It’s not even plausible to imagine a world where people aren’t trying to break and exploit economic or government systems. It’s like an ecosystem where there are always plants and animals trying to find new ways to gain advantage, even if it involves full-on parasitic behavior. The only thing we can do is try and design a government dynamic and robust enough to respond to the most dangerous and aggressive mutations.
The Pop-up Book of Phobias is also great.
Nothing that makes noise or takes batteries.
Board books. Toddlers are murder on books with paper pages. Stick with classics like Goodnight Moon or Dr. Seuss, or if you want something more recent the Little Owl series by Divya Srinivasan, or Calm-Down Time by Elizabeth Verdick are really good.
Playground/beach toys, like a bucket / shovel / rake set that parents can keep in the car. They’ll likely get lost, so go for cheap and sturdy over premium and expensive.
Sidewalk chalk, like the huge fat ones.
The water based coloring books someone else mentioned are great, too. No cleanup (beyond the occasional water spill), they can be reused, and they’re great entertainment for the car.
And yeah, like others have said, coordinate with the parents.
And if you hate the parents, get a Furby knockoff or something else that makes noise.
Sounds like something that demands an LBJ-style federal response.
And the Carolina Squat!
I thought that was the sort of thing that the government mandated companies had to do in a controlled and transparent fashion. I wouldn’t have thought that the NTSB would allow a vehicle to be registered without a thoroughly vetted crash testing procedure.
I needed a white karate gi for a Street Fighter Halloween costume, so I went to the local school and bought one, and while I was at it I bought a black one too, in case I ever wanted to be a ninja. Then I started wearing the black karate pants as pajamas.
That was over twenty years ago. Those same black karate pants are still my favorite pajamas. In-fucking-credible.
The fashion world is in a war on pockets, so they can sell more handbags. The fewer and smaller pockets we have, the more accessories we need to buy. First they came for women’s pockets. Now they’re trying to make cargo shorts unacceptable for the same reason.
John Stark, one of the rescuers of the Donner Party.
In Summit Valley the remaining rescuers discussed what to do and took a vote to save only two of the children in Starved Camp. That might have been all they could manage. The others would have to stay behind.
John Stark, above, could not abide that. That meant that nine people, mostly children, would die on the mountain, exposed to the elements down in a very deep hole in the snow. John Stark decided he would save all nine, “Already shouldering a backpack with provisions, blankets, and an axe, he picked up one or two of the smaller children, carried them a little ways, then went back for the others. Then he repeated the whole process again and again and again. To galvanize morale, he laughed and told the youngsters they were so light from months of mouse-sized rations that he could carry them all simultaneously, if only his back were broad enough.” Once they were out of the snow he would eat and rest he said, but not before. He saved all nine. That is extraordinary and that is heroism. It was also heroism he never got contemporary credit for.
“Big, beautiful submarine captains come up to me. Covered with muscles, muscles like nobody has ever seen before. Tears running down their cheeks. They say ‘Sir, thank you for sending us to the South China Sea! Nobody ever sent us there before!’ But I don’t get angry! I should get angry and sometimes I do get angry, but with these captains I don’t get angry. They say ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you!’ But nobody ever thought of South China before! I came up with that, but nobody gives me credit for South China!”
I’m just imagining being the poor sap working for a foreign power trying to extract useful information from his cottage cheese brain.
“Do you have nuclear subs in the South China Sea?”
“We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. … The biggest problem we have is nuclear — nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”
“Where! Are! The nuclear! Subs! Deployed!”
“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”
Reservoir Dogs / Pulp Fiction / Kill Bill
Stand By Me
Dirty Dancing
The Lost Boys
That is one of the stupidest takes I have ever seen, and I’ve been on the internet since AOL chatrooms.
Not voting makes politicians less accountable to you. If you somehow organized everyone who thought like you do, regardless of your agenda, and convinced every single one of them to not vote, then you would achieve the lofty political goal of… absolutely ensuring that no politician would ever try to pursue your goals.
Voting, by definition, is what makes politicians give a shit about your cause. There’s a reason why the Greek word meaning “one who does not take part in public affairs” is the root of the modern word “idiot.”
I’d be curious to see that chart for a Toyota Yaris. I drove one for a few years and it was almost unnerving how little hood it had.
There’s a tough lesson I learned about trying to get my friends into board games: It’s easier to turn gamers into your friends than it is to turn your friends into gamers. I’ve learned that some of my friends are never going to share my interests as much as I’d like, but that just means I needed to find people who were already in whatever hobby and start hanging out with them and some of them will eventually be your real friends.
Making and keeping friends as an adult is way more difficult than it seems it should be, but it’s a painful reality.
Star Trek: TNG
Batman: The Animated Series
Space Ghost Coast to Coast
With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.
Delaware has 3 electoral votes and a population of 1.018 million.
Wyoming has 3 electoral votes and a population of 584,000.
Wyoming is almost twice as over-represented as Delaware in the electoral college.
California currently has 54 electoral votes. If CA was as represented in the electoral college as Wyoming is, it would have 200 votes.
So you could argue that both Wyoming and California can claim to be more disproportionately represented by the EC than Delaware.