BrickHorn

It’s amazing how unlikely a connection can appear when you leave out critical contextual information. For example, Wuhan is a massive city of over 12 million inhabitants. It’s not at all an unlikely candidate for a disease to originate. There are a lot of potential Patient Zeros in the area. And Wuhan is not unique in its proximity to a high-level virology research lab, either. One 2020 estimate counted 62 individual BSL3-level lab complexes in China. Want to bet that those 62 labs are collectively near most of China’s population? If a disease originated naturally somewhere in China, odds are high the location of that natural origin would be near a high-level pathogen lab. That has nothing to do with cause-and-effect, it’s just pure probability and statistics. And consider a salient difference between the Wuhan lab and the others: Wuhan is a BSL4 facilty, which implements even higher safety standards (and thus reduces the chances of a leak). It’s a lot less impressive a coincidence when you frame it honestly. “What are the chances a natural outbreak would start near one of the country’s 62 high-security pathogen labs?” Pretty high, actually.

Dilbert caters to engineers’ misguided sense of comprehensive intellectual superiority. Office Space rightly mocked that arrogance.

Yeah this is a really short-sighted media strategy. Wow. Guess I’ll watch Liga MX tonight instead.

If it makes Pink Floyd enjoyable, then psilocybin really is a miracle drug.

Here’s a question for you: can vegetarians take communion?

I’m starting a business selling shirts that say “I spent two weeks praying for eternal salvation at Asbury University, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

I made a similar investment when I traded my cow for magic beans. As soon as they figure out how to sprout into a giant beanstalk, I’m going to climb it and steal a goose that lays golden eggs.

This concept of Wuv confuses and infuriates us!

It’s not that. On the offside call, the left guard was falling backward before the Chiefs player came out of his stance. And the Eagles right guard never sets. He’s almost always still turning forward when the ball is snapped.

She’s a live oak limb nightmare. It’s giving me PTSD from Arborgeddon 2023.

Eagles OL false starts almost every single play and has yet to draw a flag. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Do you want Ameros? Because this is how we get Ameros.

Annual Austin ice storm 1 - Klan 0.

There absolutely should be message board consequences for starting hyperbolic freak-out threads and pissing your pants in fear of OMG RIOTS!!! every time a few kids throw a rock through a window. Yet here you still are.

I just spent 3 hours cleaning up about 1/10th of the tree debris in my Austin yard. I don’t have time to get into a tax policy debate with you or to explain how stupid it is to defend Texas’s taxes by saying they’re as high as anywhere else in the US, as if trickle down idiocy was somehow limited to our fair state. But I do have time to say one thing before I leave my dark, cold house to spend the next 2 hours of daylight clearing tree branches: go fuck yourself.

This city and state need to start investing in basic infrastructure. Which means we need to pay more taxes / higher prices for utilities. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. All the money we saved by not paying to maintain trees around power lines has cost us in inconvenience and hassle. And we end up paying for that tree maintenance eventually. No politics, etc., but this country’s (and especially this state’s) addiction to bare minimum taxes at the expense of basic maintenance have fucked us. It was always myopic, greedy bullshit. Trees over power lines are just the canary in the coal mine. Other neglected infrastructure is rotting on a longer timescale.

Water company: “Please preserve water.” Armybrat: “Got it. Stockpiling as much water for myself as possible.”

Only approximately 90 hours until he breaks our record from 2021.

Weather Channel app is now showing a slow but steady ramp up in temperature starting around 8 PM. Here’s hoping that hourly forecast is more accurate than the 15 others I’ve seen throughout the day.

It’s a great song to learn how to play one note, over and over again.

It will be a dynamic situation even with warmer air / water. When it first begins raining, the initial rain will add force to the tree limbs before the warmer water has had time to melt any of the accumulated ice. That will make matters worse until enough of the ice melts that the remaining ice + rain is less heavy than the initial ice accumulation. How long that takes depends on the amount of rain and the temperature.

Voluntarily driving or walking outside in Austin right now is stupid. It’s practically raining tree limbs. Stay off the roads.