I’ve been there, with a mild astygmatism that went undetected for decades. The only signs were headaches and trouble focusing after looking at the same thing (books, computer screens) for a long time.

Schedule an appointment with an eye doctor to have your vision checked, and explain this issue. Our eyes and brains are very good at compensating for minor problems, and it can even slip by an eye exam. But looking at something close and fine, like a book, for several hours can tire out and overwhelm the eye muscles, until they ache and stop working well, unless you rest.

If you live in a dysfunctional nation without affordable access to an eye doctor, a pair or reading glasses may help by making focusing easier.

And with the pickup trucks, it’s the high center of gravity which makes them deathtraps.

And yet the Model F trucks are consistent best-sellers today.

Here in my city, there’s a former rail corridor turned into a bike commuter path, despite the neighborhood screeching about crime and property values. Today, houses on the path command a price premium, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, some years ago, a local celebrity chef announced plans to build a café on the path, unreachable by car. Drivers’ predictable reaction:

They basically bullied him into dropping the idea.

And tuff is rocks, so by the transitive property, science rocks.

Unfortunately, no. He did act like a sniveling coward, sneaking into the Capitol through the utility tunnels, never facing the people. But the state is so heavily gerrymandered that the Republicans had a lock on the Legislature, despite only about 50% of the votes, and Walker’s real constituency was the Kochs, the Heritage Foundation, and conservative activists generally. They passed the law, and it’s only been literally a few weeks since the last of it was finally struck down by a court as unconstitutional.

The Wisconsin Act 10 protests in 2011. That was when newly-elected governor Scott Walker sprung a surprise bill to gut public sector unions. There were many moving moments: Protests of nearly 100,000 people at the State Capitol; the day that farmers brought their tractors for a “Pulling Together” protest; watching people on their hands and knees wiping down the stone floors of the occupied Capitol to protect them from winter grit people tracked in; seeing the board at Ian’s Pizza recording the geographic origins of donations to feed the protesters as it grew to include all 50 states, and then the world, even Egypt and Tunisia (the Arab Spring was going on, too).

But weirdly, the most moving to me was the day that the firefighters joined in. I was at the Capitol early in the protests, when it felt tentative, driven by the graduate student union, uncertain of wider support. Then word spread through the crowd: The firefighters were coming. This was exciting, because the Act spared public safety unions, so it didn’t directly affect them.

But, they didn’t just join the crowd. No, the firefighters came marching in the doors in formation, led by bagpipers making a glorious din, in full regalia, and carrying union banners. They stood at attention in the rotunda while the pipers played, and made goddamn sure that everybody knew that they were in this fight, including the governor and legislators who would hear it from their offices, and let it be known that they had the backs of the other unions. Solidarity!

Earning money from having money flies in the face of OC’s implication that being a billionaire is the result of virtuous effort. And, it sounds like a major flaw in the system all by itself.

But, even though they could passively rake in the income, so many billionaires actively try to increase their wealth, for no particular apparent purpose, and at the expense of harm to others, which does seem pathological.

Yeah, some people are just born fucked up, and putting them in prison to handle it is a bad way to handle them. What do I mean? Well, when people are born fucked up, it’s usually pretty obvious. A lot of the infamous mass shooters that come to mind, people knew. In some cases, they tried desperately to get somebody to help do something about it.

But our system (correctly, IMO) operates on the principle of innocent until proven guilty. That is, we have to wait for fucked up people to hurt somebody else before we can put them in prison. Better would be a system that addresses mental health concerns and anti-social personality issues that people around them could draw upon, rather than just relying on cops and courts.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that we could ever completely eliminate incarceration. We don’t live in a perfect world, after all. But getting rid of prisons is a good goal to aim for.

In concept, it’s simple: Identify the conditions that lead people into anti-social behaviors, and change those conditions to encourage pro-social behavior instead. That way, not only do we avoid having to incarcerate people, we don’t have victims anymore. This may sound abstract and hand-wavey, so as a concrete example, crime is way, way down compared to the 1970’s, and it seems to have a lot to do with eliminating leaded gasoline, and allowing abortion. A concerted effort to reduce poverty would go a long way to reducing crime rates even further.

Social influence (culture, social norms, peer pressure, etc.) is the most effective way to keep people in line. Laws do diddly-squat. Most people respond to their life conditions and surroundings, including what people even think of as crime. For a good example, instead of jaywalking, consider speeding. It’s against the law, but socially promoted, so virtually all drivers do it even though it’s against the law. Or, consider a “law-and-order conservative” business owner whose social circle wants to see the heads of the local panhandlers cracked, but happily engages in wage theft from his employees, and whose pastor at church is diddling kids. Simply put, the better alternative to prison is to create and put people in social environments that don’t tolerate crime in the first place.

Even people who don’t respond to social influence, the sociopaths, can be handled more productively. They still have motivations and needs that, while disconnected from empathy, still guide their behavior. They’re still essentially rational people, too. There’s a program here at the Mendota Mental Health Institute that works to rehabilitate sociopathic people who’ve landed in the criminal justice system. They’ve had good success by identifying what these young men want, and explaining/demonstrating to them (i.e. through their rational faculties) that they can get what they want long-term by learning and following society’s rules. I know a guy who is/was deficient in empathy, and landed in jail, where his therapists helped him exercise and develop his empathy. Smart dude, and now he’s got a productive job where he’s invaluable to the company. The concept is again deceptively simple: As an intelligent man, he learned to consciously ask himself, how would I feel if my actions were instead applied to me? He uses the Golden Rule, essentially.

Let me flip this around and ask why do we consider prison as an appropriate way to “deal” with murderers, rapists, and child predators? I would point out that the United States has a huge prison population, and murderers, rapists, and child predators. If the threat of prison were an effective deterrent, why is that? (To unload the question, I’ll say that I believe that we practice incarceration as a morality play by which we re-assure ourselves that we are good people compared to the criminal scum. It has nothing whatsoever to do with concern for victims.)

Oh. I was supposed to lick it? I, uh, might’ve eaten it.

Mental disorder is very, very tricky to define, as something maladaptive in one context may work in another. One example is how in individualistic cultures, people hearing voices more often experience them as intrusive and malevolant, and we call it schizophrenia, while people on collectivist cultures may experience the voices as friendly and comforting. Is that a disease, then, if it benefits a person? Psychologists tend to go with a working definition based on how adaptive a condition is for the person and their society.

But in what context does it benefit a person to be unable to ever have “enough” of anything, never able to be satiated, compulsively adding to an enormous pile of wealth far, far beyond anything that they could ever use? Further, when the condition drives them to use the power attendant to that wealth to actively harm their society in myriad ways, how is that adaptive? It seems that they harbor a deep anxiety about the possibility that their accumulated wealth might be reduced, in a way completely imperceptible to them, and even being consciously aware that this is so, still suffer from a mania that compels them to hurt other people to keep that from happening.

Hardly sounds like what most of us would define as “successful in life.”

The bootlickers aren’t giving practical advice when they say it; they’re victim-blaming.

Counterpoint: Philando Castile, Daniel Shaver, Renee Good.

That’s why it’s Bootlicker Bullshit Bingo card.

Ah, yes, the 8-year-old queso fresco.

I don’t have to ask, it’s right there in the image: It’s an aged (hard) cheese.

Probably because we’ve heard this bullshit so many times that nobody believes it anymore.

Wow. How bad at food do you have to be to have cheese go bad in two weeks?

Well, yeah, inflation numbers are definitionally arbitrary even if you trust the math, since they depend so much on the judgement of the people compiling the data. The important point here is that the cost of a new car has gone up to a whole year’s pay, or more, for a lot of people.

In 1979, when my parents bought a new Dodge Aspen wagon, its price of $5,000 was around the median car price, at about ⅓ of the median annual wage. That’s about $22,000 in 2026 dollars, which is about ⅓ of the median annual wage now. But the median car price is up to $50,000.