How do you think your produce ends up in the bin in the produce section?

The only difference between a terrorist group and a military is the size of their budget.

Maybe you don’t have a soul.

You could recreate the experiments of Jan Baptist van Helmont to determine if your house is the one place on Earth where life spontaneously generates from inanimate matter.

Why did you respond with a sentence almost entirely in German?

Things get really weird when you start chasing infinities of probabilities. There is a non-zero chance of nearly anything happening. In theory, you could turn around right now and find the literal historical Genghis Khan standing behind you, complete with all his memories, having instantly been assembled just then through random molecular motions. In theory, you could be walking down the street, and a blue London police call box could materialize in front of you, and out could walk a man who honestly believes himself to be the literal Dr. Who. Ever feel nostalgia for the events of your childhood? There’s a non-zero probability of the entire Earth spontaneously rearranging itself to recreate that long-gone setting, including placing everyone back in age-appropriate forms.

The probability of such absurdities is so low that “astronomical” doesn’t even begin to convey how remotely small they are. So low that if the universe was maxed out on population, and everyone sat there watching until the heat death of the universe, that the odds of any one person observing such a thing would be less than 1%. But according to Many Worlds, any possible quantum interaction does occur.

Which means that there’s a universe out there where you have a magic light switch. Every time you flip the switch, in addition to the light turning on, a gold bar appears in the middle of the room. Again, the gold bar was simply assembled by random chance from particles in the environment. In this universe, one day your light switch just started making gold. At first you were astonished, so you tried it again. In most universes, the second time did nothing. But in some, it happened again. And in some particularly rare universes, it’s worked the dozens of time you’ve tried it. You showed your loved ones just to prove to yourself you’re not crazy, and the light switch still made gold. You brought in outside experts, even bringing in physicists and chemists from your local university to observe. And damnit, even in front of them, the light switch still makes gold! They examine the light switch but cannot find anything out of the ordinary with it. As far as repeated testing has shown, you have a magic light switch that makes gold, the one seemingly supernatural oddity in an otherwise completely rational universe. According to Many Worlds, there is a universe out there where this happened to you.

Also don’t forget the effects of thermal expansion brought on by global warming.

the first time I ever blacked out I tried to convince my mom that my dugout (block of wood for holding weed and pipe) would open the hotel room door…

According to the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics, there is a universe out there, where, when you attempted to open the hotel room door with your dugout, through random molecular interactions, it actually did open the door’s locking mechanism.

Work that grocers have passed onto their customers that they used to do themselves:

• Gathering the groceries from the shelves.
• Bagging the groceries.
• Checking out the groceries.

I had a shitty doctor who wouldn’t give it for religious reasons.

I’m sure it was just someone that has sexual hangups, but I like the idea of someone that is objects to it for an entirely different religious reason. They’re religiously opposed to treating cancer. They’re bizarrely, ideologically, obsessively pro-life, and they consider it a damnable offense to harm anything that has human DNA. A cancer is just another form of human being! They take the “every cell is sacred” idea quite literally!

I can’t give you chemotherapy. That could hurt the cancer. And that’s a person!

How strange. I would have thought the death rate among cervical cancers would have approached 100%. This must be a very ineffective vaccine indeed. Not only did it not prevent cancer, it made the cancers immune to all treatment! /s

I need to memorize some ancient Sumerian, and then prepare for one last great prank…

Would be funnier if they were in Esperanto for some reason. Because Esperanto makes anything funnier.

Yeah, a brain does exactly what it’s supposed to do. I can’t imagine how simulating something with alternative hardware could be any more efficient than the original, especially when that new hardware wasn’t designed to do the same thing.

That’s what Neuralink is for! I can see it now:

The jobs of the future will involve 12 hour shifts serving as a biological GPU. A large helmet is strapped to your head. It remotely, non-invasively takes over your neurons and forces them to perform calculations commanded by a remote server, rather than your own thoughts. It doesn’t override the vital parts of the brain involved in say, keeping your heart beating. But it does override most everything else. And it’s not like a dream. You’re not experiencing a virtual reality in there. For 12 hours, all of your senses are just full static at maximum volume. The experience would quickly drive you mad, if your own conscious awareness was not also dissolved into so much computational grist. You’re essentially a vegetable for 12 hours. Your shift is performed wearing an adult diaper. This is nearly the only form of wage labor available. Not even jobs like janitorial are available. One human mind, suitably harnessed, can remotely pilot a dozen humanoid androids. Half of your coworkers are there involuntarily, unpaid, caught up in one of anti-vagrancy law or another.

Yeah. It’s because of improvements in agriculture. It made food cheaper, and people got taller.

The average salary in Malta is under $25k. And with plenty of folks making far less than that. You’re talking about half a decade’s income for the average person. And that’s before you get into more coercive scenarios, like someone being deep in debt, about to lose their home, etc. Imagine you had been out of work awhile and were about to lose your home. The mortgage is past due and the bank calls every day. Meanwhile, you’re working odd jobs just to keep your three kids fed, while you skip meals. Someone comes to you and offers you a deal. They’ll give you enough money to pay your mortgage off in full. In exchange, you have to kill someone. (In this scenario, let’s assume your ex-military or somehow else have the necessary skills.) They even give you a long spiel about how awful the target is, and how they actually deserve it. Hell, this is an act of good, an act of vigilante justice, they tell you!

Would you take that deal?

I hope I wouldn’t. But I can imagine why people would.

I can’t remember the last time I bought something just to replace and throw out a perfectly good item. That’s not how clutter originates.

Yeah, seems like the Lego store is in the wrong overall but Ben has done some stupid and illegal shit along the way.

For folks not in the loop, what are those things?

“Just adopt” is typically advice given by people who have never had to seriously research adoption.