The US having an entire city in the middle of the desert dedicated entirely to gambling sounds like a thing other countries would make up about the US as a joke but its real and no one bats an eye at it
They also do divorce
You know I held myself back from going off on an infodump about the history of divorce in Las Vegas for the sake of this joke but the amount of people reblogging this version from me and not getting my history based joke about how divorce was important in shaping the economy is Las Vegas is driving me a little bit crazy
The people want an explanation so an explanation I shall give.
Basically Nevada used to be like. Nowhere. Even more nowhere than it is now. They broke several rules when they made it a state actually because the population wasn’t big enough to justify it but they wanted Lincoln to get more electoral college votes or something. I dunno.
Point is, there’s not much in Nevada. Sure, there’s silver mines. There’s local tribes who are pretty cool. There’s wildlife. There’s some neat mountains. Not much water though and water is needed for most industries and large scale civilization.
This vast emptiness ended up making Nevada what it is today though mostly because of crime. It’s hard for the feds to stop your crime when you’re surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. Is the state and federal government gonna trek through the Nevada desert to scold you? I don’t think so.
Local governments today in Nevada can often trace themselves directly back to criminal organizations and corrupt groups of politicians, including the city of Las Vegas and the very large unincorporated community of Paradise which is actually where the Las Vegas strip is. Why is Paradise, Nevada still an unincorporated community despite having over 180,000 residents? Because if there’s no city government that’s one less government entity your casino has to pay taxes to. Duh.
And these crime people and casino owners and easily bribable politicians despite their many problems did figure something out. Tourists like doing things that are illegal in other places. Californian tourists in particular. And one of the illegal things that all Americans really but especially Californians wanted to do was get divorced.
Around 1930 Nevada became one of the first states to make no-fault divorce legal. Not only that but the required waiting period became six weeks. Not only that but only one spouse had to live in Nevada for those six weeks. To this day, the waiting period for divorce in California is still six months. This was huge.
This becomes a whole industry. Not only is gambling legal in Nevada but now divorce is too. When a couple decide mutually that they want a divorce but there’s no legal reason for it where they live, one of them, usually the woman, goes to live in a resort in Las Vegas or Reno for six weeks (often called a divorce ranch) and then they can get divorced.
And while one or both spouses are there, they can gamble, get pampered, see entertainment, meet other people. Then they go home after their divorce and tell their friends all about it. Now all their friends know that there’s gambling and entertainment in Vegas. And now they know about the divorce ranches. More money in the Nevadan economy.
Las Vegas is a bright shining tax evasion island in the middle of the desert built on entertainment, gambling, crime, and divorce. God bless Nevada and god bless no-fault divorce.
I love r/malelivingspaces. You’ll go from something that looks like the interior of a prebuilt house in TS4 base game to something that looks like Oscar Wilde decorated it to something that looks like a wall to wall white jail cell.
I generally love the atmosphere of that subreddit. Update post from the wall to wall white jail cell guy to show us he got a single greige couch and everyone is like “yayyyy good job buddy, maybe a rug too? or a bookcase?”
people who don’t follow chess I promise this post is really funny
Karpov had cemented his position as the world’s best player and world champion by the time Garry Kasparov arrived on the scene. In their first match, the World Chess Championship 1984 in Moscow, the first player to win six games would win the match. Karpov built a 4–0 lead after nine games. The next 17 games were drawn, setting a record for world title matches, and it took Karpov until game 27 to gain his fifth win. In game 31, Karpov had a winning position but failed to take advantage and settled for a draw. He lost the next game, after which 14 more draws ensued. Karpov held a solidly winning position in Game 41, but again blundered and had to settle for a draw. After Kasparov won games 47 and 48, FIDE President Florencio Campomanes unilaterally terminated the match, citing the players’ health. Karpov is said to have lost 10 kg over the course of the match. The match had lasted an unprecedented five months, with five wins for Karpov, three for Kasparov, and 40 draws.
No cheering for this dangerous cunt. Pour it on the floor for fireworks.
isnt hydrofluoric the shit that seeps into your skin and melts your bones from the inside?
Yes!
Hydrofluoric acid is a major health risk. Contact exposure at 1% concentration can put you in the hospital.
Low concentrations of hydrofluoric acid can permeate the skin easily and is lipophilic. The fluorine ions will react rapidly with the calcium in your bones and blood causing huge amounts of problems.
If you are exposed to hydrofluoric acid immediately rinse the area with clean water for at least 15 minutes. After you must apply calcium gluconate gel to the area until such time that you arrive at a hospital.
Yes! On the morning of June 21st 2019 at 4 AM a pipe carrying hydrocarbon gas and hydrofluoric acid burst in the alkylation unit of the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery. The leak began to evaporate filling the room area with a flammable and corrossive fog. The ground hugging vapor was about 10 feet high. Within minutes on site staff activated the Rapid Acid Deinventory system which safely isolated 339,000 pounds of hydrofluoric acid. However, when the staff attempted to activate fire suppression systems they failed to activate. An operator attempted to start the water pumps manually but deemed it too hot and hazardous to attempt. At 4:15 AM the first explosion occurred, and two more explosions followed at 4:19 and 4:23 AM. Fragments of the refinery systems were launched into the air including a 38,000 pound fragment that flew all the way across the Schuylkill river. Five people were injured and nobody was killed.
The resulting fire took a full 24 hours to put out. The oil refining capacity of the United States dropped by 2% and PES filed for bankruptcy a month later.
generally you shouldn’t write run-on sentences because they get confusing and it doesn’t give the reader a break. that doesn’t apply to me though my run-on sentences are fun and understandable and they have a rhythm to it that makes you want to keep reading
This is just Gardiner’s sign list of Egyptian Hieroglyphics A1-B2 with a couple of repeats thrown in at the end. You’ve thrown a vocabulary list at us.
“Kill them with kindness” Wrong. CURSE OF CEASAR
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z S P Q R
I’m stuck in my room because i have a fresh arm tattoo that’s not exactly fun to drive with and my little sister and her friends are hanging out in the kitchen so instead of doomscrolling or agonizing over creative projects i’m sending him pictures of various car parts and asking him to name them
they’re definitely after personal info, and it goes pretty deep as far as i i can tell. like telegram channel, multiple people/accounts involved, and they pull from other people they have scammed. I played along for a little while, then noped out when they wanted a video of me swearing a pledge and talked about in-person meetings.
I OWE THIS DUDE $60 PLEASE HELP LMAO IM GONNA BE IN BIG TROUBLE IF I DONT PAY HIM BACK PLEASE HELP I NEED IT BY TOMORROW 😭😭😭😭😭
Cash app: $electrosw00sh
Wait shit he wants it by tonight my bad. PLEASE help. I’m in hot shit rn.
hey friends could you help my friend kurt out? super stressful situation - kurt is always so incredibly kind to me and checks in on me regularly and i just really want him to be safe and feel safe 😭💜 he needs $40 which isnt a huge amount by any means
Art forgery is the best crime tbh. It requires absolutely incredible artistic talent, technical skill, and attention to detail to make convincing fakes. Does anyone get hurt from it? No! The only people who suffer for it are the extremely wealthy who want the prestige of having original paintings in their own homes. It’s full of international intrigue and mystery. Perfect.
Also… art forgers like van Meegeren sometimes become a kind of folk hero. A swindler, sure, but a gentleman’s swindler.
I liked this guy’s story, Mark Landis, who conned several dozen museums into displaying his forgeries, but when the FBI came after him they couldn’t do anything because he had always given them away as donations. They said if they could have found that he’d ever taken anything in exchange they would have prosecuted him, but all he wanted was get to out of the house and meet people.
“The first painting Landis “donated” was a copy of a work by Maynard Dixon, an artist well-known for his paintings of cowboys and Indians. It started as impulse, Landis says, but then “everybody was just so nice and treated me with respect and deference and friendship, things I was very unused to — I mean, actually not used to at all. And I got addicted to it.””
And it looks like all his forgeries are done with cheap materials, like markers and Hobby Lobby frames.
Ok, but Wolfgang Beltracchi is probably one of the best Fraud Artists in the world.
His career brought him millions upon millions of dollars and lasted almost 40 years. He finally admitted to painting fraudulent art after the white paint he used came under scrutiny.
In The interview with Beltracchi, he said that none of his forgeries are copies, they’re all original works that the famous artists could have painted.
His wife was also in on the scam, she would dress up in old clothing and take pictures holding the paintings with old cameras to fake proof of the paintings’ ages.
At the end of the interview with Wolfgang Beltracchi he was asked if he felt he had done anything wrong, his answer was “ Yeah, I used the wrong kind of paint”
Just … the levels of con there, the fake photos and … wow. That’s incredible.
Heroes
Also fun fact we learned in class today: Michelangelo carved a sculpture of a Roman god, broke off the arm, and then buried it. The sculpture was dug up and was considered to be an authentic Roman artefact, until Michelangelo came along with the missing arm and called shenanigans on himself, just to prove he was as skilled a sculptor as the ancient Romans.
honestly mike? chill.
One of the fathers of art history as we know him today is Winckelmann. He was obsessed with ancient classic Greek and Roman art, and one of his biggest regrets was that while they had a lot of sculpture, authentic classical paintings were almost impossible to find (keep in mind this is the 18th century. We have barely started in Pompeii and archeology as a whole is in its infancy, so the examples were indeed very few and far between).
So he was incredibly happy when a friend of his, Anton Raphael Mengs, a respected painter in his own right, recovered an almost perfectly conserved ancient Roman painting depicting Jupiter and Ganymede. He praised the painting in the first edition of his seminal work on the art of the ancients, altho he later eliminated it due to the suspicious behaviour of one of Mengs’ collaborators, Giovanni Casanova (brother of the more famous playboy Casanova). Still, nothing really came out of those suspicions and the painting remained to be widely believed an authentic Roman painting until Anton Raphael Mengs himself, on his deathbed, revealed the truth to his sister: he had painted it then simulated finding it during an archaeological dig. Apparently he had meant it as good-natured prank but he wasn’t expecting Winckelmann to fall for it. He kept the secret as long as he could, to preserve his friend’s image as a flawless art coinnesseur, but the guilt was eating at him so much and Winckelmann was dead now so he decided he needed to unburden his soul before he left this earth.
I love this story because it reveals the very fundamental truth that no matter how much of an expert you are, you can still make mistakes.
guy who jerks himself blind every night to the characters from a flossing based gacha game where all the girls are bits of food stuck in the teeth of the demiurge and you can like feed the demiurge different meals to change the pool of waifus you’re pulling from and their names are all like “stringy chicken” and “wet cheese crumb” and shit: just a black coffee please
fake dating trope but they don’t become a real couple at the end. character is just like “wow thanks so much buddy that was a really nice and helpful thing of you to do for me and i really feel like our friendship has grown through this experience” and thats the end of it. godbless
the idea that people have romantic attraction to people who aren’t their friends is so weird to me. i dont even know if i like you as like a person why would i want to play boyfriends with you
tickles me pink when you get a quest to kill ghosts in an rpg. like yeah this massive broadsword is gonna do just fine against these things.no rites no helping them move on just fucking cleaving them in twain
“Between 1992–2003, $14.4 billion was spent in total in the 109 countries studied…That investment resulted in a 29 percent-per-country average decrease in the rate of biodiversity decline…”
This is one of the first large-scale studies to show that investment in conservation really does work. The study also examined how conservation dollars could be spent most effectively in different locations to slow biodiversity loss.
Sounds like we need to spend more.
This was over the course of 11 years. That 14.4 billion was spent over the gradual course of over a decade. This amounts to about 1.3 billion per year for what it accomplished, a pittance to most nations and truly a tiny amount if there’s multiple nations (like the 109 countries) covering it together. Never let anyone tell you dying ecosystems and climate disasters are inevitable or “too expensive” to prevent.
But there’s a significant silver lining here: If spending a “pittance” can buy us a 29% decrease in biodiversity loss, think how much loss could be prevented if countries seriously invested in this kind of thing!
This is one of the first big studies to show that investing in conservation translates to real, measurable, tangible improvements over the long term and in multiple countries. We aren’t just throwing money at something that isn’t working. That’s still really excellent news! And a big reason to invest more in conservation efforts!
“An accompanying commentary in Nature notes that halting the decline in global biodiversity would be “remarkably cheap,” amounting to less than 0.01 percent of global gross domestic product.”
these teenagers and their dog are trying ruin our money laundering business. no tony put the gun down were doing this the old fashioned way. were gonna dress up as monsters and scare them
someone ordered our new limoncello cocktail, took one sip, and sent it back, and when the bartender saw it he just whimpered “they didn’t like it…?” and looked at the waitress like
Fourteen years ago I was in my 20s. When I was a teenager I was arguing with mormons on richarddawkins.net about how there was no god with a plan for everyone. So you might just be younger than me.
gimmicky gift shop things are so great sometimes i love the theological implications of there being different types of soap to wash away sins depending on your sect
Listen, Catholics are literally not permitted to use gluten-free bread for Communion. (One of the recent Popes specifically banned it.) This wouldn’t even be in the top 100 weird things which Christian sects do to differentiate themselves.
This suggests that Maximum Overdrive was Jurassic Park for motor vehicles.
I’m sorry, but that is misleading as hell. American and European trucks are bred for different purposes.
American trucks are bred for long hauls on largely straight roads. They can go for hours without a break. A European truck needs more breaks and a lighter load, and they would indeed take great internal damage if they tried to keep up with the Longsnout.
The European Shortsnout is not bred for looks, but for agility! They navigate the windy roads of Europe in a way that would be way too risky for the powerful, but more clumsy American truck. It is true that the European overheats faster at high speeds, that is the very reason that breaks every 4,5 hours are mandatory for both the truck and the handler and a day of driving can never be longer then 9 hours.
So, all in all, appreciate all of our trucks and our shared history, and be the responsible owner that gets the right breed for the right job.
To be fair, the US does have shortnose trucks as well, they’re just a breed kept mainly for very local work where, like the above says, they are working in places with lots of turns, shorter drives, and plenty of stops. I see them used for garbage pickup a lot, where a longnosed Mack wouldn’t be able to fit much less maneuver, and the short nose prevents them from getting rubs (raw skin or even open sores) on their snouts.
I would also like to point out that the tags have got it backwards. The wild trucks (which I’m pretty sure are extinct in the wild now) that all modern breeds stemmed from were shortnose trucks. We had known about automobiles and domesticated several species, but the truck species was not discovered until close to the start of the 1900’s, in Germany, which I BELIEVE was the first country to breed them in captivity, although England was the first country to really start using them for work. I managed to find a photo of taxidermied specimen
As you can see, it resembles both long and short nosed breeds, as well as the far more common house truck used by individuals instead of for commercial work.
As to the aggression, while the mack longnose LOOKS aggressive, they’re generally gentle giants (although please do give them space on the road! not seeing you in their blind spot is NOT the same as aggression!), it is actually the smaller house truck that is often trained by their handler to be aggressive: the keyword being TRAINED, they are also not naturally aggressive. The only time I have seen a mack be commonly aggressive is when they are pulling 2 gravel trailers, and I would be cranky if I was being overworked, too. If you see them hauling that kind of load, just give them space, and you’ll be fine.
I feel like somebody should add something about the Australian variants.
From my understanding of Australian wildlife:
Does anyone know if/how American School Busses are related to trucks?
Pics for reference:
The classic long-nose schoolbus
But short-nose varieties exist, I remember when they first started appearing in my district!
@dreorzen While school buses ARE in the automobile order, they are actually part of the Van family, not the Truck family, due to their passenger capacity. As you can see in the photos, they have no cargo bed or hookup, and are not really built for object transport. But they DO excel at carrying passengers, particularly children (although certainly not limited to just children)
They’re known to be exceptionally protective of any passengers, and if you look closely on that second image you can actually see a specialized appendage that is (I think) unique to school buses- a small, red, octagonal fan, which they extend when there are small creatures around them that they are acquiring or releasing. Much like an angler fish’s bioluminescent bulb appendage, this fan (along with several bioluminescent patches on top of their faces and on their hindquarters) works to mesmerize any other vehicles in close proximity, to where those vehicles will cease movement until the bus lowers the fan. It’s super fascinating behavior, and little wonder why we trust our children to these gentle, protective giants.
Don’t forget about the bus trucks.
While these vehicles can sometimes be bred by accident (after all, who hasn’t accidentally left the gate open when your school bus is in season), they are usually bred for specific purposes.
These hybrids are bred for both their cargo capacity and their gentle temperments. Especially in a farm setting, there’s a need for many different kinds of vehicles, some of which sometimes don’t get along. Having a vehicle with both the strength and capacity of a large work truck with the amiable nature of a school bus can be a real benefit.
It’s a little unfortunate that these hybrids tend to be sterile, though, since it would be easier if they’d breed true. Also, something to keep in mind… bus trucks are bred from a bus.
Truck buses are bred from a truck and… tend to not be quite as useful as bus trucks, although some people do like keeping truck buses for companionship and as show vehicles.
It’s so funny how the game store used to sell games the music store used to sell music and hot topic used to sell goffic accessories but now they all stock the same anime backpacks and novelty fnaf soap of whatever
not planning on doing anything with this, just thought it would be fun to make a poll for it! here’s the results summary page, for those who are curious.
“is tumblr an mmo”, the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12239 pages of heated debate,
ALT
