tal

(2) It shall be unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.

Genesis 38:8-10:

Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise up offspring for your brother.” But Onan knew that the child would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also.

Not only was God pissed off with Onan, but now the State of Mississippi was weighing in.

Also, a not-insignificant amount of earthquake resistance, in the sense of resisting the effects of an earthquake, is actually fire resistance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake

At 05:12 AM Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the coast of Northern California was struck by a major earthquake with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme). High-intensity shaking was felt from Eureka on the North Coast to the Salinas Valley, an agricultural region to the south of the San Francisco Bay Area. Devastating fires soon broke out in San Francisco and lasted for several days. More than 3,000 people died and over 80% of the city was destroyed. The event is remembered as the deadliest earthquake in the history of the United States. The death toll remains the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California's history and high on the list of worst American disasters.

As damaging as the earthquake and its aftershocks were, the fires that burned out of control afterward were far more destructive.[28] It has been estimated that at least 80%, and at most over 95%, of the total destruction was the result of the subsequent fires.

They're houses (or in Hong Kong's case, probably apartments).

The "Tiny-house movement" Wikipedia page that I linked to above has some pictures if you're talking about stand-alone rather than multi-unit buildings.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-a-perrone-98b85529

Jacob A. Perrone - Owner at Perrone Law PLLC - LinkedIn

I have 14+ years of experience in the legal field, having previously served as the President of Perrone Law, PC and as an Associate Attorney at Ambrose Law...

I don't think that he's a new graduate.

Based on the Reddit thread I linked to, they have two (which do not host the same website).

There's also https://firebreathingdragonlawyers.com/

Both of them are only a month old.

$ whois dragonlawyerspc.com|grep "^Creation"
Creation Date: 2025-03-30T17:01:47Z
$ whois firebreathingdragonlawyers.com|grep "^Creation"
Creation Date: 2025-03-30T08:14:12Z
$

EDIT: Also, if either domain had lapsed and was simply re-registered at that point, archive.org's Wayback Machine had never indexed it prior to that point.

I've got some serious doubts about the character of anyone who presents themselves as a purple dragon.

https://dragons.fandom.com/wiki/Purple_Dragon_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)

The Purple Dragon (Dungeons & Dragons) is a type of dragon in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. It is an evil-aligned chromatic dragon.

A purple dragon is a talented manipulator of other creatures. It achieves control through lies, misdirection, and direct mental domination. A purple dragon might seek control for any number of reasons, including sheer delight in bandying its power about, a desire to form a bulwark of allies and thralls for security, or curiosity about newly discovered tunnels or crevices leading to unknown areas deeper below, for which recruiting bands of disposable explorers might serve its purposes.

I’m in a red and rural area and plumbers here are pulling in 90-100k starting

If accurate, I would say that that is probably not very reflective of the national situation.

https://www.servicetitan.com/blog/plumber-salary

For entry-level plumbers, the median annual base salary is $52,000, or $25 per hour.

For intermediate plumbers with 2-4 years of experience, the national average rises to $67,600, or $32.50 per hour.

At the senior level, defined as 4-6 years of experience, the average is $73,200, or $35.19 per hour.

There's also a per-state breakdown, which doesn't show dramatic variation.

If you want to kill a national leader because he does something lawful that you don't personally agree with, go do in someone yourself in your own country, who I suppose would be Ulf Kristersson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty

The four boxes of liberty is a 19th-century American idea that proposes: "There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and cartridge (or ammo). Please use in that order."

That is, one speaks out against things one objects to, one votes out leaders one objects to, one goes to the judicial system, and only then does one resort to violence.

We've no issue with speaking out against Trump

I've done so many times on here, quite publicly. That has not failed.

Trump's tried to ignore an election that he lost, but the system rejected it. That has not failed.

Trump's been stopped on a number of occasions by judicial rulings. There are certainly a few questionable cases, like trying to find a legal loophole to not reverse deportions that had occurred by trying to get people outside US jurisdiction, there's a long list of Presidents who have looked for legal loopholes; Bush Junior tried a very similar tactic with Guantanamo. That has certainly not reached a point where the judicial system is ineffective.

If all three of those had been rendered inoperative, then and only then would the use of violence against him be warranted.

James Madison, the Founding Father who drafted the Constitution, addressed the subject in Federalist Paper No. 46:

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0261

The only refuge left for those who prophecy the downfall of the state governments, is the visionary supposition that the federal government may previously accumulate a military force for the projects of ambition. The reasonings contained in these papers must have been employed to little purpose indeed, if it could be necessary now to disprove the reality of this danger. That the people and the states should for a sufficient period of time elect an uninterrupted succession of men ready to betray both; that the traitors should throughout this period, uniformly and systematically pursue some fixed plan for the extension of the military establishment; that the governments and the people of the states should silently and patiently behold the gathering storm, and continue to supply the materials, until it should be prepared to burst on their own heads, must appear to every one more like the incoherent dreams of a delirious jealousy, or the misjudged exaggerations of a counterfeit zeal, than like the sober apprehensions of genuine patriotism. Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the state governments with the people on their side would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield in the United States an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the late successful resistance of this country against the British arms will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprizes of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain that with this aid alone, they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will, and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned, in spite of the legions which surround it. Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession, than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors. Let us rather no longer insult them with the supposition, that they can ever reduce themselves to the necessity of making the experiment, by a blind and tame submission to the long train of insidious measures, which must precede and produce it.

You don't go assassinate someone because he does something that you don't like. You fight someone if they actually break with democracy.

Firefly. I watched the very first bit of the first episode, saw the sci-fi infantry scene, decided that the whole thing was low-budget action, and didn't look at it again for years.

I really think that it's a good idea to make the first bit of media be more-reflective of the thing as a whole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackout

and that the buyer’s housing costs won’t exceed 30% of their gross monthly income

That rule of thumb for how much to spend on housing is also a maximum, not a target.

Most of what American spending increases have gone to over past decades has been housing; the proportion of income we allocate to other things has declined as a share of income. A lot of that has gone to increasing the square footage of houses, while the number of people living in an average household has dropped significantly.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/529371/floor-area-size-new-single-family-homes-usa/

In 2023, the average size of a single-family home built for sale in the United States amounted to 2,514 square feet. Although in the past five years American homes have been shrinking, since 1975, they have almost doubled in size. This trend towards larger homes seems illogical given that the average size of families has shrunk over the same period.

Why are American homes so large?

Homes in the U.S. are among the largest in the world, only surpassed by Australia. There are thought to be several reasons for this, including the concentration of wealth in the country, and the deeply engrained driving culture which means that cheaper land outside city centers is easily accessible.

Where are the largest homes located?

The size of homes also varies regionally, with the largest homes being located in wealthy, urban areas and in the South. Large homes, or McMansions as they’re often called, are especially popular in Texas. In 2023, Milwaukee and Omaha had the largest average home size.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-a-home-the-year-you-were-born/

In 1920:

Avg. floor area of a new single-family home: 1,048 sq ft
Avg. floor area per person: 242 sq ft
New homes started: 247,000
GDP per capita: $10,164

In 2014:

Avg. floor area of a new single-family home: 2,657 sq ft
Avg. floor area per person: 1,046 sq ft
New homes started: 1.0 million
GDP per capita: $55,762

https://cepr.net/publications/in-the-good-old-days-one-fourth-of-income-went-to-food/

It is certainly true that we are spending a much larger share of our income on housing than in prior decades, but a big part of that story is that we are spending a much smaller share on other things. The graph below shows the share of disposable income going to food, clothes, and household furnishings since the late 1940s.

As can be seen, there has been a sharp reduction in the shares of all three. This is especially striking with food. In 1947 we spent 23.0 percent of our income on store-bought food. This had fallen to just 7.1 percent last year. The share of income going to buy clothes fell from 10.3 percent to 2.6 percent. The share for buying household furnishings dropped from 5.5 percent to 2.5 percent.

These declines freed up income to go to other areas, and one area that extra income went to was housing. The houses we live in today are on average much larger than the ones we lived in 75 years ago. They are also far more likely to have air conditioning and relatively clean sources of heat. (Coal furnaces were still common in the late 1940s.) They are much better protected against fires and less likely to have harmful chemicals like asbestos and lead.

As a result of reduced spending in other areas, and the higher quality of the housing we live in today, the share of our income going to housing now exceeds 34.0 percent, on average. (This figure includes “owner equivalent rent,” the money that a homeowner would be paying to rent the home they live in.)

Around the global financial crisis, there was a bit of a fad for tiny houses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny-house_movement

One definition, according to the International Residential Code, a tiny house's floorspace is no larger than 400 square feet (37 m2).[8][9] In common language a tiny house and related movement can be larger than 400 ft² and Merriam-Webster says they can be up to 500 ft².

While I think that some of that goes a bit over the top, it does provide some perspective; if one person lived alone in such a 500 ft² "tiny house", even that would be more than double the per-capita square footage that we had in 1920.

To use one example, Elon Musk lives in a 400 ft² prefab after he got into the tiny house thing.

I'm not saying that there aren't reasons for that. We have air conditioning in 2025, and didn't in 1920. In 1920, people have might have gone outside for a lot of the time that today, they'd spend inside. We have a lot of appliances and stuff that we didn't in 1920, and if one wants an electric dryer and washing machine and that sort of thing, it's gotta go somewhere. But I think that being aware of that is useful to understand where a lot of increases in wealth over time went

in large part, into living in larger, more-elaborate housing.

Even if you compare current US to current other countries, we have pretty large houses.

https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house/

I don't know how much more pressure can be applied absent direct conflict between the US and Russia, which I don't believe the US will do.

Almost all US-Russia trade is gone, so not much to take away in economic terms.

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4621.html

In 2021, the US imported $29.6 billion from Russia and exported $6.4 billion.

In 2024, the US imported $3 billion (90% gone) and exported $0.5 billion to Russia (92% gone).

It might be possible to pressure other countries not to trade with Russia via use of secondary sanctions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_Russia

The top party there is China (who I don't think that we're in a position to compel to cut off from Russia).

There's Belarus, which I doubt is going to be compelled to cut off trade from Russia given the state of affairs.

The other top countries are all EU members. I mean, we could try and put pressure on them, but theoretically they should be doing this themselves.

Like, I can understand criticism as to Trump's interactions with Zelenskyy, but I don't think that there's some magic, easy-to-use lever to compel Russia that the White House has in reserve. Maybe weapon supplies to Ukraine are the most-influential left.