Depends on the application. A dirt bike? Absolutely not; too much torque and horsepower means that you’re going to spin your wheel regularly (and this is why most dirt bikes are thumpers, too). A conventional street bike, touring, or dual sport? You can probably go a little lower, but probably not a lot for a large touring bike like a Gold Wing. A sport bike? That’s low, by at least 20bhp; 100-ish bhp is about the lowest you’ll see for a 600cc-class sport bike. I can’t say for certain what the tops competitive 1000cc supersport bikes are putting out, but it’s probably close to 200bhp. And all of that power needs to be in a very light package, because you need the maneuverability to quickly negotiate s-curves. (I live in the mountains; there are a number of s-curves near where I live. I’ve seen the aftermath of cruisers crashing because they misjudged corner speeds.)

Example: roids. Used appropriately, they can help improve your body.

Correction: they can improve aspects of your body, at a very, very steep cost. Pretty much all oral anabolic steroids are C17α-alkylated, and they’re hepatotoxic (i.e., cause liver damage). All steroids will fuck up your lipid profile to one degree or another, and all of them can cause heart disease, specifically hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. While most AASs will increase red blood cell count, Boldenone in particular will sharply increase RBC production, which in turn increases blood pressure and can cause strokes. All of them will shut down the hypothalmus-pituitary-testicular axis (HPTA) feedback loop in men, leading to testicular atrophy. Most AASs will cause hair loss in men that are sensitive to DHT. AASs can fuck up your hormones enough that men can start lactating (!!!). High doses of testosterone can cause gynecomastia, because testosterone aromatizes into estradiol. In women, all AAS will cause some degree of virilization.

There are not very many IFBB pros that make it to 80; if you want your candle to burn brightly, it’s going to burn out fast.

So, um, 400M rockets.

Yeah, that ain’t happenin’.

I think you wildly underestimate the amount of trash we’re be talking about here. This wouldn’t be a rocket, this would be thousands, or hundreds of thousands of rockets. And that’s just the start.

They signed up to be the lowest of the overly-entitled rentacops out there. that’s on them.

Exactly my point.

The FCC (FAA? I may have that wrong)

I’m pretty sure that the TSA falls under the Dept. of Homeland Security, as does Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

realize they aren’t pasty-whites and then it’s mean to minorities.

You see that makes it worse, right? You’ve got a lot of non-white people signing up for the job of a rent-a-cop so that they can abuse the same kind of authority that is leveled against the populations that the job attracts. It’s like a black kid on the south side of Chicago looking at the ways that CPD abuses suspects and say, goddamn, how do I get into that gig?

And this just reminds you that if they could get other jobs then they will.

Eh. Maybe some of them. Maybe. But policing attracts a specific kind of person that wants that job; sometimes it’s people that are genuinely white knights, but they generally get run out pretty fast. More often it’s people that want authority. Given that TSA pay ain’t great, and that we’re in an era–temporarily, if Trump wins–of historic high employment, I don’t think that too many of the people in the TSA are really stuck there.

Yeah, but every time I have to buy something new, they automatically sign me up again. They never give me an opt-out.

Nah, you’re not abnormal. I’ve had the same thing happen at multiple store. The most invasive has been Microcenter; they tell me that I have to give them my email in order to wait in line for tech support, and then bombard me with spam. Every time I buy something new there, I have to tell the cashier to NOT use the address on file that they won’t unlink from my bank card.

It is neither Dean nor Sam.

Besides, a motorcycle is far more fuel efficient; I typically get about 40-45mpg, v. 12mpg for a '67 Impala.

It’s very hard for me to care if cancer rates for TSA agents go through the roof; they willingly signed up for that shit, so fuck 'em.

Regardless; the TSA was caught lying about the capabilities of the machines, and I’m just not willing to step foot through one. The ionizing radiation doesn’t worry me, because I was never flying frequently enough for it to be an issue.

Lots of home internet does have a data cap, but you might not realize it. Typically what will happen is that, once you hit your cap, you’ll be rate throttled. That throttle might not affect most video streaming since Netflix is really good at video compression, but you’ll see the hit if you are, for instance, downloading large games from PSN, Steam, etc.

I refuse to fly domestically anymore just because the TSA is all security theater, I refuse to go through their backscatter x-ray, and I’m not interested in their enhanced groping. I will ride my motorcycle 1000 miles in a single day rather than take a plane anywhere.

IIRC, Yang ended up being pretty far right as far as Democratic candidates went; not who I would want in a cabinet-level position.

Beyond that, he really doesn’t have direct political experience, and being in a cabinet does require pretty solid abilities at managing politics. Or, it does if you want to be effective. The gov’t isn’t a business, and it shouldn’t be run the same way a for-profit business is run. To that end, I don’t think that politics and public service is really Yang’s wheelhouse. If he wants to cut his teeth on state politics, and then move up to the national level, he’s welcome to prove me wrong. (Not that he gives a shit about my opinion. But I think he’ll have a hard time getting elected without getting lower-stakes experience first.)

Honestly? No idea. Didn’t watch the debate, because the kind of thing that would make me vote for Trump isn’t going to come out in a debate. Would it surprise me, given that Trump is so eager to slob the knob of any authoritarian, like Orban, Putin, or Erdoğan? Not even slightly. Stein at least–and this shows just how goddamn low this bar is–doesn’t praise authoritarian leaders.

Most people can see color well enough, the difficult part is understanding how to translate that to a flat, uniform surface that doesn’t emit light.

Most people think they see color, light, and shadow well enough. But they don’t. They know what color a thing should be, or what they perceive the color to be, and so they can’t see the way that the color really is. I think that part of the genius of a painter like Lucien Freud was that he was showing you the colors are they really are (…kinda of…), rather than the way people think they are. Highlights on a face aren’t just going to be lighter; they’re going to have different hues, depending on your light source. Flattening colors out to black and white seems easier, until you realize that you can have two wildly different colors that have almost identical values, and so you have to introduce some unnatural contrast in order to make a distinction between objects. Hell, B&W in general requires increasing contrast and fucking around with your virtual white and black points, or else your drawing looks flat and lifeless.

Photography–particularly film photography, where you don’t have software interpreting the image–can be a useful tool in seeing this. Without any filters, you can examine detail areas of an image and see how reflected light, and how shadows, are changing the hue of what you’re seeing. Your brain automatically makes adjustments, unless you’re really looking. And training yourself to really see what’s actually there, versus what you expect, is a very challenging process.

Not correct. I voted green in a very, very blue state in 2016, because Stein–at the time–seemed like the best candidate to vote for to register my opposition to Clinton and the conduct of the DNC. I suspect that there were a fairly large number of people like me in the state that I lived in at the time, although the state still handily went blue.

I voted for Stein too. OTOH, I was in a solidly blue state where there was no real chance that Clinton wouldn’t win. And TBH, I’d voted for Clinton in the primaries in 2008, because I wasn’t sure if that Obama guy had the experience necessary to be president, since he was a one-term senator. But by 2016, and given the way the primaries ran and Sanders got sandbagged by the DNC, I was done with Clinton.

I solidly blame Clinton and Wasserman Schultz for the 2016 debacle. If Clinton had campaigned hard in PA, MI, and WI, and if Wasserman Schultz hadn’t made tipped the scale for Clinton in the first place with the entitlement bullshit, then none of this would have happened.

“Vacillated” is a very interesting way of saying that she’s refused to straight-out say that Putin is guilty of war crimes for invading Ukraine and pursuing a war of aggression. Every time she’s been asked about it in interviews, she’s used weasel-words to avoid coming right out and saying it, while implying that she has said it. OTOH, she will absolutely say that Israel has (and is) committing war crimes in Gaza, and is pursuing genocide.

I’ve seen people on them. Not a ton. But I would see people on them every so often when I was heading to shows at House of Blues, usually later in the evening in the summer and early fall. I can’t imagine using them in the middle of winter, when it’s -10F and winds are whipping around at 30mph.

As a counterexample, look at the Marina City towers in Chicago (aka the corncobs); all of the units have balconies, and the balconies are definitely a selling point. They’re quite large; in the case of the studios, the balcony can be nearly as large as the living space. (I think that I recently saw a nearly all original condo in Marina City go up for sale in the mid $400s? It was an interesting time capsule.)