I used to be a stranger

Forgiveness refers to cancelling a debt. Reconciliation is not a requirement; it is a gift given from the forgiven.

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New urbanism. Which is to say, 'urban' but without car dependency. Suburban is made by and for the service of automobiles, and I do not consider them a necessary ingredient to my independence or work. Relevant meme, Traffic Control Alignment

I think that we need realtors. Realtors provide a useful value-added commercial service in the modern economy. It is completely impossible for buyers, sellers, and real-estate lawyers to navigate the treacherous waters of land sales alone, and it would be extremely harmful to the general public if there was transparent information on building history available for free, stored on some kind of digital database.

Tachyons are a theoretical particle that may always be travelling in a sense 'faster than light' and cannot slow down to lightspeed. As you can probably imagine, models that suggest their existence make observation of them, even indirectly, extremely difficult.

Anthromorphist interpretation of car fronts will lead oneself to notice that higher performance vehicles built within the past 30 years have trended to look angry, increasingly so.

My uncle got badly shocked twice while trying to repair an appliance. An unfortunately foolhardy thing to do for a guy who's had open-heart surgery! His excuse was that he couldn't find the right breaker on the fuse panel to turn off the appliance. IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHICH FUSE IT IS, THEN JUST SHUT ALL OF THEM OFF!!! What's the worst that could happen if you disconnect your entire house; you have to reset the clock on the microwave oven? Who cares! Electricity is hazardous and should always be treated with great respect. Have you ever thought about the fact that the potential energy inside your phone/laptop battery or PC power supply makes it comparable to a hand-grenade?

I Got Rhythm by George Gershwin

Too good to be true. 20-characters get.

It is not a question, that 'bronyism' is fading as the original members of the fandom age and lose interest. The original surge is almost a decade ago. MLPForums.com ? My guess is yes; directly proportional to the general level of interest. I think it's telling when more than half of the thread titles on the General Discussion pages look like they're combs for marketing research, and that the Debate Symposium is slowly turning into a wing of the bar just for american right-wingers and atheists.

We should not build solar panels, because we might suck all the energy out of the sun.

There are numerous islands in the "Sunshine Coast", the archipelago between Vancouver Island and the British Columbian mainland. Many of these islands only have populations of a few dozen to a few hundred. The biggest is Salt Spring Island, with ten thousand living there. BC Islanders have a reputation for being laid back, polite, friendly, casual (even moreso than your average Canadian) and also fiercely environmentalist and provincialist. Given the option between 10 brands from anywhere and 1 brand from just down the street that's four times the price, they'll go with the local brand every time. One of McDonald's Canadian fast-food competitors A&W found this out the hard way. They opened an A&W on the port city of Ganges. While tourists did attend it during the summer, business dried up to zilch through the winter, and the burger joint shuttered its doors before even a year had passed. To this day, no major brands or chains have any presence on the island, with the exception of government services (aka the Coast Guard).

While researching for the story I'm writing, I came to learn how other languages use different texts and different narratives that undergird the emotional personal spirit of what many kinds of words and sentiments mean. For example, in Finnish they have a word "sisu", which is very difficult to translate into English. One rendering would be "determination". But it's a word that encapsulates the entire national character; stoic, resourceful, and ever resilient even unto death. It is personal, psychological, and even physical. In Danish and Norwegian, they have the word "hygge", which has no equivalent in English. One rendering would be "to give joy/comfort". It is a property of pleasantness, homely-ness, conviviality and wellness one has in their home when making it hospitable and comfortable for family, friends and visitors. In Hebrew they have the word "shalom". It literally means "peace", but this concept is very multifaceted. It refers to wholeness of mind, body, household tranquility, unity of family, health of community and most importantly of all, spiritual wellness in faith, love and prayer towards god. English is very effective at talking about things like work, sex, romance and objects. But it struggles to articulate ideas closely related to our relationships with nature, friends and our inner feelings.

Planet 7 has the unfortunate fate of a name that is easily interpreted as a one-word pun in English. I wish its name would be changed to Ouranos. Which is weird. Why do we keep the name Uranus? We badly pronounce a bad German transposition of a English transliteration of a Greek name. A more direct modern English transliteration of the name would be Ouranos (Oo-ran-ohs ). Now you'd think this isn't a big deal. Who cares? Well for one thing, the IAU has demonstrated before that they care more about technically good science than they do about popular perception: they were willing to demote Pluto in order to define "planet". For another, there is a disproportionately smaller number of scientific papers about Uranus than there are about literally every other planet. Some people think that's because of its name. Even the smaller number of papers about Uranus also contain puns and jokes, like probing, and methane coming from it etc.

The Girl from No. 6 is a novelized biography by Vanessa Voth about her grandmother Marie Loewen. It tells of Marie and her mother Kaethe; fleeing from Mennonite Russia during the early years of Stalin's 5-Year Plans to becoming refugee colonists in Paraguay, and the struggles of their lives living in what is now Filadelfia and Fernheim. It is relevant to my interests because it is from these exact circumstances that my grandparents lived, and where my mother was born. Marie Loewen was a friend of my opa.

Along with the kefir, I put back the malk.

As a Canadian, I try to be conscious of the ways in which we as a society failed, and should do better. In the 1880s, Canada constructed a national trans-continental railroad, the Canadian Pacific Railway. While most of the effort was cool (albeit expensive and dangerous), native land was appropriated to lay the right of way. This land remains under CPR's ownership. CPR hired thousands of Chinese immigrant-workers, under false promises that trans-pacific ferrying, room and board, tools and transportation would be paid for by the company. They were effectively indentured servants unable to go home. British Columbians openly expressed racist attitudes towards Chinese peoples and even prevented identification as persons until 1920. Hundreds died in the extremely dangerous construction conditions in the Fraser Canyon, the region now known as Hell's Gate. Beginning in the 1900s and carrying on until 1993, the Canadian government prosecuted a systematic reeducation program meant to extinguish or eradicate social and cultural identities of native groups nation-wide. This system was called "Indian Residential Schools" and over its time inculcated over 100000 people, mainly children. These "schools" were more like prison camps which destroyed families and has caused tremendous suffering. The Truth and Reconciliation Foundation begun in 2011 is undertaking to restore some of these cultures and undo the social damage. Following WWII, Canada received over 1000 Nazi War Criminals as refugees redirected after initially being sent from Ukraine towards Argentina. The exact identity of these peoples is still a matter of ongoing investigation.

Hot take: All states in the style of California. (Art by eccekevin)

There are lots of US State flags which are beautiful or unique enough that they can fly on their own fields. Of all of them, I'd say Texas, New Mexico and Alaska are so good that they could be national flags. There are some US State flags which have good elements, but with a bit of refinement could be truly great. There are two classes of American State flags which need change, in order of priority: those with clear racial prejudices, and those that are simply ugly seal-on-a-bedsheets (SOABs). Racially charged flags, aka ones that directly reference and unashamedly promote the Confederate States of America. While I concede that many aspects of Confederate imagery are rooted in much older symbolism (such as St. Andrew's cross), the connotation is too dear and too negative for the majority of peoples living today for that to be a strong defense. Notably on this list, Mississippi is included in its old appearance, as of a month ago. At time of posting, Mississippi does not have a flag: a design competition is currently underway to change it. Old My favorite proposal is this one. However it is probably not going to win, because it does not contain the Motto "In God We Trust", which apparently is a design requirement according to the State Legislature. Below are the SOABs. Each of them have a number of elements which could be emphasized to make a unique flag of their own: buried in each of these flags is a beautiful emblem waiting to emerge. Special shoutouts to the flags that are presently so bad that they had to resort to putting the state's name on them; defeating the purpose of a flag's symbolism entirely. (California gets a pass in this regard because theirs is unique and cohesive enough to make it work.) Worst prizes go to Georgia. Georgia gets second mention for redesigning its flag no fewer than 4 times in the past century, each one being more racist than the last. (Image from Wikipedia, retrieved 2020-07-18) I think the two most American things about all state flags in general are the facts that NONE of them use the same Aspect Ratio (size), and despite the fact that nearly all of them use blue somewhere, NONE OF THEM use the same shades of blue. Each state has to do things their own way, because nothing quite says "the American dream" quite like going it alone.

Haumea. It's too cute to refuse.

AAA Games cost that much when I was a teenager, and if the prices kept up with inflation they should cost over $100 USD today. The way they try to keep behind inflation is creative new income strategies like day-after-release patches, paid DLC, free-to-play and other strategies to avoid a sales strategy that in some ways is outmoded.

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