palordrolap

True. He's in government, and specifically that government, so he has access to all the money and drugs he wants, so if he's remaining clean, he's doing exceptionally well on that score.

This should not be taken as an endorsement of his abilities as a politician or his knowledge about science. Plenty of other evidence suggests he should be doing neither of those. Hell, I'm not even sure I'd follow his advice if I was a heroin addict trying to get off the stuff.

New head canon: This is where the Birthday Skeleton lives.

Well, Richard Stallman is an archetypal greybeard, so there's a tenuous link there.

The anti-Christ that doesn't know or is pretending that he doesn't know he's an anti-Christ, seeks to warn people of people like him, but not him specifically because he's warning them about it, so it can't possibly be him.

Insignificant by comparison to the things others have gone through, but I'll tell it anyway.

The plane flew and landed on time, but when we got off the plane we were on the outskirts of the airport in the dark and nowhere near a terminal. Thus, a seatless bus. A what?!

I'd never heard of such a bus or such a thing even being possible. What the heck is going on?

Everyone else seemed to think this was normal or were doing a very good job of hiding their confusion as I tried to play along. I can't see a thing out there, but what I can see and feel tells me we're moving. Am I even supposed to be on this bus?

I'd just followed everyone else. No-one had said anything. Where are we going?

Fears were unfounded. We were dropped off at a terminus. Inside, it became clear our bags were taking their own sweet time and journey to the building. Waiting. More waiting. No-one really said anything. No-one was panicking, so I didn't either. No point making a scene. It's late. We're all tired.

Bags did eventually turn up.

I was lucky to be able to get the last trains of the evening back to my home town because it was getting very late. I do not know what I would have done if that hadn't been possible. I have heard of people having to sleep at airports and train stations. That might have been me.

Yes, I know this makes me sound like someone who has (or had) literally no idea about airports or travel. And you'd be right. That flight home was my second flight ever. There'd been no weird little bus on the way out and I'd never seen them in TV shows or in movies featuring airports.

Anyway by the time I got to my home town, buses had stopped for the night, so I needed a taxi. Thankfully there was no shortage of those.

I haven't travelled since. Not for any of the above reasons particularly because I know more of what to expect now. It's been more of a mental health, financial thing.

that's what ICE and Trump want to happen

Yeah. It's the same playbook used to great effect in a certain Middle-Eastern conflict.

As for the "accidental" sabotage, I can't imagine they'd be very ... charitable ... to that sort of agent, especially if there's the vaguest whiff that they might be doing so on purpose. Stomp stomp stomp, etc.

There are fates worse than death. Civil disobedience and nuisance is the only way. Make them absolutely loathe every moment they're on duty so they don't want to go back to work.

Scientists can and do lie. And they also make mistakes. And when their work leaks before going through peer review, gullible people think that any retraction must be some conspiracy to cover up the truth.

Consider the whole vaccines versus autism debacle.

Now we could enter into a semantic "no true scientist" argument, but again, we've got to consider those gullible people, who'll take anything as undeniable truth as long as it comes from an apparent authority and it aligns with their beliefs.

You may now stab me if you wish.

There's something ironic about real bears being repatriated to a country run by a toy one.

Not pictured: The song that autoplays immediately afterwards that smiles as it punches you in the gut.

Unmentioned by other comments: The LLM is trying to follow the rule of three because sentences with an "A, B and/or C" structure tend to sound more punchy, knowledgeable and authoritative.

Yes, I did do that on purpose.

Even in river valleys, the cabling tends to be well insulated and underground here. Again, unless it's especially rural.

I've seen places where basements / cellars have been completely submerged by freak floods and all the old electrical infrastructure (cables, meters, etc.) is still in place and back in use once everything has dried out, save perhaps for a few minor repairs.

But I get it. Where it's cheaper and the health and safety / OSHA / whatever it's called where you are, rules don't disallow it, overground is going to happen.

Where I live, all the power, except major cross-country transmission, is underground.

You do find more minor transmission lines out where it gets rural, right down to telegraph-style wooden poles, but you'll pretty much never see it in cities or suburbs. (Wooden telephone poles are a different matter).

The only advantage of power-by-pole is ease of repair. Once it's underground, it has to share trunking with the other utilities in the area, and I'm pretty sure the number of times a road needs to be dug up varies as the square of the number of utilities under it.

But at least it's relatively safe under there when the road isn't being dug up for the fourth time in a year.