The definition of bootlegging is so broad that I think you can even legally be charged with bootlegging if you source your alcohol products for sale from anywhere other than a distributor, e.g. buying in bulk from Costco or a discount liquor place to stock the bar.

In general, I think it typically means illegal transport and sale, since not too many people have historically trusted moonshiners or developed a taste for moonshine. There was that weird moment in the mid-2010s where reality TV caused a huge interest in moonshine, but that was just distillers realizing that they could capitalize on a trend by making unaged 80-proof corn liquor, throwing some cinnamon sticks and apple slices in a Mason jar, and calling it “moonshine.”

8 fluid ounces is a cup, 4 cups is a quart, 4 quarts is a gallon. Most canned drinks are 12 fl. oz, or 3/4 of a pint.

8 ounces is half a pound.

It makes perfect sense!

This is an interesting take, I guess.

To fill you in, the replicants in Blade Runner are banned from Earth and are typically used in extremely dangerous lines of work like asteroid mining and space warfare, or sex work and mundane industrial labor. They aren’t considered people and are literally corporate property (i.e. slaves).

I personally side with the replicants who came back to earth to demand their makers “correct” the genetic time bomb they encoded into their DNA.

Certain strains of Christianity in the US are really apocalypse cults. Somewhere in the story there’s something about being persecuted and being threatened with death unless you renounce Christ.

They need to be persecuted because it reinforces the idea that they are living in the end times and therefore closer to rapture or whatever.

Edit: persecution is also a key part of Christianity’s origin story (Peter being crucified for his belief, Christians being fed to the lions in Rome, etc.).

There’s a movement within black metal that calls itself “National Socialist Black Metal” (NSBM). It’s what happens when any group of dickheads insert themselves into an existing scene or genre. Similar thing happened to skinhead punks in England in the 80s.

Some times it boils down to here’s a black metal band comprised solely of neo-Nazis and while they sing songs about trolls and despair they also do Nazi shit in their spare time. This only fuels the assertion you made earlier because a lot of times you can’t even tell they are NSBM from the music, you have to have read an interview, listened to their stage banter, or looked up a list of known NSBM-adjacent bands.

I gave it a go with “Chattahoochee” by Alan Jackson:

Well, ding dang doodle dingle dangle doodle
Ding dang dingle dangle doodle dangle
Ding dang doodle dingle Georgia asphalt
Dingle dangle doo but we dangle dingle doo

And “Thunder Rolls” by Garth Brooks:

The dangle rolls
and the dingle strikes
another dingle dangle doo
on a dingle doodle diiiiing
as the dingle doodle doOooo
dangle dingle ding
dingle dangle heart
the dangle rolls

It’s Columbia, not Colombia. But either way, it’s named after Columbus, which he has a bit of a hard on for, so that name is unfortunately safe.

I’ve always interpreted “small government” as single-party with lots of privatization of government services instead of small government that stays out of people’s lives.

This movie is an onion.

If we’re being charitable in our reading of Bear, he’s only sympathetic because he’s not outright evil. But really he represents a lazy evil that emerges from mediocrity and cowardice. There is a mild redemption arc at work, but the film doesn’t let us accept Bear’s resolution. The audience always knows that he’s not the true victim but the film also makes the point to demonstrate that nothing is ever as straightforward as we want it to be. Watching demands a lot from the viewer.

It might be possible that dice took over in usage because most people are never introduced to the concept of dice being singular. Very few mainstream dice based games from my childhood used less than two dice: Monopoly, Yahtzee, Farkle, Risk, Parcheesi, Backgammon. Trouble is the only one I remember that used a single die and that game didn’t even let you roll it.

I think the tipping point was in the early 2010s when all of a sudden everyone and everything hitched their wagons to Facebook. Facebook as SSO, Facebook messenger instead of email or SMS, Facebook marketplace dethroning Craig’s List, etc. Once people from elderly relatives to local business centralized all of their online identity into Facebook, it was over. To this day, Facebook is still the only way to see info for community events and small businesses (and instagram is the platform Facebook used to sequester musicians and artists).

It didn’t have to be Facebook, of course, but there needed to be a networked service that people trusted enough to give it every thing. Remember check-ins? People would post their location at restaurants, jobs, theaters, and shops. Public profiles that listed jobs, homes, family members and relationships, pets, children’s photos, and hobbies all under real names (I remember when Facebook started the purge of pseudonyms and aliases).

I deleted my Facebook account over a decade ago and people panicked and warned me that it was a bad idea. The craziest thing someone said to me was that it would make me un-hire-able since there’d be nothing for people to snoop to see if I was a good fit. The only “bad” thing that happened is that I lost contact with some old acquaintances, but that’s just life.

Regardless of all the other tech stuff in the past 20 years, I think that convincing people that it was okay to let a company like Facebook exist will the explicit goal to transparently harvest personal data was what opened the floodgates. Facebook (and other social media) demonstrated that people will willingly exchange privacy for digital errata. Once governments and corporations saw that, the future wrote itself.

I think that those things are only meaningless because the parents/grandparents didn’t or couldn’t engage with the next generation about it. Heirlooms, trinkets, and tchotchkes have to be imbued with stories and sentiment otherwise they’re just junk.

20th century hyper-consumerism sold the idea that you could buy sentimentality and proceeded to replace things that were valuable because of their unique stories with things that were valuable because of “the collectible market.” There’s a big difference between “this Coke sign was in your great-great-grandpa’s soda fountain” and “this Coke sign is valued at $100.” Likewise, a box of old family photos fails to have value when you can’t identify the people in the photos and the relative you inherited them from didn’t bother taking the time.

The Garden of Eden is in Missouri!

I don’t really check out library books because when I want to read something I need it on hand to start. Like, I literally finish a book and pick up a new one. Instead, I buy exclusively used and then discard them in one of the little free libraries in my neighborhood. I also have always had access to different library networks than my local public library system, so I often find myself using those instead when I need access to research databases or articles.

However, I have always had a local library card wherever I lived. Currently I use my local library for Kanopy and for checking books out for my kid, who loves going to library and loves books.

Edit: There have been municipalities known to introduce emergency service subscription/tax models and firefighters have literally watched someone’s house burn down because they didn’t pay the fee. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39516346

Only because their basic needs are already met by the income of, you know, their regular professional job.

Tangentially related: Some times your relatives don’t even have to still be in possession of the item any longer to inflate the price and get offended. My mom goes on and on about how much some LP she had when she was 15 would be worth if grandma hadn’t of let it mold in the garage. I looked the album up and if she had a first pressing in mint condition it would be worth a bajillion dollars, but she most certainly played the shit out of a beat up copy of a 14th pressing that isn’t worth shit. Likewise, eBay fucks with their sense of worth, too. My parents will mention something they have being worth a lot of money and I’ll ask how they know only to be hit with “we saw that someone had one of these that went for several thousand.” And of course, looking deeper into unravels the entire plot of why that very not really rare thing sold for an unusually high price 10 years ago during a minor surge in popularity of that thing due to a new media reboot.

Which makes little sense because Conn-Selmer doesn’t just manufacture brass instruments and saxophones, they also exclusively import a lot of the European and Asian “alternatives” (i.e. illusions of choice). The Selmer (not Selmer (USA)) part of Conn-Selmer are made in France and like half of the other brands are Chinese or Japanese.

I mean, regardless of what happens, Conn-Selmer has a practical monopoly, but even though Conn-Selmer does manufacture in the US, they probably still rely on importing metals, right?

Musk’s obsession with an author like Heinlein, who wrote several books about a multidimensional polygamous space time sex cult with a dash of incest, makes a lot of sense.

Age, in this case, shouldn’t be what’s stopping him. Something, something constitution.