. There’s no reason they shouldn’t run a progressive candidate, but it’s clear they’re allergic to winning elections.

Also, did anyone seem to notice that “weird” dropped out of campaign messaging in the last couple months following the nom? Can’t help but think the DNC was behind that. Calling them weird was their kryptonite, even if Kamala Harris essentially said, “I’d do nothing different from Joe.”

Joe Biden was a perfectly okay president. He was pretty invisible for the most part. He was a boring president. But he didn’t bring the FIRE Bernie had in 2016 and 2020. He ran at a time when he KNEW he would win because Bernie was too far to the left for the DNC to be comfortable, and for that, I consider him a coward.

We didn’t deserve a President Sanders, but holy shit did we ever NEED him. And yes, I am coping pretty hard right now.

Worth it. I’ve never even seen the falls, but I’ve seen lots of Jim Carrey movies. The man deserves it, and I’m sure he’d love to be honored in this ecologically non-invasive way.

And here’s the /s for those who need it.

And then there are the teachers using memes specifically because they know it will make those memes uncool. And I salute them.

As lesser cats, mountain lions purr and meow!

Cheetahs, too.

Still do not recommend petting.

The biggest mistake anyone can make with a 10 pound domestic housecat is to underestimate one. Cats seriously punch far above their weight. Like someone welded a bunch of razor blades to a flying, out of control angle grinder that always knows which way is down. A cat can ruin your day quickly.

It’s fortunate their primary prey is plastic.

Not just the scent of rain, I love the sound of rain. The tapping on the windows. The pitter patter on the roof. The splashing as it forms puddles in my flowerbeds.

I love the feeling of rain. The way it immediately cools the air around me. The way it falls on my head. I could pass on the wet socks, though.

I love the sight of rain. The way it darkens the world a little. The way colors pop when the sun comes back out. The way the flowers are always just a little brighter for having had a quick soak.

There is basically nothing for me not to love about the rain.

Heat cycling is a huge stressor on any material. That’s part of why diesel freight trucks tend to last well past a million miles while it’s newsworthy if a passenger car makes it that long. How many times a week is your Toyota Corolla driving 10+ hours at a time? Most commonly, when you hear of a million mile vehicle, it was making long haul deliveries daily and was maintained at the correct intervals.

Obviously depends on just how bad your eyes are.

Tldr: I can see perfectly fine without glasses because I have one really good eye and one really bad eye.

I wear prescription lenses. Despite that, I can see pretty clearly without my glasses. I have a scratch on my left cornea that happened when I was 4 years old. My right eye can see better than normal because I guess it was still a developmental stage of my life? I don’t know. But I can read literally every line the doctor throws at me with my right eye, and I can do it quickly. But I get stuck on the second or third line down with my left. I’m practically blind in that eye.

What happens is I look at everything through my right eye. I also have a really hard time seeing depth. Seriously, the real world looks no different than a TV screen to me. It’s hard to know exactly where something is in 3D space. I’ve adapted mitigations for it. Like, when I’m driving, I pick points on the car I can see, and if I can’t see past it, I assume my wheels are on it. I also stay way the fuck back from other cars. You see that depth perception kill me when I try to put keys in lock cylinders. I will scratch the absolute shit out of a lock. It’s like I’m drunk.

But as for seeing? I can see mostly fine without my glasses. I can read things. Distant things. I can make out detail just fine. I can navigate the world perfectly. My powers of perception are pretty close to zero. Glasses don’t stop me from stubbing my toes. Really, they’re only there to keep my left eye from straining. And to be in compliance with the restrictions on drivers license.

My wife’s sister had LASIK a few years ago. Prior to that, she was - for all intents and purposes - blind without them. Like Velma Dinkley, she could not move without them. She could make out fuzzy shapes, but she could not accurately grab an object in front of her. For her, it really was like seeing in 144p. The surgery was seriously life-changing for her.

Love that you accounted for the fact that if you rounded up a million randos, statistically, some of them will be missing a finger or two.

Not sure whether you’re being facetious or if you genuinely don’t know, but you link communities with an exclamation point.

!books

If you want to be absolutely sure you point to a community on a specific instance, just include the instance

!books@lemmy.world

!books@lemmy.ml

Everyone knows William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were physicists first and animators/cartoonists second.

My kitchen sink is next to the water heater. It’s hot in 5 seconds. My shower is on the opposite end of the house. I’d reckon it’s a 2 minute wait. Sometimes, I turn the bathroom sink on and get undressed.

Just gonna leave Brainrot Girlfriend here for you to read.

Hey baby, I’m nine inches tall…on my feet.

It’s a serious medical condition. I don’t know how I’m alive.