Not quite. The Santa Clara decision gave corporations equal protection under the 14th Amendment, is law in the same sense that Citizens United is, and has been applied many, many times. The 2010 decision held that 1st Amendment protections apply to corporations.

It’s a 19th century idea that appeared in the published decision of the Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.

Only—get this—it wasn’t even what the Court decided. Instead, it was the guy in charge of recording the decision for publication who declared “corporate personhood” in the headnote (summary) of the case. And would it surprise you to learn that the guy was the former president of a railroad company? We just sort of went along with this not-precedent until the Citizens United case.

Clove oil is a decent anti-mildew agent. I have used it in a past apartment, and use it on my boat to knock out the mildew scent.

So, we’d be governed by influencers?

Oh god, I wish that were true!

Figure out how to make sexual intercourse or masturbation physically pleasurable. Most people seem to get it naturally, but I can’t crack the code.

For what it’s worth, I can’t visualize either, but have excellent directional sense.

I have this problem, as well. Distorted amplification, song lyrics, speech against loud background noise? Forget it. Oddly, I got a pair of Shokz bone-conducting headphones recently, and noticed that I have been understanding lyrics for the first time in songs that I’ve been listening to for 30+ years. (I should really listen to that song about how “Shareef don’t like it; Fuck the passport, fuck the passport.”

Classic selection bias. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but I remember reading that the majority of men who have ever lived never reproduced. That’s unfortunately pretty normal.

Interesting! I see what you mean, but while looking up Win11 emoji, I found this article from Microsoft about adding 3D design elements based on customer feedback. And, indeed, on my work computer (23H2), they’re not-quite-flat anymore.

I’d be so happy for a desktop window manager that didn’t make all of the window borders grey-on-grey, and distinguish the active window by making the title text slightly-darker grey.

Apple’s skeuomorphic phase overlapped the Retina display era, though, so I don’t buy that explanation. Also, it’s nothing to do with raster vs. vector. The photos that we take with phone cameras are raster graphics, for example. They look great, and it’s because they’re high-resolution. High-res raster UI elements would look great, except then the versatile manipulation by CSS would not be possible. Vector graphics are very good at that.

But here’s the thing: Complex vector graphics exist, too. There were some pretty fancy PostScript graphics even back in the early 1990’s. With all the pixels that we have now, we could have good design instead of flat, if the developers bothered. But it seems we’ve internalized the feeling that we’re not worth the effort, aesthetics and color aren’t interesting, and life is a joyless slog. Which sounds and awful lot like clinical depression…

(Incidentally, odd that emoji aren’t flat design.)

It was discontinued only a couple of years ago, so you can still buy that design on Amazon, by the way. It’s the SOLO brand Jazz design.

Flat design is clinical depression in graphical form, a reflection of the contemporary existential/mental health crisis. It’s a societal cry for help, basically.

Kudos to Obama for actually following through, but the withdrawal from Iraq had a deadline set by the U.S. Status of Forces Agreement signed by Bush, per the request of the Iraqi government.

Maybe we ought to take a cue from Vietnam.

We also use “taking coals to Newcastle” here in the Midwestern U.S. (Something about being descended from former British colonies…) But I’ve heard plenty of riffs on that idea, like, “bringing corn to Iowa.”

Not really, the average isn’t skewed much, simply because there are so few super-rich in a population of 380 million people. And even then, men like Jeff Bezos and his rocket ship are outliers, most of the billionaires have 1000x more money than the median, but they don’t use anywhere near 1000x the resources. (Warren Buffett, in particular, leads a pretty middle-class lifestyle.)

From what I learned from my environmental sciences degree, the environmental impact comes from hundreds of millions of people living in big houses, driving big cars, eating meat for most meals, and buying scads of consumer goods. (Amazon shipping boxes are a significant environmental challenge all on their own.)

We’d need at least four Earths to sustain humanity if everybody lived like the average middle-class American. That’s probably an underestimate. We’re completely blowing out our fair share of resources.

That’s very sad to hear. I have lots of albums that I love all the way through, and although I am full of crap, I’ll have you know that that is a natural biological process.