Universal healthcare would too.

That’s just a good-ass rule.

Yeah, I think everyone would take that deal.

[Warning: if you are easily offended, you're on the wrong website AND you might not want to read the post below.]

Free frig

---

I’m giving my frig away. It’s really the only frig I’ve ever given. If you’d like to frig, its free to pick up, outside of [location]. Please, come get it, its the only frig I have

I’m not really looking for a frig right now. I’ve been looking for a damn for a while, but nobody ever seems to have those to give away. Or a shit. I’d settle for a crap, but even those don’t get given very often. There’s lots of fucks out there though, and unlike shits and craps, nobody ever seems to take those.

I’ll show myself to the corner.

Thanks, Ralph!

celestedoodles:

daria grownup -  Daria and Jane step out from Jane’s senior art show at Boston Fine Arts College to get a slice of pizza from a food truck

You need to stop hanging out with people who think being racist and sexist constitutes a “party.”

Let me tell you about a catastrophe. I don't use that word lightly: This event was monumental, an apocalypse that was literally global in scale, and one of the most deadly disasters in Earth's history.

It began about 2.5 billion years ago (though opinions vary). The Earth was very different then. There were no leafy plants, no animals, no insects. Although there may have been some bacterial life on land, it was the oceans that teemed with it, and even there life was far simpler than it is today. Most of the bacteria thriving on Earth were anaerobic, literally metabolizing their food without oxygen.

But then an upstart appeared, and things changed. This new life came in the form of cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae.

Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic. They convert sunlight into energy and produce oxygen as a waste product. Back then, the Earth’s atmosphere didn’t have free oxygen in it as it does today. It was locked up in water molecules, or bonded to iron in minerals.

The cyanobacteria changed that. But not at first: For a while, as they produced free oxygen as their waste, iron would bond with it and the environment could keep up with the production.

At some point, though, as cyanobacteria flourished, the minerals and other sinks became saturated. They could no longer absorb the oxygen being produced. It built up in the water, in the air. To the other bacteria living in the ocean—anaerobic bacteria, remember—oxygen was toxic. The cyanobacteria were literally respiring poison.

A die-off began, a mass extinction killing countless species of bacteria. It was the Great Oxygenation Event. But there was worse to come.

Up until this time, the atmosphere was devoid of the reactive molecule. But as oxygen abundances increased, some of it combined with methane to create carbon dioxide. Methane is a far more efficient greenhouse gas than CO₂, and this methane was keeping the planet warm. As levels dropped, the Earth cooled. This triggered a massive glaciation event, a global ice age that locked the planet in its grip.

Things got so bad the cyanobacteria themselves were threatened. Their own numbers dropped, along with nearly all other life on Earth. The mass extinction that followed was vast.

But there was an exception: Some organisms could use that oxygen in their own metabolic processes. Combining oxygen with other molecules can release energy, a lot of it, and that energy is useful. It allowed these microscopic plants to grow faster, breed faster, live faster.

The anaerobic species died off, falling to the oxygen-burning plants, which prospered in this new environment. Certainly, anaerobes didn't vanish from the Earth, but they were vanquished to low-oxygen environments such as the bottom of the ocean. They were no longer the dominant form of life on Earth.

It was perhaps the first of the mass extinctions life would face on our planet, and its impact resonates through the eons (and of course there is quite a lot of detail to this story). To this day, our atmosphere is rich in oxygen, with most multicellular life on Earth descended from the upstart oxygen breathers, and not the anaerobes.

It's an interesting tale, don't you think? The dominant form of life on Earth, spread to the far reaches of the globe, blissfully and blithely pumping out vast amounts of pollution, changing the environment on a planetary scale, sealing their fate. They wouldn't have been able to stop even if they knew what they were doing, even if they had been warned far, far in advance of the effects they were creating.

If this is a cautionary tale, if there is some moral you can take away from this, you are free to extract it for yourself. If you do, perhaps you can act on it. One can hope that in this climate, change is always possible.

(775): He couldn't get his dick hard. So he started yelling at it. " EVERYONE is laughing at you, you piece of shit no wonder you can't get pussy" i wonder if that happens frequently I'll try again next weekend.

Oh shit.

Sometimes it means “sexist fuckface”, I guess.

(980): Really, who hasn't had sex on your bed?
(727): ME.

buy this print
Or share on: facebookreddit

(734): who orders an old fashioned in 2014? even my Grandparents think you're an asshole.

(617): He said he was Greek American and that is why my legs slammed shut. During the World Cup there are only Americans.

(647): We were ushered out of Medieval Times by a squire for making out in the torture chamber. Children were present.

You have a lot to learn about effective rhetoric.

Yeah, well, standing on a street corner and yelling at racists used to be a lot more perilous as well, on some “Hark, Boy, Is This Racist? I Care Not” bullshit.

(847): There is a severe lack of banging on that itinerary... I'd like a revision on my desk within the hour.

If everyone was like you, it would be quiet as fuck around here.

(540): I'm in the ER bruh, I went skinny dipping last night and a cat fish bit my dick.

cleromancy:

#i can’t decide if this bus is being supportive or threatening me

blood-stained-clouds:

ew—-society:

courageisthekeytohappiness:

i’m in love with peter pan. 

you forgot my favorite one

Ah, damnit Internet, you made me cry before breakfast.

africancheewahwah:

The fact that most guys’ first response to a woman wanting equality is “SO CAN I HIT U NOW” is sort of terrifying
Like that’s the first thing you’re concerned about? I just want equal pay and you want to punch me in the face? Cool cool

Oh my god, yes. It is horribly weird and it ALWAYS comes up.

Seriously, if the only thing keeping you from punching strangers is the income gap, you need to spend some time with Mr. Life Choices.

$2 Undecillion Lawsuit

What if Au Bon Pain lost this lawsuit and had to pay the plaintiff $2 undecillion?

—Kevin Underhill

The bakery-cafe chain Au Bon Pain (with a few other organizations) is being sued. This is how much money the person suing them is demanding:

This is how much sellable stuff there is in the world:

This is the estimated economic value of all goods and services produced by humanity since we first evolved:

Even if Au Bon Pain conquers the planet and puts everyone to work for them from now until the stars die, they wouldn't make a dent in the bill.

Maybe people just aren't that valuable. The EPA currently values a human life at $8.7 million, although they go to great lengths to point out that technically this is not actually the value any specific person places on another person's individual life.[1]Note that they don't say whether they assume that amount would be higher or lower. In any case, by their measure, the total value we place on all the world's humans is only about $60 quadrillion.[2]The world's combined oil reserves are only worth a few hundred trillion, which suggests that purely from an accounting standpoint, the "no blood for oil" slogan makes a lot of sense.

But while people may be worthless,[3]I'm rounding down. we're hardly all there is on the planet. Out of all the Earth's atoms, only 1 out of every 10 trillion is part of a human.

The Earth's crust contains a bunch of atoms,^{[citation needed]} some of which are valuable. If you extracted all the elements, purified them,[4]This is just one of many reasons that this idea wouldn't make sense in practice. The reason many elements (like U-235) are valuable is that it's hard to manufacture or purify them, not just because they're rare. and sold them, the market would crash.[5]Both in the sense that the supply would cause a drop in prices, and the sense that the market is like 20 miles above the mantle and you just removed the crust supporting it. But if you somehow sold them at their current market price, they would be worth ...

Oddly, most of this value comes from potassium and calcium, and most of the rest comes from sodium and iron. If you're going to sell the Earth's crust for scrap, those are probably the ones you should sift out.

Sadly, even selling the crust for scrap doesn't get us close to the numbers we need.

We could include the core,[6]It's down there. which is iron and nickel with a dash of precious metals, but it turns out it wouldn't help. The amount demanded from Au Bon Pain is just too large. In fact, an Earth made of solid gold wouldn't be enough. The Sun's weight in platinum wouldn't be, either.

By weight, the single most valuable thing that's been bought and sold on an open market is probably the Treskilling Yellow postage stamp. There's only one known copy of it, and in 2010 it sold for \$2,300,000. That works out to about \$30 billion per kilogram of stamps. If the Earth's weight were entirely postage stamps, it would still not be enough to pay off Au Bon Pain's potential debt.[7]Also, the stamps would probably be less valuable now that there is literally an entire planet of them, but that's the least of Au Bon Pain's problems.

If Au Bon Pain & co decided to be intentionally difficult, and pay their debt entirely in pennies, they would form a sphere that would squeeze inside the orbit of Mercury.[8]The fate of this sphere of pennies is left as an exercise for the reader. The fate of Mercury is that it would fall into the pennies and disintegrate. The bottom line is that paying this settlement would be, in almost any sense of the word, impossible.

Fortunately, Au Bon Pain has a better option.

Kevin, who asked this question, is a lawyer and author of the legal humor blog that reported on the Au Bon Pain case.[9]And which we encountered in Question #90. He told me that the world's most highly-paid lawyer—on an hourly basis—is probably former Solicitor General Ted Olson, who recently disclosed in bankruptcy filings that he charges $1,800 per hour.

Suppose there are 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy, and every one of them hosts an Earth-sized population of 7 billion Ted Olsons.

If Au Bon Pain hired every Ted Olson in the galaxy to defend them in this case, and had them all work 80-hour weeks, 52 weeks a year, for a thousand generations[10]This scenario assumes that the former Solicitor General reproduces asexually....

... it would still cost them less than if they lost.