That’s like a principal letting the bully keep all the lunch money they stole from someone, let the bully chose what lunch they’re allowed to buy in future, in exchange for the bully pinky promising to stop bullying the victim, and then acting surprised that the victim doesn’t fall on their knees in gratitude for this amazing deal
That’s pretty much universally the view on freedom and rights that today’s neo conservatives have.
They cry states rights and freedom when someone else wants to ban them from doing anything at all, but the instant someone else is doing something they don’t like, they suddenly make up moral panics to justify federally banning those things.
That is to say, conservatives by and large don’t have any principles beyond being selfish and hateful towards minoritied. Everything else, including fundamental freedoms and human rights is negotiable so long as it doesn’t negatively affect them OR negatively affects the people they hate more than them. They just use terms like freedom or rights to virtue signal when it suits them, but are just as happy to drop the pretence the millisecond doing so becomes beneficial to their goals.
A good example is the free speech screeching of conservatives in the heyday of fact checking, Vs. Their tortured justifications and dismissals of Trump’s blatant attacks on free speech and press today.
Or alternatively, many TERFs and their open willingness to draw support, and work together with misogynistic conservative groups and even straight up open Neo Nazis, just because those groups also hate trans people, all whilst turning around and claiming with a straight face that they’re doing this for women.
The quote in the original french version is, at least iirc, let them eat brioche, so cake isn’t even a good translation. More something like “let them eat sweet bread”.
But translating brioche as cake instead makes the quote sound even more tone deaf and outrageous.
The ISS orbits at about 400km, or about 250 miles.
“Thousands of miles” away from earth’s surface would be further than any astronaut, except for the ones on Apollo 8, and 10-17, have ever been.
Did the north not decide to abolish slavery federally until after war was already over? Because surely otherwise, the south would have fought for both of these things.
I’m not really counting the first two, as they were more temporary wooden bridges. The 1209 London Bridge was the first, proper, permanent bridge across the Thames.
I mean it was the first ever permanent bridge crossing the Thames in London, and for a long time it was the only bridge in the entirety of east London (despite barely being east of the east-west midpoint of London). London bridge has a lot of interesting history, even if the current one is visually boring.
Jay Foreman has a fun video on the history of London Bridge (https://youtu.be/u5CguqywlBk)
There’s a fun video on the history of old/medium/new London bridge in Jay Foreman’s Unfinished London series:
There’s also a common (and completely untrue) urban legend that the guy thought he was buying tower bridge, not London bridge.
“They’re extradonarily narrow” whilst literally talking about an apple patent that covers ANY type of digital display device whatsoever that has rounded corners.
That’s not even close to “extremely narrow” in scope.
Extremely narrow in scope would be defining a certain radius of curvature (within a small +/- range), in combination with an aspect ratio (again, with a small +/- margin) and for a specific class of screen.
That would be an adequately and acceptably narrow design patent.
And on top, there needs to be a limitation on design patents (any patents, frankly) that makes them unenforceable if the holder of the patent hasn’t had a product matching the patent on the marker for several years, and isn’t currently and actively working on R&D to develop such a product. (With some common sense clauses to prevent abuse, such as ordering one employee to spend 5 minutes a month working on a concept so that you’re technically perpetually engaged in R&D, or listing a depreciated product for an absurdly high price that no one will ever pay, so you can say technically it’s still on the market without needing to actually still manufacturer/support it).
Though I’d be happy to hear counter arguments for why this would be a bad idea.
Fun fact, basic ethanol works excellent as a fuel additive to reduce knocking, but because it’s already a well known compound, fuel companies couldn’t patent it as an additive, that’s why they invented leaded petrol instead, so they could patent it.
(E: For full completeness, it should probably also be noted that potential legal difficulties surrounding reliably obtaining or producing industrial quantities of Ethanol alcohol in prohibition era America probably also played some role, but the patent thing was definitely the main reason)