If we ever have the ability to detect a spaceship it will be very obviously not a rock, these two things just have very different size, mass, density. Spaceships aren't 33 billion tons in a cloud of gas. Spaceships are not massive enough to have their own gravity. Not a thing, conceptually flawed

The US does not have a political party duopoly, we have an informal top-two runoff election system

You can form your own political party and then go run your own candidates for Dem or GOP central committees. In most cases the actual level of support you'd need for such a takeover is not that much because so few people actually participate

Modern architects don't do open plan designs because people like it or because family life has changed, but because you don't have to do any math to figure out air ducts and wiring

Having a separate kitchen and separate dining room wasn't conspicuous consumption, it was a practical thing that let you isolate messes, smells, and noises.

The parlor is a room you keep tidy, yes. No it was not pointless conspicuous consumption. Before telephones, to "call" someone meant to stop buy unannounced, this was a thing that happened, and so almost everyone wanted a room that was always in a condition to receive guests

hang on I'm trying to imagine the kind of person who doesn't think "negotiate your own insurance" sounds like some kind of hellish punishment. Something you expect to find in a hieroglyphic stele: "Akhenaten, Son of Ra, smote the asiatics and made them negotiate their own insurance"

there was an actual project to put health records on the blockchain but thankfully the incentives are so powerfully aligned against pushing data places, it never went anywhere

It's really hard to make the main faucet valves drip only a small amount, but I'm quite confident it would be extremely easy to design a purpose-built valve that does this when you throw a simple switch

The Odyssey is literally in the high school freshman year curriculum in Ohio

for cookies you need to cream your butter into sugar in the mixing bowl, and mix your salt, flour, baking soda in a second bowl. You still don't need any measuring cups, but you do probably need two bowls. You ultimately spend less time measuring this way and there's fewer dishes to clean

I generally rewrite my recipes to minimize the number of bowls. Like you can stick the mixing bowl on the scale and directly add your flour, yeast, salt, water, there is no need to have any other bowls or measuring cups at all to make bread

once again AI gives a deranged answer that, I think, totally misunderstands how things work in commercial kitchens and incorrectly assumes that what works in a restaurant also works at home (that's a lot of bowls!!!)

note that Joy of Cooking--the ur-case of modern cookbooks--does quantities in the steps not in advance

I'm really confused who the "quantities listed in advance" thing is for or, if someone finds it useful for something, why they can't do both, are we paying by the line or what

enron didn't, as far as I know, fiddle with depreciation but I think they did something very similar by failing to mark down as loses contracts that did not perform as well as how it was initially valued when it was signed