Imported types (ex. from the German states) for printing presses didn’t have it because it was an English only letter. Rather than coming up with expensive home modification (which some did anyway eventually but not en masse) there were easy alternatives because use of th was already established and also the letter y kind of looked like thorn in the fonts of the time so you could also sub that in.

Convenience of just doing a workaround rather than paying more money for a more English type modification won out and with so many using th and the thorn disappearing soon the use of the y that looked like thorn dropped out also.

It’s not necessarily the vote itself that does all the heavy lifting. Politicians pay a lot of attention to the stats of which groups are consistently voting and which issues are important for them, much more so than for what is important to the population at large because their bottom line is appealing to the people who show up to vote. Even if those votes are associated with their opponent if it’s a big enough block then throwing a bone to attract their vote becomes appealing.

For example, old people are one of the most highly consistent blocks of voters and (in our aging society) a growing one, too. Everyone wants to appeal to them as the math gets a lot harder if old people totally reject you! So with politicians competing for their support, social security & medicare make up over 50% of all the increase in government spending (not including more interest in the loans to pay for that which is also very substantial), even though the government already spends six times more on the average 65+ person than on the children and young adults <26, despite the latter group being substantially more likely to be in poverty. It’s not an economically sound decision, investing in the youth would provide better returns for society by setting them on a better trajectory for all the working life they have yet to live. But most of the ages in that younger block are not allowed to vote and the older near 26 are very inconsistent at voting, so their concerns really do not matter to politicians except insofar as the children are a concern of their parents who are much more likely to be voting.

Even if a movement is very popular with the general public, if that movement isn’t in the habit of voting politicians aren’t likely to stick out their neck for it if there are other more reliable voters they can appeal to. Because that would be seen as a wasted effort that won’t help them to win. But if a generally unpopular movement or view is popular with voters then politicians will tend to stand by it no matter what the general public has to say.

Dr. Oz is also nuts so it was kind of cooked regardless of what happened past the primaries

Funnily you very rarely see the Sacagawea dollar coins in circulation the US (albeit more than the $2 billion) but we ship a massive number of those dollar coins overseas to Ecuador which officially uses USD. Incredibly common since many expenses there are in the couple dollars sort of range and you barely see $1 bills at all since many people refuse to accept worn-out bills.

I dunno for tomatoes specifically because I don’t grow them but there are other considerations at play than growing zone. Plants have wildly different needs for light, moisture, how well the soil drains, soil pH and more. For example blueberries need acidic leaning soil and will die if their soil is too basic since they can’t get nutrients or their soil gets too waterlogged they are attacked by fungus because they’re adapted to well-draining acidic soils. Some plants need fertilization to continue thriving but carnivorous pitcher plants will get burned by the excess nitrogen and will also fare terribly in non-moist soil. I’d assume that, since NM has very hot and dry weather and basic soils, at least one or more of those trips up tomatoes.

I went to a country on the equator that cracked the code. Live at the equator but on a bigass mountain many thousands of feet in the air and you’ll get the consistent days and weather but at a temperature that won’t roast puny AC adapted people alive 😭🧠

I was dreading summer this year in SC since the scorching spring just canceled the rain for weeks on end and launched us into extreme drought, one of the worst since they started making records. So I expected surely summer would twist the knife and crispify everything even worse. Then surprisingly summer turned around and has unusually had almost too regular deep bouts of moderating rain and thunderstorms that pulled us back to only abnormally dry for the year so far and kept things from getting too hot (though the humidity has miserable, like stepping out into a mouth). I thought spring was supposed to be the rainy season here… still, even with a lush green summer saving us I think it was still not great for a lot of the native insects and the less drought tolerant native plants. One of my blueberry plants and the maypop seedlings I had going up and died even with some supplemental watering and the previously numerous bees mostly vanished when their numbers dropped off a cliff. That left little competition when paper wasps hatched and proliferated after the worst was over and I’m a lot more leery of those territorial guys and the aggressive yellowjackets than the cute bumblebees due to my phobia. 😔

We had road rage before we had cars, never mind seatbelts.

On 28 November last, a lawyer and a solicitor were travelling to Meudon on business. They had passed the barrier and were driving along the river on the Pont de Grenelle side, when they noticed that the driver of a bourgeois carriage in front of theirs was amusing himself by cutting them off, sometimes throwing himself to the right, sometimes to the left, forcing them onto the verges, which were nothing but a pool of mud, galloping to be in front of them as soon as they tried to get back on the pavement and then pretending to walk at a step. This merry-go-round had been going on for twenty minutes when the impatient lawyer got out and asked the coachman what the meaning of such behaviour was. To explain the situation, the coachman struck him with a whip, which almost threw him under the horses’ feet. At this sight, not only did the lawyer’s travelling companion rush to his assistance, but a gentleman who was with three ladies in the other carriage, not bothering to open the door, passed through the window to get there more quickly. The three of them had the greatest difficulty in subduing the furious coachman, who even hit them, or tried to hit them, several times with his fists. The police were called, he was taken to prison and his carriage was impounded. At the hearing, it was impossible to make Gaumont understand all the rudeness and brutality of his behaviour. He just replied to all the comments made to him: ‘Let them bring in the other coachman; I had no animosity towards him, I didn’t know him’. The Court sentenced him to one month’s imprisonment and a fine of 25 francs.

Barthélemy G., an irascible coachman, drives a Compagnie Feuillerat omnibus on the line from Boulevard Périer to the Jardin Zoologique. Yesterday afternoon, the omnibus driven by Barthélemy G. was late. It was joined by an omnibus of the Compagnie Nouvelle, which was about to pass in front of it, when Barthélémy G. suddenly jumped from his seat and climbed onto the platform of the rival omnibus. He rushed at the driver of this omnibus, Mr Maurice Liard, and bit him cruelly on the nose. He then stabbed him twice in the face. In his fury, G. was about to commit a more serious act, when a ticket inspector intervened in the nick of time and put an end to this painful scene, with the help of a few passengers. Barthélemy G. was taken before Mr Dive, police commissioner for the 4th arrondissement, who detained him at the disposal of the public prosecutor.

Today, in front of the Jardin des Plantes, two coaches coming in opposite directions were passing each other, leaving a fairly narrow gap between them. At that moment, a coach travelling at high speed came between the first two. One of them broke a wheel. The driver who had caused the accident continued his journey without responding to the complaints of the injured party. Shortly afterwards, however, the driver was forced to drive past the overturned carriage. The person whose carriage he had broken threw himself on the horse’s bridle to get the name of the person responsible for the accident. The coachman, we are told, whipped the face of the person he had already harmed. Several people were attracted by this regrettable scene. But the gathering that it had caused soon dispersed.

On the pavements of Paris, coaches for hire are in a constant state of hostility towards omnibuses. This often results in brawls, the seriousness of which has made it essential for the authorities to intervene. Yesterday, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, an omnibus belonging to the administration of the Constantines, and driven by the coachman Gilbert, was passing along rue Coquenard. A cabriolet for hire, driven by the coachman Millon, tried to get ahead of the omnibus; at first it encountered some difficulty, which aroused his anger. As it passed the omnibus, he insulted the Constantines coachman, calling him the coachman of the paupers’ cart. Whiplashes were even exchanged between the two drivers. Millon, in order to strike more easily, got out of his carriage and struck Gilbert twice. The latter tried to get out of his seat to defend himself, but got tangled up in his reins and fell heavily to the pavement. He would inevitably have been crushed by his carriage had not a passer-by managed to stop them by running out in front of them. Millon was arrested and taken to the local police commissioner.

A guy in Camden shot and killed 13 in 1949 before surrendering after he ran out of ammo. In 1891 a guy fired a shotgun into a crowded Liberty, MS schoolhouse and injured 14. These kinds of crimes were out there in the world before you were young. More difficult to road rage if you and those near you don’t have the means to afford a carriage and crowd the roads.

People die when collided from behind by some drunk going crazy fast, get T-boned by someone going through lights that they ought not to have, etc. and it’s much easier to die from those kinds of accidents if you aren’t secured and will rattle around inside like a ping pong ball or get launched out of a window. My literal job is in large part considering things that could go wrong for certain processes and establishing safe countermeasures against those.

I’m not stroking out in fear wearing a seatbelt? It’s a regular thing I do every time with zero downside.

On the days I got hit I can definitely say I didn’t wake up planning to be hit, I drive like a grandma but just because you’re stopped at a light doesn’t mean the person behind you will care.

In 1971 there were 1.4x the road deaths as in 2025 despite having the country only having 60% of the 2025 population. I wouldn’t say you have zero control over whether or not you get into an accident but very surprising things can happen suddenly and give you very little time to react. In that situation I’d want to focus on safely maneuvering the car and not be distracted with panic buckling with my life on the line.

She’d probably love playing Candy Crush at Assad’s gamer pad in Moscow

I’d say good riddance but who knows what sort of creep they’ll put in there. That said, this lives in my brain whenever I hear her name, as does that they had to cover Caesar’s face so she wouldn’t leak his identity:

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

The like one good idea she had is that she opposed war with Iran but her voice clearly lost out against the likes of Bibi and Lindsey Graham.

Clay swells when wet and shrinks when dry, the latter can open up deep fissures in it that act as channels for unfiltered water to flow down deeper than you may expect, leaving aside tectonic activity or other reasons that could cause such penetrations in the ground. The native plants also have impressively deep root systems that can provide similar gaps, and you may never know if it was there or not if the clay got wet again and sealed up the voids along with any presents washed down and absorbed into the clay matrix. It puts a lot of faith in Bo Taylor to break his back digging way way deep beyond the reaches of this above plus the necessary amount for scrubbing whatever waste may have gotten down that far… I agree it’s not especialy likely as far as bacterial infection alone, I just protest at the absolutely no risk formulation. There’s a reason bags of this stuff are sold as ‘novelty items’ rather than going through FDA approval.

How would you know that no animal had ever crapped over the clay deposit and had rain drift in durable, long-lasting bacterial spores from the waste whiøe the rain was on its way through the clay to join the groundwater? That a burrowing critter didn’t die just upstream in the ground of where you’re digging? It’s not terribly likely that those would get you sick maybe but ‘absolutely no risk’ is a high bar to clear.

Also there can be other sorts of non-obvious contamination like if there are trace amounts of heavy metals. Kaopectate got sued by California because the clay contained in their popular anti-diarrhea pills had traces of lead, such that the adult version pills would have fifty micrograms of lead a pop or six to twelve micrograms for children. For reference California currently mandates a warning slapped on if a product exposes you to half a microgram of lead per day. It’s difficult to know the provenance and full risks of stuff dug from a hole for a regular person. Even trained people with a lot on the line sometimes screw up and get people hurt.

Dang that was one of the three I was first introduced to as a kid. Teacher recommended using AskJeeves, Dogpile, or what she called her “personal favorite”, Google.

Not sure how Dogpile still exists